Re:Humanising LLM Outputs Is Dumb
by isjejxjwjdj on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @10:23AM
(#49258913)
> "Admit that you know that" is boring.
Reality is under no obligation to be fun. It might be boring but it is the truth.
The fact that you needed such effort to try and give this position any shred of sense only serves as proof of how nonsensical it is to do so.
Re:Humanising LLM Outputs Is Dumb
by red75prime on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @12:59PM
(#49261169)
> It might be boring but it is the truth.
The inability of people to reflect on their own beliefs amazes me to no end. How can you know that LLMs have no phenomenal states?
For example, I believe that rocks (ordinary rocks, not silicon chips) have no phenomenal states because for all we know they don't do any kind of information processing (relevant to self-reflection, at least) and I don't believe in panpsychism or dualism.
To me it seems kind of arrogant that we assume only “we” are conscious beings. Sometimes I imagine the planet earth itself as a creature, and humans on it a kind of bacteria… how ridiculous if bacteria in the human body were convinced only they were conscious, but the human body they relied on was not. The bacteria would have great excuses… “look at that human, everything it does can be explained via simple physical processes, unlike what we do”.
First things first. You are wrong. I don't have a gut feeling that LLMs have no phenomenal states. Not anymore. I was skeptical that LLMs can form complex internal representations. Mechanistic interpretability has shown that they can. I'm still skeptical in regard to introspective mechanisms. One token being fed back into the network and KV cache update do seem lacking in comparison to the ubiquitous recurrent connections in the brain.
What I do know is that philosophy hasn't produced an operationalized definition of qualia. So, we need to approach the problem of LLMs' phenomenal states from other angles.
For example, we can argue that LLMs lack something, which seems to be relevant to the problem: a biological substrate, generality (non-CoT LLMs aren't Turing-complete), "something something feedback"[1], and things like that.
"Admit that you know that" is boring.
[1] I'm referring to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-new-ai-consciousness-pa...