by viccis | 2025-08-16 23:15:32+00:00
Writing all of this at the very real risk you'll miss it because HN doesn't give reply notifications and my comment's parent being flagged made this hard to track down:

>Ok I'm a huge Kantian and every bone in my body wants to quibble with your summary of transcendental illusion

Transcendental illusion is the act of using transcendental judgment to reason about things without grounding in empirical use of the categories. I put "scientifically" in shock quotes there to sort of signal that I was using it as an approximation, as I don't want to have to explain transcendental reason and judgments to make a fairly terse point. Given that you already understand this, feel free to throw away that ladder.

>...can definitely generate original, context-appropriate linguistic structures: Homo Sapiens and LLMs.[3]

I'm not quite sure that LLMs meet this standard that you described in the endnote, or at least that it's necessary and sufficient here. Pretty much any generative model, including Naive Bayes models I mentioned before, can do this. I'm guessing the "context-appropriate" subjectivity here is doing the heavy lifting, in which case I'm not certain that LLMs, with their propensity for fanciful hallucination, have cleared the bar.

>Comparing transformer inference to models that simplify down to a simple closed-form equation at inference time is going way too far

It really isn't though. They are both doing exactly the same thing! They estimate joint probability distribution. That one of them does it significantly better is very true, but I don't think it's reasonable to state that consciousness arises as a result of increasing sophistication in estimating probabilities. It's true that this kind of decision is made by humans about animals, but I think that transferring that to probability models is sort of begging the question a bit, insofar as it is taking as assumed that those models, which aren't even corporeal but are rather algorithms that are executed in computers, are "living".

>...it's now on you to explain why the thing that can speak--and thereby attest to personal suffering, while we're at it...

I'm not quite sold on this. If there were a machine that could perfectly imitate human thinking and speech and lacked a consciousness or soul or anything similar to inspire pathos from us when it's mistreated, then it would appear identical to one with soul, would it not? Is that not reducing human subjectivity down to behavior?

>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 it's possible, but it would require something that, at the very least, is just as capable of reason as humans. LLMs still can't generate synthetic a priori knowledge and can only mimic patterns. I remain somewhat agnostic on the issue until I can be convinced that an AI model someone has designed has the same interiority that people do.

Ultimately, I think we disagree on some things but mostly this central conclusion:

>I don't agree that it's any reason to write off this research as psychosis

I don't see any evidence from the practitioners involved in this stuff that they are even thinking about it in a way that's as rigorous as the discussion on this post. Maybe they are, but everything I've seen that comes from blog posts like this seems like they are basing their conclusions on their interactions with the models ("...we investigated Claude’s self-reported and behavioral preferences..."), which I think most can agree is not really going to lead to well grounded results. For example, the fact that Claude "chooses" to terminate conversations that involve abusive language or concepts really just boils down to the fact that Claude is imitating a conversation with a person and has observed that that's what people would do in that scenario. It's really good at simulating how people react to language, including illocutionary acts like implicatures (the notorious "Are you sure?" causing it to change its answer for example). If there were no examples of people taking offense to abusive language in Claude's data corpus, do you think it would have given these responses when they asked and observed it?

For what it's worth, there has actually been interesting consideration to the de-centering of "humanness" to the concept of subjectivity, but it was mostly back in the past when philosophers were thinking about this speculatively as they watched technology accelerate in sophistication (vs now when there's such a culture-wide hype cycle that it's hard to find impartial consideration, or even any philosophically rooted discourse). For example, Mark Fisher's dissertation at the CCRU (<i>Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction</i>) takes a Deleuzian approach that discusses it by comparisons with literature (cyberpunk and gothic literature specifically). Some object-oriented ontology looks like it's touched on this topic a bit too, but I haven't really dedicated the time to reading much from it (partly due to a weakness in Heidegger on my part that is unlikely to be addressed anytime soon). The problem is that that line of thinking often ends up going down the Nick Land approach, in which he reasoned himself from Kantian and Deleuzian metaphysics and epistemology, into what can only be called a (literally) meth-fueled psychosis. So as interesting as I find it, I still don't think it counts as a non-psychotic way to tackle this issue.