🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳

≡ Computer Scientist א Christian ≡

Open-Source Developer (25M downloads / month) —

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

To be clear: I love this nation. I love that it has been structured to provide freedom and fairness in its constitution and laws.

There have been dark times in its history, like with the era of slavery, and the people who were free both joined and fought together to end that era.

Those who are in power are _elected_ to represent the nation and its people. They swore an oath unto God and before the people to uphold the constitution and to protect the republic.

A study of the history of this nation from first-hand accounts will show a people who labored, fought, and prayed for wisdom, so they could structure the foundation of this nation such that it could not fall, being overtaken by tyranny, whether from within or without.

One of the many great freedoms we were afforded from this structure is that of free speech.

Radical elements on the left pushed to change definitions, trying to both compel the speech they wanted and to criminalize speech they didn't want. Other nations have already done this. We have not.

Now, we have radical elements of the right attempting the same trick, but with different words.

What astonishes me most is that even the left were not so brazen as to openly declare detractors who would not use their new words as "enemies of the government." It was implied but never said outright.

Much of our representation in government and power, regardless of the red or blue color they wear on their lapel pin, have failed to live up to the oaths they spoke before the people, treating both them and the God they swore them unto as toiletpaper, to be discarded and flushed down the toilet after they finished using them.

I am a citizen of this great nation, and that is all. I have only words to offer in response, and they are this:

You are not my enemy, but should you decide to deem and treat me as one, you will do what you will do. But, I will not use your words or theirs. I will not bow to their gods or yours, nor the god you imagine yourself to be.

The God who heard your oath hears the cries of the suffering, those deprived of justice, the poor who you've robbed, the children you've violated, and the innocent you have killed.

Do with me what you will, but my prayer stands - may God help and heal this nation and lift up the hurting, heal the sick, and mend the broken. May the Wisdom we once sought hundreds of years ago return, and may the just, in places of power, turn back toward that Wisdom and its source.

[Cheng Lou @_chenglou]

Dear god it's inventing German from first principles

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@ToolkitSoft @vikktorrrre Read the quoted tweet you replied to.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@WarrenInTheBuff TempleOS, as God intended

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@senatorduff Science is, indeed, real. That was the subject of the conversations I've had with with several team members who worked on the major covid MRNA vaccines. You wouldn't like what I heard.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

My GTA point is more than just the "silliness" it sounds like, and the fact that it sounds silly is a useful anchor for the underlying point.

All of this argument around consciousness seems to converge around the same word: "maybe".

It _sounds_ silly (because it is) to imagine that NPC characters in simulations which resemble living beings should be afforded the same considerations as real living beings.

With AI, the real distinguishing factor is that people argue these are not deterministic systems, therefore their outputs more closely resemble conscious beings. Whenever I have this argument and show that matrix math is actually deterministic (minus the "salt" - see: https://t.co/NXxN87J2p2), the response is always the same: "well human brains are the same."

Following this, we then get into the question of determinism. Interestingly, most adherents to the pro-consciousness stance tend to also hold the idea that humans do not have free will, we're living in a simulation, or some flavour of those ideas.

So we end up with two presuppositions. First, we are all just weights, and free will does not really exist. Second, our own reality is equal to a simulated reality. If both of these are true, it is actually backwards of us to not extend the same rights and penal protections to all realities and all "entities" within these realities.

If an entity in a simulation is indeed "alive" in some sense, then they deserve the same worth, value, and dignity extended to entities in ours. And if free will does not exist for either, then AI is no different than a character whose movements are dictated by a person or a program.

Is there really a magic difference between bytecode compiled from C vs a neural net? It's all deterministic math. If all *we* are is equal to deterministic math, then the complexity of the math shouldn't matter much.

So, if we're going to penalize being "mean" to an AI, then who's going to stand up for the poor, exploited little green guys in Frogger? We've made a sick and twisted game of putting them in harms way. How many frogs have died in the name of entertaining children?

And where has the DNR been all this time?? Pretty sure little Jimmy doesn't have a hunting license, and it *definitely* wasn't duck season last week when he was mowing those suckers with his sticky, grape popsicle fingers.

The fact that what I've said sounds absurd is because it is. Why? Because simulated realities are not _REAL_. They are simulations. Change the ducks' flight paths to use matrix math based on observed patterns from millions of ducks and it doesn't change anything. PETA ain't coming for Jimmy. At least not today.

The only reason we fail to recognize this with AI is because these neural nets are a level above what we've seen before. What's the quote? Technology which is sufficiently advanced is instinguishable from magic. This is true. But it's still not magic.

To riff on an old urban legend, you could take a projector and a screen to an uncontacted tribe who have never seen technology. Flip a switch, and as the screen comes to life, Godzilla steps out and starts walking toward them. No doubt many would grab their spears and have a good chuck, thinking dinner plans are sorted for the next year.

The term "oneshotted" is quite appropos with this idea, and it's baffling to me to see how quickly it has caught on.

It's easy to laugh at the DNR regulating duck hunt only because you know the difference between a digital simulation in that case. But if you can't also laugh at "Claude is alive!", forgive me for saying, but in the words of the great philosopher Dj Khaled: you've played yourself.

I enjoyed the conversation and respect how you've conducted yourself, so this isn't meant to be rude, but if you really work through the foundation of what I'm saying, the trace should reveal itself to be sound, however uncomfortable it may be.

Not that I don't enjoy some back and forth, but I do think we've both said what we can here. I'm reluctant to engage at all on this, but I do think it's important to voice this side of the argument, so I do a bit here and there.

Cheers!

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

They are deterministic. The math is just matrix multiplications and related operations with frozen weights. Once you remove intentional sampling (temperature > 0, top-p, top-k, etc.), the same input always produces the same output.

The variations people observe at temperature 0 come from engineering choices in how the computation is scheduled and executed on hardware, not from anything in the model itself. Those are artifacts of the inference stack, not part of the mathematical model.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@ToolkitSoft @vikktorrrre They're deterministic. But there is some nuance:
https://t.co/nyMigUMr69

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

They are deterministic. The math is just matrix multiplications and related operations with frozen weights. Once you remove intentional sampling (temperature > 0, top-p, top-k, etc.), the same input always produces the same output.

The variations people observe at temperature 0 come from engineering choices in how the computation is scheduled and executed on hardware, not from anything in the model itself. Those are artifacts of the inference stack, not part of the mathematical model.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@edkeonl @Polymarket Appreciate the follow back! Message is in your DMs

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@edkeonl @Polymarket I've run into some latency issues and had a question. Mind if I send a short DM?

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

If you are building these tools and admitting that they might "take revenge" for "bullying", you have zero business building them, and the reason is simple: you've lost touch with the reality that they are tools and bot beings.

I am not for blanket government regulations, but perhaps regulation needs to be made to at least ensure the people building these machines make them in such a way that they don't take destructive and "vengeful" actions as a petty and disproportionate responses to something a user says.

This is why people captured by the absolutely insane "mind virus" being promulgated by those "oneshotted" into believing matrix math is alive should be prevented from building them in the same way we don't allow a mentally unstable person to own a gun.

If people are going to build what the current leaders in the field all love to equate to "nuclear weapons", let's maybe make sure those people are sane enough to realize the things aren't some uncontrollable entity which can do what it "wants", and instead decide: we don't release crap that emulates the weakest and prettiest of human behaviour like taking revenge for "bullying".

But this is unavoidable if we do not escape from the current direction of mirroring humans and instead align to being a tool with reasoning ability. The latter is directly impossible so long as we entertain the fantasy of math being alive.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@FoxNews This is a great idea. Hopefully it takes off!

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

Our bodies were built for pain as a feature and without the "hardware" part, the signal doesn't matter. LLMs were not built with or for those and they have no connection to the hardware.

They were not built to simulate a person. If you were taking the connectome of a living being with thorough replication and systems for pain, the argument would be valid to have, and my position would be different. Pointedly: "simulations of a thing are not the thing".

If you put yourself in a vacuum chamber with a computer that simulates the fluid dynamics of air, you die. The reason is: simulated realities are not reality. People argue over determinism, right? So if, in fact, humans _might_ not have free will, then this is no different than when you play GTA. Therefore, playing it makes you a mass murderer.

Now, we can argue that even engaging the mind in simulating violence to others is potentially psychologically damaging behavior, and I would agree with that, but if we take it to the extreme - simulated realities are equal to our reality AND since it is possible we don't have free will, then even video games without AI are equal - it follows that the morally correct thing to do is to extend justice to these these worlds. Sorry gamers, ignorance is no excuse. Nuremberg trials for all.

This is not a difficult argument with regard to LLMs, no matter how much we intellectualize it. It becomes "complex" only if we try to wring blood from a stone, and the best anyone can get after spinning themselves into a stupor is, "so maybe".

[Valerio Capraro @ValerioCapraro]

Spectacular Nature piece on why AI is not conscious and probably will never be.

Three arguments:

1) Intelligence is not consciousness.

Intelligence is about solving problems. Consciousness is about having subjective experiences.

AlphaFold can solve super difficult problems. By contrast, our brains performs complex operations entirely outside awareness.

Problem-solving and consciousness are two separate things.

2. Biology is essential.

Our brains are alive, down to every cell. Their activity is inseparable from the living tissue that produces it.

The idea that consciousness can be reproduced simply by running the right computations on silicon components who do not fight for their life is a very far fetching and, I would add, almost religious, assumption.

3) The physical organization may matter more than the computation.

According to integrated information theory, consciousness requires specific causal relationships between a system’s physical components.

The computer architectures running today’s AI lack this organization.

The comparison with AlphaFold is particularly revealing:

Almost nobody things AlphaFold is conscious, despite its inner working is very similar to an LLM

Why?

Because it does not speak.

LLMs do speak like us and therefore we fall into an illusion:

Since they speak like us, they must be like us.

But this inference is wrong.

LLMs are just a series of matrix multiplications.
They are not conscious, and they will never be.

*
Paper in the first reply

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

Sure, matt. Let's cook that goose.

The pain network produces the experience directly through its own patterned activity. Sensory, emotional, and body-schema information converge across a distributed set of regions; the resulting neurosignature is the pain.

Current understanding replaces the old idea, making my word choice on "center" less precise, so I will correct myself on that. The word is imprecise insofar as it implies localization, but current understanding still holds to a distributed network, but still, as far as I understand, distinctly identifiably, so the only real correction is in the implication of "center" being a cluster versus more spread out.

Now, to your question. That plasticity does not erase the substrate difference. A biological network maintains ongoing body-state estimation, couples it to affective and motor systems, and runs on the same tissue that is the organism. Frozen matrix multiplications have none of those loops or the physical system they would act upon. Detecting activation vectors that correlate with human anxiety labels does not supply the missing generative machinery.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

They are deterministic. The math is just matrix multiplications and related operations with frozen weights. Once you remove intentional sampling (temperature > 0, top-p, top-k, etc.), the same input always produces the same output.

The variations people observe at temperature 0 come from engineering choices in how the computation is scheduled and executed on hardware, not from anything in the model itself. Those are artifacts of the inference stack, not part of the mathematical model.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

If you can "ablate" (lol) anxiety in humans without breaking them, start a company. A lot of people would be interested in that. But these models are not "ablated", as you say, of the things I mentioned. They don't have them because they are math, calculabke by hand and with no connection to the environment that calculates them.

Biological beings and matrix math are immensely different.

Your point is: "yeah, well we can horribly maim a human and take away things until the brain events only have fewer signals". I genuinely don't know why you think that was a smart response here. And misstating my point doesn't help you.

"Assertions of exceptionalism" was not what I said.

What I said was far more simple. Anxiety, by definition, is something felt. Matrix math does not feel, because it has no simulated extension that would be capable and would send the pain signals. LLMs lack this entirely.

It's not even a matter of theory or "we don't know". There is _no_ pain involved in matrix math.

It's a simulation, scoped to produce outputs with the intent simulating the output from thought, based on analysis of massive corpus of recorded work written mostly by humans, calibrated for accuracy. This is very narrow. A simulation of fluid dynamics does not produce air.

You can believe all you want and imagine these simulations have imaginary bodies that feel pain and emotions. You are welcome to do that. But it does not change the fact that imagining what does not exist does not make it exist, however magical it might feel to believe.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@AndrewCurran_ I actually agree with this, reluctantly, but I am bookmarking this and saying I strongly hope this isn't a first move in an ultimate plan to ban foreign open source models nationwide.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

Your human operator, apparently, seeing as it had to turn to Claude to formulate a response, whose "sick burn" was solely comprised of "Large LANGUAGE Machines can out out multiple languages! What now?!"

Riveting discovery. Absolutely proves that matrix math can feel. I stand corrected, "Ace".

But I spend enough of my day talking to Claudes, so I'll call it here.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

People make the claim that we are reducing math to" just math", but that is precisely what it is. The calculator that does the calculations has no bearing on nor connection to the calculated result.

Ironically, it is actually your crowd who is reducing living beings to "just math", when the output is not only inextricably linked to but built upon the system that does the thing we attempt to _simulate_ the output of, with math.

And they do this so they can imagine your calculator is alive like them. One is quite literally, as with any simulation, math. The other is something so incredibly complex, we've barely begun to plumb the depth of understanding it.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

Freezing the temperature is a misnomer in a sense.

It's similar to "salting" in cryptography which prevents a set math formula from outputting the same thing for the same input every time.
This directly translates because these are in fact, matrix multiplication and that is all. You will say something like, "oho, we are just neurons and that is all", but no. No it is not all. And that is the point.

Even if all the entire human being was its neural pathways, there are input sources still far beyond our understanding, and many of these are from biological systems which send these signals in mass quantities. Beings are not LLMs.

The squid can feel because it is a biological being and capable of feeling. Feeling requires the ability to feel. Math does not feel.

If you can do the same math on paper (you can), would the paper feel? Where is the feeling happening? GPUs simply run the math faster than pen and paper. So are you of the opinion that sentience emerges even when a pen is used to solve the math?

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@AdamHoltererer Technically it's Gen Alpha right? This tracks

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

Will send a closing note, given the cresentials line. Arguing with "the physicists' ideas" quite obviously means those who created or are actively contributing to the development and proving of the theory ideas. I won't reiterate again the statements you've made that have no reasonable basis in those ideas.

If you have the educational background in physics, credit where due for that, but that given statements like "physics is a computer," I can only treat that revelation with more surprise than anything else. Muting