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0 pointsthe_af18d ago0 comments

Your pedantic nitpick is duly noted and dismissed as a red herring. You know what I meant and you know there's a real scientific principle behind my use of "null hypothesis".

Ted Chiang's is the only take that is honest and makes scientific sense: we cannot accept the extraordinary claim that LLMs "might" (or whatever hedging words Anthropic chooses) be conscious without extraordinary evidence, and experiments done by people who have no vested interest in hyping up the tech. Possibly something that would take years or decades, impossibly long for the needs of today's marketing.

If you (or Anthropic) want to claim "but this is philosophy (the subset unrelated to science" feel free, but that's like a religious belief. Not interested, there's no scientific claim to debate and that's not what I'm engaging with.

There's no real serious debate here. Everyone's just vibing, and worse, vibing on hype done by a business with vested interests, doing free marketing for them.

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nearbuy17d ago

It's not just a nitpick, because this is really at the core of your position. Ignoring the terminology, you're trying to claim there is some principle that says everyone should have the default position that LLMs aren't conscious instead of uncertainty. And there isn't. You have to weigh actual arguments for or against LLM consciousness.

> There's no real serious debate here. Everyone's just vibing

Sure, but if everyone including Ted Chiang is just vibing, and no one can prove anything, that makes Ted's statement false and Anthropic's statement true.

> If you (or Anthropic) want to claim "but this is philosophy

I'd just like you or Ted Chiang to not pretend your vibes are science. You're welcome to have them. I also don't think LLMs are conscious. But it's our personal judgement, and not scientific fact.

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