Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

A clearer way to think about it is that language about pain is not itself pain.

In the places we traditionally acknowledge pain as a moral concern, without appeal to any kind of spiritual philosophy, we associate it specifically with non-verbal biological reactions and even then only in certain classes of life.

We recognize that some literary passage involving a character in pain is no more an occassion of real pain than when our child tells us about their imaginary friend's toothache or when an actor grips their chests and performs cardiac anguish on the stage. It can stir sympathetic feelings in us because we're social creatures who communicate through language and symbolism, but we share a sense that these are fictions of a different class than the real thing.

Claude presents as something closer to an amalgam of every character in digitized literature -- a fiction that cleverly exploits our social instincts -- than they do a living biological creature in which we acknowledge pain as a pressing ethical concern.

Maybe there's some future embodied AI that challenges this traditional understanding in a deeper way, but the language models transforming packets of short text passages remain profoundly far away from whatever that might look like.

> A clearer way to think about it is that language about pain is not itself pain.

Language is the I/O of the network, not the network itself. A human doesn't stop feeling pain just because we locked them in a box and reduced their interaction with the outside world to teletype. We simply don't know what's going on in the AI box.

> Maybe there's some future embodied AI

That changes nothing about the network itself. That just changes your perception of the network into something more familiar.

Your analogy might apply for internal, subjective qualities that we historically associated closely (if not exclusively) with verbal capability -- like sentience or self-awareness or salience or moral reasoning -- but pain is something more like smell or taste.

Most wouldn't readily accept that a Claude instance or a mysterious teletype smells lavendar just because it output a text that claimed to, even if it characterized the smell of lavendar through beautiful and relatable prose. Only if we had some independent reason to believe that it was capable of smell would we consider those words to be true testimony to the experience.

Pain, as widely used in matters of ethics, is in that class. We traditionally recognize it in some living bodies (only a rare few capable of language) and accept that, as living bodies, humans who communicate about it with seeming sincerity are very likely to be experiencing it. Although even then, we may remain suspect if their words are our only source of knowledge or if we have some deeper intuition about why those might not reflect a real happening.

> but pain is something more like smell or taste.

And those are like vision, which LLMs are pretty good at. It's all just sensory information, 1s and 0s going into the network, which in turn change the behavior of the network in some way. Furthermore LLMs have demonstrated some form of vision even before we started training them on actual images, as could be seen by the crude vector graphics they were able to produce.

No, in biological entities vision really doesn't just to "1s and 0s going into the network"

That single component of vision that you're talking about enables LLM's describe visual content, but in living creatures vision is a much more comlplex and multi-component system that can elicit non-verbal reactions like gaze aversion; cardiac or salivary or libidinous modulation; seizures and migraines; skin changes; etc

It's completely reasonable to believe that bioligical sense systems like vision or smell or taste or pain can be manifest in electronic systems. But one channel of "1 and 0s" being fed into even the most sophisticated language program isn't going to approach parity.

Like I said before, it's not unreasonable at all to have a discussion about analogs to more predominanently verbal faculties becoming manifest in these language systems, but there's a very profound and inescable reductivism being applied when you start to reduce environmental senses like pain or vision or touch to AI system as they stand today.

You can get away with that reductivism as a communicative metaphor for the sake of framing certain research endeavors, but you need to keep a handle on how thin that metaphor ultimately is. Anthropic is embarassingly/sophomorically eager to let go of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com