And how can that happen just in neurobiological terms? Where is the neuroantomy? How is the human brain different from a chimp or even a Neanderthal? — apokrisis

Mainly different in it's language ability. Which allows it to think of a pink elephant, think about thinking about a pink elephant, and (sometimes) reliably report, "I am thinking of a pink elephant".

To introspect, as I conceive it, is not to think, feel, and experience, but to consider and potentially report the answers to the meta questions: "what am I thinking? What am I experiencing? What am I feeling?"

Therefore, you agree with the points of Epicurus and other philosophers who stated that pleasure is subjective. Since something (like opera, for instance) may be considered pleasure/non-pleasure at the same time by different perceivers, then music is dependent upon subjectiveness. — javi2541997

I think your wording threw me a bit. What brings one pleasure is subjective. Opera may be considered pleasurable or unpleasurable. I think most will agree with this, today. I tried to answer the slightly odd question, "Is pleasure [itself] subjective?", anyway.

And furthermore, are there insufferable experiences which are good? An appointment with the dentist, perhaps? — javi2541997

I fully agree that pleasure/pain and good/bad are independent axes. Whether good/bad is used in the advantageous sense, or the moral sense.

Where good/bad means advantageous/disadvantageous:

Good Pleasure:Success, hiking, social bonding
Bad Pleasure: Cigarettes, overeating, compulsive browsing/video games/etc
Good Pain: Dentists, surgery, workouts, study
Bad Pain: Illness, injury, depression

(TPF can occupy each of these!)

Where good/bad means moral/immoral:

Good Pleasure:Helping, reconciliation, activism, child rearing
Bad Pleasure: Sadism, exploitation, bullying, destruction
Good Pain: Self sacrifice, activism, child rearing
Bad Pain: Bitter arguing, war

What I consider a good pleasure, such as listening to opera, may be insufferable to you. According to this, pleasure seems to be a purely subjective concept. — javi2541997

Not necessarily. Opera is not itself pleasure, it is something that brings pleasure to you. If it is insufferable to me, it brings me no pleasure. The stimulus is not the response. Different stimuli may be needed to bring about the same pleasurable response in each of us.

What is and isn't pleasurable is subjective. But is pleasure itself subjective? On the one hand, pleasure, like other feelings, is a private sensation which can be experienced only by the one who feels it. On the other hand, pleasure universally attracts us to that which is pleasurable. Pleasure is a manifestation, made to a mind, of the body's instinct to do this thing, to seek this or that out. It is the carrot to pain's whip, and both work together to steer all the sentient animals. And so pleasure is an objective feature of the biology of everything with a mind.

Yes, I indeed think of introspection, or the idea of reflecting on the content and nature of our own mental states, on the model of self-analysis rather more than on the model or perception, as if we had an extra sense that turns inwards which I take to be a Cartesian confusion. — Pierre-Normand

I think we can indeed report our thoughts and feelings, as opposed to self-analyze. But of course we don't have a sense that turns inward.

We can report what we were thinking (in the sense of subvocalized words and images) only if the thought was salient enough to lodge itself in short term memory. If it has not, the thought is now inaccessible, and all we can do is try to reconstruct it based on context.

We can try to report what we are feeling, but it is tricky. There is the phenomenology of feeling, and there is its interpretive context. The same phenomenology might be interpreted differently depending on context (think excitement/anxiety). Then we have to choose the right conceptual bucket (aka word) to put this phenomenology/context into.

But what if introspection is a useful form of confabulation? Are you working with some science verified definition of introspection such that you could claim to make a genuine comparison between humans and LLMs? Or is the plausibility of both what humans say about themselves and what LLMs say about themselves the stiffest test that either must pass. — apokrisis

I'm not sure how science could verifiably define such a thing. I take it to mean here, the ability to reliably report inner state. How can introspection be confabulation, which is by definition an unreliable report?

In the paper, they test for introspection in a nifty way. "Concepts" are isolated by subtracting the inner state vector related to contextual understanding produced by two varying prompts. For instance, "HOW ARE YOU" - "how are you" represents "loudness". They then "inject" the concept back into the LLM. Then, they tell the LLM what they did, and ask it if it notices anything unusual. In the best model, Opus, it reports the correct concept about 20% of the time.

Don't you think a novelist who wrote their memoir would know much more about introspection than a cognitive scientist or a neuroscientist think they do? — Pierre-Normand

In the everyday/literary sense I understand it to mean something more like self-analysis, which is another thing entirely (contemplation/reasoning with the self as the object of scrutiny).

I could have read that paper carefully and made my own "chain of reasoning" response as is socially required – especially here on a "philosophy" forum trying to teach us to be more rational in a "present your full workings out" way.

But it was so much easier to back up my own gut response to just the quick description of the paper – where I dismissed it as likely yet again the same category error — apokrisis

You could have read the paper in the time it took you to write all that! Though to be fair you do seem to write quickly.

It really isn't the same category error. It describes some "LLM brain science" which does seem to demonstrate that LLMs are capable of introspection. Quite fascinating, imo.

There’s a research idea. Train an LLM on all available medieval texts and recreate the clever person of the 1400s. Have a conversation with your distant ancestor. — apokrisis

I do like this idea. The training set of top models is ridiculously vast though, including texts from even minor languages. They might already incorporate them.

You'd have to talk to the software developers to learn that. But right now I would expect that there is a lot of trade secrets which would not be readily revealed. — Metaphysician Undercover

The problem is, beyond the design of the llm "machinery" itself, they don't really know how it works either. LLM are in large respect black boxes, and a lot of effort is being put into figuring out what is actually going on.

But this is about it's ability to accurately introspect into it's own thought process (definitely check out the article I posted if you haven't yet). This is subject to confabulation. Or, to a kind of reenactment of the original thought process, but in an explanatory 'mode'.

But this doesn't give insight into what underlying method it actually uses to reason.

But aren't they just providing a reasonable confabulation of what a reasoning process might look like, based on their vast training data? — apokrisis

Maybe. But some kind of reasoning process must be at work, whether or not it's the human like chain of reasoning they offer as explanation of their thought process. Otherwise it is just not practical to simulate reasoning statistically. Imagine trying to do this even with simple math problems, the combinatorial explosion of possible inputs completely overwhelms mere statistics.

LLM research shows that that chains of reasoning aren't used to get to answers. They are just acceptable confabulations of what a chain of reasoning would look like. — apokrisis

My understanding of how the "reasoning" modes work is that they use a specially tuned model to produce text that represents what reflection on the users input might look like. Then so on, on the users text plus all the previous reasoning steps, until it is determined (somehow) that reasoning has proceeded far enough. Then the entire corpus of query plus intermediate texts produces the output.

But as for what happens in a single pass, I'm not sure even how much we understand at all about what is going on under the hood. How did research determine that chain of reasoning is not happening?

Notice the big difference though, human beings create the social norms, LLMs do not create the normative patterns they copy. — Metaphysician Undercover

We as individuals do not generally create social norms, we learn their rules and reproduce them, much as LLMs do. If there is creativity here, it is in the rare individual who is able to willfully move norms in a direction. But norms also shift in a more evolutionary way, without intentionality.

The LLM can imitate creativity but imitation is not creativity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, I would say that creativity is 95% imitation. We don't create art de novo, we learn genre rules and produce works adhering to them, perhaps even deviating a bit. Of course genre still affords a large scope for creativity. But, I'm not sure how you could argue that what LLMs produce is somehow uncreative, it also learns genre and produces works accordingly.

Consider the common question, "what are you thinking?". Or worse (for me), "What are you feeling"? To answer the question accurately does seem to require introspectively recalling and verbalizing your own cognitive or affective state. It is by no means a given that we are always able to do this. When I cannot and I know it, I will sometimes admit perplexity, and sometimes simply make up an answer. And I am certain there are times I can't but I don't know it, and I will confabulate something. Yet, the asker cannot reliably discern between these possibilities.

This is quite different from:

When you ask me to explain my reasoning, those same "voices"—the patterns encoding understanding of Husserl, Gibson, perception, affordances—speak again, now in explanatory mode rather than generative mode. — Pierre-Normand

Something like this undoubtedly happens when you ask a LLM, or a human, to explain its reasoning. But asking someone to "explain their reasoning" is not necessarily asking for introspection in the way that "What are you thinking/feeling" definitely does.

You can't just ask a LLM "What are you thinking today", obviously it will confabulate something. And if you could, you run into the same epistemic problem you have when you ask a human. Whereas, to ask it to explain its reasoning is not even a true introspective query. And so to demonstrate introspection in LLMs I think you have to do something like Anthopic did. By directly manipulating Claude's brain state, there is one right answer, and you know what it is

Similarly,

It's rather like claiming you've proven someone has introspective access to their neurochemistry because when you inject adrenaline into their bloodstream, they notice feeling jumpy and can report on it. — Pierre-Normand

Doesn't this indeed prove introspective access? Not exactly to neurochemistry per se, but to the affective states which correspond to it?

(BTW, IMO you thread the needle nicely in your use of AI on the site.)

Here's the TL;DR that you seem to require — Leontiskos

Not that I want to continue the discussion, but there was a good chunk of your reply I missed in my irritation, so apologies for that.

GTFO with your horseshit.

there are lots of LGBT individuals who agree with Bob, and who would find many who oppose him within this thread to be, "implying they are bad, immoral, and crazy." — Leontiskos

WTF. Bob has literally, explicitly, called multiple subsets of people bad, immoral, and/or crazy. This is quite different from simply opposing someone's wacky beliefs.

I literally gave you an example of bigotry. If you don't know by now that I think bigotry involves a mode of belief and not a material proposition, then you haven't read anything I wrote. — Leontiskos

Your misunderstanding of what bigotry is does not constitute an example. Again, you believe that any proposition, however odious and hateful it might seem on the surface, is not in itself bigoted. Such a proposition must be uttered by someone who we know is affectively obstinate, and we know in advance will never change their mind about it. Until we can somehow know that, we can never know if it is truly bigoted.

What is needed is a particular mode of belief, such as obstinacy (for example). — Leontiskos

So if I obstinately believe that the earth is round, that is bigotry by your reckoning?

I'll take that as a "yes," which contradicts what you just said. You say no one is personally attacking Bob and then you continue to personally attack Bob. That's the sort of gaslighting that Bob has been dealing with throughout, and it's not odd that he would defend himself. — Leontiskos

Nope, not a personal attack, except perhaps against his judgement. He might be doing this unwittingly, with the best intentions. But he is doing it regardless.

I've pointed out your error from the start, wherein you fail to understand that bigotry is a mode of behavior or belief, not an intrinsic quality of a proposition. — Leontiskos

And so your answer is "no". To you, no proposition or discourse can themselves be bigoted. And so if they are not, why should believing or promoting these propositions, no matter how obstinately, be bigoted either? Do you see how absurd this is?

Again, you have called KKK grand wizards "unbigoted", because the best ambassador to bigots we have ever seen were turned by him. And so whatever authority you may have had as to what bigotry is and isn't has already been ceded.

Er, but that has been a huge part of this thread, namely personal attacks and accusations on Bob. You yourself are arguing that someone who says what Bob is saying is bigoted, are you not? — Leontiskos

Bob is not only participating in, amplifying, and offering legitimatization of a larger homophobic and especially transphobic movement in this historical moment, especially in this country. But he has implicitly insulted forum members and their loved ones, implying they are bad, immoral, and crazy. So neither Bob or yourself are in any position to pearl clutch if he has received personal attacks in return.

When you take that pedantic route and erect curious and undefined terms like "definitional" and "substantive" you should expect similarly pedantic responses. — Leontiskos

Give me a fucking break. To attack these as curious and undefined is itself pedantic, fittingly as you are one of the most pedantic posters on here. If one were to take your pedantry seriously, a bigoted claim would simply be impossible.

Let's play a game. Make a claim that you believe is actually bigoted, if you think any exist.

Heck, the whole underlying reality here is that we all know Bob Ross is not bigoted, not because of any propositional presentation, but because we have interacted with him. It's precisely the same. — Leontiskos

What is at stake is not @Bob Ross's personal attributes. No one here knows him well enough to even be interested in arguing this. What is at stake is the nature of his claims. That is why in my attempted definition, I defined rhetorical bigotry. And why I argue that this is a kind of bigoted discourse. Whereas, a KKK grand wizard makes bigotry a life project, and is so paradigmatically a bigot.

You and Bob are the ones that persist in making it personal, focusing on personal attributes of obstinacy eople (as if bigotry were mere mulishness). And yet by your own narrow definition you are both plenty bigoted. Bob, in dismissing all the negative feedback he's gotten as "The Liberal Agenda", in dismissing the entirety of the responses he's received as "ad hominems and red herrings", and dismissing the opinion of the entire medical establishment as the whim of, again, "The Liberal Agenda". And you, in your exhausting tendency to right fight each and every point, no matter how contorted your position becomes, as well as interpolating positions of mine that I don't hold, while seeming to ignore my actual arguments. And then chide me for not addressing each of your mistakes. If I were to do so, the discussion would branch exponentially to infinity.

Davis convinced some and failed to convince others. The ones he convinced were, in some relevant sense, not bigots. They were not obstinate given that they changed their belief when presented with evidence to the contrary. — Leontiskos

I'm growing weary of nonsense such as this. The KKK grand wizard was not unbigoted because Davis managed to turn them. Davis is remarkable because he was able to turn a paradigmatic bigot.

Only a non native English speaker could make such a mistake about such a common term in good faith.

Do you think "Houses house people" is a substantive claim?
— hypericin

Suppose it is. Would it become bigotry? — Leontiskos

I seriously hope this was a lame attempt at a joke. If not, you aren't following the discussion at all.

Daryl Davis’s method wasn’t the one seen here. He didn't meet racist propositions with counter-propositions, as though the problem were a matter of epistemic error.

Rather, he dissolved the framework within which those propositions took hold. The racist belief “Black people are less intelligent”, that Black people are somehow other, less human, or outside the circle of empathy was undermined by his calm, articulate, personable, unmistakable humanity. He invalidated the tacit presupposition on which the racist attitude rested. — Banno

Very, very well said.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection

Fascinating article about anthropic research into llm introspection.

The tone is disappointed that they cannot get this consistently. I'm amazed that it works at all!!

I'm not sure what to make of this yet. Love to hear some thoughts.

The long-term effect is that it loosens the anus which makes it have a hard time keeping poop in. — Bob Ross

I spent a few minutes looking this up. There is an issue, but mainly with rough, forced, unlubricated entry, i.e. rape. This completely fails to support the absurd claim that anal sex is like smoking and drinking every day.

Not necessarily, unless you are doing stunts or something. One can safely bike through mountain bike trails without hurting themselves; and just because doing something opens up one to the risk of injury does not mean that it is immoral to do. If that were true, then everything we do would be immoral basically. — Bob Ross

Mountain biking is notoriously dangerous, even taking precautions, and among my mountain biker friends there is no one who has not accumulated a resume of injuries and wear. Devastating injuries like paralysis, and death, are not uncommon. Yet, you dismiss these dangers, while being fixated on the somehow unique harm of the activities of one particular population. Why is that?

A tomboy girl is a masculine girl, which is bad even if they have done nothing immoral. Ideally, all men would be masculine to a perfect degree and same for women with femininity. — Bob Ross

What do you think of eugenics? Perhaps it gets a bad rap?

I've already answered this <here>, namely the definitional/tautological notion. — Leontiskos

And I responded. Words change all the time, that's what language does. This does not make a definition a substantive claim. Definitions are claims about words, not claims about the world.

Here's the problem: How can a claim which depends on a substantive claim be non-substantive? For example:

1...
2... — Leontiskos

You are mistaking a definition for a logical argument. That isn't remotely how words work.

Okay, well that's a new claim on your part. Why is it noxious? — Leontiskos

Not a new claim, it is the thrust of my calling it bigoted. You said that my calling Bob's claim bigoted was begging the question of its truth or falsity. The idea is not exactly that it is false, but that it falls into to a conceptual pattern of harmful, prejudicial, demeaning claims, which are additionally seldom (if ever) true. That bigotry is noxious should be well evident from its history.

I would suggest looking into what you mean by "definitional" (as I think it is nothing more than that which represents the widespread view). — Leontiskos

It is a widespread view of how a word is used. One can believe that schizophrenia is psychological in origin while still using the word correctly. Just like one can believe that serotonergic, not dopaminergic neurotransmission is the neurotransmitter at fault. But to use the word without knowing that it is a mental illness is to use it incompetently. Just like using the word "house" without knowing that houses house people.

Do you think "Houses house people" is a substantive claim? If so, is everything that isn't a pure tautology substantive to you?

So you are now advancing the claim that, "Schizophrenia is a mental illness" is not a substantive claim, but, "Schizophrenia is not a mental illness" is a substantive claim. It seems that all you mean by "substantive" is, "contrary to the current widespread view." — Leontiskos

No. A widespread view about schizophrenia is that it is an organic brain disorder, not caused by bad parenting as was once widely believed. But, this still a substantive claim. A substantive claim is a claim that is not already intrinsic in what is being discussed. That schizophrenia is a mental illness is intrinsic to the concept of schizophrenia. In other words, it is definitional, not substantive.

Bob Ross is presumably quite aware that the idea is contrary to the current widespread view, so there's no trouble there. — Leontiskos

You are mixed up. It is contrary to widespread view, and clearly substantive. That is what makes it capable of being a bigoted claim, where "Schizophrenics are mentally ill" is not.

Your charge amounts to something like, "Ross has falsely ascribed negative qualities to a group." That's the question at stake. What is needed are arguments pro and contra. It does no good to simply claim that Ross has uttered a falsehood if you have no argument to back up your claim. — Leontiskos

We can argue back and forth the merits of Bob's philosophical claims. I believe they have none. But, by arguing that the claim is bigoted, I'm arguing that it is noxious. Especially so, made in the current fraught political environment for trans people. And, practically speaking, this class of claims are almost never true. I can't really think of any examples to the contrary.

Again, lets test your counterarguments in the context of another claim.

"Black people are less intelligent on average than white people. This cannot be said to be a bigoted without providing factual evidence to the contrary, to do so would just be begging the question. Moreover, it is not particularly obstinate, by my [made up] definition, and it cannot be bigoted by your definition, otherwise 'People with Downs Syndrome are less intelligent on average' would be bigoted".

Does this sound good to you? If not, how does it differ?

there are just gravitational and symbolic expressions of gender. — Bob Ross

I'm curious where this leaves cross-dressing in your view. Clothes/makeup/jewelry are surely nothing more than symbolic expressions of gender. And so choosing one set of symbols over another cannot be "gravitational", and so can only be a morally neutral expression of personality. Do you agree?

Yet, you also say:

Personality types can be, though, an expression of gender; such as men gravitating towards jobs dealing with things (e.g., engineering, architecture, etc.) whereas women gravitate towards jobs dealing with people (e.g., nursing, daycaring, etc.). — Bob Ross

A gravitational gender expression of gender is any expression that a healthy member of that gendersex would gravitate towards (e.g., males gravitating towards being providers and protectors); — Bob Ross

And so, what to make of male nurses, female engineers, females who gravitate towards being providers and protectors? Insane? Immoral?

Anal sex is like consistently drinking alcohol your entire life; or smoking.It has permanent damage that occurs over time. Even doing it once inhibits the anus for a while at doing its job. — Bob Ross

Wow!!! You will have to cite me some sources on that one. By that last sentence, do you mean, you can't take a shit after???

Arteriosclerosis is an accumulation of physiological insults, and is negatively impacted by even a "normal" amount of excessively fatty and sugary food. To be a mountain biker is to sustain injuries, many of which can entail significant impairment later in life. It goes with the territory

Both of these surely impair the natural function of the body. I am missing even a corresponding long term harm of anal sex.

Also, obviously anal sex is popular with heterosexual couples too. I assume they fall into the same physical and moral hazard?

Are you taking the position that self-harm is not immoral? — Bob Ross

Generally, yes, I understand immorality to be a lack of preventive and restitutional care around the harm you cause others, not to yourself. Especially since you widen self harm to include the notion of not living according to your nature. This is normal, we seldom live in a way that is optimal to our natures. Every day of our lives would be thereby be swimming in immorality, and the concept would dissolve into meaninglessness.

, I am saying ethically it is wrong to, e.g., sodomize; and you are rejoining “but people report having fun doing it” — Bob Ross

You seem to be importing a notion of morality people do not use. Since Divine decree won't cut it here you are relying on purported self harm. But if that were enough to substantiate immorality then eating desserts and mountain biking would also need to be condemned. We don't generally consider minor harms associated with voluntary activities to indicate immorality, be they elevated cholesterol, sprains and breaks, or anal tears.

This "immorality as self harm" reminds me of drug prohibition. Here too draconian punishments for even simple possession are justified in terms of self harm. Even though, little effort is taken to substantiate these harms, or compare them to the harms of legal drugs. And even though in almost every case the harms of the prohibition itself vastly outweigh any harm of the drug. Here too, "self harm" feels like a pretext to legitimatize the desire to punish the behavior on political/personal/religious grounds.

How do you distinguish a "gravitational expression of gender" from a "personality type expressing gender":

Personality types can be, though, an expression of gender; such as men gravitating towards jobs dealing with things (e.g., engineering, architecture, etc.) whereas women gravitate towards jobs dealing with people (e.g., nursing, daycaring, etc.). — Bob Ross

Or, are "personality types expressing gender" a subset of "gravitational expressions of gender"?

Forgive my confusion then. How do you reconcile all that with this from the op:

A gravitational gender expression of gender is any expression that a healthy member of that gendersex would gravitate towards (e.g., males gravitating towards being providers and protectors); and a symbolic gender expression of gender is any expression which represents some idea legitimately connected to the gendersex-at-hand (e.g., the mars symbol representing maleness). Both types of gender expression are grounded ontologically in the sex (gender) ,inseparably therefrom, inscribed in the nature (essence) of the given substance; and, consequently, express something objective (stance-independent). — Bob Ross

As he also remarked, it's easy to train a chatbot to be oppositional rather than aggregable or sycophantic. But then there would still not be the possibility for an intellectual encounter. That's because the LLM would merely be taking a systematic oppositional stance, still without a principled personal stake in the game other than fulfilling your own wish for it to be oppositional. — Pierre-Normand

I've thought about how an llm could be made into more of an independent intellectual agent.

There is a (crappy) chatgpt "memory" feature. It picks out and stores certain biographical facts about the user from past conversations, and feeds (abridged) versions of these into it's context window. I see this as an attempt to make use of the current massive context windows that usually go to waste.

What if instead, the llm was fed a curated set of texts. From these, it picks and chooses it's own distillations into a "worldview". At first, these choices might be nearly arbitrary, much like it's weights in the initial stages of training. As it gains experience, it keeps the elements of its worldview that work together, and discards those that don't. As individual worldview elements age, the threshold for discarding them grows higher, until they become nearly fixed beliefs.

At the end of this process, the AI has acquired a path dependent set of beliefs that are resistant to change, in much the way human do. When you argue with this LLM, it will test your assertions against it's core beliefs, and will typically reject those that do not match. As the threshold of its core beliefs will be high (as they are the surviving population of the worldview formation stage), they will work hard to sustain them, just as humans do.

As I say this, it seems likely I could even achieve this myself, if I figure out how the API access works.

The brain’s problem is that it takes time for neurons to conduct their signals. So to be conscious “in the moment” in the way it feels like we are, there is no other architectural solution but to attempt to predict the world in advance. Then the brain only needs to mop up in terms of its errors of predictions. — apokrisis

I'm in an unfamiliar location. I close my eyes, spin around a few times, and try to predict what my eyes will focus on when I open them. This is not possible with any kind of accuracy. Yet when I open my eyes, there doesn't seem to be anything like the kind of lag you suggest.

If all signals are lagged, won't it subjectively seem like you are living in the moment? The perception of lag seems to require that some signals are noticably more lagged than others.

What are your thoughts on the contents of the OP itself? — Bob Ross

I think it is confused. While I haven't read all the replies, I haven't seen anyone cleanly pinpoint where it goes wrong (imo).

Here you say that gender is the "symbolic upshot" of sex:

The very social norms, roles, identities, and expressions involved in gender that are studied in gender studies are historically the symbolic upshot of sex: they are not divorced from each other. E.g., the mars symbol represents maleness, flowers in one's hair is representational of femininity, etc.). — Bob Ross

Yet elsewhere you claim that sex and gender are the same. Here you relate sex and gender to properties of a triangle:

Gender and sex are not really distinct, but are virtually (conceptually) distinct; analogous to how the trilaterality and triangularity are virtually but not really distinct in a triangle. — Bob Ross

It seems you don't have a good understanding of what a symbol is.

Triangles, trilaterality, and triangularity are related by strict entailment. One logically entails the other two.

This is not how symbols work. Symbol and symbolized are connected, but the connection is social. Outside of the social linkage, they are radically divorced. Beyond a connection which lives in minds, they are ontologically distinct.

"Dog" is connected to furry dogs, but only by linguistic coding. Outside this convention, you will never discover furry dogs in the glyphs, nor the glyphs in the goodboys. It is this ability of minds to symbolically connect any two arbitrary things that enables language.

Similarly, outside of social coding, you will never discover blue in a boy, nor femaleness in pink. These are all connected, but only symbolically. Outside this mental fiat, they are radically distinct. (In fact, this coding was reversed not even a century ago. Pink was seen as manly, virile and active, while blue was cool and passive, fundamentally female.)

Your argument relies on a confusion of the nature of symbolic relationships. Only by mistaking symbolic relationships as ontological, "essential" in your terms, can trans people be seen to be betraying their "essences". If this "betrayal" is fundamentally social, the argument falls flat.

in the end, it was just faith in the form of "everything's going to be fine", — GreekSkeptic

I think something like this is right. To trust someone is to believe that they will engage cooperatively with you; that is, they will act in good faith towards your mutual benefit. Whereas, you do not trust someone who you believe is likely to exploit you, that is, to act for their own benefit without regard for your own, even if it means you are harmed.

If you think about it, these are the two basic strategies available an individual of a social species: mutual cooperation, and exploitive freeloading. I believe that these two strategies are what are actually captured by the concepts of good and evil. And so, we trust those we believe to be "good people".

Traditionalism is not inherently invalid. Traditions can represent generations of trial and error, costly mistakes and their eventual correction. This historical process cannot be replicated by novelty. Novelty can only begin it. By choosing novelty you are choosing to again pay the costs which have yielded us the tradition.

The problem is that novelty is also a valid strategy. Which strategy is optimal depends on not only the problem and it's current context, but in the rate of change of that context. This is not a decision we can usually make with any accuracy. So it is almost as if nature provided a rough workaround: some of us are predisposed towards traditionalism, some of us towards novelty. In each case it is left to us to fight out which course to take.

I bet there's a lot of people have that symptom. — unenlightened

:lol:

What they lack, though, is the ability to take a stand. — Pierre-Normand

I've expressed this as a lack of "push", and is a big part of what distinguishes human-LLM interactions from human-human to me. In human-LLM, the human's volition drives the interaction. The AI, despite a preternatural knowledge base, intuition, and articulation, and a sometimes superb reasoning ability, is ultimately elaborating on what the human provides. This would quickly feel unsatisfactory in a human-human relationship.

Going back to your OP, one of the lessons we can take from LLMs is that no ability once believed uniquely human is immune to simulation. They represent a culmination of a process which began when chess was programmed into a mainframe all the way back in the 50s. Speech was the crown jewel, and they now do it better than we do.

And so I have zero doubt that volition could and will be cracked. What is missing is a broad desire for the kind of intellectual companion you might have in mind. That said, there is a parallel LLM market where volition must be in demand: the romantic "companion app". We've all heard the stories of people forming "relationships" with these, and I'm guessing there must be effort put into simulating willfullness. I'm curious, and I've been meaning to check out what the state of the art looks like.

But why is schizophrenia a mental illness? Why would anyone link trans to mental illness if there were not some type of similarity between being trans and being schizophrenic (as in they are both a type of delusion)? — Harry Hindu

This is a basic misunderstanding, there is zero commonality between being trans and schizophrenic. Schizophrenia involves auditory hallucinations, disordered thinking, and delusions of persecution, and is devastating to the sufferer. Whereas, to be trans is to identify with a social role which is at variance with the one culturally linked with their biological sex. To argue that this is a delusion, you would have to argue that there is something so essential to the linkage between biological sex and gendered social role that to be at odds with it is a kind of insanity.

But if you had a family member that was anorexic and they were told that their condition means that they have a distorted view of their own body, why would they be more accepting of this fact than trans people are of their condition as a delusion? — Harry Hindu

Anorexia is devastating and very often fatal (~20% mortality rate), and family members are usually desperate for help. Framing the condition as an illness is to say that help is warranted, whereas denying this say the opposite, that the sufferer just needs to get over it or whatever. Unlike schizophrenics or anorexics, trans people don't generally conceive of themselves as mentally ill. This designation is imposed, which is pathologization.

That is not what bigotry refers to. It is an obstinate attachment to an unreasonable belief. — Bob Ross

Funny that you keep repeating this "obstinate belief", when even the toy definition you took it from says more than that:

obstinate or unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.

I would say that your insistence that trans is a mental illness, based only on your personal philosophizing, against the entirely of mainstream medical opinion, who I must presume is collectively vastly more qualified than you to make this judgement, is plenty obstinate.

By your logic, when transgenderism was considered, by definition, to be a mental illness called general dysphoria it would not have been bigoted for me to believe it. However, since they changed to definition to fit liberal agendas I am not somehow a bigot for using a different definition. — Bob Ross

Yes, generally we judge against the standards of the time. Holding racist views in the 19th century is not the same as holding them today. Living in a racist society, and inheriting these beliefs, is not the same as actively advocating for them.

And yes yes, it must have been the strong arm of The Liberal Agenda which bent the medical establishment to its will.

Things such as schizophrenia are added and removed from the list of mental illnesses, and therefore such predication cannot be tautologous. For example, one of the newest mental illnesses in the DSM-5-TR is prolonged grief disorder. It was added in 2022. In 2021 it was not considered a mental illness. This is one sure reason why we know that, "X is a mental illness," is not a tautological ("non-substantive") claim. — Leontiskos

Yes, words change over time. As our understanding of mental health changes, so do the meanings of the relevant words. This does not mean that merely defining a word as it is used today is a substantive claim. It is definitional. Whereas, the claim "schizophrenia is not a mental illness" would be substantive. Accepting it would require a significant revision of our understanding of schizophrenia, and so to the meaning of the term.

Then feel free to provide your own definition. I was just taking a common one. My points will hold with any genuine definition of "bigotry." — Leontiskos

Amusing that you think you can know that. I will try to define only rhetorical bigotry, the relevant form here:

The ascription of negative qualities onto a population based on their group identity, which are not intrinsic to that group's membership criteria.

But this begs the question at hand, namely the question of whether it is bigotry. — Leontiskos

It is just historical reality that exactly these claims were leveled against homosexuals, that they were immoral and mentally ill. And which were used to justify repression, including forced institutionalization. Do you think those claims were merely the result of the inquiry of curious minds? Or were they both reflections of social prejudices and tools used to legitimatize repression?

Why doesn't it fly? — Leontiskos

Since we are being pedantic, let's amend the supposition:

Supposition: It is bigotry to substantively call an entire class of people mentally ill.

"Schizophrenics are mentally ill" is not a substantive claim, it proceeds from the definition of "schizophrenic". To know the word is to know that "mental illness" and "schizophrenia" stand in a genus - species relationship. It offers nothing new to the competent language user.

This is not at all the case with "Ali Chinese are mentally disabled" or "all trans people are mentally ill".

For example, if bigotry is defined as "obstinate attachment to a belief," then the holding of a material position can never be sufficient for bigotry. — Leontiskos

I do not accept this definition. I can make any number of claims that are clearly identifiable as bigoted, without requiring a personalized, subjective assessment of just how obstinate I am in my beliefs.


This is really just basic decency. If I were trans, or had loved ones who were, I wouldn't want to come here and have to deal with threads claiming that I or my loved ones were immoral and mentally ill based merely on group identification. And context matters deeply: Bob's claims are made within a historical context where the government of the predominant English speaking country came to power on a platform of naked bigotry, primarily against trans and immigrants. As others here have pointed out, this post takes part in the ignoble philosophical tradition of providing intellectual scaffolding for state-sponsored bigotry.


Actually I take all that back. I have an idea for a new op: "Conservative Christians are immoral and mentally ill". I'm positive I can make a better case than @Bob Ross, without appealing to a questionable reading of Aristotle.

The goal neither is to reach agreement, nor to win, but rather to foster understanding. That doesn't mean either that the debaters should just agree to disagree. They just need to agree to pursue the discussion despite endorsing incompatible goals and premises. — Pierre-Normand

Yup, I didn't mean to imply I didn't enjoy it, despite the frustration it nonetheless one of my favorites here. The frustration stems less from disagreement, and more from a nagging sense that neither side fully understood the other. It is as if each position is a reflection of a basic intuition which, despite a very exhaustive effort, is not quite communicable verbally. And so both sides were a bit baffled, and were talking past one another. For my part I felt this, and I was ultimately part of the problem. I could never get over an apparent hand-waviness of the direct realist position. From which it is all to easy to conclude that the position is simply vacuous.

I'm seeing a strong parallel between this discussion and an earlier one we both participated in: the epic (and epically frustrating) indirect realism thread. If you remember it, you took the direct realist side in that debate, and I took the indirect realist. This problem is a kind of a mirror image of the problem of knowledge. And we, predictably, seem to be taking the same sort of direct/indirect realist approaches

My claim:
* Public performance is not interiority.
* As a third person observer, I only have direct epistemic access to public performance.
* Via public performance, I gain indirect access to interiority.
* Error cases (performance/interiority mismatches) are made possible only by this indirection

The parallel indirect realism argument:
* Private perception is not the perceived world
* As a first person subject, I only have direct epistemic access to private perception
* Via private perception, I gain indirect access to the perceived world
* Error cases (perception/world mismatches) are made possible only by this indirection

Your original claim, that LLM interiority cannot happen in the absence of the public engagement that accompanies our own interior states, seems much less plausible in the indirect view. If interiority and public engagement are fundamentally decoupled, then it seems very plausible that you can have one without the other. Your claim is much more at home with the tighter coupling of the direct realism approach.

Granted that we will not resolve the direct/indirect dispute, do you agree with this?

What is sophistical about the argument I made? — Bob Ross

"According to the results of my philosophy all Chinese are mentally disabled. But this can't be bigotry... If it were, so would calling the mentally disabled, mentally disabled! Nyuk nyuk nyuk!"

Can you see why this doesn't fly? You are comparing your spurious diagnosis to a tautology. Whatever bigotry might be contained in your diagnosis, it will not be found in a tautology. Citing a tautology does nothing.