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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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People keep saying this, but I'm not convinced our own brains are doing anything more.
thinking is so easy to model when you don’t do it and assume nobody else does either
love these guys who clearly didn't make it all the way to the end of the 250-word article
Let the haters hate.
Despite the welcome growth of atheism, almost all humans at one level or another cling to the idea that our monkey brains are filled with some magic miraculous light that couldn't possibly be replicated. The reality is that some of us only have glimmers of sapience, and many not even that. Most humans, most of the time, are mindless zombies following a script, whether due to individual capacity, or a civilization that largely doesn't reward metacognition or pondering the questions that matter, as that doesn't immediately feed individual productivity or make anyone materially wealthier, that maze doesn't lead to any yummy cheese for us.
AI development isn't finally progressing quickly and making people uncomfortable with its capability because it's catching up to our supposedly transcendental superbrains (that en masse spent hundreds of thousands of years wandering around in the dirt before it finally occurred to any of them that we could grow food seasonally in one place). It's making a lot of humans uncomfortable because it's demonstrating that there isn't a whole hell of a lot to catch up to, especially for an average human.
There's a reason pretty much everyone immediately discarded the Turing Test and basically called it a bullshit metric after elevating it for decades as a major benchmark in the development of AI systems... The moment a technology and design that could readily pass it became available. That's the blind hubris of man on grand display.
of course somebody prompted up a LessWrong-specific chatbot
Creationists: We don't understand the brain so it must be the work of god.
AI Worshipers: We don't understand the brain so it must work exactly like LLMs.
Banned for using the word metacognition seriously.
see I was just gonna go for “promptfondlin” but I’m glad I hesitated cause this is my new favorite ban reason
gasbag with occasional live one, the most tragic form of bad poster
I think I'll start using "metacognition" in a derogatory way. What a metacognitive post.
Funny how all the people saying this always include themselves in the select few sapient ones.
Where does this NPC meme even come from? It's one thing to think most people are stupid or conformist or susceptible to propaganda, but believing a large fraction of the population are "mindless zombies following a script" goes beyond simple arrogance to straight up delusion.
Yea, most people don't think about some things I care about as deeply as I do. As if that means they don't have their own internal life going on.
probably fucking 4chan once again
It did in fact come from the *chans, but what I'm wondering is how it became a thing. Anons making wild leaps of logic after being told some people don't experience verbal inner monologue is still a couple steps removed from the kind of right wing mainstreaming of the weird idea that most people supposedly lack sentience.
I guess the supposed appeal is in the implicit dehumanization and racism.
yeah, that's actually how I've always read it. looking at people in lives stretched to the limit of tolerance by the pure drive for survival, and instead of having a fucking lick of empathy and going "wow yeah, all this is kinda shitty, maybe we should change it" they go "oh yeah very clearly this person is incapable of self-directed behaviour and action"
metacognition, n.: thinking as formulated by zuck
tell me more about the AI haters who work in AI research at Apple
I was referring to the downvotes of the comment I replied to.
I wonder if any of the people about to downvote your comments are the weird non-sapient humans who work exactly like LLMs you seem to think exist, or maybe your posts are just inane promptfondling horseshit we’ve seen before
More eye-rolling contempt than hatred, tbh.
It’s a funny thing, that there are certain kinds of people who are assured of their own cleverness and so alienated from society that they think that echoing the same dehumanising blurb produced by so many of their forebears is somehow novel or informative, rather than just following a script.
(the irony of responding with an xkcd is not lost on me)
Much like the promptfondlers proudly claiming they are stochastic parrots, flaunting your inability to recognise intelligence in other humans isn’t a great flex.
How nice it must be to never ponder how large humanity is, and how each and every person you see outside has a full and rich interior and exterior world, and you that only see a tiny fraction of the people outside.
Personally one of my "oh other people are real!" moment, was when our parents (along with my sisters) took us on a surprise ferry trip to England (from France) and our grandparents that—at least as far as kid me remembered—we only ever saw in their home city, were waiting for us in Portsmouth, and we visited the city together (Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is quite nice btw).
I knew they were real, but realizing that they weren't geo-locked, made me more fully internalize that they had full and independent lives, and therefore that everyone had.
How about people here? When did you realize people are real?
When I moved out for the first real time. I realised my parents were whole human beings in their own right, and by extension every other person in the world.
I know that might make me sound stupid as I was an adult when I had that realisation. I mean it as the first time I really understood and internalised that idea. Everyone is on their own journey. Also not disputing me being a dumbass, there is plenty I do not know.
I don't think that's nice. That sounds extremely bleak and depressive, not to mention downright sociopathic.
I wouldn't swap it for the world ^^, but maybe a tad fewer existantial crises would be nice (no monkey-paw curls plz)
To respond to this part:
I just have this basic human feeling of appreciation whenever someone close goes out of their way to do something nice for me. It's always this reminder of hey, I exist in other peoples' lives as well, isn't that cool!
still difficult for me, I think it's part of my flavor of autism
I don't remember a time when I didn't understand everyone else had a life and thoughts of their own, just like I do. Maybe it helps that I grew up with a sibling of a similar age.
Choose your sneer answer: