> the techbro botlickers tend to ignore that sort of thing

(admitting up front that users won't see the notice not to upgrade from 1.9 to 1.10)

> Naturally, this sort of "developer" – we use the word fairly loosely here, you understand – doesn't read the code first. That would ruin the vibe, man.

> You can probably guess what happened next: suddenly, there were a lot of very unhappy ChatNPCs

> In his follow-up blog post this week, The Jqwik Anti-AI Affair, Link innocently (or perhaps ever so slightly disingenuously) explains: "The line was not visible when you looked at it in an emulated terminal. I added this fade-out feature because I personally do not want to see it."

That's not at all nefarious huh

> Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.

> Prompt fondlers

Note that I'm not even explicitly disagreeing with OP, you interpreted my "flipside" as a disagreement. It's undeniable that removing regulations in cancer treatments will be "impactful". Possibly even it will have positive impact. But I am unconvinced that this would be a wise pattern to adopt more broadly.

The original does not read to me as a call for tweaking regulations, it reads like an anti-regulation Boogeyman post. Forgive me for possibly over indexing on patterns I've observed from HNers making this type of comment.

They are of course free at any time to come in and declare that my characterization is unfair, at which my point about the flipside is still completely valid.

So yes I remain unconvinced. Free market maximalists tend to highlight their favorite part of the story while ignoring history.

> There is a gaping chasm between "no evidence" and "irrefutable evidence". You can apply some logic to achieve a reasonable certainty about what's probably going on. As I said in a previous comment, insofar as you can know _anything_, i.e., that your senses are trustworthy and allow you to form some coherent model of the actual world around you, you can be reasonably certain that other people have an inner life as you do. If you are willing to apply your skepticism so far that we can settle the debate at "we can't actually know anything" then conversations about what we know aren't even worth having.

:thinking: My assumptions about the universe are quite different from the ones that I would have if I stuck to how I was raised. I am pretty much at a loss at this entire response, I have nothing further to say, other than that apparently communication was attempted and none was had.

I guess I'll just leave you with a proper source on the discussion of p-zombies and hope you are able to get it all sorted out. Best of luck.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/#ArguAgaiConcZomb

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.

> I mean, a light wave behaves similarly in most respects to a wave through a physical medium, yet they are of entirely different natures.

Different waves behave sufficiently differently from each other that I could not conduct a comparison of them and argue that they are likely all mechanistically identical. My entire premise rests on the observation that other people behave very much like you do, which is what I was trying to point out when you mentioned ChatGPT earlier. I'll expand on the things that I've glossed over so far to make my position more clear.

Consider the alternative to every human around you having consciousness; everyone else is a p-zombie. Examine that idea critically.

Other people behave exactly as if their experiences drive their behavior. For example, people behave as though the experience pain which is unpleasant enough to avoid (compare this to your own pain avoidance). Of course, you could conceive of machinery which emulates pain avoidant behavior exactly without the experience at all. Depending on your metaphysical beliefs that could take the form of:

- Some algorithm or physical process running entirely on wetware

- Some non-physical process not dissimilar to the dualist notion of a soul

The first one has a big wrinkle. There does not appear to be any appreciable _functional_ difference in your cognition and the cognition of the p-zombies around you. Their brains and bodies are very physically similar to yours, and their thought patterns when analyzed by modern imaging processes reveal no special wetware carrying extra weight when compared to yours.

The second one has fewer problems, given that you accept dualism to begin with. It rhymes with a logical razor. Why would we imagine a soul-like mechanism drives their behavior _without_ experience when the only soul-like mechanism you've ever observed carries experience along with it? Without quite convincing evidence to the contrary, the default position here should be they way they operate is similar to the way you operate. To rephrase the idea from before, insofar as you can know anything, you can know that sufficiently similar outcomes are driven by sufficiently similar mechanisms.

Different approach to the idea: Ask any human, "do you have subjective experience?" They say "yes, I do" (after you explain the question). For a p-zombie to do this, they must be making a false report. In every other aspect, you can expect them to reliably report their condition, health, hunger, wellbeing, and they make accurate observations of the world around them and synthesize accurate predictions about the world around them (some do, at least). And yet for this one particular question, they are fabricating the result. Why? To maintain the illusion that you aren't the only one with lights on inside? Why do all of these p-zombies make this false report here? It's a grand conspiracy! If you say "the reporter is checking a truth value of a condition and assess it to be true, honestly by mistake" then you've arrived at the conclusion that you don't know whether _you yourself_ have consciousness, depriving the word of any meaning and undermining the Solipsist position that you can only know about your own consciousness.

So the way I figure it, Solipsism is either special pleading (I am the one exception to the mechanism by which all the people around me arrive at their behaviors), grand conspiracy (someone or something is misleading me for inexplicable ends) or self-defeating (I cannot know whether I have consciousness). None of those outcomes align with how I understand the universe to generally work.