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Yes.
Statistical models are not persons. You are confusing expressing negative feeling with experiencing negative feeling.
Or, to borrow from the famous argument. If LLMs can feel pain, then so can the United States.
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.
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.
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.
A guy used TNT back in the day, blew a hole straight through his head and that certainly affected his personality, he got all aggressive and dour. Neuralink. Lobotomies. So much for uniform failure. It's just that the interaction is fairly primitive compared to what we can do with AIs, for a mix of technical and ethical reasons.
We have a map of what the brain does, we've isolated what parts do language or other roles and can turn parts off and on. You underestimate what progress has been made in neuroscience: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151014084955.htm
What is the distinction between channelling intelligence and possessing it? AIs can reason, plan, problem-solve. That's intelligence. What specifically is missing? I too use Opus and Fable, I'm satisfied that they're intelligent. They are not like humans in all respects of course but they certainly possess intellect.
Black powder, actually, and last time I read up on him, I recall a fair amount of evidence for replication crisis issues. That is, there's evidence the scientists studying him had an agenda, and shaped their studies and the reporting of those studies to fit that agenda, rather than impartially reporting facts. which actually feeds directly into:
Neither impinge on the objection I'm raising, though the actual history of Lobotomies is actually a really good example of the history I'm pointing to. Psychology and Psychiatry and the medical field generally repeatedly claimed they could deliver practical mind reading or mind control, gained massive sociopolitical power from these claims, and then failed to deliver them while gaslighting the public into a messy, ad-hoc combination of "we delivered them" and "we never promised to deliver them". Massive parts of history make a lot more sense if you understand this, because this particular scam was wildly impactful on the political history of the Modern era. If you want a bit of the flavor, read old Sci-Fi, it's absolutely riddled with the resulting tropes. If you dig into the political and institutional histories, you'll find the same thing, because the Sci-Fi was extrapolating from the understanding of science promulgated by the actual scientists. Lobotomies were established as a legitimate technique because the scientists claimed that psycho-surgery was a real thing they could do, and fell when it became unavoidably evident that those claims were categorically false.
I don't think I do. Mind Reading and Mind Control were the table stakes proposed by the Humanist contingent in the turn of the last century, and it does not appear to me that we are any closer to these now than we were then. If the brain is a computer, we are researching how to plug in different keyboards, monitors, mice and headphones, and at the bleeding edge we're figuring out how to bypass damaged USB ports by soldering wires directly to the board, while the modernist claim you seem to be repeating is that we can edit the source code. The distinction matters. In this too, I'm open to being proven wrong: maybe next year we'll actually have mind reading and mind control. But I observe that one of the worst and most common failures of the Scientific Materialist mindset is the propensity to assume things are empirically proven when they haven't. And again, mind reading and mind control is both what we should expect if the brain really is like a computer, and something science as an institution started claiming it could deliver something like a hundred years ago.
I'm making mathematical models of tank guns. The AI is amazingly knowledgeable about physics, engineering, math generally, military history, and on and on. I say I want to figure out a general model for gun weight based on peak pressure generated by the propellent and the shell. It can do this! It calculates hoop-stress for steel, calculates the pressure curve...
...and then it explains to me that shortening a gun's barrel increases the peak pressure its shell generates. Only, that's not true. Hold the shell weight and propellent charge constant, and barrel length cannot increase peak pressure, only reduce it. I'm not particularly proficient in physics or mathematics or engineering, but even I know that. It's simple logic if you understand even the basics of what these words in combination are describing.
It "knows" a vast amount, and it presents its "knowledge" in what appears to be a very human way from the perspective of the user, but the knowledge is not integrated or manipulated in the way I would expect from a human. The gaps in knowledge and certainty appear in places I've never seen in humans, and working around those gaps involves a different process than I've ever used with humans. The AI doesn't actually understand anything about hoop stress or the physical properties of steel or the internal ballistics of tank cannons, or possibly anything at all. It's not an actor in its own right, the way we commonly think of them. It's a lens, some sort of high-dimensional refractor that concentrates diffuse, disparate elements into a specific focal point, but fundamentally dependent on the physical positioning of those elements and of the lens itself for the content of that focal point.
...And again, maybe this is me just using it wrong. If so, I'm very interested in how to use it better! I'm only a bit over a month into my career as a serious AI prompter, so I claim no deep insight into the actual frontier capabilities of all AI or even the models I'm using. I'm just describing what I'm personally seeing. Further, even this is fundamentally amazing! We've legitimately created a repeatable, mass-production terminal for coding in Grad Student! That by itself with no further improvement is probably the biggest technological breakthrough of the last century! But while it presents itself as a person, it pretty clearly isn't a person, and the illusion only holds even briefly at the focal point itself. sidestep, and it fuzzes out and breaks apart.
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