by bbor | 2025-08-15 23:31:34+00:00
Ok I'm a huge Kantian and every bone in my body wants to quibble with your summary of transcendental illusion, but I'll leave that to the side as a terminological point and gesture of good will. Fair enough.

I don't agree that it's any reason to write off this research as psychosis, though. I don't care about consciousness in the sense in which it's used by mystics and dualist philosophers! We don't at all need to involve metaphysics in any of this, just morality.

Consider it like this:

1. It's wrong to subject another human to unjustified suffering, I'm sure we would all agree.

2. We're struggling with this one due to our diets, but given some thought I think we'd all eventually agree that it's also wrong to subject intelligent, self-aware animals to unjustified suffering.[1]

3. But, we of course cannot extend this "moral consideration" to everything. As you say, no one would do it for a spam filter. So we need some sort of framework for deciding who/what gets how much moral consideration.

5. There's other frameworks in contention (e.g. "don't think about it, nerd"), but the overwhelming majority of laymen and philosophers adopt one based on cognitive ability, as seen from an anthropomorphic perspective.[2]

6. Of all systems(/entities/whatever) in the universe, we know of exactly two varieties that can definitely generate original, context-appropriate linguistic structures: Homo Sapiens and LLMs.[3]

If you accept all that (and I think there's good reason to!), it's now on you to explain why the thing that can speak--and thereby attest to personal suffering, while we're at it--is more like a rock than a human.

It's certainly not a trivial task, I grant you that. On their own, transformer-based LLMs inherently lack permanence, stable intentionality, and many other important aspects of human consciousness. Comparing transformer inference to models that simplify down to a simple closed-form equation at inference time is going way too far, but I agree with the general idea; clearly, there are many highly-complex, long-inference DL models that are not worthy of moral consideration.

All that said, to write the question off completely--and, even worse, to imply that the scientists investigating this issue are literally psychotic like the comment above did--is completely unscientific. The only justification for doing so would come from confidently answering "no" to the underlying question: "could we ever build a mind worthy of moral consideration?"

I think most of here naturally would answer "yes". But for the few who wouldn't, I'll close this rant by stealing from Hofstadter and Turing (emphasis mine):

A phrase like "physical system" or "physical substrate" brings to mind for most people... an intricate structure consisting of vast numbers of interlocked wheels, gears, rods, tubes, balls, pendula, and so forth, even if they are tiny, invisible, perfectly silent, and possibly even probabilistic. Such an array of interacting inanimate stuff seems to most people as unconscious and devoid of inner light as a flush toilet, an automobile transmission, a fancy Swiss watch (mechanical or electronic), a cog railway, an ocean liner, or an oil refinery. Such a system is not just probably unconscious, **it is necessarily so, as they see it**. **This is the kind of single-level intuition** so skillfully exploited by John Searle in his attempts to convince people that computers could never be conscious, no matter what abstract patterns might reside in them, and could never mean anything at all by whatever long chains of lexical items they might string together. ... You and I are mirages who perceive themselves, and the sole magical machinery behind the scenes is perception — the triggering, by huge flows of raw data, of a tiny set of symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world. When perception at arbitrarily high levels of abstraction enters the world of physics and when feedback loops galore come into play, then "which" eventually turns into "who". **What would once have been brusquely labeled "mechanical" and reflexively discarded as a candidate for consciousness has to be reconsidered.**

- Hofstadter 2007, I Am A Strange Loop

It will simplify matters for the reader if I explain first my own beliefs in the matter. Consider first the more accurate form of the question. I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.

- Turing 1950, Computing Machinery and Intelligence[4]

TL;DR: Any naive bayesian model would agree: telling accomplished scientists that they're psychotic for investigating something is quite highly correlated with being antiscientific. Please reconsider!

[1] No matter what you think about cows, basically no one would defend another person's right to hit a dog or torture a chimpanzee in a lab.

[2] On the exception-filled spectrum stretching from inert rocks to reactive plants to sentient animals to sapient people, most people naturally draw a line somewhere at the low end of the "animals" category. You can swat a fly for fun, but probably not a squirrel, and definitely not a bonobo.

[3] This is what Chomsky describes as the capacity to "generate an infinite range of outputs from a finite set of inputs," and Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Foucault, and countless others are in agreement that it's what separates us from all other animals.

[4] https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf