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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   24727 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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But I don't really care. Like am I supposed to be existentially aghast at the notion that I might be a mere token predictor?

Nah, you (and everyone else on this forum) might be a p-zombie for all I know. But I know that I have qualia, and that precludes the idea that consciousness is some weird emergent property in LLMs or similar systems. Feel free to believe (or Chinese-room style repeat the words that you believe without actually believing them) that you do or don't worry about being a mere token predictor or not, it matters to me and I know I'm not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

Seriously, what's wrong with being a predictor? It's an accurate statement along the dimensions to which it's relevant. Like there's going to be some name for the process where a neural network learns to connect pieces of information.

I mean you can't even prove that you have qualia, so what am I really supposed to do with this? If God came along and magically gave an already high-performing AI qualia for one day just for lulz, how would we know?

Nothing is wrong with being a predictor, but I know I don't just predict the next token from input stimuli that someone prompts me with. I'd wager that most humans aren't either. A token predictor is what an LLM is, like liquid is to water, a rifle is to weapon, a macbook is to a laptop. It you want to think this subroutine I just wrote is conscious, you can, but it's still just a subroutine.

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