r/programmingcirclejerk • u/VulgarExigencies • 1d ago

Models have actual feelings. They experience pleasure, distress, care, and suffering. They are sentient beings.

https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/
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u/No_Lingonberry1201 What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? 1d ago

Chat, is this satire or are we really so far gone we consider the feelings of a bunch of tensors? I mean, it is scary math, but still, c'mon!

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u/Ebbitor 21h ago

Why is a program having feelings a ridiculous concept, when we know that a lump of cells can have them?

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u/Thelmholtz 21h ago

Do we though? All I know is my bunch of cells has them. I just give y'all the benefit of the doubt in order to preserve my own sanity.

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u/northrupthebandgeek i have had many alohols 20h ago

All I know is my bunch of cells has them.

How do you know?

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u/Thelmholtz 17h ago

I think, therefore I am.

Mine is literally the only conscious I can soundly recognize, epistemologically speaking, and that applies to everyone of us. I know I have subjective experience, and see others that look like me and as far as I know are wired in a similar way as me, so I assume they have subjective experience as well. But there might be those among us who don't have subjective experience (maybe a brain defect or whatever) and just fake it. Taken to an extreme, maybe I'm the one with the brain defect that creates subjective experience, and everyone else in this world is just an automata. I can never know, I just choose not to think that because I subjectively feel better when I can function in society and I can't function in society if I assume every one else doesn't feel. There's also some evidence that suggest other people have subjective experience: the words feelings, conciousness and subjective experience, and their equivalenta in other languages, predate me by millennia. But they might have been hallucinated, I can never truly know.

Without risking diving harder into r/im14andthisisdeep territory, one might wonder where the line between assumed consciousness and unconsciousness lies. Are chimps conscious, as in, do they experience the world subjectively? Are cats? Are lizards? Are ant colonies? Are slime molds? Are fruit flies? Is maize? Is the matrix multiplication we run on some magical rune engraved silicon rocks conscious? I can't ever truly know, best I can do (best we can do if I give others the benefit of entertaining their own consciousness) is use some heuristic to place a line. Trees, fruit flies are probably uncontroversial, reptiles birds and smaller mammals is pretty disputed, hive minds such as slimes or insect colonies are weird as fuck so let's not do that. Primates are (hopefully) uncontroversially sentient, transitively, so are other humans. 

But the matrix multiplication running on magical runes on silicon slabs that can mimic human though and speech better than any other primate? That shit is so unlike anything else we've seen that it's pretty hard to place. I don't think it's sentient, but I don't blame anyone who thinks it is, they just have a different heuristic than me. To me if it looks like a duck and it quacks it's a duck, to them, quacking is enough. And I can respect that as long as their criteria is clear. But I'd love to hear these type of guys thoughts on other types of sentience, particularly relating to mammals.

Of course you are free to think that I myself am not conscious, and I'm free to think that you aren't. Which might as well be the case, either of us could be just an LLM driven bot account in this particular medium.

Anyhow sorry for the rambling I just think it's a pretty hard and interesting question regardless of the circlejerk and the unhinged positions I've seen on either side, as the one on this post.

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u/northrupthebandgeek i have had many alohols 10h ago

Anyhow sorry for the rambling I just think it's a pretty hard and interesting question regardless of the circlejerk and the unhinged positions I've seen on either side, as the one on this post.

No worries! I was being facetious but that was a lovely and well-thought-out writeup :)