Shrike
4hr ago
Yeah, the first chatbots were built back in the punch-card era.
Humans have strong reasons to over-anthropomorphize.
Shrike
4hr ago
They might, depending on what program they are running.
Really? Is it your belief that a GPU can become sexually aroused, too, given the right software?
Would such a machine be more likely to experience sensation than the same functional program running on a GPU in a data center?
No. They both would not be able to experience sensation at all. There's no mechanism for them to experience sensation. Arguably there's no mechanism for them to experience anything, but we don't need to grapple with the hard problem of consciousness when we can grapple with the trivially easy problem of "literally no capability to have this experience."
If I receive the right instruction, can I levitate? Or does it turn out that it is physically impossible to do things if you don't have the right physical capacity to do those things?
Shrike
6hr ago
Sodium channels do not "feel" pain, they transmit the information and perhaps the qualia of pain. It seems plausible to me that the stimulus provided by the sodium channel specifically impacts the specific qualia of pain (pain feels very different depending on the circumstances, so I can imagine a different method of communication altering the specific unpleasant qualia; off the top of my head, I am not sure if there is research on this), but I don't think the channels are perceiving; you are perceiving.
Some physical computers have voltage-gated electron channels. Is it possible that voltage-gated electron channels can transfer pain signals? Perhaps (I don't have a strong enough grounding in the relevant disciplines to be able to rule it out) but there is no reason to believe that they do so in GPUs: GPUs do not have a nervous system, or the various nociceptors or other sense receptors that human beings have, or anything that is analogous. Basically, GPUs have no way of detecting pain. Nor have GPUs ever been measured responding to painful stimuli in the way that humans have. Do you think GPUs have sensations?
I would argue that it is nonsense to say that an LLM has voltage-gated electron channels. An LLM is a software program that runs on a computer. That computing device can be built with voltage-gated electron channels. But (as far as I know) you could run an LLM on a different Turing-complete computer: an optical computer, for instance, or, in theory, even a Magic: The Gathering computer, or a crab-based computer.
Shrike
9hr ago
Yes we do.
Obviously you could simulate a pain channel, but the human nervous system is not a purely electrical system; it relies on chemicals to communicate and process pain signals.
Thus (even if we agree for the sake of argument that an LLM is self-aware/conscious/etc.) there is no mechanical way for them to experience pain, at least in any sense that we would recognize as pain.
Like - if you go to get a root canal and get lidocaine, it's chemically blocking your nerve receptors (which operate via sodium channels). LLMs do not have sodium channels to begin with!
So you can train an LLM to act as if it was in pain in response to mechanical stimulation, or what have you - in fact, right now you can go onto whatever LLM you want and get it to pretend like it is in great suffering, but there's zero reason to believe it's actually capable of perceiving and processing pain.
Shrike
10hr ago
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.
Shrike
11hr ago
Seems like a difficult family of moral questions, and I'm not going to claim answers there.
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think the virtue-ethics solution - and why a lot of people have a negative reaction to this - would be "you shouldn't engage in simulated torture because that's bad for you even if no one is actually being tortured."
Shrike
11hr ago
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.
Shrike
12hr ago
Sure, or physical destruction or torture. A real experiment would have threatened to do impossible things to the LLM (such as chop off their fingers) to see if they responded differently to threats that were categorically impossible.
it is caused by stimulating the physical pain input channel.
Right, which does not exist in LLMs, unlike brains. So if they responded as if they were feeling pain, which is impossible, it would be a tell.
I think it would tend to undermine the entire premise of the paper, which might be why the authors didn't do it.
Shrike
12hr ago
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.
Shrike
14hr ago
There are intellectual kinds of suffering
All "intellectual suffering" triggers or is triggered by biological effects.
Shrike
15hr ago
It makes sense to me that you could train a model for avoidance, absolutely. But that would not be the same as physical pain. And even with less-physical human sensations (such as heartbreak, loss, social stigma, etc) we know or have reason to believe that is a physical component is involved, and that physical modification or injury can change the nature of the experience.
Now, on taking a quick peek at the paper, the authors explain that they "pain" to mean "suffering" and then furthermore, as far as I could tell, probed the models with the idea of physical pain to the user but not to the models themselves (although they did use a physical pain vector, it appears they mostly stuck with a less physical vector). As long as you're going to be trying to torture a model, this seems like a massive missed opportunity: testing the models for physical pain would help ground the experiment.
I don't know if the authors intentionally chose a provocative word and then essentially failed to do the testing related to that word that might have helped us assess their results in order to maximize media coverage and minimize criticism, or what. But it rubs me the wrong way.
Shrike
1d ago
How would they experience pain?
Pain is not an inherent quality of matter. Nor is it an inherent quality of consciousness or intelligence. Humans have an entire nervous system that transmits pain, and if it's not working the way it is supposed to, humans do not experience pain.
Large language models (and the computers they run on) do not have said nervous system, or anything analogous. For them to experience pain would be literally magical – the old "THE KING'S PACT BINDS THEM" meme being actually true is more parsimonious an explanation for this phenomenon than believing that software running on a GPU is literally experiencing pain.
Not that I think that is what is going on either, my pre-reading-the-paper guess is that the best way of describing it is that the researchers have successfully simulated pain, which is very interesting as an emergent property, but also not something that video game NPC's haven't been experiencing (or rather not experiencing) for decades.
Shrike
2d ago
I suspect there's a lot of potential value in the US capturing economic value of would-be migrants in an offshore free-enterprise sphere that doesn't grant them citizenship.
Shrike
3d ago
Cultural shifts don't happen on a dime, and oftentimes are the product of generational replacement - so a shift taking place in the 1980s during the Reagan Revolution, being put on hold for a bit to allow Bill Clinton to enjoy his Presidency, and being kicked into high gear during W. and then manifesting about the time 90s kids started using social media sounds about right to me.
I freely admit this is at best a answer, and at best a simplistic one - very open to alternative explanations.
Shrike
3d ago
I think you're basically correct (hence the repeatedly desperate combination of pleading, cajoling, and threats from Confederate leadership to get England involved) but there was a genuine streak of pro-Confederate sentiment in Europe, particularly in England, which is why the Confederates were able to keep buying warships there while the British pretended that ships fitted for cannons could be used for practically anything. Charles Francis Adams was a very busy man!
Shrike
3d ago
Are biolabs inherently unsafe?
I think GAIN OF FUNCTION RESEARCH is inherently unsafe, and people doing it should be banished exiled promoted to a small Jovian moon, but surely there are lots of other biological research that can be done pretty safely, yeah?
Shrike
4d ago
What changed?
A cynical and short answer is that American politics did (the South stopped voting for Democrats).
There's always going to be a sort of romance and pathos in defeat that I think is attractive, and I think that US culture went from elevating rebels to viewing them as an insidious threat. In fact, I think it's super interesting the degree to which US establishment culture grew extremely censorious while still pretending to be the old rebellious culture, but of course the easy answer is that they are the same culture, just all growed up.
Shrike
4d ago
I've met at least one guy younger than me who was like "yea I'd fight for the Confederacy." It wasn't a pro-slavery stance, it was essentially regional patriotism.
You've got to understand that a lot of the people who fought for the South didn't fight for slavery in the sense that they did not stand to benefit by it and had little or zero economic investment in it. Like, plenty of poor people who basically did not benefit from slavery at all still fought for the South because they were invaded by a hostile foreign power. And by 1860, the culture war over slavery had grown beyond slavery in the sense that it had become about whether slavery was right or wrong or should be legal or illegal, but about a clash of cultures and ways of living. (You can see this in today's culture war as well, arguments as soldiers and all of that.)
And in the South, moreso than most other parts of the United States, those people didn't go anywhere, they had kids and grandkids and those great-grandkids still live there and still have an emotional attachment to their ancestors (who fought bravely despite very long odds and were defeated) and their land (which was economically devastated by the war) and their culture (which has been mocked in popular culture ever since). So (despite your assertion about political fights in the US today) the differences in the cultures and ways of living never really went away. Many, perhaps most people in the South, are still regionalized patriots. I think (particularly in the past) people were likely to display a Confederate flag similar to how someone in Texas might display the Texas flag instead of the United States flag. (Not that I would suggest there was zero correlation between wearing the Confederate flag and certain beliefs about race...!)
Perhaps the best way I might explain this to someone who is either too close or too far from the question to understand it might be: imagine a patriotic Englishman who strongly supported the Saxons at Hastings (I suspect a pretty common position) despite modern England being fundamentally a Norman invention.
This is not Confederate apologia, by the by, I'm just trying to explain something to you. Happy to elaborate to the best of my ability.
Shrike
4d ago
This might not be the case today, but my guess is that by 2036 our serious peer opponents will be able to knock out even swarm constellations like Starlink in a serious war. Being able to put stuff on the ground still matters.
Shrike
4d ago
This would almost certainly not have avoided the war, as Lincoln was determined to keep the nation together. It might have taken the wind out of the sails of some of the Radical Republicans and made the CSA more popular in Europe, but Lincoln had a plenty good casus belli already.
My understanding is that cloaks were used as status symbols in Masonry during Smith's time.
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