Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots • Hacker News Board

Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#31

Post by customguy » Sun, May 31, 2026, 8:42 PM UTC

Joker_vD wrote: post #29

queenkjuul wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the ability to experience feelings and sensations This isn't a scale of "0 to Human," this is a binary: can a computer feel sensations? We know for a fact that many animals can, including humans. Rocks can not.

Descartes famously thought that no, animals did not have feelings and sensations, and their reactions were purely mechanistic in nature. You see, he believed that humans and animals had fundamentally different substrate i.e. immortal soul/lack of it, and you needed soul to percept. Thankfully, today we know better than that, and so we can be absolutely certain that computers can't feel sensations: they have different…

Who claimed it's because they're of fundamentally different substrate? And who is talking about computers? It's about algorithms. You could recreate an LLM with infinite humans and infinite time and infinite pens and pieces of paper surely, just like you can make a 16-bit computer in Minecraft, and it would not make that LLM more or less sentient.

That Descartes analogy is far off the mark, since we're not making guesses about something that existed before us, we are talking about something we made and are making. Just like you know there's no fairies moving clock hands because you know how a clock is made. I'd even say that some people get confused, or confuse others for money, is the only reason this is even discussed.

Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#32

Post by queenkjuul » Sun, May 31, 2026, 9:34 PM UTC

Joker_vD wrote: post #29

queenkjuul wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the ability to experience feelings and sensations This isn't a scale of "0 to Human," this is a binary: can a computer feel sensations? We know for a fact that many animals can, including humans. Rocks can not.

Descartes famously thought that no, animals did not have feelings and sensations, and their reactions were purely mechanistic in nature. You see, he believed that humans and animals had fundamentally different substrate i.e. immortal soul/lack of it, and you needed soul to percept. Thankfully, today we know better than that, and so we can be absolutely certain that computers can't feel sensations: they have different…

Do you, or did Descartes, believe that rocks can feel sensation?

GP asserts they do. I assert they don't.

I only raised the question about computers, i didn't answer it.

But the other reply raises a good point: Descartes would not have thought so about a clock, because he knows both how a clock is made and how a clock works. He knew neither about animals. We know both about computers.

Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#33

Post by sublinear » Sun, May 31, 2026, 11:43 PM UTC

brookst wrote: post #2

Ok, this is fun. Perhaps a little on-the-nose, but then again, so is much of the “AI isn’t really thinking, it’s just doing the same work and producing the same output” claptrap. The last couple of years have changed my thinking on lots of stuff, but the biggest and most disturbing one is a newfound doubt in my / our own sentience. Maybe there’s something ineffable there. Or maybe… not. Maybe it is all post hoc ratio…

It can be fun to imagine so long as it leads to learning and confidence instead of doubt and vulnerability.

There are two grifts going on right now that are way out of hand. One is AI and the other is health/longevity. They are both FUD about human capability.

There's a long history of this sort of thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_delusion

Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#34

Post by flowerthoughts » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 6:09 AM UTC

yomismoaqui wrote: post #19

In beggining to think that there is some kind of human centric hubris that ends proved wrong by science. We thought we were the center of the universe, and science showed us that we are not the center of our galaxy, not even our solar system. Maybe with our thinking it's the same, we are not that special and we can something good enough just piling enough silicon.

Even at the individual level, yes. I read somewhere recently, can't remember where, that the concept of "I" may have occurred as a consequence of developing the concept of "you", "us" and "them". So being able to have virtual humans in your brain inevitably makes you reserve one of them to represent yourself, and it starts to feel special.

Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#35

Post by throwaway63467 » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 6:35 AM UTC

spwa4 wrote: post #26

throwaway63467 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you doubt that you’re sentient? Your world model includes yourself and you can reason about yourself as part of the world so why should the ability of an AI model being able to also do that change your opinion on that? Don’t get why you think what consciousness is, I guess you look at something beyond the definition and whether there’s something special on the meta level but I don’t get how you could doubt…

> Why would you doubt that you’re sentient? Because if you apply the same logic to that we apply to AI. "Under the hood" AI is nothing but vector-matrix multiplications and a few other operations. We know matrix multiplications aren't sentient, nor are those other operations. Likewise, we know if we look under the hood/cut open a human brain we find conductive membranes, and a Kalium-Natrium balance that shifts, sign…

I don’t say AI is sentient but what do you expect out brain to do in the end, it’s likely just some matrix operations and integration and other stuff arranged in a very intricate way.

Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#36

Post by spwa4 » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 7:55 AM UTC

throwaway63467 wrote: post #35

spwa4 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would you doubt that you’re sentient? Because if you apply the same logic to that we apply to AI. "Under the hood" AI is nothing but vector-matrix multiplications and a few other operations. We know matrix multiplications aren't sentient, nor are those other operations. Likewise, we know if we look under the hood/cut open a human brain we find conductive membranes, and a Kalium-Natrium balance that shifts, sign…

I don’t say AI is sentient but what do you expect out brain to do in the end, it’s likely just some matrix operations and integration and other stuff arranged in a very intricate way.

The whole human architecture, including everything else, can easily be expressed as just over 2 GB (2 bits per base pair), and compressed to under 300 mb (half of the gains are just specifying the length of some sections rather than everything). And that includes everything from the cpu architecture to toenail building, not just the brain.

Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#37

Post by brookst » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 1:08 PM UTC

queenkjuul wrote: post #27

Lerc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that? How about if you draw a line graph of ability and sentience, We know two points. No ability at all has a sentience of zero. Human ability has a sentience of 1HS (one human sentience). Mark a point where you think a LLM sits. (presumably from your description some ability, zero sentience) What shape is the line graph? It gets from zero to 1HS as you go across. When does it climb. If there is just…

> the ability to experience feelings and sensations This isn't a scale of "0 to Human," this is a binary: can a computer feel sensations? We know for a fact that many animals can, including humans. Rocks can not.

I don’t think discrete vs continuous is as definitive as you believe.

Where in this chain does it flip from zero to one? Amoeba, plankton, jellyfish, roundworm, fruit fly, salmon, frog, rat, chimp, human.

Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#38

Post by ryandvm » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

brookst wrote: post #2

Ok, this is fun. Perhaps a little on-the-nose, but then again, so is much of the “AI isn’t really thinking, it’s just doing the same work and producing the same output” claptrap. The last couple of years have changed my thinking on lots of stuff, but the biggest and most disturbing one is a newfound doubt in my / our own sentience. Maybe there’s something ineffable there. Or maybe… not. Maybe it is all post hoc ratio…

100%

LLMs didn't make me rewrite my understanding of intelligence. It made me wonder just how intelligent anybody is.

"It's not smart, it's just predicting the next most likely token."

It is not at all clear to me that perhaps that is exactly what I'm doing too. I have no idea where my sentences are going. Try to express one of your own thoughts backwards. It sure seems like we're all just predicting the next most likely token...