Isn’t the entire paper is trying to point out that the second you ask the question “Do LLM have <anthropomorphic property X>”, you have to assume that they do, even before you make any assessment?

Just because the person asking the question isn’t aware of they’re implicitly making that assumption, doesn’t change the fact that a logical assumption has been made. It just makes the questioner ignorant of the assumptions they’re making.

Personally don’t totally understand the argument being made in the paper. But I can understand the idea that I can ask a question, without properly understanding the assumptions I’m making when asking the questions. Indeed I can also understand that I might not even notice the assumptions I’ve made with my question, and why that would make my entire exploration and conclusion invalid, _after_ doing the investigation. Logical fallacies can be really difficult to spot and understand.

You're still assuming the person is capable of playing the guitar.

Does your fridge play the banjo? Doesn't make sense does it?

Please tell me your comment is satirical too?

The latest Definitive Edition of the game actually allows writing code using Ensemble Studios' original scripting language, XS. There are some great docs on it here: https://ugc.aoe2.rocks/general/xs/

The scripting functionalities, such as built-in functions, are still getting expanded with most major updates.

There is also a python-based tool for creating and editing scenarios and triggers via python scripts called AoE2ScenarioParser - and a lot of people are using it as well!

Emperor: Battle for Dune is impossible to find nowadays. It was fun game though. Same with SW: Galactic Battlegrounds. Short of piracy, you can't get them.

Hacking meme aside, lots of computer scientists are overextending their domain expertise into an area that has been well studied by philosophy and biology. It isn't surprising the software is good and the philosophy looks like outsider art.

Here are some relevant pointers to connect this discussion to the existing philosophy on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism

Basically there's a lot of cases where some properties arise from sets of a thing, which would otherwise not be present in a single or few things.

One classic example is that a single molecule or drop of water does not express fluid mechanics.

And of course, a bit more basic would be materialism, but maybe you are one of the lucky hundreds:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism

> disguise the underlying dogma, which serves as an unsupported conclusion: humans are assumed to be completely entirely unique in every way whatsoever

Is that the argument the paper is making? In my reading they seem to primarily be making the point that assigning anthropomorphic concepts to LLM is dangerously misleading, and more importantly, not needed to properly study and evaluate LLMs.

I don’t think you have to make the assumption that humans are unique for that argument to hold up. I would argue that really it’s a comment on how loose and poorly defined all anthropomorphic attributes are. At the end of the day we have to make the assumption that other humans feel and experience broadly the same mental activity as each other, because we’ll never directly experience anyone else conscience, we can only experience our own.

We can barely link our own mental experiences to concrete empirical measurements. The vast majority of the measurements we make are entirely self-reported, and we simply assume strong correlation between self-reported measurements and the individuals actual experiences. We also have to assume that somehow all of our self-reported measurements are “calibrated” to some reasonable degree. Even measuring anthropomorphic properties in humans is pretty fuzzy and inaccurate, the only reason accept such poor data is because it’s the best we’ve got, and there enough signal in there for us to develop useful tools like talking therapy, physiological profiles, mental health scores etc which have some level of predictive and healing power when applied to _humans_.

It’s honestly amazing that what we have works for measuring and predicting humans, and we only know that works through decades of empirical measurement and study. But to then try and directly apply that fuzzy mess to a completely different system, and just assume the same level of predictive power, strikes me as kinda crazy. It requires huge assumptions, which effectively can never be tested (because even the human mind is a total mystery to us), to be made, and if we can study these systems without making those assumptions, then why make the assumptions at all?