They’re made out of weights • Hacker News Board

Re: They’re made out of weights

#541

Post by doug_durham » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

Lplololopo wrote: post #232

noduerme wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is that different from any other model of reality that you'd use to winnow a dataset into an answer to a question? The only major difference I see is that beyond a certain number of transformations, people are willing to treat it as some sort of miracle, and too tired to figure out why it came up with the answer it came up with. It's almost like people desperately want to give up their agency and creativi…

Agency? What are you talking about? I want freedom. I want freedom to do what i want and not sitting in front of a computer and coding for some company. Please AI lets burn down knowledge work and labor work. Lets create so much stress to our society that we start rethinking what works mean. Lets redefine work into discovering the world again. Let people do old handcraft jobs, let them do more sports, let them read m…

Work has never been about "discovering the world". There have been a handful of privileged folks who had the time to "discover the world". Work has traditionally been "let's find enough food for my family". If you want to think of a future of abundance then perhaps we can discover the world.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#542

Post by calepayson » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

aspenmartin wrote: post #398

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two meanings to "the body is a complex machine" and I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. 1) The abstract "dictionary" version: It'd be technically correct to say that the body is a machine under the definition of "A machine is a thermodynamic system that uses power to apply forces and control movement to perform an action.". 2) But there's also the less abstract/technical: "The body is alike…

> With regard to AI, there's a lot of people extrapolating "There is no magical animating spirit, the brain is just a pile of stochastic molecules following the laws of physics" into "The brain is an inert pile of matter, computers are an inert pile of matter, ergo AI/LLMs are like the brain!" Why do you need a specific organization of molecules for a phenomenon similar to consciousness to arise? Does anyone seriousl…

I think the point of the commentator above is that there are two extreme narratives that start each start with an uncontroversial assumption and then taking it to a pretty wild place. One narrative takes the assumption that brains are just matter so it should be possible to engineer consciousness and then argues that LLMs are conscious. The other takes the assumption that LLMs aren't conscious but then argues that because they aren't we won't ever be able to make anything conscious.

I don't actually think the commentator you responded to is arguing for either of these narratives and I thought it was a pretty useful way to look at some of these arguments.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#543

Post by namuol » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

brainwad wrote: post #530

namuol wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said it wasn’t fair use, I just think it’s kind of disrespectful of the author’s wishes. Being legal doesn’t make it moral or admirable.

I generally give short shrift to the idea of author's moral rights , _especially_ when they try to use those rights to stop derivative works. OP credited Bisson, that's enough in my books.

I find it in poor taste, but maybe that’s the point.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#544

Post by svachalek » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

fullstackchris wrote: post #84

The prose in the post is what I've been shouting from a rooftop since the LLM hype started. Just tokens produced by weights. Useful, but never forget that ground truth!

It's a parody of an original story that reversed the premise. In it, machine intelligences were marveling that an apparently intelligent species could in fact be created without any sort of reliable digital substrate, and instead just simulate the capabilities of real minds by using protein synthesis.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#545

Post by f_klem » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

ACCount37 wrote: post #270

f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

I don't think cognitive linguistics has that much to say about AI nowadays. Let alone philosophy. The biggest contributions from linguistics are probably "human languages mostly have statistical regularities rather than hard rules" and "the sum of data humans get from birth to language acquisition is insufficient to learn a language from scratch". Which LLMs already work with, and work around, respectively. From ther…

> I don't think cognitive linguistics has that much to say about AI nowadays. Let alone philosophy. I would like to read those sources.

> The biggest contributions from linguistics are probably "human languages mostly have statistical regularities rather than hard rules" and "the sum of data humans get from birth to language acquisition is insufficient to learn a language from scratch". Which LLMs already work with, and work around, respectively. From there, nothing.

Again, what's the source for 'biggest contributions from linguistics are...'? It is a big contribution to the development of LLMs, but different cognitive linguistics authors already challenged this idea already 20-30 years ago. LLMs work with and around the problems you cite because of massive data/money, not at the fundamental level. It is all a game of statistics and data, which has been already challenged by cog. ling.

> And philosophy just exists to be a distractor. Well, this is just telling me that you either know too much about philosophy and reached that conclusion (which might make sense, know of some philosophers who also think that) or you just read too little.

> So all of that "treating human mind as a machine is wrong" amounts to "human mind must be powered by magic fairy dust"

This is the common fallacy people in AI/IT make . One of the benefits of reading philosophy is that you find your way out of them.

> Want to know why Turing did what he did? The actual tests Turing though about are themselves flawed (not that I discovered that, has been known for some time already)

Re: They’re made out of weights

#546

Post by f_klem » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC

raincole wrote: post #351

f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

> subjective experience and agency, amongst other things In other words, souls? I'm sorry if that sounds accusing, but to me it sounds like you're talking about souls that are independent to the physical world, just with more 'scientific-y' wording. (I fully understand that some people believe souls exist.)

As other commenters pointed out, I'm not getting into the mind/body problem. But that's what people normally do: you challenge the assumptions, and all of a sudden they assume you are already coming to a conclusion. And no, just because I challenge the assumptions, I don't need to provide a counter conclusion.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#547

Post by svachalek » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC

viftodi wrote: post #224

It makes me very sad to see this pseudo-intellectualism posted here and so many people replying here about consciousness and so on, not realizing what it would entail if this were true. For LLMs to have consciousness we would approach fictional levels of how the universe works, and magical levels of how any interpretation of information as an equivalent of some qualia would magically apply. (E.G. the word hurt in out…

So that's all pseudo-intellectualism, but the real intellectual take is "I personally speculate that it's the electro magnetic field in the brain, it's the only way to be able to globally represent information".

Disregarding the whole argument boils down to "I personally speculate" it's also supposing that machines don't have electromagnetic fields?

Re: They’re made out of weights

#548

Post by wat10000 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 6:02 PM UTC

f_klem wrote: post #519

wat10000 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assertion is not that cells are machines built by humans (obviously false), merely that they are machines. Which they pretty clearly are, unless you assume the supernatural.

There is no need to assume the supernatural. They are machines based on what? By definition, a machine is something build by humans, or any intelligent life form (because we extend the definition from our own experience as self defined 'intelligent life forms'). Living organisms and machines do share traits under our current frame of reference in modern science. But that doesn't mean cells are machines. The right fra…

By what definition?

Anyway, seems like an argument over said definitions rather than the underlying characteristics. The relevant question is whether they're purely physical objects behaving according to rules, which is being described as "machine," or whether there is something beyond that. Current understanding is contradictory: all indications are that cells and bodies are purely physical objects, except that there is this phenomenon of subjective experience which doesn't fit with that at all.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#549

Post by calepayson » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 6:02 PM UTC

f_klem wrote: post #500

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two meanings to "the body is a complex machine" and I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. 1) The abstract "dictionary" version: It'd be technically correct to say that the body is a machine under the definition of "A machine is a thermodynamic system that uses power to apply forces and control movement to perform an action.". 2) But there's also the less abstract/technical: "The body is alike…

I agree, we can miss the forest for the trees. 1) This definition could actually be expanded (for example, with definitions from Mumford or Reuleaux). But still this definition cannot be applied directly to living organisms. 2) This is in my opinion one of the sources of misunderstanding. We mainly operate on analogies and metaphors, so we have build this 'analogy space' around the idea that living organisms are mach…

> 1) This definition could actually be expanded (for example, with definitions from Mumford or Reuleaux). But still this definition cannot be applied directly to living organisms.

I'm not sure I understand this. Why not?

Re: They’re made out of weights

#550

Post by f_klem » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 6:04 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #358

f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

The problem with the stuff you cite is that it is coming from consciousness via an anthropomorphic perspective. The priors baked in are poisoning the logic. The question we have to answer is "Why do we think we're magical matter uniquely blessed with consciousness?" If you go far enough down the rabbit hole on that question, the answer you will come to is either "we're not" or "because god" (with a lot of pseudo-scie…

There is no way of dealing with these topics via a non-anthropomorphic perspective. That has been already (in my view) proved by Heidegger and then Derrida.

Last time I read about panpsychism, it was deeply flawed. But I can't remember the sources (sorry).