> I see also a common pattern of jumping through different topics at different levels (from theoretical to concrete and back), and that is confusing.

I can probably to clarify it.

1. I don't want to end in a situation when AI deserves human rights but I deny it. There are moral reasons for that, and they are important.

2. I employ a systemic view. Not just arguments for consciousness or against it. I look at the people generating these arguments, how their minds work? I look at social institutions while they try to find some consensus. I'm very interested in their inner processes of generating truths. IN particular I'm interested in their failings and how they can generate untruths instead.

3. To understand a system I rely on historic data. How people and social institutions (including science) dealt with similar questions before.

The issue is, that the problem of LLM agency has potentially extremely wide implications, I expect people to be afraid of them, I expect social institutions to be afraid of them, so I cannot trust science in this regard like I trust it when it talks about physics or biochemistry.

> 2) instead of strictly and directly dismissing readings on philosophy

I think I have a good idea what philosophy thinks now, and it doesn't seem convincing. It looks like a normal philosophy, not like an established science, so you should take it with a grain of salt.

> The world cannot be experienced 'objectively'.

So why we call it subjective experience then? Probably it is irrelevant, and the reasons are purely historic... or maybe not. How about the idea of computers experiencing things, just not "subjectively" but rather "digitally"? Or choose any other adjective you like. You are arguing against assumptions, but why you just accept the idea of experience with the assumption that human way to experience things is the only possible way?

> I can barely count research papers, books or contributions in the space of AI research that references (either to built upon or dismiss) philosophy that is pertinent to AI, pertinent to philosophy of technique or cognitive linguistics. This is strange.

I believe it is an expected outcome. AI is evolving fast, there are plenty of things to research without establishing connections with other branches of science. No sane AI researcher would stop researching AI to get PhD in linguistics to build a bridge between AI research and linguistics. Probably in an ideal world this shouldn't happen, maybe it is short-sighted behavior of a system, but it is just how things work in our real world.

BTW it is a good example of what happens with all the philosophy when shit hits the fan. When possibility of empirical studies arrives, no one bothers themselves with philosophy of things.

> I am not talking about linguists in general, but specifically about cognitive linguistics.

I studied psychology, I've read some linguists (cognitive ones, because they are in an adjacent field), and you see, I don't have trust in either. They do their research, they find some interesting facts and devise interesting theories, but it is all looks more like a chemistry in the first half of a XIX century, than a chemistry after periodic table was created. They can't find their building blocks to create a sound theory.

> The moment you say 'they could think', that implies an assumption about the actual possibility of thinking as a process that can be modeled and executed by a machine.

No, I'm not implying "modeling a thinking process". We don't know what thinking process is. What we observe in our minds is not thinking by itself, it is some kind of a mirror process in our consciousness. The real thinking is hidden from us, but it creates echoes in our consciousness we can observe. If we don't know how thinking works, we can't model it. BTW the reverse is also true: if we can't model thinking, we don't know how it works.

I'm defining thinking more in terms of a problem solving ability. Like psychologists do. Science still doesn't have a good enough definition for thinking, but it has some definitions that a) operational; b) good enough for some limited tasks. "Operational" means that they are defined in terms how to measure what you define, not in terms of modeling some process.

> there is already enough convincing arguments in the field of philosophy so as to say that current LLM systems do not posses agency or experience, and that they do not behave like us.

Well, I don't argue that current LLM systems do not possess agency or experience, I argue that we should not trust philosophy to be the first who claims that LLM systems got agency, if they really got it. There is a possibility that they will fight to the death against it even if it is true. You see, until philosophy methods successfully proved that something is conscious despite it was deemed unconscious before, we can't really know that their methods really work. Maybe they work, or maybe they just mirror our biases and heuristics.

> Again, read the sources, what are you people afraid of? Just read the sources, and then engage in the conversation.

I hadn't read books you mentioned, but in your words I see nothing that can hint that those books have something I don't considered already. So maybe I'll read them in a future, but I wouldn't postpone my engagement in the conversation till I read them.

> So why we call it subjective experience then? Probably it is irrelevant, and the reasons are purely historic... or maybe not. How about the idea of computers experiencing things, just not "subjectively" but rather "digitally"? Or choose any other adjective you like. You are arguing against assumptions, but why you just accept the idea of experience with the assumption that human way to experience things is the only possible way?

We call it subjective because is 'we, ourselves' and not the objects we perceive there in the world, where the 'experience' is manifested, as perception. We do not always codify dichotomies in language.

> No sane AI researcher would stop researching AI to get PhD in linguistics to build a bridge between AI research and linguistics. Probably in an ideal world this shouldn't happen, maybe it is short-sighted behavior of a system, but it is just how things work in our real world.

In the real world, anyone doing a serious PhD thesis will read whatever is necessary to build a proper, sound theory or body of work. This dismissal just makes me think that you don't know how a PhD thesis is done.

> BTW it is a good example of what happens with all the philosophy when shit hits the fan. When possibility of empirical studies arrives, no one bothers themselves with philosophy of things.

From what I see, you never took philosophy seriously. I don´t know how you can then seriously engage in a conversation about philosophy.

> I studied psychology, I've read some linguists (cognitive ones, because they are in an adjacent field), and you see, I don't have trust in either. They do their research, they find some interesting facts and devise interesting theories, but it is all looks more like a chemistry in the first half of a XIX century, than a chemistry after periodic table was created. They can't find their building blocks to create a sound theory.

This is true, cognitive linguistics do not represent a unified theory. Not yet, at least, and maybe it will not come to that. The same happens in psychology, but nobody is dismissing psychology all at once just because of that.

> No, I'm not implying "modeling a thinking process". We don't know what thinking process is. What we observe in our minds is not thinking by itself, it is some kind of a mirror process in our consciousness. The real thinking is hidden from us, but it creates echoes in our consciousness we can observe. If we don't know how thinking works, we can't model it. BTW the reverse is also true: if we can't model thinking, we don't know how it works.

This is exactly what the assumptions I challenge are about. The AI space already declared that they 'know' how such processes work. Or at least, they pretend they do.

> I'm defining thinking more in terms of a problem solving ability. Like psychologists do. Science still doesn't have a good enough definition for thinking, but it has some definitions that a) operational; b) good enough for some limited tasks. "Operational" means that they are defined in terms how to measure what you define, not in terms of modeling some process.

You would agree that 'problem solving' is just a small portion of what 'thinking' constitutes.

> You see, until philosophy methods successfully proved that something is conscious despite it was deemed unconscious before, we can't really know that their methods really work. Maybe they work, or maybe they just mirror our biases and heuristics.

You talk about philosophy as if argumentative biases were completely strange to philosophers. Not the case, and a great deal of XX century philosophy is exactly about that. But if you read the sources on AI research through its own history, you will see how the AI research space is full of such biases and assumptions. Again, my original argument is about that.

> I hadn't read books you mentioned, but in your words I see nothing that can hint that those books have something I don't considered already. So maybe I'll read them in a future, but I wouldn't postpone my engagement in the conversation till I read them.

You don't have to trust me. Just pick them up and think for yourself, do some research. Regarding postponing the conversation, I really appreciate that, but it is really difficult to argue about books you haven't read, especially if they are complex ones. Unfortunately I don't have that much time to explain the books in detail.