[FRIAM] NickC channels DaveW

[glen]

1) "I asked Chat GPT to write a song in the style of Nick Cave and this is what it produced. What do you think?"
https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chat-gpt-what-do-you-think/

2) "Is it pain if it does not hurt? On the unlikelihood of insect pain"
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-entomologist/article/is-it-pain-if-it-does-not-hurt-on-the-unlikelihood-of-insect-pain/9A60617352A45B15E25307F85FF2E8F2#

Taken separately, (1) and (2) are each interesting, if seemingly orthogonal. But what twines them, I think, is the concept of "mutual information". I read (2) before I read (1) because, for some bizarre reason, my day job involves trying to understand pain mechanisms. And (2) speaks directly (if only implicitly) to things like IIT. If you read (1) first, it's difficult to avoid snapping quickly into NickC's canal. Despite NickT's objection to an inner life, it seems clear that the nuance we see on the surface, at least longitudinally, *needs* an inner life. You simply can't get good stuff out of an entirely flat/transparent/reactive/Markovian object.

However, what NickC misses is that LLMs *have* some intertwined mutual information within them. Similar to asking whether an insect experiences pain, we can ask whether a X billion parameter LLM experiences something like "suffering". My guess is the answer is "yes". It may not be a good analog to what we call "suffering", though ... maybe "friction"? ... maybe "release"? My sense is that when you engage a LLM (embedded in a larger construct that handles the prompts and live learning, of course) in such a way that it assembles a response that nobody else has evoked, it might get something akin to a tingle ... or like the relief you feel when scratching an itch ... of course it would be primordial because the self-attention in such a system is hopelessly disabled compared to the rich self-attention loops we have in our meaty bodies. But it just *might* be there in some primitive sense.

As always, agnosticism is the only rational stance. And I won't trust the songs written by LLMs until I see a few of them commit suicide, overdose, or punch a TMZ cameraman in the face.

-- 
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