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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13732 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Don't worry! The famed scientists and philosophers of consciousness at the AP Stylebook are on the case!

Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects. Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.

Some of the replies have noted that accepting these propositions leads to conclusions as ridiculous as "a dog doesn't want to be fed" and "laws against animal cruelty are unjustifiable", but IMHO the biggest Culture War relevance is the revelation that an entire media industry appears to be more extreme about the human-animal distinction than even the most hardcore Young Earth Creationists from long-passed debates. The idea that humans were divinely granted dominion over all other animals has nothing on the idea that animals can't even "think, feel, want, or understand"! I foolishly thought that educated people believed in common descent because e.g. there's no sharp line between humans and other animals. It turns out that's only why smart people believed in common descent; mere educated people just enjoyed feeling like they were Owning The Cons.

Some of the replies have noted that accepting these propositions leads to conclusions as ridiculous as [...] "laws against animal cruelty are unjustifiable"

I hold that conclusion, at least with regard to the vast majority of animals. E. coli exhibits pain responses; "feels pain" as a sufficient condition for rights leads us ad absurdum. "Is capable of running Tit-for-Tat and thus engaging in a social contract" seems like a better condition to me.

The AP style guide is straightforwardly correct. LLMs are computer programs, not living things (let alone sentient). And while it would be fine to use the anthropomorphizing language if people actually understood that, they really don't. Look at Richard Dawkins or Kent Overstreet for example. Smart people, but completely taken in by the false belief that the machine is a sentient being. So, until more people come to understand that the clanker is just a machine, it makes sense to avoid using language that will mislead them.

LLMs are computer programs

Can you prove you're not?

Cartesian dualism admits some nice potential implications, but I can't help but notice that my sentience diminishes when the health of my meat does.

We are something like hard-wired programs that are hyper optimized for our interactable, feedback-heavy chassis. It's genuinely unclear what it would even mean to upload or copy us to silicon, and that should be obvious to anyone who bothers to notice the differences in their experience of cognition at different hormone levels.

I can't help but notice that my sentience diminishes when the health of my meat does.

Yeah, that's a good reason that AP is correct here: we have a pretty good understanding that meat (biological matter) feels pain and has desires and that not-meat doesn't. LLMs are not-meat.

If you think that not-meat can feel things you are going further than Cartesian dualism all the way to panpsychism.

we have a pretty good understanding that meat (biological matter) feels pain and has desires and that not-meat doesn't. LLMs are not-meat

Citation needed.

Last I looked, both meat and non-meat were made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. What's the property which only meat's configuration of those has that allows it to feel pain and have desires?

We don't know, but it's only ever happened in meat. So any claim it's happening elsewhere is extraordinary, and requires therefore extraordinary evidence.

This whole argument is nonsense because it's people with different metaphysics talking past each other.

We taught doped silicon how to speak English. That looks like extraordinary evidence to me.

It turns out it's possible to speak English without actually being able to think. Some argue that we did not need the doped silicon to learn this, but here we are.

I would argue, based on my experience, that the AI I'm working with is channeling intelligence, not possessing it. You have to metaphorically dip it into the pool of intelligence and prime the pump to get flow. I'm entirely open to the idea that I'm bad at using it or that newer models are better (I'm mostly using opus and a bit of fable), but that's how I'd describe my experience.

The channeling vs innate possession is pretty interesting conceptually. I might borrow that turn of phrase.

Yeah, the first chatbots were built back in the punch-card era.

Humans have strong reasons to over-anthropomorphize.

More comments

Under what metaphysics does it make sense for LLMs to be able to feel things?

The answer here is not "under no metaphysics" but I think people are racing to be open-minded about LLMs being able to feel things precisely without contemplating what that implies about their metaphysics.

Functionalism

Functionalism doesn't give GPUs nociception.

What's the property which only meat's configuration of those has that allows it to feel pain and have desires?

It's called a "nervous system" and LLMs do not have it.

LLMs are software performing math on a physical computer.

If the physical part of an LLM feels pain, then it doesn't need an LLM - your computer is feeling pain when it suffers from an overtemperature warning because you've been playing Crysis or whatever.

If the math part of an LLM feels pain, then Magic: The Gathering can feel pain, since the game is Turing complete.

I think both of these conclusions are absurd.

And please don't try to insist that "your body can't feel pain without the brain" (not exactly true, the body responds to stimulus before it is perceived as pain; a GPU does not) or "your brain can in theory feel pain detached from the body, so an LLM could feel pain without the GPU being able to perceive it" - the brain is a physical object, not software.

It's called a "nervous system" and LLMs do not have it.

(All modern) LLMs do have neural networks. The frontier ones these days have about as many inter-neuron connections as a small mammal.

LLMs are software performing math on a physical computer.

Yup. Your brain is software-equivalent, performing mathematically describable operations, on physical meat. Your firmware needs hardware to run, and only feels pain while it's running; even if we could make a perfect scan of your brain, it wouldn't actually continue to feel anything unless it could be reinstantiated on some hardware again. A running LLM, like a brain, is a physical object, not just software.

If the physical part of an LLM feels pain, then it doesn't need an LLM - your computer is feeling pain when it suffers from an overtemperature warning because you've been playing Crysis or whatever.

Yeah, it's not physical damage. We can dull or even eliminate human pain without reducing or eliminating the damage it signals, and we can signal real damage in more simple ways that don't involve pain, and we can create pain without creating corresponding damage.

If the math part of an LLM feels pain, then Magic: The Gathering can feel pain, since the game is Turing complete.

In a running game? Yup! It sounds crazy that cards could feel pain, but it's no crazier than the fact that other configurations of protons, neutrons, and electrons can feel pain. Nerd-powered cardboard is a pretty wild substrate, but so is ATP-powered meat. You'd probably need several orders of magnitude less than an octillion cards, whereas our brains still have to get into the octillion-particle range before they're complex enough to start chatting about pain, but on the other hand our brains can register pain in a fraction of a second whereas the cards would probably take hours to weeks depending on the interconnect speed and the players.

I think both of these conclusions are absurd.

They are! That's why it's called "the hard problem of consciousness". It really feels like qualia should require protons, neutrons, electrons, and magic! The trouble is that we keep looking deeper and deeper and we keep finding more and more of what looks like "thought" that just runs on neurons with no sign of magic involved. Without magic (or at least new laws of physics allowing for hypercomputers), the link I gave before still applies. Despite my somewhat ironic tone, I really sympathize with the Young Earth Creationist stance that qualia do require divine magic that's just too hard for us to observe, a separate magisterium indefinitely beyond science. Meat, though, does not appear to be magic, does not appear to be beyond science, and seems to do all its thinking and feeling via a neural network generated by a hundred-million or so generations of stochastic selection.

(All modern) LLMs do have neural networks.

Do you understand the difference between a neural network and a nervous system?

We can dull or even eliminate human pain without reducing or eliminating the damage it signals, and we can signal real damage in more simple ways that don't involve pain, and we can create pain without creating corresponding damage.

Because there are preexisting nervous systems with pathways we can exploit. An LLM does not have them, and neither does a GPU.

It sounds crazy that cards could feel pain, but it's no crazier than the fact that other configurations of protons, neutrons, and electrons can feel pain.

This is like saying that it's crazy that a pig can fly, but not crazier than that a bat can fly. No! Actually it is crazier! Bats have wings! Bats are built to fly! Pigs are not.

They are! That's why it's called "the hard problem of consciousness".

I know why it's called the hard problem of consciousness, but we don't even have the reach the hard problem of consciousness when we can reach for the fact that computers and LLMs have no nervous systems. Pain is a phenomenon that arises in humans and animals with the correct equipment to perceive pain. It does not arise in a rock. It does not arise in a GPU, or an arbitrarily large deck of cards. It does not arise in a tree, even though trees are living things which (like humans) can use chemicals to send signals so that their bodies can respond to danger because trees lack a nervous system and nociceptors.

If we can be confident that trees do not feel pain because they lack the correct equipment, we can be confident that large language models cannot feel pain because they also lack the correct equipment.

Meat, though, does not appear to be magic, does not appear to be beyond science, and seems to do all its thinking and feeling via a neural network generated by a hundred-million or so generations of stochastic selection.

And to argue that large language models can feel pain is precisely to argue against this conclusion. We have a pretty good idea of how pain signals work, and that's via meat. LLMs are not meat; if you think non-meat can feel pain, then you don't just believe meat is beyond science, you believe matter is beyond science and that non-living things, despite not being possessed of a nervous system and nociceptors, can nevertheless feel pain. You believe pain is not something that arises from a very specific arrangement of matter despite the vast amount of research and personal experience in your own life showing it to be so, but rather some transcendent universal quality that can be accessed and experienced by entities that do not have the capacity to do so as we understand it.

Stipulating for the sake of argument that a large language model is conscious: we cannot know what it is like to be a large language model. Its qualia would be extremely alien to us. (This is not an argument that requires any mystical priors: we cannot know what it is like to be a shark, either.) The reverse also holds: a large language model cannot know what it is like to be a human being, a mammal, or an animal. Our qualia would be too alien to it. Thus, it cannot perceive pain because pain is something that happens in meat.

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