YoungAchamian
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User ID: 680
I mean I agree that I want the state to have little say in any of those things too, but I also extend that to defining the gender of the Spawner on official bureaucrat forms. If you have similar small government sensibilities I'm not sure why you care if the pointless bureaucracy has dotted the right I and cross the right T in regards to which parent of a child is which gender. Giving the bureaucracy power means they will just use it against you when they get a similar chance.
Play semantic games, win semantic prizes; I think I quibble with your definition of "exists"
Basic reality = Physical reality. Basic implies the most primitive, lowest, natural element. If you can't deploy any of your 5 senses on it does it "exist" in physical reality or is it a construct of human social belief?
Include specific reference, I am not following
This, though additional edits point to it being Science TM which it wasn't when I read it.
Ha. It's more one - of many - epistemic methods. Again, the problems of empiricism alone are well documented.
The scientific method is not the only epistemic method, nor the most complete one, but it is the least arbitrary and most self-correcting method available for grounding state action in basic reality. Or would you prefer a method far more biased and value driven? It would have the same problems, in far greater measures, that you are decrying above about grounding in basic reality.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
and guess what? We can already almost perfectly model a single biological neuron in silicon.
Looking back I must have gotten a pre-edit. But yes this is in-silico not silicon. There is an approach is called neuromorphic architectures and it fits your stated goal better, but the practitioners/researchers belong to a different camp of thought than LLMs (the Bio-inspired camp vs brute force camp)
We have examples of sentient systems with no persistent state, and humans to boot. There are lesions that can make someone have complete anterograde amnesia. They can maintain a continuous but limited capacity short-term memory, but the standard process of encoding and storage to longterm memory fails.
They can remember the last ~10 minutes (context window) and details of their life so far (latent knowledge) but do not consolidate new memories and thus are no longer capable of "online" learning. I do not think it's controversial that such people are conscious, and I certainly think they are.
That demonstrates, at least to my satisfaction, an existence proof that online learning is not a strict necessity for consciousness.
Uhh learning is not my argument. Maybe I did not make that clear. Amnesiac humans behavior is still not determined solely by current sensory input (Markov property). They may be unable to form new memory but they still possess an internal state(Working memory, Emotional state, Affective valence, a sense of self, a personality) that persists.
If you take two different amnesiac patients with identical sensory input, Same environment, same stimuli, can you confidently predict their actions? Or is there some latent state that is history dependent that influences their behavior?
LLMs don't have an internal state that I know of. If you have another article I'll read it, I do enjoy them.
Further, I do not think that using an external repository to maintain state is in any way disqualifying. Humans use external memory aids all the time, and we'll probably develop BCIs that can export and import arbitrary data. There is nothing privileged about storage inside the space of the skull, it's just highly convenient.
Its not external vs internal, its integrated vs externally orchestrated. As of right now LLMs do not control memory access, they don't maintain it, and they don't own it. This absolutely could change in the future, I'm not an AGI bear, I am a "LLMs as they currently exist will become AGI" bear.
I do not believe that my thoughts on the topic came up, at least in this thread. As above, I do not make strong claims that LLMs are conscious. I maintain uncertainty
Then I am mistaken, sorry for attributing an argument to you that is not your own.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
It is important to me that the state has a grasp of basic facts of reality.
Do you apply this principle to other topics as well? There are a lot things the state operates on that are not objective reality, do you write posts about those too? You know religion, psychology, conspiracy theories/misinfo, fiat currency, borders, markets, etc. None of these the things exist in basic reality, they are all fictions. You mentioned in the AI-thread about your big problems with science. The scientific method seems like a very basic fact of reality.
Really? One would think that "My Tribe is good vs the enemy who is bad, Zug-Zug!!" would be the lowest form of discourse as it is the one most commonly found in the animal kingdom. People who can't behave better than animals are generally locked up in prison, and definitely shouldn't be enfranchised.
They are more "conscious" than a rock, since at . I do not know if they have qualia, but at least they contain conscious entities as sub-agents (humans).
So once LLMs start having little green men inside them they will be as conscious as a corporation haha. Also a corporation itself is not more conscious than a rock, as the corporation cannot do anything without conscious agents acting for it. It has no agency on its own. If I create an LLC and then forget about it, does it think? does it have its own will? or does it just sit there on some ledger. If a rock has people carrying it around and performing tasks for it, has it suddenly gained consciousness?
Would you start objecting if someone were to say "China is becoming increasingly conscious of the risk posed by falling behind in the AI race against America"? Probably not.
Yeah not, but I also don't think China is actually conscious. We're all using that as linguistic shorthand for "Chinese Leadership" or "Chinese populations" This nation state idea itself lacks a mind. It is controlled by conscious agents (humans) but it itself lacks consciousness.
Hold on there. You are claiming, in effect, to have solved the Hard Problem of consciousness. How exactly do you know that they're not conscious? Can you furnish a mechanistic model that demonstrates that humans made of atoms or meat are "conscious" in a way that an entity made of model weights can't be even in principle?
You are smuggling in the claim that I am claiming to solve the problem of consciousness. I'm not. I'm claiming that LLMs lack properties that any plausible theory of consciousness requires (Or realistically my own theory). I'm saying that system A lacks necessary conditions for property P, therefore A does not have P. I don't need to prove the full positive theory of P.
My basic theory(really a constraint) of conscious behavior:
- Any sentient system must have persistent internal state across time.
- This implies non-Markovian dynamics with respect to perception and action.
- LLMs are finite-context, externally stateful, inference-time Markovian systems.
- Therefore, LLMs lack a necessary condition for consciousness.
I'm willing to entertain another plausible theory of consciousness if you have one you prefer. Or if you think you have an animal that we consider conscious that exists in a Markovian state.
That is not mutually exclusive to anything I've said so far.
Maybe I need to reread your opinion, but my understanding is that you are in the "LLMs are conscious/have minds" camp of thought. If you are then this is exclusive, because I am making the claim that these clearly not conscious tools are personified as having personalities due to human's innate social bias to attribute personality to things. But that doesn't actually make them conscious/mind-having. It's sort of like this video: Social bias towards consciousness
the same model weights, even at 0 temperature, give different outputs for runs in different environments
You are right this is technically true, with the caveat that these changes are from really tiny floating point changes on really tiny weights. But importantly, these tiny changes are akin to small random noise perturbations in molecular physics engines. It's an implementation detail due to the impreciseness of numerical operations on tiny numbers. In principle, if you froze the weights and evaluated the model on a perfectly precise machine with exact arithmetic. The mapping from inputs to outputs would be deterministic. The existence of minor numerical nondeterminism on real hardware doesn’t change the fact that the system is fully specified by its parameters, architecture, inputs, and execution environment. In a way that the effect of atomic biology of living organisms on their behavior is not. It's a bad abstraction, the inferential gap is too far.
Well, you can imagine you can, anyway. LLM execution has that in common with Molecular Dynamics simulations: you can write down the equations on paper, but you're never going to evaluate them that way.
The last part is ostensibly true, LLM with billions of parameters are essentially billions of interconnected equations. It is hard to dig through it just like codebase with a billion lines of code would be hard to dig through. We know what those equations do in small cases, just like we understand what individual lines of code do. Scaling them up doesn’t introduce agency We can extrapolate that since mathematical equations/code have no agency, they don't suddenly start doing something else when they are scaled up.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
They're model weights, and we're collections of atoms: bags of meat and miscellaneous chemicals. Both statements are technically correct. And yet... a tiger being made out of atoms doesn't make it any less capable of killing you. The problem with pure reductionism is that it throws out exactly the information you need to make predictions at the level you actually care about. Too much of it can be as bad as too little.
I always find these arguments sort of annoying because it really conflates what is actually going on in ML/AI systems with this weird pseudo-science fiction mystification. Yes Tiger's are made of atoms, but no you can't use atomic physics to describe tiger-behavior. With AI models, you can describe behavior directly in terms of the underlying code. The model weights are deterministic parameters that literally decide how the system behaves.
Also you've gotten reductionism vs abstractions completely backwards. Abstractions "throw out information". High-level models compress details to make systems easier to reason about. Also not every useful abstraction corresponds to a mind, subject, or being.
Some Thought Experiments:
- A corporation is a higher-level abstraction with goals, memory, persistence, and decision-making. Do we think corporations are conscious?
- A nation-state has beliefs, intentions, and agency in discourse. Are they conscious? Do they feel pain?
- A thermostat system “wants” to maintain temperature. Are they alive?
LLMs don't have minds and they aren't conscious. They are parameterized conditional probability functions, that are finite-order Markovian models over token sequences. Nothing exists outside their context window. They don't persist across interactions, there is no endogenous memory, and no self-updating parameters during inference. They have personality like programing languages or compilers have personality, as a biased function of how they were built, and what they were trained on.
YoungAchamian
5d ago
I’m not sure how to follow up if you don’t want a debate. Other than to thank you for the civil disagreement (heh)
Litigating where kirk falls on the spectrum would undoubtedly be a tedious back and forth sharing of clips.
YoungAchamian
6d ago
One could say politics is entirely about taking from other people.
I’d disagree with that framing definitionally, politics is a solution to the coordination problem between independent agents. Politics is not required to be zero sum, that is submitting to a purely conflict theory frame. I reject that.
Coordination is not emergent because humans are not mind readers or simple agents engaging in thoughtless behavior
YoungAchamian
6d ago
I feel like i am still trying to hammer out the concept. It’s raw and unrefined. Anyone who is expecting tight linguistic references is going to be disappointed. I think these are details to attach after it has been fully pulled from the ether of the mind and given shape.
Yes i am obviously stripping away your negative rights by calling out your insincerity and partisanship.
I live in ########### you are welcome to come by and get shot for trespassing anytime
Edit: removed identifying information post mod warning
YoungAchamian
6d ago
I’ve discussed this up and down this thread and don’t feel like rewriting it.
YoungAchamian
6d ago
Yes and i see plenty of public statements, testimonials, and mainstream media coverage to the effect that Ibrahm Kendi is a genius, thought leader fighting the greatest evil of our time: equal opportunity and meritocracy.
Just because people say it doesn’t make it true. Sometimes people want to be seen doing something for the social benefits and incentives. Kirk benefited far too much personally and financially for me to naively believe he was just “giving a voice to the disenfranchised” out of the goodness of his heart and the conviction of his beliefs. Obviously his brand requires people to believe those narratives though.
YoungAchamian
6d ago
Has it?
YoungAchamian
6d ago
Like i said, very bad faith.
YoungAchamian
6d ago
Idk maybe i am just abnormal around hero worship. But i was a right wing MRA in a left-ish college and when those conservative speakers rolled through i didn’t feel they were “giving me a voice as a disenfranchised righty”. More like now i had to defend any association between our ideas whenever they put their foot in it, acted like a smug asshole that was too rhetorically slippery to pin down or admit they were wrong.
YoungAchamian
6d ago
Well someone linked a poll result that something lime 44% of leftists believe that Kirk “deserved” what happened, and 40% of rightists believe Pretti “deserved” what happened. So apparently the concept i am describing is far more concrete than your framing and “polls” would suggest.
YoungAchamian
6d ago
It is actually his and mine’s active area of research. The interplay between domestic actors and foreign ones, engaging in the manufacture of narratives vs naturally grown ones. How much of this increased polarization is a result of cognitive warfare, how do you identify that, strategies for radicalization and deradicalization, etc.
I can’t really say more on a public forum.
YoungAchamian
6d ago
I’m referencing the class of kirk-like influencers, i don’t think kirk himself has said any or all of the things in this thought experiment. This is purely about how words/speech lead to violence. And that style of coordination isn’t rightly some hallowed thing that everyone around here seems to think should be protected
As i said, its not about the particular details of the kirk case, its about the meta-level symbols/semantics. If you need to sub kirk out for Alex Jones, Nick Feuntes, Hasan Alabi, etc go ahead.
YoungAchamian
6d ago
If you are going to call me out and make insinuations about me at least have the courage to tag me so i can respond.
Say you are a green hat wearer, its a core part of your culture/identity/religious beliefs etc. I am am a blue hat wearer. I host a famous podcast where I spend several hours a week advocating that green hat wearers are scum of the earth.
"They are morally bankrupt", "We should return to times back when green hat wearers didn't exist", "something needs to be done to those green hat wearers before they harm us", "They are going to inflict violence on us", "Look at this unhinged take from a green-hatter", "look this politician is anti-green hat, he gets us, vote for him", "Green hatters are trying to replace us!", and through my wealth from this podcast I run super pacs, think tanks, and lobby politicians to make wearing green hats illegal.
Am I inflicting violence on green hatters? You'd say no. After all I have never directly advocated for violence. I've merely drummed up hate, which is not violence. Perfectly fine right? And if a few lone wolfs go off and commit "stochastic violence" against green hatters, unfortunate, but "have they tried not being green-hatters", "Wearing green hats is going to result in nonzero deaths..."
Maybe after a couple years I get enough political capital together and a president is elected who "really gets the problem with green-hatters" And this president starts passing laws that make life difficult for green-hatters, not illegal yet, just difficult. If they break the laws, well I get to point at "See I told you all this PoS green-hatters were criminal degenerates", "We need more laws to secure a green hat free future!"
I imagine you can see where this argument goes. At what point in your opinion have I directly coordinated violence against the green-hatters? Probably never right?
Feminine violence feels like an older concept. I am not directly doing the violence but I am coordinating it to be done, and when it is done, through my schemes and machinations, I will bear some culpability for that. I am a key part of what made the Green Hat Pogrom happen. Should the survivors of that pogrom, never be able to blame me? After all I didn't commit the violence, I was just "using my words" "speaking my piece" "Engaging in discourse".
YoungAchamian
6d ago
Taking an insane argument that anything and everything, some sentient life might do, which might through nth order effects, might cause me to be restricted in my rights, so I should just kill everyone, including myself, proves nothing. It is the definition of an absurd argument that nobody is making and that no sane person believes.
If you seriously see that as the logical conclusion of my argument then you have a few screws loose or are discussing in incredibly bad faith.
YoungAchamian
6d ago
I gave an example of how going along with their example violates their own negative rights. Apparently you can violate people's negative rights for flapping butterfly wings, which means the concept of nth order effects being actual violations is ridiculous. Reducto Ad Absurdum
YoungAchamian
6d ago
Yes unfortunately some people are incapable of not being narcissists. I am increasingly on the opinion that universal suffrage was a mistake. A section of the populous will never be anything more than knuckle dragging apes.
I have no solution to that at this time. Other than recognizing that perfect is the enemy of good. And intelligent people can understand the concept of a negative right and the ironclad boundary between that and a positive right.
That could not be further than the truth. The world is complex and technocrats that think they can manage everything with a central authority fuck up on a grander scale than anyone. China is a planned economy and its technocrats are still paying for the fuckups from the last batch of mistakes from the technocrats several decades ago. Technocracy creates a system that ignores the human element of the world and in its tyranny it forces people to submit.
My preferred state only exists to solve collective coordination problems. It should do so rationality based on empiricism yes, but the empiricism of letting individuals decide their own actions. The empiricism of understanding how sociology, economics, and psychology work. Which is essentially a market. A deontological system could easily be one who's values are some shithole 3rd worldist state. I agree that science can never tell you how to act, or why, or what to value, it only tells you what is or is not. But I also don't think the government should be in the business of telling individuals why or what value and should just stick to protecting negative rights as the how.
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