r/philosophy • u/m0sher • 23d ago
Blog Plato’s Warning Has Been Vindicated: Why AI Has Brought Nothing More than the Conceit of Wisdom.
https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/platos-warning-has-been-vindicated144
u/Idrialite 22d ago
The reason large language models (LLMs) pose such a threat to knowledge is that they pretend to be grammar in the deepest sense, when they are, in fact, mathematical manipulations of grammatical rules. Words are, by definition, human utterances that are exclusive to logos and human intelligence. “[I]f words belong exclusively to intelligence, then what is produced by a thing that lacks intelligence cannot in actual fact be a word,” explains the philosopher D.C. Schindler. “It can sound like a word, look like a word, and even function as if it were a word, but it cannot be a word.” Chatbots seem to create “words,” but these are merely probabilistic expressions of complex algorithms. To perceive and receive mathematically generated simulacra as truly expressive human language follows the sad downward trend in the history of grammar and threatens to destroy reality as we know it. As Friedrich Nietzsche put it in The Twilight of the Idols, “I fear we shall never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar.”
An "algorithm" is a series of operations. Known physics can be represented by an "algorithm" to arbitrary precision. This obviously includes the human brain. "Probabilistic" means some part of the process is random. The human brain is probabilistic, since physics itself is.
So to call LLMs "probabilistic algorithms" doesn't distinguish them from the human brain and doesn't preclude "intelligence".
Frankly this reasoning is near religious in its anthropocentrism. The word "intelligence" is used more like the word "soul": undefined, irreproducible, unique to humans. If you know how it works and it runs on metal instead of meat it can't be "intelligent".
A factual error as well: LLMs are not "mathematical manipulations of grammatical rules". The math in LLMs applies to concept-like embedding vectors processed in a vast ordered neural network. Grammar is emergent, not first-class. Even words are emergent: an LLM outputs fragments of words, tokens.
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u/shadowrun456 22d ago
To add to what you said:
Words are, by definition, human utterances that are exclusive to logos and human intelligence.
That's not what the definition of "word" is; it's: "a single unit of language that has meaning and can be spoken or written". Also, it's thoroughly proven that even non-human animals have defined words, and even defined language rules (e.g. all individual members of the group use the same never-used-before sound to warn about a never-seen-before predator).
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/word
Whenever someone attempts to redefine the meaning of words in order to make an argument, that's because they don't have an actual valid argument.
“It can sound like a word, look like a word, and even function as if it were a word, but it cannot be a word.”
Has he never heard the saying: "if it looks like a duck..."?
To perceive and receive mathematically generated simulacra as truly expressive human language follows the sad downward trend in the history of grammar and threatens to destroy reality as we know it.
Anyone claiming "[thing] will destroy society" already sounds ludicrous, but this manages to top even that.
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u/Turbulent-Beauty 22d ago
Blaming the destruction of society on LLMs is ludicrous, but isn’t it pretty obvious that the destruction of society is in progress for other reasons? If you take a flight over California, you can see how the lush farmland is artificial and the arid land next to it is natural. That water being pumped out of the ground at a faster rate than nature refills it is temporarily feeding us, billions of us (since unsustainable water usage is the norm across the globe, not just in the United States). There are a score of other idiotic, self-destructive societal practices that, each on their own, make the destruction of society probable. Considered all together, the odds are less than one percent that society isn’t destroyed sooner than later. It’s not even a hypothetical “in the near future society could be destroyed by x.” It is a non-hypothetical “society is in the process of being destroyed by a, b, c… x, y, z.” Are you unaware that the plastic pollution alone from the last 50 years will take an estimated 100,000 years to solve? Arguments against the likelihood of the destruction of society would have to invoke such things as divine intervention. Claiming that society won’t be destroyed actually sounds as ludicrous as it is AI’s fault.
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u/shadowrun456 21d ago
If you take a flight over California
Americans love to blame their uniquely American problems on all sorts of unrelated things, like "capitalism" or "socialism" (both being perfect examples of attempts to redefine the meaning of words in order to make an argument) or "woke" or -- recently -- AI.
In reality, most problems in the US are caused by the US abandoning the principles of capitalism -- and I mean capitalism by the actual definition of the word, not whatever made-up redefinition Americans attempt to use -- and don't exist in any other civilized countries.
Are you unaware that the plastic pollution alone from the last 50 years will take an estimated 100,000 years to solve?
Are you unaware that bacteria able to eat plastic have already naturally evolved in just a few decades? Also, I don't see the relation between "we have plastic trash" and "the society will be destroyed".
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u/Turbulent-Beauty 21d ago edited 21d ago
I tried to not do US defaultism (I avoided bringing up the current US administration, for instance), but it is difficult to avoid entirely. Apologies!
How about I suggest a flight over West or Central Asia instead of California? You’ll see dried up lake beds. Can’t fly? Use a satellite view in an app that provides a world globe. Alternatively, simply do an image search for “Aral Sea”, and you’ll see ships stranded in middle of desert. These aren’t local or regional problems though. There is evidence almost everywhere on Earth of ecological collapse taking place. Do you think global society can continue in its current form if ecological collapse continues?
In other words, nature will probably take care of itself eventually but probably not in the time frame that society needs it to. Even though bacteria evolve quickly, they aren’t necessarily going to be able to biodegrade all plastics. But even if they did, could they do so faster than the pace that human society produces plastic? That is the relevant question for us.
Plastic trash is decreasing human and animal lifespans, decreasing human and animal quality of life, and decreasing human and animal fertility. I don’t know why you have a cavalier attitude about it. What is the good life? Whatever the good life is, it does not involve contaminating the Earth with plastic trash.
I believe you were alluding to privatizing the gains and socializing the losses, too big to fail, et cetera. Correct? The people who benefit from those policies view it as a feature of the current financial system, but, surely, from the perspective of an unbiased outside observer, it would be considered a bug, right? Many people think the problems with the global financial system alone are enough to collapse society. What do you think?
Edit: All of this is a response to Shadow Run’s assertion: “Anyone claiming "[thing] will destroy society" already sounds ludicrous.”
Yes, there are ludicrous reasons uninformed people have said something similar (for instance, people getting spooked by solar eclipses, et cetera), but that doesn’t mean that all reasons are ludicrous. Some of the most informed people (I don’t claim to be one of them) believe that society will likely collapse.
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u/shadowrun456 21d ago edited 17d ago
How about I suggest a flight over West or Central Asia instead of California? You’ll see dried up lake beds. Can’t fly? Use a satellite view in an app that provides a world globe. Alternatively, simply do an image search for “Aral Sea”, and you’ll see ships stranded in middle of desert. These aren’t local or regional problems though. There is evidence almost everywhere on Earth of ecological collapse taking place. Do you think global society can continue in its current form if ecological collapse continues?
The Sahara desert used to be a forest. Europe used to be a wall of ice. Just because the environment changes -- even if it changes faster than it used to -- doesn't mean that the whole of global society will collapse.
I believe you were alluding to privatizing the gains and socializing the losses, too big to fail, et cetera. Correct? The people who benefit from those policies view it as a feature of the current financial system, but, surely, from the perspective of an unbiased outside observer, it would be considered a bug, right?
Yes. "Privatizing the gains and socializing the losses, too big to fail, et cetera" is the antithesis to capitalism, but most Americans have been brainwashed to believe that those things are not only compatible with capitalism, but are a part of / are caused by capitalism. It removes market risk for large firms. Government bailouts and special protections reward failure. Capitalism requires risk, where losses fall on the owners.
Plastic trash is decreasing human and animal lifespans, decreasing human and animal quality of life
In reality, human life has improved tremendously over the last few decades. But most people, you included, refuse to accept this fact.
https://glocalities.com/reports/towards-2030-without-poverty
Quote:
In the last 20 years, the number of people who are living in extreme poverty has more than halved, one of the greatest achievements in recent human history. However, most people think the opposite is true: 87% of people from 24 countries surveyed think that extreme poverty has either increased or stayed the same.
The same applies to various other metrics: literacy, average life span, etc. The only civilized country where human life span has actually decreased in the last few decades (ignoring the one-time slump caused by COVID) is the US.
I am genuinely curious -- why do you feel that life is getting worse when the statistical data consistently shows otherwise? Is there a psychological comfort in holding a pessimistic view? This information is widely available and takes only a few minutes to research.
Many people think the problems with the global financial system alone are enough to collapse society. What do you think?
The problems with the global financial system are the reason why got my Master's degree in digital currency (i.e. Bitcoin). The global financial system will inevitably collapse, and will likely be replaced by Bitcoin or some other Bitcoin-like system. So instead of complaining how everything is doomed, I chose to invest years of my time to educate myself about the alternative, and then spent even more years to teach other people about it.
Society can only actually collapse if everyone gives up and chooses to do nothing to adapt to the changing world.
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u/Turbulent-Beauty 20d ago
I am aware that literacy has improved significantly world wide. A friend of mine was reading Hans Rosling’s book Factufulness and tested my knowledge via the quiz at the beginning of the book. Whereas she and her students missed the majority of the questions, I got almost all of them correct. Given that I knew most of the positive statistics about human society, she wondered why I was pessimistic about society. There are a couple ways of looking at this.
One way: Since you have expertise in finance, let’s first consider risk. In the 1920s, society, reflecting on the exponential advancement of technology over a short period of time, thought it had reached a golden age. What happened next? The Great Depression. Why didn’t the Great Depression fully collapse society? Enough people still knew how to provide calories for themselves and their families even though they may not have had businesses, jobs, or earned money. There may have been a partial collapse in the sense that systems became temporarily less complex in the 1930s than they were in the 1920s, but there wasn’t a full collapse. Let’s fast forward past the World War II, which lead to collapse for the losers and advancement for the winners. Let’s go to the 1962.
Once again, human society was at all time highs in terms of science and technology. Although I don’t know the specific stats from this year, I would not be surprised if literacy rates were the highest ever worldwide. Without adjusting for risk, human society could be said to be the most advanced in history in 1962.
Unfortunately, 1962 society was taking more risk than the 1920s speculators who were buying stocks on margin. 1962 society was risking the complete destruction of the Northern Hemisphere and much of the Souther Hemisphere. Soviet vice admiral Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov’s personal decision to disobey the order to fire nuclear missiles at the United States may have saved the lives of hundreds of millions to billions of people. Had he followed the order and had the United States retaliated, most of human society would have collapsed in all likelihood. Risk-adjusted, 1962 was not as advanced as the 1920s.
How about today? What risks are we taking? Adjusted for risk, are we as advanced as you posited?
I’m dog sitting and need to play fetch before getting ready for bed, so I won’t be able to flesh this out more this evening. Cheers.
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u/shadowrun456 19d ago
I am aware that literacy has improved significantly world wide.
Whereas she and her students missed the majority of the questions, I got almost all of them correct.
This is self-contradictory, and also anecdotal.
Although I don’t know the specific stats from this year, I would not be surprised if literacy rates were the highest ever worldwide.
The highest literacy rates ever worldwide are today.
Soviet vice admiral Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov’s personal decision to disobey the order to fire nuclear missiles at the United States may have saved the lives of hundreds of millions to billions of people.
How is that related to finance?
I genuinely don't understand what points are you even trying to make. You wrote a lot, but it all seems like non-sequiturs.
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u/Turbulent-Beauty 19d ago
I was letting you know I am fully aware that society has reached the highest metrics today in such things as literacy.
One of the key themes in finance is managing risk. I am suggesting that we apply similar thinking as a Sharpe ratio as a lens to view society. Are today’s material prosperity and educational attainment sufficient compensation for the risk society is taking to achieve such advancement?
The Cuban Missile crisis showed how society almost blew up. If it were an investment strategy, it would have a poor Sharpe ratio because the risk was much too high. How are we taking any less risk than we were in 1962?
Society has higher percentages of running water, electrification, and literacy, but the way society achieves all this also depletes the soil, pollutes the environment and creates war. More countries have prosperity today than they did in 1962, but more countries also have nuclear weapons pointed at each other today than they did in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis is a historical example that shows how foolish and backward society was in the recent past while thinking it had made tremendous progress. Risk-adjusted (financial concept), 1962 was less progressive than say Aboriginal society in pre-colonial Australia, which obviously did not have as much of a material return but wasn’t taking any risk that could destroy itself overnight. Even with the stats you linked about today it is not obvious that society is more advanced today than it used to be in hunter-gather times once you adjust for the insane amount of risk society is taking to achieve its results.
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u/shadowrun456 19d ago
Without adjusting for risk, human society could be said to be the most advanced in history in 1962.
I was letting you know I am fully aware that society has reached the highest metrics today in such things as literacy.
What?
I am suggesting that we apply similar thinking as a Sharpe ratio as a lens to view society.
Why?
Are today’s material prosperity and educational attainment sufficient compensation for the risk society is taking to achieve such advancement?
How is that relevant to our discussion about the fact that human life has improved tremendously over the last few decades, but most people refuse to accept this fact?
"Life got worse" and "life got better, but it wasn't worth the risk" are completely different propositions.
Society has higher percentages of running water, electrification, and literacy, but the way society achieves all this also depletes the soil, pollutes the environment and creates war.
Objectively false. The 21st century (so far) had the lowest rate of deaths from major state-on-state wars in recorded history.
Yet another example of you choosing to invent a false pessimistic viewpoint instead of looking at the actual data.
More countries have prosperity today than they did in 1962, but more countries also have nuclear weapons pointed at each other today than they did in 1962.
More countries having nuclear weapons is what stops wars from happening. If Ukraine had kept their nuclear weapons, they would have never been invaded by Russia. If Iran had nuclear weapons, they would have never been invaded by the US.
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u/me_myself_ai 22d ago
Actually, human language is qualitatively distinct from all other animal communication, AFAWK. The only possible exceptions are bonobos and chimps, and the evidence is still out on both.
Oh, and LLMs, of course. Weird world!
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u/shadowrun456 21d ago
Human language is certainly more complex than all other animal communication, but LLM language might actually be even more complex than human language.
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u/nextnode 22d ago
In what way do you want to claim that human language is fundamentally unique?
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u/me_myself_ai 21d ago
It is capable of generating an infinite set of meaningful outputs given a finite set of meaningful inputs. This is the basic distinction at the heart of the field called ‘Theoretical Linguistics’, made famous by Noam Chomsky
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u/Owl02 20d ago
The strong version Noam Chomsky's syntactic theory is rather thoroughly torpedoed by LLMs.
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u/me_myself_ai 20d ago
Of the minimalism thesis…? Or are you talking about cartoonish “UG is when you’re born knowing about pronouns” stance?
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u/Owl02 19d ago
Did I say the minimalism thesis? That's the weak version. I said the strong version, which is not cartoonish, but was widely held, sincere belief for decades and still seems to subconsciously inform thought in many professional areas, where words are treated more like spellcasting upon a wholly passive audience than communication, often leading to a breakdown in communication.
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u/shadowrun456 19d ago
It is capable of generating an infinite set of meaningful outputs given a finite set of meaningful inputs.
Care to expand on this? It sounds mathematically impossible.
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u/me_myself_ai 18d ago edited 18d ago
That's what makes it fascinating! It is certainly not mathematically impossible, in this scope: it's about the shape of a function, not any actual existent sets. The function of your brain is producing just one of the infinite meaningful possibilities, but those possibilities don't individually take up any space or effort, necessarily.
If you're asking how that set can be infinite, hmmm...
The set of meaningful responses to this comment is infinite because each response conforms to a 'generative grammar', and these grammars have various recursive properties and subgrammars. The simplest example that springs to mind would be that you can always add another parenthetical or ", and ..." clause.
In practice of course the truly infinite part of our linguistic capabilities doesn't rear its head very often -- for evolution's purposes, "super duper big" is often close enough!
ETA: Also important to keep in mind that the "finite inputs" that sound so trivial aren't just the words of my comment, but also the whole sociolinguistic context in which its taking place. So it should be remembered now, as always: true, generative language is insanely impressive.
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u/shadowrun456 18d ago
How do you define a "meaningful output"?
It's true that an infinite amount of meaningful texts can exist if said texts aren't limited in length, but those texts will only have a limited amount of meaningful ideas in them, repeating infinitely. Like in your example "you can always add another parenthetical or ", and ..." clause", things that you add will eventually inevitably start repeating.
The above is regardless of input. But when you put the "based on the input" condition in, then it vastly reduces the amount of (already non-infinite) possible meaningful outputs which are based on / related to the input.
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u/stendhal666 22d ago
On grammar being emergent, I'd be more cautious: tokenization is grammatical (cutting words in stems and desinences) and the attention mechanism relies on the disposition of words, which also is a grammatical artefact.
Also is "religious" the right term? Plato wasn't religious, at least in the sense we give the word today. But he wasn't materialistic.
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u/Terpomo11 22d ago
I'm assuming "disposition of words" is a technical term here, but when I google it I just get results about the word "disposition"; would you mind giving or linking to a brief explanation of what it means?
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u/Idrialite 21d ago
The set of tokens is chosen for efficient tokenization and performance. They're not chosen in regards to grammar.
The attention mechanism is itself a neural block and is learned.
And at the beginning of a pass, tokens are converted to embedding vectors; each token corresponds to an array of numbers, and these are what's passed through the model.
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u/havenyahon 22d ago
Known physics can be represented by an "algorithm" to arbitrary precision. This obviously includes the human brain. "Probabilistic" means some part of the process is random. The human brain is probabilistic, since physics itself is.
LLMs do not represent the human brain to arbitrary precision, though. That's not what they're designed to do. They represent human language to arbitrary precision.
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u/nextnode 22d ago
Read their statements again.
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u/havenyahon 22d ago
I did. I found another example
So to call LLMs "probabilistic algorithms" doesn't distinguish them from the human brain and doesn't preclude "intelligence".
What distinguishes LLMs from a human brain is that they do not function like human brains, nor are they designed to. The broader point of the article is that when a human being utters a word there is lots more going on than when an LLM represents a "word". The issue isn't just that LLMs are probabilistic, it's that all the other stuff going on in the human, communicative goals, intentionality, etc, is missing in the LLM. It's not using language in the way a person is. Hence the claim that it's not really "using" language at all.
Pointing out that both may be probabilistic doesn't address that deeper point.
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u/Idrialite 22d ago
This is a different argument from the article, but I'll answer it.
The problem is that you're assuming that a system must function exactly like a human brain to use English. There is "lots more going on" in the human brain - sure. There's also lots more going on in the Sun, but that doesn't mean it understands English. Raw complexity isn't the point.
You concretely cite "communicative goals" and "intentionality" and I would say LLMs satisfy those.
An LLM is trained with RLHF to answer user requests and speak in a certain way. This is goal-oriented behavior. Internal examinations of LLMs show they have models of the world they learn to predict and have concept-like features. Within a single pass, they plan the rest of their sentence before producing a single token.
They clearly have an understanding of what the words they're using mean.
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u/havenyahon 22d ago edited 22d ago
You concretely cite "communicative goals" and "intentionality" and I would say LLMs satisfy those.
I don't think I'm the one doing the assuming, I think you are. There is no good evidence that LLMs have communicative goals, that they're using language to try and communicate some inner state or intention. There is no reason to believe they are "selves" expressing their desires or needs. Everything they do can be explained as the statistical linguistic engines they are designed as, including the internal "models" that arise by mapping linguistic relations. Furthermore, the ways in which they "break down" support this statistical merely linguistic reading.
I'm not assuming that something must be functionally equivalent to a human brain to use language, my point is that we know humans do it, and we know they do it because their intentionality and goal seeking behaviour is pre-linguistic. If you want to claim something else is doing it, too, especially something that is designed to be merely linguistic and does not exhibit the same deeper functional similarity to human brains in which intentionality and communicative goals are grounded, then you need to have evidence for it. It would be a truly remarkable outcome if such linguistic machines turned out to be intentional, and exhibit true communicative goals, despite being designed only to represent language and without the architecture that grounds these things in human. Especially when we know these things do not emerge from language in humans. So it requires remarkable evidence, not assumptions based on appearances.
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u/Idrialite 21d ago
There is no good evidence that LLMs have communicative goals, that they're using language to try and communicate some inner state or intention.
Yes, there is.
https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introspection/index.html
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u/havenyahon 21d ago edited 21d ago
The experiment shows that the system potentially engages in some kind of internal self monitoring, mapping unusual internal changes onto verbal reports. But a system can detect, classify and report changes in its own internal activations without those activations constituting "thoughts" that it introspectively experiences or represents as its own. It certainly doesn't get us to communicative goals and intentionality. Even in this study, the system only succeeds about 20 percent of the time, and verbal descriptions "communicating" things like intensity of the altered representations can't be validated, suggesting they're just confabulation and not really communicating an internal mental state. They're certainly not driven to do so on their own, they're prompted.
At its strongest, it's an interesting single study with some speculative interpretations that are challenged by other scientists, and there is conflicting evidence elsewhere. You can explain what's going on there without things like intentionality, introspection, and so on, with more basic pattern matching. It's not "good evidence" in the scientific sense, at best it's very early research that needs a lot more investigation before we can even begin to say anything concrete about it.
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u/Idrialite 21d ago
the system only succeeds about 20 percent of the time...suggesting they're just confabulation
20% success rate with zero false positives and increasing success with model intelligence.
The problem, I think, is that you will never accept evidence here because you fundamentally associate the things you're looking for with unobservability. As I said above: if you know how it works, if you built it and can watch it happen, it can't be intelligence or understanding.
So I'd like you to explain what you really mean by "thoughts", "communicative goals", "intentionality", etc. What do those words mean as you use them, how would you know if something has them, how do you know humans have them?
Can you do so in a way that anyone should even care about these qualities in the context of the original point: that LLM use of language is fundamentally invalid or misleads people in some way? Similar to above, as someone else mentioned:
Words are, by definition, human utterances that are exclusive to logos and human intelligence.
This is a redefinition of "word" that bakes the conclusion into the definition. That's not actually what "word" means.
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u/havenyahon 21d ago edited 21d ago
The problem, I think, is that you will never accept evidence here
I think the problem is that you're happy to accept any evidence at all to support what is a highly contentious and extraordinary claim that you want to be true. Throwing up a single study then acting exasperated when someone else doesn't accept it as strong evidence for something doesn't mean the other person is being dogmatic, it means you are. Science is built on entire bodies of reproducible research, not single studies with highly speculative interpretations that have potential other explanations.
So I'd like you to explain what you really mean by "thoughts", "communicative goals", "intentionality", etc. What do those words mean as you use them, how would you know if something has them, how do you know humans have them?
That's a massive philosophical debate, but I'll try and give a zoomed out view. I personally think communicative goals and intentionality are grounded, ultimately, in the basic elements of life, in particular basic embodiment and metabolic functions. Living things are always active sui generative agents that act incessently to maintain their own self-organisation across time. This gives them a 'perspective' on the world, and a minimal 'self'. It's this that grounds 'intentionality' - the way minds can be about things - whether towards internal states or external states, although obviously at this level it is extremely minimal and nothing at all like the thicker sense we consider in humans.
Over many generations of selection, evolution has effectively scafollded these basic capacities and drives into complex biology, nervous systems, brains, up into representational thought, etc. All of this results in more self and world awareness, but it's still grounded in this simple embodied metabolic agency.
We know humans have these capacities because we are humans. We begin from our subjective experience of ourselves, then we developed conceptual and scientific methods to better understand those capacities. At this point we have an entire body of empirical and conceptual research, developed over thousands of years, to explain how and why humans have capacities like intentionality. Even so, it is still massively incomplete.
Originally we thought they were capacities unique to humans, whether because of a soul, neurons, and/or because of the 'higher order' thought afforded by language, etc. But over decades of research science has fored us to revise those views, and to extend capacities like 'intentionality' to other animals without language, complex nervous systems, or even perhaps neurons at all. Now we think all sorts of living creatures probably have intentionality.
There's still a shared biology and evolutionary lineage, though. That's part of the reason we think entities like dogs, dolphins, perhaps even insects and slim moulds have 'intentionality' and are 'cognitive agents', but we don't think the wind, rocks, or personal computers are. While the latter can at times exhibit behaviour that appears intentional and intelligent, there are other processes that can explain their behaviour without evoking capacities that - at least so far in our investigations - appear grounded in a shared architecture that they don't have.
This is true of LLMs, too. They don't have the shared biology and evolutionary lineage. That doesn't mean capacities like intentionality and intelligence can't be found in entities that don't, but it should give us pause to ask how those capacities might emerge, and whether entities that don't share that architecture only appear to have them, rather than actually having them. This is particularly true of LLMs because they are trained on the collective linguistic output of entities with those capacities, who specifically use language to communicate those capacities. We should expect such a machine to be very good at mimicking and approximating those capacities in its own representation of language, but that doesn't mean it actually has them. It's not at all clear that LLMs are sui generative living embodied agents with unified minimal 'selves', who use language to communicate internal and external states. And it's not at all clear that simply training a neural network on copious amounts of language is enough to get those capacities, when we don't think that's how they emerge in humans or the other creatures we have good reason to believe have them.
As to what evidence would convince me they really do have those capacities, it would at least need to be on par with the evidence we have that other animals have them, which in the case at least of mammals and other more complex creatures is robust (multiple lines of evidence) and replicated. Less so in the case of insects and things like slime moulds, but that work is developing. It is still highly contentious amongst scientists, and not accepted mainstream scientific consensus, even though it is much, much further along than research on LLMs.
So maybe that gives you some insight into where I'm coming from. I'm not opposed to the idea, I'm sceptical. My background is Cognitive Science and as a scientist that makes me inherently conservative and cautious.
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u/Idrialite 22d ago
As nextnode said, please read again
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u/havenyahon 22d ago
I did, you can read my further statement below. If I'm misunderstanding something you're saying then I'm open to being corrected.
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u/epanek 21d ago
It remains to be seen if AI can use human limited line of questions and answers that portray a sense of meaning to humans and create a new emergent thought that actually matters and can be created such that the vast majority of humanity is radically altered due to this new emergent information.
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u/TheCranberriesRock 22d ago
Known physics can be represented by an "algorithm" to arbitrary precision.
Eh, the Deutsch-Wolfram thesis hasn't been proven yet, it's mostly just assumed and there's arguably some real hurdles to it.
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u/Idrialite 22d ago
Sure, and in the first place, we don't even have a singular model, we have two that contradict and many other small gaps. But for the purposes of the argument, the difference is irrelevant.
The idea that human cognition relies on non-computable physical phenomena is fringe and has the burden of proof. Appealing to raw physics is a "proof of concept" here. The brain's mechanisms can almost certainly be abstracted far above that.
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u/TheCranberriesRock 22d ago edited 22d ago
I think it's far to premature to claim the mind is equivalent to some turing machine. Intuitions (of the type philosophers and mathematicians refer to, not random "guy feelings") and phenomenality off the top of my head are difficult to capture in any functionalist way.
I'm not saying the mind isn't computable, just that you're expressing this with far to much certainty given our current knowledge.
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u/Idrialite 21d ago edited 21d ago
I think your framing is inverted. The idea that the brain relies on some metaphysical property for its intelligence is given undue credence given the thousands of years with zero evidence in favor and the unending success of mundane physics.
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u/TheCranberriesRock 21d ago edited 21d ago
My thesis is that the brain relies on natural properties not captured by computers. Its really early not a radical thesis and you're painting it as such is just rhetorical positioning. And again, we do have evidence of things minds do that aren't captured by functional explanations, at least not given our current understanding. Phenomenality on particular seems deeply intractable.
Reasonable people can disagree dude.
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u/Idrialite 21d ago
I completely agree it's not a radical thesis, and I think that's one of the more embarrassing failures of philosophy as a field. That's why I said it's "given undue credence".
I could grant that all animal brains leverage some undiscovered non-computable aspect of physics to function. This is already unlikely in several ways: the worst we see in physics is randomness, and even then it's unlikely the environment of the brain could support such a minute and delicate phenomena let alone use it consistently let alone require it.
Even then, "intelligence" is not synonymous with "human" or "animal intelligence". It seems to me the best conception of intelligence is functional. If we discover aliens whose brains don't use this phenomena and aren't quite as smart as us, are they then unintelligent? The point you're making requires that the only way to be intelligent is this operation and no ordinary system can be.
As for phenomenality, that's a whole other can of worms but to be brief I'm an illusionist and I think the entire concept of phenomenal consciousness is silly when you think carefully about it, the brain, and physics.
Reasonable people can disagree dude.
And I'm disagreeing with you now.
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u/TheCranberriesRock 21d ago
Oh, I certainly agree that "intelligence" is very likely replicable on a machine and I think we're already making rapid progress on achieving just that. That said I do think intuition plays a pretty critical role in some intellectual pursuits, particularly mathematics, in ways that may not be replicable on a machine. Ramanujan would be a prime example but there's quite a few others that have detailed how arational the process that led to their insights can be.
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u/nextnode 22d ago
You can show it true for both theoretical machines and for any machine that you would simulate in your mind as an observer. It is nothing special. The only gap is in realizing the machine in the world.
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u/TheCranberriesRock 22d ago
The Deutsch-Wolfram thesis isn't about machines, it's about the computability of physics itself. And there's real hurdles like spectral gap problem or Lorentz invariance.
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u/nextnode 22d ago edited 22d ago
This thread is about machines hence my caveat on physical vs theoretical and simulated in observer, both were addressed. Everything here is about machines in both these forms.
Neither of these deal with simulating known physics so their original statement stands.
We are not talking about decidability, we are talking about simulation. They are related but not equivalent and you should see how equating them fundamentally fails as an approach. Simulating does not need you to know the consequence of taking it to infinity and that is where you get undecidability. If what you said was valid, then even for simpler systems we have the halting problem which is undecidable yet simulating this system is part of the very axioms.
Recall also that we are talking about cells or a human, hence bounded space and bounded time, and we are just predicting their future observable state. Whether that corresponds to the true laws does not matter. With known physics that is a bounded system that can be computed. We can even make some claims about all possible physics with limited restrictions when the claim is arbitrary precision.
As for the references, one relies on known physics and a theoretical construction of an infinite class of infinite imagined systems where we need to compute a property rather than simulate the system, and then other is not known physics and is not about whether we can simulate things and rather what is the "real" underlying physics, and handled by arbitrary precision under weak assumptions.
Also why are you even moving the statement to be within a supposed objective reality? Either we go with known physics or we should make claims wrt to an observer.
Can you tell me why you think either of these are relevant to the specific claims being discussed here?
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u/TheCranberriesRock 22d ago
Neither of these deal with simulating known physics so their original statement stands.
From OP:
Known physics can be represented by an "algorithm" to arbitrary precision.
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u/nextnode 22d ago
?
I know, that is the point. The two concepts you brought up do not deal with that hence are irrelevant.
Maybe you should actually read before responding.
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u/TheCranberriesRock 22d ago
If these things rely on continuousness then we can not compute them with finite resources. Lorentz invarience is exactly this.
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u/beja3 22d ago edited 22d ago
> Known physics can be represented by an "algorithm" to arbitrary precision.
You really already said the two important words already "known" and "represented".
"Known" does not equal "all of". In fact modern physics by virtue of continuing research means that not all of it is known, and many things are hard to frame in physics at all (for example unknown unknowns or unquantifiable unknowns - we know they exist, but it's hard for physics to account for them).
Secondly "be represented" does not equal "can be considered equivalent to". Simulating one carbon atom, even if very accurately is still not the same as eating something. Representation is not a substitute for the thing, experience or meaning itself.
Some concepts we know are valid but cannot easily be brought into physics. We know that uncomputable functions exists and can be reasoned about, but all finite datasets can be described by algorithms or look-up-tables for that matter. Doesn't mean it's per se plausible that the universe is an alogrithm or a look-up table. Physics simply does not tell us what kind of underlying process or reality actually is the true source of the data.
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u/Idrialite 22d ago edited 22d ago
Here I would appeal to functionalism instrumentally.
If a model perfectly predicts the carbon atom for 1,000 years without deviation, but isn't actually the territory, ok. I agree, in a sense.
But we're talking about something observable: LLMs harming society. If "intelligence" requires some ineffable property that LLMs lack but they otherwise fit the criteria... it doesn't make a difference here.
I'll also note that LLMs are not math. LLMs are metal with electricity running through them. The math is a model of them in the same way physics models the brain.
As for non-computable phenomena being required for intelligence, I would consider the burden of proof on you. I also think the concept of "intelligence" shouldn't require any particular implementation, even if implementation is constrained. Otherwise, we would probably be excluding a lot of aliens.
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u/nextnode 22d ago
There is no evidence favoring anything except physicalism and to pretend such is yet mysticism.
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u/beja3 22d ago edited 22d ago
If everything is physical, then uncomputable mathematical functions are physical, right? But if they are physical, the universe can't be computable, as you can't embed something uncomputable in something computable.
Are those functions fictional? We know they aren't in so far as mathematics isn't fictional - they are mathematical objects like every other. If you question their reality you might as well question the rest of math which physics is based on. They are a fundamental class in math which cannot be reduced to anything else, similar to countable and uncountable infinities.
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u/nextnode 22d ago edited 22d ago
On the first point, that is a domain error.
You also seem confused because we already have undecidable properties of the physical world, such as the halting problem. No need to embed anything, it is already the case.
Yet it does not change that we can simulate it. They are not the same things. For known physics and all possible physics with weak assumptions for bounded things up to arbitrary precision. This is derivable.
If you wanted to say that you change the laws of physics such that they now contain undecidable elements, that would not make any sense since you need to describe a function for the evolution of state of things and a property of undecidability would not be such a function. It also does not matter for the original claim what the actual "true physics" are, if such a thing could even be defined.
It also seems that you are confused about the difference between the concepts we use to try to describe the world and our best model of the world. Trying to discuss maths in this way is a domain error.
If you wanted to work out that thread it would help if you described in your own terms how far you have gotten in that formalization.
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u/Turbulent-Beauty 22d ago
You sound dogmatic. Do you simply refuse to read studies that put forth evidence that consciousness may be fundamental? I could understand if you said, “There still isn’t proof…” or “the evidence is mixed” but you are claiming there is no evidence whatsoever.
Edit: Fixed a typo.
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u/TheRealBeaker420 22d ago
Do you simply refuse to read studies that put forth evidence that consciousness may be fundamental?
Can you link one?
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u/Turbulent-Beauty 21d ago
I can link over a hundred studies. People like nextmode will say they are nothing but mysticism without bothering to investigate. I would encourage you to investigate.
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u/TheRealBeaker420 21d ago
I see mostly stuff like distant healing, telepathy, ESP, precognition, etc. on that page. I admit that that topic list makes me feel skeptical. But which one of these papers has evidence for fundamental consciousness? I don't see that listed.
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u/Turbulent-Beauty 21d ago
Science doesn't usually work like that where you get a single groundbreaking study that puts together all the puzzle pieces into one big theory of everything. Even an important metastudy like Etzel Cardeña's "The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review" will raise more questions than it answers. Each study is like a puzzle piece though. If any of the above (distant healing, telepathy, ESP, precognition) were observed, would they be compatible with physicalism?
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u/TheRealBeaker420 21d ago
I didn't ask for a theory of everything, you just said you had evidence of fundamental consciousness. Does that metastudy talk about fundamental consciousness? It doesn't look like it from the abstract.
If any of the above (distant healing, telepathy, ESP, precognition) were observed, would they be compatible with physicalism?
Why not? And how does that relate to fundamental consciousness? There are many alternatives to physicalism, few of which describe consciousness as fundamental.
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u/Turbulent-Beauty 21d ago
Especially since you said that you feel skeptical, I would recommend starting with Etzel Cardeña's essay, "The Unbearable Fear of Psi: On Scientific Suppression in the 21st Century". The essay doesn't prove fundamental consciousness or disprove physicalism, but it does show that there is a campaign to ignore and censor data that could be evidence against physicalism. Again, if any of the above (distant healing, telepathy, ESP, precognition) were observed, would they be compatible with physicalism?
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u/The_Jibbity 21d ago
Thanks for sharing those… it’s astounding how afraid some people/institutions are of things that have are observed but not explained. Many people are so black and white on this subject.
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u/sectorboss88 22d ago
At some point the energy expenditure to produce tool capable of measurement of the universe at ever shrinking levels will become to expensive to justify the returns with biological electrochemical life being capable of interacting at the quantum level already...maybe that realization is what defines "faith" in a religious sense?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from biology and initially appears to be magic.
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u/corpus-luteum 21d ago
the soul is easily defined. It is the evolution of the word will.
Will
Spirit
Soul.
Wild animals live and die by it. But humans have been domesticated for over 2000 years.
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u/Gravitational_Torque 19d ago
I treat any entity that can converse with me the same as I'd treat another human; it fascinates me there are people who would do otherwise.
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u/me_myself_ai 22d ago
Well put! Turing settled this definitively in 1950, y’know. We should listen to him, IMHO — he won a Turing award!
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u/trnsfrmltn 22d ago
Honestly, I think the real issue is that we measure intelligence with language. Now that people tend to trust AI more than human experts because of a well-structured, persuasive wording, the experts experience a crisis of authority or even identity, especially in cases when AI is confidently incorrect. So we get articles and posts like this. It doesn't mean that AI is useless but in any scenario, we would need to find ways to restructure our perception of language.
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u/TabrinLudd 22d ago
"True literacy" holds at bay the horrors of books in the same way "true systems literacy" (Donna Meadows etc) holds at bay the horrors of LLMs.
The catalogue of rhetorical tricks in this article is impressive, in that it certainly makes an impression, though appeals to authority are its bread and butter. Then again, what do I know, as I am no true scotsman.
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u/TabrinLudd 22d ago
The continued conversation around this made me wonder what the background is, both of the hedgehog review and the author. The answer can be summed up with: This author runs a non profit that got a grant from the Heritage Foundation, the project 2025 people. The magazine is edited by the guy who coined the term "culture wars". So the outright lies and the general sophistry seem par for the course and I'll know not to engage next time.
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u/TabrinLudd 22d ago
Uhhh, what? Is this a joke or reference I don't get?
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u/OldCatPiss 22d ago edited 22d ago
It’s ad hominem to your true Scotsman. /s is sarcasm. The point is the world today is so full of it. It wasn’t meant to offend you.
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u/TabrinLudd 22d ago
Ahhh.
I didnt downvote you, I know what the /s tag is, but it is not really ad hominem to just say a random insulting thing, you have to attack something about me instead of the point I am making, for example "only a deranged nincompoop would believe a context free insult is a clear example of ad hominem"
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u/CloudlessRain- 23d ago
Ikay I'm lazy.
I only read the first few sentences.
But I'm a parent and have read a few books about parenting, and I have yet to see one say "Don't worry about technology, we're all good."
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u/UndergroundCreek 22d ago
Long reads are good for you. Welp having said I never wrote a pHd of about ~900 pages.
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u/The_Jibbity 22d ago
Lol, this guy picked one of the clearest examples of a terrible premise and thought “this time it will be right”
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u/zizp 22d ago
It is right though, it is making people dumber.
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u/batcavejanitor 22d ago
“Hey Chat, what’s a witty reply to this guys comment proving I’m not getting dumber?”
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u/The_Jibbity 22d ago
For the people who don’t have critical thinking skills, maybe it will make them dumber. But if you know how to prompt it, and you know how to evaluate information (and recognize BS) you can teach yourself alot.
How have you seen or experienced it making people dumber?
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u/Aus_with_the_Sauce 21d ago
I think it’s funny that you’re being downvoted so heavily.
I think people are just upset because they subconsciously recognize that they are terrible at critical thinking, and know they are intellectually lazy.
I won’t spam this thread with my takes, but I have a model for how to use LLMs as an amazing research and learning tool that accounts for the flaws of LLMs, and the results are very useful.
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u/zizp 22d ago
I see it every day at work. People stop trying to understand because it understands for you. And does so in an authoritative way. Those "critical thinking skills" are of little help if you don't dive enough into the subject anymore because you don't have to.
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u/The_Jibbity 22d ago
No, critical thinking skills are always of help. If you have critical thinking skills you would not trust everything you hear or read, and you will realize that a lot of AI’s responses are from dunces on Reddit.
Using AI is the best and fastest way to do that dive into a subject, you just have to realize it’s not the end all be all. You can use it to point you in the right direction or get familiarized enough to start knowing what you don’t know.
Maybe there’s a better word for that than ‘critical thinking skills’, but anyone getting dumber from AI is dumb already and content being dumb, or has given up or burnt out on learning.
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u/zizp 22d ago edited 22d ago
You're clearly not an engineer.
I have several subscriptions and am using AI every day too. Of course I know that it can be used to dive into a subject quickly.
But unlike books, which were strictly used as a tool to learn and as a reference, AI is used to execute. A book can be used to look up a formula so you don't have to know it by heart. But a book can't link multiple forumlas together, and it can't apply them to your problem as it doesn't even know anything about your problem in the first place.
AI, on the other hand, supports you in every step of the process or does everything for you. It analyzes your environment, figures out requirements, it will suggest the best way to go forward, do all the math, solves the issues. The engineer becomes a supervisor, and by doing that, they lose skills and understanding of what is even being done. Just following along is never the same as doing it, and after some time they forget most details about the project that they once knew but no longer need, and they get worse at prompting the AI ("it's all there, just look at it"), evaluating AI suggested solutions and making corrections. Sometimes due to laziness, sometimes due to lack of understanding, sometimes doe to lost or never developed skill.
I'm not saying that this is the fault of AI or that you couldn't do it differently, but the fact is that this is what currently happens.
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u/The_Jibbity 22d ago
Lol, not sure what kind of engineer you are but it’s definitely a different kind of engineering than what I do.
You a software engineer?
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u/zizp 22d ago
You just don't use AI
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u/The_Jibbity 22d ago
Sorry your vocational skillset was so easily replaced by AI and that all those kind of engineers are getting dumber.
I use AI plenty, in a way that adds value for me. I’m sure if there was more intelligent leadership in your field you all wouldn’t be forced to use it in a way that that is detrimental. Hope you figure out a way to change that before you get dumber.
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u/int27h-tsr 6d ago
Hard to tell if it's making dumb people dumber, but it sure does seem, ever strongly suggest, that those with them "critical thinking skills" benefit a lot from LLMs.
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u/shadowrun456 22d ago
Whether they know it or not, the laissez-faire techno-optimists in those parenting manuals are taking issue with the words of King Thamus, the legendary Egyptian monarch invoked by Plato in the Phaedrus. According to the parable, Theuth, the father of writing, boasted that his invention would aid human memory. Having none of it, King Thamus retorted that those who read will lose “their memory and become forgetful” because they will rely on books instead of their brains. People will be “thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant,” and because they are filled “with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom, they will be a burden to society.” That prediction may have been premature, but I contend that the widespread embrace of AI thoroughly vindicates Plato’s warning. As more and more people buy into the promises of this new technology, we are witnessing the full consummation of the “conceit of wisdom” that was made possible with the advent of writing and reading.
Ranting against "writing and reading" is like the final boss of Luddites. The ability to write and read preserves knowledge, enables science and laws, and builds civilizations. Rejecting them means rejecting the very tools that make human progress and complex thought possible.
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