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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13536 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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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.

Humans have strong reasons to over-anthropomorphize.

I'd go farther and say humans have strong cognitive biases that force us to unconsciously over-anthropomorphize. I think it's built into our cognitive firmware.

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.

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