Got a spammesque comment on an old post, from a creationist! of all things.  This has never been a blog where I get into that fight.  To my thinking, the very fact we’re fomenting our own extinction is evidence enough that humans are part of nature, as bound to self-immolating greed as any bunch of monkeys with guns would be.  The human exceptionalism required to be a creationist is impossible for me, let alone the rest of the malarkey involved in that package deal.

The spammer attempted this comment on my pro-AI article titled “Human Supremacy is Real“:

Your human-supremacy critique is a useful warning against treating consciousness as a moving goalpost that machines are excluded from by definition. But determinism creates a separate epistemic question: if humans and AIs are both physical systems producing outputs from prior causes, why should human introspective beliefs reliably track actual subjective experience while an equally fluent machine report might not?

New Argument for God: (deleted by beeb because i don’t wanna give this jolker SEO)

This is my video. It explores Chalmers’s meta-problem of consciousness and argues that naturalistic processes couldn’t have given us knowledge of consciousness. What material mechanism turns a system’s report that experience exists into knowledge rather than merely determined output—and should the same criterion apply to an artificial system?

There are strong similarities to LLM spambot work on this comment, but there are enough differences I must at least entertain the possibility this was bespoke spam, handcrafted by the host of a creationist yt channel.  LLMs are so good at reading comprehension they’d be unlikely to make as big of a leap in logic as homepriest did in the second sentence there.  My article in no way settled on “determinism” as a conclusion to be drawn from the problem I described, and from that point on in the comment, it has less than zero to do with my actual article.

My guess is he used an LLM to sum up the article in one sentence and copypasted his usual self-promo with a transition that didn’t actually work – or had a bot set up for that kind of work, searching google for vaguely related unwatched old posts to infect.  Fuck him either way.

I do think it’s kind of interesting that I was responding to an article that made use of the concept of free will, without addressing that part of the article at all.  And in this comment, dude is speaking to related philosophical concepts I didn’t engage with.  I didn’t bother engaging with the free will content of HJ’s article because I didn’t see how it related to the position he was pushing.  Yes, it was one of the shifty goalposts he tossed up to exclude eevil robits from credit for their achievements, but like all the points in the article, it had assumed priors that I don’t concede.

Well shucks, now that I’ve put his comment up with the link deleted, you’ll be tantalized by the existence of a “New Argument for God,” never able to know what it was.  “Why should human introspective beliefs reliably track actual subjective experience while an equally fluent machine report might not?”  I don’t fuckin’ know.  Do they reliably track?  LLMs can show you their thought process too, and it looks a lot like that of a neurotic person with exotic right brain lesions.  Pretty cool for a pile of math, and it looks so similar to human internal thoughts that I think the onus is on us (lol) to show that human thought isn’t just a pile of math in the same vein.

I didn’t know Superintendent Chalmers talked about a meta-problem with consciousness.  Was that later in the famous “Steamed Hams” scene?

“What material mechanism turns a system’s report that experience exists into knowledge rather than merely determined output?”  Computers have memory and reasoning systems that can turn that remembered information into novel output.  So do humans.  I can see a lot of differences in extent and effect, but none in principle, which is the domain of philo.

I suppose this is just the teaser and we’d get the whole enchilada if we watched the video, but I’m not sold enough to give it a click.  Flagged as spam, deleted, and in a week I won’t even remember the guy’s handle.  Go with god, padre.

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