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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   24995 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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I believe that you understand me correctly. It's like how a PS3 can emulate a NES, but the underlying circuitry of the PS3 is actually very different from that of an NES. And in the future, if scaling up LLMs and making them faster were able to create something that was truly indistinguishable from a human in terms of its chain of thought and speech and perhaps even actions of an attached android (none of this is guaranteed to happen, of course), this wouldn't indicate that the LLM was human-emulating intelligence. Rather, it's an intelligence that is emulating how a human thinks and behaves, but the underlying intelligence that allows it to emulate human thought would still be that of an LLM, which, as far as we can tell right now, isn't the result of emulating humans.

I believe that you understand me correctly. It's like how a PS3 can emulate a NES, but the underlying circuitry of the PS3 is actually very different from that of an NES. And in the future, if scaling up LLMs and making them faster were able to create something that was truly indistinguishable from a human in terms of its chain of thought and speech and perhaps even actions of an attached android (none of this is guaranteed to happen, of course), this wouldn't indicate that the LLM was human-emulating intelligence. Rather, it's an intelligence that is emulating how a human thinks and behaves, but the underlying intelligence that allows it to emulate human thought would still be that of an LLM, which, as far as we can tell right now, isn't the result of emulating humans.

Ok, and it seems your position is that -- possibly -- LLMs (or computers in general) could achieve human level intelligence without the use of sophisticated models. In which case they would have human-level intelligence without human-emulating intelligence. Right?

Yes, but it depends on what you mean by "sophisticated" models. Certainly the models would have to be complex, detailed, accurate, and precise, at a level similar or equivalent to the models we humans use in our heads. But the models would likely be utterly incomprehensible to us humans.

But the models would likely be utterly incomprehensible to us humans.

Incomprehensible in the sense that you wouldn't be able to figure it out by looking at the computer's code and memory? Incomprehensible that it couldn't be described in an abstract way? Or incomprehensible in some other way?

Incomprehensible in the sense that you wouldn't be able to figure it out by looking at the computer's code and memory?

Almost definitely yes.

Incomprehensible that it couldn't be described in an abstract way?

No, it could be described in an abstract way, but the description could be so complicated and non-intuitive to humans that no single human or even team of humans could be said to have a meaningful understanding of the model other than in very broad terms. The model only needs to be comprehensible to the LLM, and only to the extent that it allows it to produce decisions and actions that are sufficiently intelligent.

Thank you for clarifying all that. I'm tempted to argue that based on my general observations and common sense, human-level intelligence requires sophisticated models. However it doesn't seem you disagree. It seems your position is that a computer system which displayed human level intelligence must have sophisticated models baked into it, even if those models are incomprehensible to us.

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