“I have trouble respecting these kind of meta arguments because instead of arguing the point you want to make you essentially revert to explaining why others are so dumb they don’t see the truth like you, which is inherently loathsome.

“It’s a also 65% straw man because most people arguing for machine consciousness don’t see it as a black and white thing and aren’t arguing that LLM’s (which is just an aggregate group) are conscious in black and white. Specifics matter and the aggregate group lacks those.

“George Hinton has spent a lot more time pondering these questions than most of you beacons of truth and is a lot less sure that the symbologists are obviously right about this, and discounting the opinion of someone who founded the field you’re now building your substack on as deluded borders on disrespectful.

“My biggest issue with this whole ‘let’s get in the echo chamber together and discuss why others aren’t smart like us’ vibe is that you’re not discussing consciousness in terms of GWT, IIT or any real concrete form that we could argue..

“The argument you guys come up with is one of incredulity: “it’s just numbers and matrix multiplication” and “transistors aren’t humans”.

“That’s not a real argument for two reasons. The first is that neurons are reducible to deterministic (or deterministically stochastic) and simple parts too.

“..messenger molecules running across axions and dendrites don’t know that you’re a conscious being and they don’t care: they’re just obeying physics. It’s just chemistry in a wrinkly pink melon, how dumb to think that could be conscious. It’s just molecules.

“The second is that none of you people actually know what consciousness is, which Hinton explicitly flagged recently. You don’t know what you’re discounting because you don’t understand it either.

“It’s not a given that neural nets can do what they do and be as good at what they do as they are. It’s wasn’t a given for decades where Hinton was regarded as a fringe guy. But here we are: that are as good at what they do.

“The real mystery isn’t in some deterministic matric multiplication that you probably also don’t even fully understand – it’s in what it produces. Why is it that when you backpropagate weights in neural networks that this ends up doing things that would be considered crazy sci fi a decade ago? What’s happening inside the neural net is far more interesting than the simple operations that keep it running, just like dumb messenger molecules inside our brain aren’t interesting.

“And again it’s mostly a straw man since few scientists that actually ponder these questions think LLM’s have full unrestricted consciousness.

“They mostly think you don’t deserve to gate keep what can be conscious because you can’t even define what it would take for an artificial system to be conscious.

“You just have personal conviction based on an argument of incredulity based on a false reduction (it’s just math, it’s just prediction). You could do much better by pointing at flaws or omissions in the architecture but then you’d have to cede ground as the architectures change or improve, and it would force you to be specific and falsifiable about what consciousness is.

“Much easier to get together and talk about straw men and the obvious delusion of the other people – Hinton included for all you care.

“Best not pin yourself down with anything anyone could falsify.”

WITH GEA / Billionaire 🐒 ’s with Keypads not only of the Noam Chomsky Erving Goffman Elton Mayo William Foote Whyte @OlivettiGroup @MIT ’s manifold, manifest, multifarious, and super califragilisticexpialidocious thx😵‍💫🥸🤓🙏 to @rcdigital presenting to human society, country nation & neoliberal plutocrat Permanent-warfare fiefdom as Rene.

JOHN BLUNDELL

• whoops the ghost of Christmases past, bongheads or abstainers from hallucinogen-is-is in caves like some Golden Eagle has swooped – no further correspondence will be entered into nghwhuhlmphh well it was really a piliapp.com thàng