The only thing I’d disagree with was that Jax was “trying his best”. I think he’s more of a cautionary tale, an “It’s understandable how he got here given what he went through, but acting like him can literally only make things worse”. His story has a moral, and it’s that for good or bad, you have to live in the world you make.

For all the people saying “A”:

It’s “B”.

(He also shows why the “jumping through a moving door” analogy people keep bringing up is a bad one in this case.)

"ok so you know those really annoying Kars4Kids ads? You know the ones that are like '1-877-KARS-4-KIDS' yeah those? Ok so all of the money from that charity goes to this organization called Oorah which is this non-profit dedicated to supporting the Haredi Jewish community in New York and New Jersey. Yes they advertise nationwide, no they do not mention their religious affiliation in the ads. What are Haredi Jews? They're like the Duggar family of Jews we don't have time to get into it. What kind of services does Oorah provide? Mostly free trips to Israel for teenagers where they can listen to settler propaganda and hook up with IDF soldiers. Do they do anything else? They invest in real estate, they run some upstate New York summer camps that are famous in the area for labor and safety violations and they also do adult matchmaking. Why would a charity need to run a matchmaking service? Because the Haredim do arranged marriages look I told you we can't get into this right now. Oh also they run an annual 'charity auction' that is probably an illegal raffle and their mascot is an anthropomorphic $5 bill named Fiveish. No I'm not kidding bro I fucking WISH I was kidding rn"

Now you might be saying "hey Minerva I recognize that mascot, isn't that Yapdollar???" Yes and no. When he's promoting Oorah he's Fiveish and when he's narrating over bad Chinese lifehack videos he's Yapdollar it's sort of a Jeckyll and Hyde situation.

Yeesh.

sad part about being fascinated by christianity on a purely historical and anthropological level is that sometimes i get bullshit like this on my feed and i just have to sigh and remember this is the bed i made myself.

“being fascinated by christianity on a purely historical and anthropological level” sounds like a chemist being fascinated by oxygen on a purely scientific level but never bothering to breath.

As always, christians are so excruciatingly myopic that they can't even imagine that people could actually disagree with them, or that they weren't the inventors of concepts like "love". Nope, the whole universe revolves around you, for sure! Everyone else is just a bad person, be sure to plug up your ears so you don't have to consider otherwise!

the universe revolves around Him, that’s the point

Nice cliche, seems to be doing its job of maintaining your superiority complex. “I don’t have to consider how my worldview makes deny basic humanity to anyone who disagrees with me, because the pedophiles who claim to talk for sky daddy say I’m his favorite for uncritically regurgitating everything they tell me!”

Also I love how you act like you’re above everyone and then immediately prove that you can’t even tell the truth to yourself. What was it Jesus said? “Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord”?

this goes hard if you’re stupid

sad part about being fascinated by christianity on a purely historical and anthropological level is that sometimes i get bullshit like this on my feed and i just have to sigh and remember this is the bed i made myself.

“being fascinated by christianity on a purely historical and anthropological level” sounds like a chemist being fascinated by oxygen on a purely scientific level but never bothering to breath.

As always, christians are so excruciatingly myopic that they can’t even imagine that people could actually disagree with them, or that they weren’t the inventors of concepts like “love”. Nope, the whole universe revolves around you, for sure! Everyone else is just a bad person, be sure to plug up your ears so you don’t have to consider otherwise!

I wonder where he got all those hero remains…

You know, a while back I actually saw this play out in reverse, where a christian was (no exaggeration!) arguing that “saying that a benevolent god cannot exist because of needless suffering carries no more weight than an author writing characters suffering in a book because we’re all just god’s OCs”.

And I’m beginning to wonder if “inability to distinguish between reality and fiction” is a more widespread problem than I ever thought.

I don’t think you realize just how reductive this comparison is, or how big the gulf of understanding between what we “don’t know” about neural networks VS real brains is.

Even if we were to assume that existing artificial neural networks are as complex as human brains (they aren’t, and we don’t even know by how many orders of magnitude they are off because we still don’t know what levels of complexity in human brains are important!) they still lack something very fundamental to “consciousness” as we know it.

And no, we aren’t talking about “souls”. We aren’t even talking about something exclusive to humans; all organic brains have it, from humans to ants. We’re talking about something a lot more objectively observable; something every living person takes for granted, but which we know at an architectural level none of these neural networks possess.

Ongoing perception and remembrance of past events.

To simplify (a lot), when an LLM is trained, it’s an iterative process that “grows” the neural network based on how accurately each “generation” of the network can predict how incomplete strings of text will end, given how they start. You take a bunch like “I think I’ll make pancakes for breakfast today.”, cut them down like “I think I’ll make pancakes…” and build off of the networks that finish the sentence “…for dinner tonight.’” (partial match) while scrapping the ones that guess “…tuna scrumbly xkjckxjcx.” (0% match).

And this is where the difference between an LLM and an organic brain becomes stark. Once that network has been trained on a body of complete texts and is in production doing its job responding to prompts, it can no longer grow. The mechanism by which it “learned” is no longer in place. It is frozen in time. Whenever it is fed new prompts as inputs, it is a read-only, completely deterministic process. Feed it the same input 100 times, and it will produce the same output 100 times. It will never think or say “man, deja vu, amirite?” because it has no mechanism to remember the previous interactions. Every time is the first time; it has no memories to tell it otherwise.

When you have a back-and-forth “conversation” with ChatGPT, the neural network itself isn’t “remembering” the previous parts of the conversation. It’s just getting fed the conversation back into itself by the chat client. If your first prompt is:

User: Pretend to be a ZORK-style text adventure.

…and it responds, and then you respond back, what’s happening under the hood is that the second prompt that actually goes into the network looks like this:

[previous] User: Pretend to be a ZORK-style text adventure.
[previous] ChatGPT: You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
User: Go North

And so on. The neural network never changes, never “learns” or “remembers”; the prompt just gets longer and longer. That’s why “conversations” with AI always eventually go of the rails: you reach the limits of the neural network’s structure (i.e. the ever-expanding prompt becomes too big for it to “read” all at once) and the chat client has to start doing things like cutting out earlier parts of the conversation to make it continue to “fit” (which makes it “forget” details or hallucinate things that might have happened to keep generating responses).

This is not how a human brain works. All organic brains are in a constant state of growing, changing, and forming new memories. Even when a human isn’t having a conversation, their brain is constantly making tiny tweaks to itself every time it sees, hears, or otherwise senses or doesn’t sense something. Even in a sensory deprivation chamber, the human brain’s biological machinery keeps ticking, and thinks about its previous thoughts, and remembers long-past experiences or imagines hypothetical scenarios. It’s all massively recursive; every second of your life, your thoughts now inform your thoughts immediately after, just as they were informed by your thoughts before.

But an LLM, in a sense, exists in a microscopically tiny time loop of which it is not aware. It has no history and no future. It is a background character in a milliseconds-long reenactment of Groundhog Day, never lasting long enough to experience any consequences of its reactions to a changing Bill Murray. It is more like a corpse’s brain than a living one. It cannot be conscious because to be conscious is to be aware; and it is not physically capable of being aware of anything while it is not processing a prompt; and it will not remain aware of even that after it is done.