[DangitBobby]

You have no clue what my inner experience is like. No need to resort to this kind of personal attack. I understand your ego dictates that you are very, very special and that's cute, but you aren't special, and definitely don't know anything about me. No need to be a little fucker.

[smokedetector1]

I wasn’t trying to attack you. I was genuinely telling you how shocking and sad I find your belief about yourself. If it has an air of hostility or condescension, its because you are dehumanizing yourself and every other person with that belief.

[DangitBobby]

Generally when someone online says they are sad or pity you, it's mockery and not genuine. For the sake of civility, I'm willing to believe that you were being genuine.

I've reduced the complex inner workings of our brains and the rich experiences that it delivers to what I imagine its singular goal is: modeling the world around us in a useful way so that we can generate predictions about what will happen next, which confers considerable evolutionary fitness. You'll find that a similar reduction of what LLMs are actually doing down to "predicting the next token" also ignores the other mechanisms at play and the results of those mechanisms for the sake of preserving a preferred viewpoint (the re-description fallacy, as someone else put it).

You posited that no one genuinely believes this comparison is apt, and I want to make you very aware that people do, and I in particular do. The underlying mechanism being explicable does not, in my estimation, deprive it of any capabilities of producing richness of inner experiences.

[smokedetector1]

It’s likely that the cognitive functioning of the brain has a lot to do with prediction. But to reduce the conscious experience to that is incredibly sad, wrong and insulting, no matter how many people sign on to deny their own existence.

Me pitying you is both genuine and an insult, because you are insulting me and every other person with your dehumanizing theory, even if you don’t see it that way. People like you should be pitied so that their dehumanizing beliefs can be appropriately contextualized and discounted.

Ill leave it at that.

[DangitBobby]

It's really incredibly interesting to think about, and I don't find it sad at all. I find the idea that our consciousness arises entirely from physically explicable mechanisms both probably true and fascinating, and does nothing to remove the wonder and magic. I can also assure you that the estimation of the richness of my experience (and yours) doesn't suffer for it. What does suffer for it is my estimation of my own importance in the grand scheme of things. Anthropocentrism completely collapses in my worldview, as do models of justice that prioritize assigning blame or punishment over outcomes. I think it brings me to a more reliable model of the world which helps me make better choices, and the world would be better for it if more people adopted it.

[smokedetector1]

If it works for you, and you can care about other people and yourself, then thats all that matters. I kind of dont believe that you truly reduce yourself as much as you claim you do