The online communities in question do more damage than good. They encourage isolation and spread social contagion.

We should do more as a society, absolutely! But these places are not “stop gaps” because they’re NOT helping.

We've created these unhealthy gardens where young people feel safe, removing any reason for them to engage in the real world. They don't thrive in these places, they slowly withdraw.

Tying your identity to the place where you're helpful and where that help is appreciated and acknowledged isn't mental illness.

Your work may have coherence and purpose, but if it doesn’t have significance then it isn’t the source of meaning you thought it was.

It’s like saying we shouldn’t call immigrants “aliens” because that conjures images of space. Where do you think the term comes from?

If you didn't know the word "duck", you could still see the duck, hunt the duck, use the ducks feather's for your bedding and eat the duck's meat. You would know it could fly and swim without having to know what either of those actions were called.

The LLM "sees" a thing, identifies it as a "duck", and then depends on a single modal LLM to tell it anything about ducks.

Humans got by for millions of years with our current biological hardware before we developed language. Your brain stores a model of your experience, not just the words other experiencers have shared with yiu.

I still don’t want to play with you, sorry.

Best of luck!

You have an enormous chip on your shoulder. You consistently make truth claims about entire fields that are still in debate and then you arrogantly shout over the other person when they disagree with you.

I strongly suggest you work on this. It will limit you in life. It probably already has. You probably already know how it has, even!

I'm not saying this to be mean, or because I "have nothing left to stand on." You're clearly intelligent and you clearly care about this topic. But until you mature and learn to behave, others will continue to withdraw from conversation with you.

Best of luck.

It doesn't matter how smart (you think) you are. If nobody wants to talk to you, you'll be spinning all that brain matter in the corner by yourself. Based on your comment history here, it looks like this happens to you more often than not.

I'm sure you have good points. I could probably learn a thing or two from you—maybe you could learn something from me too! But why on earth would anyone want to engage with someone who behaves like you do?

Again, best of luck.

Good day, sir.

Best of luck.

No. The LLM does not produce emotion-like responses. I'd argue no on creativity either. And only very limited in reasoning, in domains it has in its training set.

You have fundamental misunderstandings about neuroscience and cognitive science. Its hard to argue with you here because you simply don't know what you don't know.

Yes, the human brain is the machine we're describing. And we don't describe it very well. Definitely not at the level of understanding how to reproduce it with bitstrings.

I'm glad you're so passionate about this topic. But you're arguing the equivalent of FTL transit and living on Dyson Spheres. Its fun as a thought experiment and may theoretically be possible one day, but the line between what we're capable of today and that imagined future is neither straight nor visible—certainly not to the degree you're asserting here.

Will we one day have actual machine intelligence? Maybe. Is it going to come anytime soon, or look anything like the transformer-based LLM?

No.

Back of the envelope math puts an estimate of 10^42 bits to capture the information present in your current physical brain state. Thats just a single brain, a single state. Now you need to build your mythical decoder device, which can translate qualia from this physical state. Where does it live? What’s its output look like? Another 10^40 bitstring?

Again, these arguments are fun on paper. But they’re completely removed from reality.

This is not just a lossy mapping; it excludes entire categories of experience that cannot be captured/encoded except for as a pointer to the real experience, one that is often shared by the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended cognitive beings that have had that experience.

I can point to beauty and you can understand me because you've experienced beauty. I cannot encode beauty itself. The LLM cannot experience beauty. It may be able to analyze patterns of things determined beautiful by beauty experiencers, but this is, again, a lower resolution map of the actual experience of beauty. Nobody had to train you to experience beauty—you possess that capability innately.

You cannot encode the affective response one experiences when holding their newborn. You cannot encode the cognitive appraisal of a religious experience. You can't even encode the qualia of red except for, again, as a pointer to the color.

You're also missing that 4E cognitive beings have a fundamental experience of consciousness—particularly the aspect of "here" and "now". The LLM cannot experience either of those phenomena. I cannot encode here and now. But you can, and do, experience both of those constantly.