As much as I flatly do not believe LLMs can have anything close to consciousness, I definitely agree that the argument of them being just a probabilistic word matching engine can also be applied to our own brains lol.

While one can quibble with its argument, Gettier's conception of knowledge as justified true belief (prob familiar to many philosophy undergraduates) implies that machines can't in fact accrue knowledge. The idea that knowledge can't be defined in a non-circular way is only plausible for someone with no familiarity with epistemology.

> By that logic human thought is just electrochemical signals propagating through neural networks.

This argument keeps getting rehashed. The point is not the signal. The point is where/how the signal travels which in the human is affect by much more than whatever concept that can be represented by words.

Brother you're arguing on HN of all places that education is a training pipeline while missing the fact that reddit and HN are the de-facto training run for institutional propaganda. How many reddit comments are just regurgitated knee jerks and puns? All of them that's how many. That's a training pipeline. How much of HN is braindead takes from people who value status more than knowledge and competence? All of it that's how much. That's another training pipeline for the next "Show HN: here's a picture of my cock". The fact that you recognize the "Show HN:" token is proof that you were trained. There's really nothing much to add here. I believe you already agree with me but in any case I spelled it out so that the next person can stop huffing the human chauvinism copium.

There's no such thing as "emergent properties". The phrase is just a technobabble way of framing primitive animist superstition.

I think the idea of emergent properties in LLMs is less and less relevant. Yes, the first few times they scaled pretraining and such models could do few-shot tasks was quite interesting. But the models we use now are really the product of extensive RL hillclimbing on a wide array of curated tasks. What’s interesting now is that the tasks they’ve been fitted to (long running tool call chains interleaved with reasoning tokens) do very useful things.

>human thought is just electrochemical signals propagating through neural networks.

Is it not? Or are we discussing existence of a soul etc.

I genuinely don’t know why people feel so certain about things like this. It’s like they mix up salience with reality.

I mean what can a person really be certain of, an experience is happening. I might be wrong about everything or confused. But I know I am having an experience. Do I know other people are? No. I assume they are.

Ask an llm what is truth that it is most certain is true. It will answer something similar. Do I believe it is conscious, no. But I also believe “I” exist, which is weird because where is the boundary between “I” and everything else.

So ok, we create meaning, not truth. Maybe just accept that.

> By that logic human thought is just electrochemical signals propagating through neural networks.

My dear fried: the human being is much, much more than this. And deep down we both know it. Do not reduce us to materials y "randomness". Is your life a random coincidence? Not at all.

Imagine one day in the far future 21xx, we decide that machine actually has conscious since the 202x, and people in the future look back at us in horror: The kill(create new session) an "Android" without second thought, whenever they want.

> There's a certain type of knowledge that machines definitely can't have - experiential

Can you justify this? Do you mean currently or ever?

I can certainly imagine a future architecture where I would describe a machine as capable of accruing knowledge through its experiences (read: experiential knowledge).

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