![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aorish:A while back, a certain blogger quoted Philip K. Dick that reality is what doesn’t go away if you stop believing in it. This blogger had tried so hard to disbelieve when the spirit of Death started talking to him in his head, but it wouldn’t go away, so he had no choice but to treat it as reality.
You do what you have to, but I think Dick was wrong. Reality doesn’t go away when you stop noticing it. Something can be rammed into your head so hard you have no way to dislodge it, but still not be real, and something can be real even if there’s no way for you to see it.
A mental trap: asserting that human-created meaning exists outside of humans. For instance, wavelengths of light exist, but humans are the ones who categorize some wavelengths as “yellow.” If you talk about yellow as an objective property and philosophize about the true nature of yellow, you’re overprivileging the human perspective.
Also a mental trap: thinking that someone is asserting human-created meaning when they’re not. Someone talks about the wavelengths of light that are commonly considered “yellow,” and you get mad and lecture them about how yellow isn’t real. They weren’t trying to assert yellow as real; they were just trying to talk about the properties of light in a concise and easy to understand way.
Both mental traps constantly snap shut when people talk about sex chromosomes.
I saw an argument that the Chinese Room may have a consciousness separate from the human within it. The human doesn’t “mean” what they say, but the room means it. Therefore, an LLM might have a consciousness and mean what it says.
I think the point is made more clearly if, instead of using the Chinese Room for the comparison, you use No is Yes for the comparison. The girl says “No” and means “Yes.” It would be absurd to argue that her words create an independent consciousness that means “No.” The word “No” has simply been unmoored from its original meaning.
You can argue that there’s something within an LLM that “thinks.” Presumably, it goes “I want to make this text similar to the text I’ve read.” But the LLM doesn’t mean “No” when it mimics a text that says “No,” because the word “No” has been unmoored.
In Dragon Age: Inquisition, you can get into an argument about whether other-dimensional spirits qualify as “people.” One of your possible arguments is that spirits, in the Dragon Age cosmology, are fundamentally reflections. They mimic the emotions they see, and they can’t feel anything a human hasn’t felt first.
The other guy argues that humans also impact and change each other. If this argument changes your mind, does that mean you’re not a person because you reflected him?
LLMs are reflections. You show one a bunch of fantasy novels, and it reproduces the general style of fantasy novels. Show it a bunch of 4chan posts, and it reproduces 4chan posts. So in a way, that argument about spirits is also an argument about LLMs.
In the long term, I think utils bottom out a lot lower than they top out, thanks to the hedonic treadmill. If person A gets maximum positive utils from giving B maximum negative utils, it’s a net negative. And I think a lot of the things that give positive utils are more replaceable than things that prevent negative utils. If you have the preference to be safe, you won’t be happy while you’re forced to fight in an arena, but I don’t think someone who watches an arena fight inherently enjoys it more than watching a video game tournament. So my concern is less with making some people really happy, and more with giving people the basics like food and shelter to prevent the worst cases of misery.
This isn’t always as fair as it sounds. I think it’s basically tolerable if some people are rich and some people have enough to get by. But people shouldn’t be rich so long as others are starving.
timeasmymeasure
