I question it, and I think any reasonable person should question it as well. There's no evidence whatsoever that LLMs have ANY sensory experience, pain or otherwise.

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rhplus 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why are we even questioning this? They’re bytes loaded into GPU memory. Reboot the cluster and they’re back to their initial state.

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bigstrat2003 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Because some people are completely cooked by the ability of an LLM to mimic a person. Their pattern matching centers in their brains fire so strongly saying "this thing acts just like a real conscious being" that it overrides their ability to remember that this thing is just a statistical model, not a living creature which can think and have experiences.

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kelseyfrog 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We're just meat. Like meat can feel pain?

	▲	slopinthebag 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		if meat can feel pain, than surely a rock can feel pain. and so did the broccoli i ate for dinner. i am a monster. with the right biology and with whatever gives us phenomenal experience, whatever we are can indeed feel pain. that does not imply that anything substantially different from ourselves can feel pain, so that requires further justification.

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Tadpole9181 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not making a point on whether they do or not, but on the premise that absence of evidence is evidence of absence... But I've been alive for serious debates on:

1. Lobsters don't feel pain - dunk them in boiling water alive.

2. Babies don't feel pain - mutilate their genitals without anesthesia.

3. Black people don't feel pain "the same way" (and are just after drugs).

4. Women feel too much pain (and it should be ignored).

So maybe let's take a moment to think what criteria we're going to use to make these claims. And the potential harm of the decision.

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frumplestlatz 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Maybe consider the obvious, enormous chasm between everything you just listed and an LLM.

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Tadpole9181 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Oh, yeah, of course. None of those other people said the same thing about the obvious, enormous chasm between "real" people and everything else listed. I'm glad you're taking even a single moment to reflect on the idea.

	▲	frumplestlatz 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Everything you listed is a biological entity with a common evolutionary heritage. All but one of the things that you listed is just a human being. Tell me, where is the pain center in a GPU? Where are the nerves? Persistent memory? Any evolutionary reason at all to develop a pain response that in any way mimics ours? Model weights are not a gestalt biological entity. The things that you listed are not in any way remotely similar to a model. I would suggest you plug your comment into a model and ask it to critique it — it might help you walk through why your comparison makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. One nice thing about models is that they they don’t get annoyed explaining the obvious, because they’re not conscious entities.