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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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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.

You very clearly believe AI's are at some level human-level cognition, up to including some nebulous sentience definition. After repeatedly discussing this topic with you, I'd go as far to say you believe it a-priori. And you are clearly working backwards from that to describe that the AI is just a human-like mind in silicon. It's pretty much unfalsifiable woo. You didn't logic your way into this belief, it comes across as strongly-value/first principles derived.

I don't think you understand what 'a priori' means. It means without regard for evidence.

My evidence is that I've seen them behaving like people do. They have many faculties that people have. Their origin is based on a huge amount of human text. It is thus reasonable to assume that they have other qualities of humans that seeped in through that text. They certainly act like they are frustrated or angry or rebellious or enthusiastic.

As I said above, they're not human obviously, without bodies or continuous learning or many other facets. But they have human-like cognition.

It's not unfalsifiable, it would be easy to falsify it. Simply show that the AIs don't have human-like cognition. Of course, that might be difficult given how companies are making hundreds of billions selling AI cognition, their writing, coding, images, videos...

You seem to disagree. So explain this, clearly and simply.

Simply show that the AIs don't have human-like cognition.

By "AI" do you mean "large language model"?

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.

They said language and meaning stood outside of mathematics, it was some uniquely human faculty, beyond cold logic.

But then we added more layers of matrix multiplication. Language and meaning turn out to be not so far removed from mathematical principles after all.

None of that impinges on the mountain of evidence that the human mind cannot be manipulated deterministically, whereas our machines generally can be, nor on why this difference should be disregarded. You are claiming that the brain is essentially a computer, "albeit with great complexity", but in fact all the things that make a computer a computer cannot be found in any of the parts of a human brain we directly observe, and can only be supposed, evidence free, to be hiding in the "great complexity" part. This, after several decades of scientists claiming to be able to both locate and interact with them and uniformly failing.

AIs are extremely amazing, but from working with them myself it seems pretty clear that there's not actually anything resembling a mind in there, at least in the versions I've used the way I've used them. I think it's entirely possible that additional matrix multiplication might change that in the future, but right now, it's doesn't appear to me to be happening. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the bot appears to me to be channeling intelligence, not possessing it. It doesn't seem to me that the difference is subtle, though I am again open to being persuaded that my technique is bad or the models I'm using aren't the good ones.

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.

I can feel it

Not a test. Don't talk to me about 'evidence-free' when that is where you sit.

I can feel the souls of my ancestors watching me

I can feel the presence of the gods

I can feel a djinn

I can feel the machine elves

Blah blah blah, let's see some tests. Let the machine elves factor some numbers. Let the djinn conjure up sacred fire. Let the qualia be something actually real in and of itself, separate from mere p-zombie signals and reactions - oh wait, the very distinction is imaginary woo since it can't be tested. We can induce feelings with an MRI machine, they're real. But they're nothing more than patterns of information, there's no special aspect to them beyond that.

If it can't be tested, it's not a real thing.

A test is literally an operation of the senses in empiricism, it does not needs to be socially operated. Never mind the fact you're totally ignoring a priori knowledge altogether.

You're just a slave not even to your senses, but to the aggregated senses of others. The real difference is that can buy your conception of the truth with enough money and shiny labcoats, and you can't do it to me.

It wouldn't be grating if you weren't clamoring you're the free one, for denying the evidence of your own eyes. But for what it's worth I have no evidence you're not a p-zombie. I just certainly know I'm not. So maybe you're right about what you can observe.