Shrike
2hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
4hr 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
4hr 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
6hr ago
There are intellectual kinds of suffering
All "intellectual suffering" triggers or is triggered by biological effects.
Shrike
7hr 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
17hr 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
1d 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
2d 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
3d 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
3d 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.
Shrike
4d ago
I mean, probably the same thing he did in real life. It's very hard to fight a war against a larger enemy without an offsetting advantage. The only offsetting advantage that the South had was that their troop quality was superior.
Since troop quality tends to equalize over the course of a war (very noticeable change, for instance, in the capabilities of Southern cavalry relative to their Northern peers over the course of the war) fighting an aggressive campaign to rack up as many victories as possible and break the enemy will to fight early on is pretty smart.
I am sure that in hindsight there is a lot of things Davis could have done differently, but my study of the war didn't focus very specifically on him and thus I am likely ignorant of many of them.
I think Lee can perhaps be criticized for being willing to win costly victories early in the war, but ultimately the South was never going to win a war of attrition, and Lincoln basically needed to cycle through commanders until he found one (Grant) that understood this and was willing to throw his own men into the meatgrinder, so fighting to optimize for casualties probably doesn't help you win the war if it means you are losing more often - this was basically McClellan's strategy (McClellan as far as I can tell was actually very good at training and loved his men - if anything, this was a problem, he wasn't willing to let them die) and he was pretty evidently ill-suited for actually winning the war.
But it seems to me that there wasn't much Davis could do differently in most cases. What is he supposed to do about Johnston or Jackson, tell them "don't die"? Or tell Lee "good job, try to get fewer people killed"? He could have put Lee in charge sooner, or perhaps put him in charge in the West, but Lee wasn't ultimately capable of beating Grant. Maybe he could have tried to have Grant assassinated after Shiloh, or something similarly off-the-wall.
The one thing I know I would push for if I woke up tomorrow as Jefferson Davis, newly elected President of the Confederacy, is push to free slaves to fight sooner. But a lot of that is because I think such an effort would be better for the postwar South (regardless of who won) rather than thinking that it would win the war. There's also a real problem here in terms of timing - something like this became more politically viable late in the war, but arguably too late to matter. If Davis had been able to free the slaves on Day One, it might have made a difference in terms of Northern political will, and garnered additional support from England. But obviously that was politically impossible. The best he could likely have done would have been to launch pilot programs earlier in the war. Maybe that would have worked well, or maybe not.
Shrike
4d ago
This is off the top of my head based on what I recall from coursework like a decade ago, but if memory serves:
- Southern troops were exhausted from the battle and the maneuvering leading up to it and not in a condition to pursue
- Washington, D.C. was likely fortified (I know it was later in the war)
- Northern troops were falling back in that direction, would benefit from interior lines, and would have a numerical advantage on the defensive
I'd need to do more research to have a really solid opinion, but it strikes me a lot like the people saying Hannibal should have just thrown his army at Rome after Cannae, ignoring that the Romans had the superior numbers.
Shrike
4d ago
I'm not sure. I did a course in it, not an entire degree, and to the extent I focused on anything it was actually the naval war, so I don't have a strong opinion on the single most important battle. But Vicksburg, if memory serves, was what really allowed the North to implement Scott's Anaconda strategy on the Southern interior.
were regiments composed of freed slaves actually useful (I don't trust the academy to give me an honest answer here).
I think the answer is "yes" in Union service, and it's unclear how they would have performed in Southern service, since their options were basically fighting for freedom or surrendering for freedom. (However I do think that freeing them was better than the slightly insane plan to conscript the slaves to fight as slaves.)
Even if one agrees for the sake of argument that freed slaves wouldn't perform as well on the battlefield (and setting aside any of the culture war reasons, at least in the South a lot of troops went into the war with a deep familiarity with firearms we would not expect most slaves to possess) being able to use them in logistics, screening, and garrison roles is useful.
Definitely the south should have never fought outside of an intrenched position
See Fort Henry and Fort Donelson for what happen when you adopt this tactic. Fortifications are force multipliers, not a replacement for maneuver.
Perhaps the Union could have fought its own defensive war and just starved the South out over time via naval blockade without taking a lot of casualties.
The South was an agrarian society. You could have made them poor this way, but not actually starve them out. Furthermore...although the Union blockade was successful, the Confederacy's commerce raiders punched above their weight and imposed real economic losses on the North. Northerners might not have seen a "sit and wait" strategy as politically acceptable while the South was tearing through their commerce and whaling. However see Winfield Scott's similar Anaconda Plan, which was ultimately essentially implemented because Scott was more correct than most other early war leadership about the length and cost of the war.
I'm not sure Northern naval dominance was quite as inevitable as one might imagine. Certainly they had the superior manufacturing, but the Confederacy's early war goals were to procure European ironclads and obliterate the Northern wooden-hulled fleet. However they were unable to procure a European ironclad until late in the war. I doubt buying a few ironclads would have prevented a resolute North from eventually beating them at sea with their greater manufacturing capabilities, but it might have set the blockade back at a crucial time.
Shrike
4d ago
I studied the American Civil War in graduate school, and the books I read (and my professor) did not think highly of the Fabian thesis. They pointed out that
- The material and morale cost imposed by having a hostile army rampaging all over your countryside was extremely high (this is part of the reason Lee invaded Pennsylvania, Virginia had been marched over by armies of both sides so many times).
- A standing army was a necessary symbol of the legitimacy of the South to its people (and also helpful to foreign sponsors) as a nation-state.
- Aggressively defending its territory was necessary as the South was a slaveholding state, and the North was freeing slaves in territories it entered. This is a pretty serious problem when you are at war, the men are off fighting it, and you need to make sure your armies are fed. Allowing retreating in the face of their superior armies meant that the Southern economic base would evaporate.
There are also some who suggest that the South was unable to wage a guerrilla campaign (e.g. in the aftermath of Lee's surrender) because of poor or brittle morale. This is untrue; the South accepted an outrageous percentage of casualties that would probably have folded up other nation-states, including the Union.
Highly recommend Gallagher's Union War and Confederate War on this question.
If I was going to try to win the Civil War for the South as a time-traveler, I would have used the tourniquet in Albert Sidney Johnston's pocket to save his life and do my best to make sure the Union troops were routed at Shiloh on the second day. Johnston was regarded by many as the best commander in the United States going into the war, and American literature over-indexes on the fighting in the East. The truth is that the Western campaign was arguably the most decisive. (Focusing on Gettysburg is arguably a bit of pro-Confederate myopia that glorifies the South's high-water mark in the East while overlooking their relatively poor generalship in the West, although you aren't wrong about the potential electoral consequences.) A victory over Grant there could have removed the North's most effective commander.
Of course, saving Johnston's life might not really matter in the long run – I like it because it's an interesting "what if," a small change of the sorts that spawn alternate-history books. There are lots of other things an effective time traveler could do, such as ensure Grant did not get the early sweep at Forts Henry and Donelson (possibly more important than saving Johnston), pick up Special Order 191 before it was recovered by Union forces, give advice on how to win/not lose at Gettysburg, kick the early trial plans to free slaves to act as soldiers into higher gear, or possibly even persuade South Carolina not to fire the first shot.
I also do think that the South could have used more effective defensive tactics without going purely Fabian. Lee (who had an early war nickname of "the King of Spades") imposed massive costs on the North via effective trenchworks and defensive tactics later in the war. But at the end of the day, particularly in premodern war, "eating the other guy's corn" versus "letting the other guy eat your corn" is a big difference.
Functionalism doesn't give GPUs nociception.
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