[ninjanomnom]

I've spent no small amount of time thinking about my own mind and thought patterns, but I've never thought I was special. When I work to understand myself and others, it feels like putting together rules for some slowly changing system with complex enough inner workings to be nearly random in some cases. Even so, I can understand people entirely different to myself so I can empathize and work with them.

Honestly the more I see from LLMs the more it makes me think that we are much the same. Imagine a network of many different LLMs each given different capabilities and prompts, each able to communicate with others. Now imagine splitting this network in half, wouldn't the resulting adjustment look similar to a split brain patient in humans? Are "you" possibly just the LLM that has been given control over the speech and other intentional body actions?

[verisimi]

> I've spent no small amount of time thinking about my own mind and thought patterns, but I've never thought I was special.

I don't see how that can be. You have no experience of anyone else subjectively. For all you know, you could be a 'brain in a jar' with inputs coming in via wires, other people could be part of the illusion. The only thing you can say you know is your own present experience - it is infinitely special. Sure, when you consider yourself objectively, you appear to be like one of so many people. But, there's no getting away from the fact your own experience is infinitely special to you. And it has meaning/value to you because of emotions. Animals seem to, but these are not at the same level. Machines give no indication of emotions. AIs appear to have emotions, but this is a simulation/illusion - like those medieval wooden toys, but better.

> I can understand people entirely different to myself so I can empathize and work with them.

This is a form of projection, imo. You have no idea about what is going on inside others. You only have appearance to guide you.

> Honestly the more I see from LLMs the more it makes me think that we are much the same.

If you take a purely objective, materialistic viewpoint, why not consider it the other way - that we ourselves are a sort of AI, our hardware being wetware/bodies - just mechanistic. Do you think you are an AI? (As was illustrated in Westworld?)

[ben_w]

To me, the other person writing "I've never thought I was special" has no contradiction with "your own experience is infinitely special to you".

Is it "projection" to think we have insight into other minds? Sure, but if you do that projection by default then you won't think that you're special — to project like that is to be absent that thought.

> And it has meaning/value to you because of emotions. Animals seem to, but these are not at the same level. Machines give no indication of emotions. AIs appear to have emotions, but this is a simulation/illusion - like those medieval wooden toys, but better.

Likewise for this: there are many cases where humans project meaning/value onto even inanimate things, or even onto what we imagine other people might be doing — this is why "blasphemy" is a concept and not just a string of letters/phonemes, and also why people with real and violent actions to propaganda that demonises some minority or individual.

Do any AI have emotions[0], or are LLMs merely good at pretending? Both can be true at the same time (LLMs being only one of many kinds of AI), or exclusively one, or neither.

[0] regardless of if this is meant as "the qualia of emotions" or "something which has a functional influence on the network's output that is similar to the influence on human brains of hormones associated with emotions"

[verisimi]

Thank you, but I don't really understand the point you are making here. This is probably my misunderstanding, but can I push you to explain what you mean a bit more fully?

[ben_w]

I'll try, but you may need to give a more detailed question…

The fact that my experience is the only one I can experience, makes it special to me; at the same time, by default, unless and until given reason to the contrary, I project onto everyone else the same mind that I myself have.

I don't currently share ninjanomnom's opinion, but I used to: they wrote "I've never thought I was special" — as a child neither did I, but over the years I have learned this is not correct, and that I'm weird in a lot of ways. I don't experience so much disgust as others seem to, with the exception of violent horror where my disgust reaction is vastly stronger than that of society at large. I do have an extreme disinterest in spending money that means I can't even imagine regularly spending as much as €750/month combined on all the things that aren't rent/mortgage repayments. Conservatism was an alien concept until I learned about Chesterton's Fence. Back in the late 90s, I was one of about 4 kids in a school of 1000 who preferred to do maths homework than to have the afternoon off to watch the World Cup (and at that point I didn't even realise that made me weird, I thought everyone else was weird for watching it).

As a kid, I projected my thought process onto other humans, and (thanks to a teenage fling with Wicca) natural phenomena. Yes, this was an error on my part; my mum remained a believer in the supernatural for her whole life, told me she was disappointed when my (older) brother stopped believing, and I overheard her saying much the same to my partner about me when she realised I'd stopped believing.

It may well also be an error to project any kind of mind-model onto LLMs. We don't know for sure yet, because we don't know what it would take for an information processor to have qualia. (Why do I have qualia? My brain is a bag of cells sending electrochemical signals to each other). That said, I'd say there's value to interacting with them as if it were truly "like us": as they are trained on human interactions, I believe you get the most out of them by talking to them in the same way you'd talk to a human, regardless of what is or isn't going on inside.

But even though I can reason that I'm special (or at least that I'm weird), if I'm not actively thinking about it, I still default to projecting onto other humans and certain animals.