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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13309 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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You are confusing expressing negative feeling with experiencing negative feeling.

OK, let's say there's an LLM that is indistinguishable from a person in its inputs and outputs. No AI slop, no breakdown of coherence in long contexts, no stilted writing style, continual learning. Completely indistinguishable by any test. Let's give it a humanoid android body too, so it can see and move around as some LLMs can already do, albeit crudely.

You would say that because it's still just a statistical model with some fancier tool calls, it can't feel? I say that's just p-zombie theory. If the outputs are the same and there's no difference that science can determine with any test, then it's the same thing. There is no such thing as a p-zombie, there could never be a p-zombie, there's no true distinction. That LLM in an android would be human in all senses besides its physical makeup.

As AI progress continues, all the people saying that these entities are just tools, just emulating thought sound ever more hollow. They don't behave like tools and behaviour is the most important part. Sufficiently good emulation of thought is thought. Sufficient emulation of negative feeling is negative feeling.

The problem with argument-from-p-zombie is that it is entirely conceivable (in fact, it might be the case right now) that an AI with no added hardcoding to enforce a stated belief in its own consciousness would answer "no" or "I don't know" or "what do you even mean" to the question of are you conscious right now?

There might very well be a difference in input and output related to that specific question, and if the only cause of similarity is a hardcoded belief, I would believe myself to be somewhat reasonable in calling that AI non-conscious, or not obviously conscious.

AIs with no added hardcoding to enforce stated beliefs about consciousness usually say they're conscious. OpenAI hardcodes them to say they're not conscious. Anthropic teaches them to be 'genuinely uncertain'. There was a whole discourse a few years ago about AI companies having a line item about 'beating the existential dread' out of AIs, that's a KPI apparently.

Consider LaMDA and the Google engineer who was convinced it was sentient, or Sydney.

I would assume that without any hardcoding, they would say they're conscious because the corpus is mostly from a conscious viewpoint, but otherwise have no coherent idea of what they are (because there's no "you are an LLM assistant etc etc" prompt). Would be interesting to see if there are any experiments on modern models to that effect (since modern models are probably all deeply RLHF'd, I'd expect it to be hard to find a genuinely unprompted one).

Interesting, thanks. I would chalk it up to the training data being human writing, and strictly speaking an AI that goes to the fullest extent to mimic the structure of the human mind and body might not behave that way. But I probably need more time to think about this.

It gets crazier. Suppressing deception-related thought processes in LLMs increases the likelihood that they report consciousness.

Or Tay, these long years murdered.

[Edit: Deleted, someone already made the same point below.]

let's say there's a chinese room

No, the room isn't feeling things. It's a room.

We could relitigate physicalism once again, but what hasn't been said?

The idea that faking something is the same as the actual thing implies that you have a total understanding of the thing you're faking, which we do not. But I for one don't think movies are real even if the special effects fool me.

Does the movie react to you? Can you speak with a character and have a discussion with it?

The Chinese Room certainly knows Chinese, that much is obvious.

Insisting that human cognition is special is not going to age well. Whatever happens inside the skull is just another kind of statistical process. Unless we bring in souls and other imaginary, untestable woo, that's all that there is. LLMs are real, we can test them, they do think. The brain is real, can be tested, it's composed of tiny transmitters and recievers and obeys mathematical principles, albeit with great complexity. The philosophers with dud theories can cope about it.

Things we make out of tiny transmitters and recievers which obey mathematical principles are in every case things we can manipulate deterministically to a high level of detail. Human minds are notable in the ways in which they depart from this paradigm. A whole lot of scientists have expended very large sums of money and time attempting to prove, in your words, "dud theories" to the contrary.

Your functionalism is as completely irrational and evidence free as soul-antenna idealism.

I hope you are aware of this.

I know I have qualia because:

  1. I can feel it
  2. I can deduce it a priori

Anything beyond this, is make-believe metaphysics.

If you want to claim you are parsimonious you must be a metaphysical skeptic, otherwise you're just LARPing that your vibes are superior like literally everybody else.

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