LLM’s Don’t Have Minds : Neither Do We!

I have long held in question the idea that humans ‘are intelligent’. Especially at the collective registers. Clearly, the capacity to assemble complex objects is not the qualifying feature we’ve long thought it to be. Human intelligence is a possibility space, not a status.

In recent interviews, Eric Weinstein suggested something I find compelling, that, rather than our recent AI developments demonstrating that machines have minds, they have had quite the opposite effect: the demonstration that, at least, much of the time, we do not!

Methods demonstrate that merely improving on existing determinations ( by a complex vector-based weighting system ) of ‘which word comes next’ accounts for much if not most of the LLM’s behavior. Especially catastrophic mistakes and delusions.

Perhaps, much of the time, our own ‘intelligence’ is doing something quite similar. One possible exception space is that of metacognition ( one of my favored haunts ).

A multipolar trap, as defined by Daniel Schmachtenberger, is a situation in which multiple rational agents or entities, each acting in their own self-interest or competitive advantage, create a collectively destructive or suboptimal outcome for all involved. Despite recognizing that a cooperative or different strategy would yield better results for the group, the structure of incentives or pressures in the system compels each actor to continue their detrimental behavior out of fear of being outcompeted or suffering a relative loss. These dynamics often lead to a ‘race to the bottom,’ where participants are locked into a pattern of actions that degrade the overall environment or context, making it increasingly difficult to shift towards more beneficial, collaborative solutions. Notable instances of multipolar traps include arms races, overfishing, and ecological degradation, where short-term gains lead to long-term systemic harm.

It should be clear that a species that is not intelligent enough to know what must not be done, is not yet intelligent. If ‘science’ as practiced by moderns lights the fuse of a multi-polar apocalypse that leads to vast extinctions or the end of life on Earth, it will invalidate the entire history of human conception, invention, insight and discovery. This fact should reign over »all human thought and endeavor… and the fact that it does not, should force us to ask extremely sober questions about what does, how it become dominant, and how we can defuse and replace it.

Now.

Not later.

In every waking moment and action.

I have long felt that any scientist possessed of even a modicum of moral or ethical concern, would conceal all of their research, and never publish — until and unless the species could demonstrate the establishment and maintenance of societies actively capable of preventing the weaponization of findings.

For without such a society, as Frederic Brown noted in his story ‘The Weapon’, science is effectively the act of giving a loaded gun to a child who doesn’t understand harm… and pointing it directly at the history and future … not merely of humans, but of life on Earth.

No sane or intelligent mind would ever do that.

Right?

What if ‘our intelligence’ isn’t actually ours at all, but is the result of our unacknowledged participation in fields of intelligence in Nature and Timespace… and the reason our species is insane, is that we keep declaring that we’re the sovereign »source … of something we’re actually transceiving?

One imagines fish that are absolutely, militaristically certain… that ‘they make the water’ and thus ‘are entitled to control it’. And then start wars with every other life form over this. And they go mad attempting to attack anything that suggests that they are not in control of the water, or do not locally ‘own’ it, etc.

I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and the origins of our species.

As a cognitive activist, my dream is that my work may contribute to our ability to understand the origins of our strange situation as modern humans, and assemble effective replacements for what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of.

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