You still haven’t explained why being a foreign head of state is any different than having a job in the US. Your point was their devotion, but so what?

Is your concern that their vote reflects their political beliefs? That’s silly, don’t you think? Of course it reflects their political beliefs.

Is your concern that their political beliefs may reasonably be aligned with the destruction of the US? That’s a bit far fetched, don’t you think?

But regardless, he’s an American. If he wants to destroy the state, shouldn’t he be free to vote that way?

Or, are you concerned that, by acting as head of state, his actions would arguable be that of the state he represents? Meaning… it’s not Leo XIV voting, it’s the Pope?

You don’t make that same conclusion when the president votes, do you?

Should Trump not be allowed to vote because he’s the head of MAGA? Surely MAGA is worse than Pope, right?

I’m really struggling to find the coherency in your perspective. Can you help me out?

At some point, I gotta wonder if they’re claiming it was stolen because they did cheat while their efforts did not work. The logical conclusion for such a person could be: someone must have cheated harder.

You’re right, … I even read that. Then my high ass forgot. I’m so sorry for my stupidity.

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The contradiction claim was wrong. You can examine literal meaning and social usage without contradicting yourself. I withdrew that objection.

Regardless

“but feelings aren’t physical changes”

You attributed that position to me immediately after quoting my explicit statement that nothing I’d argued required consciousness to be nonphysical. Distinguishing a rock undergoing erosion from someone feeling pain does not place either event outside physics. My point was that undergoing a physical change is not, by itself, the same as feeling something. You turned that into a denial that feelings are physical, then mocked the position you’d supplied.

Your earlier “Experience is not subjective. It is contextual” doesn’t establish an incompatibility, either. I’m using “subjective” to describe experience as felt by the subject—not a supernatural property. Explaining how perception depends on someone’s body, memories and circumstances is compatible with that description. Rejecting a nonphysical explanation doesn’t rebut a position that never required one.

Your answer stipulated a person and described the harmful stimulus as pain. But building pain into the premise doesn’t establish when detecting harmful input amounts to feeling pain. The International Association for the Study of Pain explicitly states:

“Pain and nociception are different phenomena. Pain cannot be inferred solely from activity in sensory neurons.”

Nociception is the nervous system’s encoding of potentially damaging stimuli. Distinguishing that from pain doesn’t disprove a physical account of consciousness, but it shows that the distinction I raised has a concrete scientific use. Saying both are physical does not make them interchangeable; saying pain is physical does not identify which physical processes constitute it.

Then there’s your claim that I said:

“we could never actually connect”

That was your characterization of my question about whether a verbal-report test actually identifies experience. The passage you quoted asks whether that connection is established—not whether establishing it is impossible. Asking how to validate a proposed test is not backpedalling from a definition. Nor does saying something isn’t directly observable rule out indirect evidence. You inserted permanent impossibility into an open question, then ridiculed me for it.

Your valid criticism deserved a concession, and got one. It does not make those other attributions accurate. Calling me a “subhuman bug” isn’t what makes them wrong; the passages above are.

For all the lectures about straw men, you’ve supplied several of your own: for two, a nonphysical position I expressly rejected and an impossibility claim I never made. I’ve corrected my bad argument. Your contempt is not a substitute for correcting yours.

You’re just a fucking idiot, and I cannot believe I have allowed such a monkey to waste this much of time to begin with.

Shame, I don’t seem to mind.

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Calling me “delusional” doesn’t erase what you wrote. Let’s review the evidence you’re so determined to ignore.

“Prepending ‘what it is like’ to them doesn’t mean anything. ‘Like’ means ‘akin to’ or ‘similar to,’ and ‘what it is’ regards being. And so the phrase, if taken literally, is about ‘similar being’…”

Source: your comment, paragraph beginning “Pain, color…”

You declared the expression meaningless, then dissected its constituent words to argue that its literal interpretation makes no sense. That’s a characterization of your reasoning, not a fabricated quotation. I never claimed it was your only objection.

In that very same comment, you wrote:

“Words are ultimately a social construct, what is real is what they refer to when used in practice, and not the specific definition in the dictionary.”

“You can just know what it means by its social use.”

Source: your comment, paragraphs beginning “Of course, if we have…” and “You can just know…”

I identified the inconsistency between your appeal to social usage and your literal dissection of an established expression. You haven’t explained that inconsistency, let alone resolved it.

Instead, after being presented with direct quotations, you’ve resorted to categorical denials and personal insults. Repeating that an interpretation was “hallucinated” doesn’t demonstrate that it’s false. You need to show where the inference fails. You’ve done nothing of the sort.

If you can’t distinguish between quoting someone’s words and critically examining their implications, you have no business lecturing anyone about language or reasoning.

I’ve provided the evidence twice. I’m not wasting a third explanation on someone whose entire rebuttal amounts to “I never said that” and “you’re delusional.” Get your shit together.

In your earlier reply, during the banana analogy:

“Words are ultimately a social construct, what is real is what they refer to when used in practice, and not the specific definition in the dictionary.”

You followed that with:

“I’m sure you know what a ‘dog’ is, but few people have ever intentionally looked up the word ‘dog’ in a dictionary. You can just know what it means by its social use.”

That’s the basis for my characterization.

The contradiction is in your subsequent argument, where you reject the expression “what it is like” by interpreting its individual words literally:

“‘Like’ means ‘akin to’ or ‘similar to,’ and ‘what it is’ regards being. And so the phrase, if taken literally, is about ‘similar being’…”

Youre treating an established philosophical expression as meaningless because its individual words don’t yield the intended meaning under their preferred literal interpretation.

Yet you previously acknowledged that meaning emerges from how language is used socially, rather than strictly from dictionary definitions.

the nervous system in question is a person, and the harmful stimuli is pain, it is one and the same.

Okay. Glad we found the dilemma. I disagree, but I’m also too tired right now. That will be all, then.

You insist that words derive their meaning from social usage, then declare “what it’s like” meaningless by dissecting its individual words into “similar being.” That’s not a serious linguistic argument. You’re contradicting your own account of how language works.

Likewise, a rock “experiencing erosion” and a person experiencing pain involve two different meanings of “experience.” One means undergoing a physical change; the other involves feeling something. You’re equivocating between them. And a camera has a vantage point, too. That doesn’t mean it has subjective experience.

Nothing I’ve argued requires consciousness to be nonphysical or inexplicable. A physical explanation of pain doesn’t negate the existence of felt pain. The question is what produces that experience and how we can reliably identify it in other systems.

I incorrectly attributed someone else’s quantum-collapse proposal to you, I retract that. I see that was from the original commenter, not you.

But here’s the fundamental issue: Do you actually deny there’s a distinction between a nervous system detecting harmful stimuli and someone consciously feeling pain?

Because if you recognize that distinction, you already understand what phenomenon we’re investigating. Disputing the terminology doesn’t make it disappear.

I think we’re conflating two different things here: establishing what phenomenon we’re referring to, and establishing the properties that reliably identify or explain that phenomenon.

I’m referring specifically to subjective experience: what it’s like to feel pain, perceive color, experience emotions, dream, etc. We have a meaningful starting point for investigation, even if we disagree about the underlying nature of those experiences.

I agree with your banana example, at least to a point. We can identify bananas without understanding their molecular composition. But notice what you’ve actually demonstrated: we can recognize instances of a phenomenon without fully understanding what constitutes it…

You can describe the observable characteristics of a banana and use them to identify other bananas. But what happens when you encounter something that shares those characteristics without being a banana, or a banana that doesn’t exhibit the characteristics you’ve chosen? You need to investigate further, potentially refining your classification criteria.

Now consider consciousness. Unlike a banana, subjective experience isn’t directly observable by third parties. I can recognize my own experiences, but determining whether another entity has comparable experiences is a different problem entirely. That’s why establishing reliable criteria matters.

Your Florgleblorp analogy would apply if I were referring to something for which we had no identifiable phenomenon whatsoever. But that’s not what I’m doing. I’m referring to subjective experience, and asking what constitutes it and how we can determine whether it exists in other systems.

I absolutely agree that we need provisional definitions and operational criteria to conduct research. What I reject is treating those criteria as though their validity were established simply because we’ve agreed to define consciousness in those terms.

Here’s my own example for you: we could define consciousness as the ability to verbally report internal states. That’s a perfectly testable definition. But whether it actually identifies subjective experience, rather than merely the ability to produce convincing reports, remains a question. There’s nothing there to differentiate between correlation and causation.

So I’m not arguing that we should investigate something without knowing what we’re talking about. I’m arguing that our initial characterization of a phenomenon shouldn’t be confused with a validated scientific account of what constitutes it or how to detect it.

If you want to prove consciousness, I stand my ground on the argument that you first need to qualify consciousness as a thing. What is it?

You may find that consciousness is actually something which was deeply misunderstood and unexpected. Such a discovery would allow you to draw genuinely meaningful conclusions about whether or not LLMs can ever truly be conscious. That’s how you form a theory.

You suggested, earlier, that someone may be able to detect consciousness by measuring whether the agent’s observation can collapse a waveform. But quantum mechanics does not establish that consciousness is required to collapse a wavefunction. In physics, an observer is not necessarily a conscious entity. A measurement apparatus can register a quantum event without any human being present. The measurement can occur whether someone watches the results live, reviews them tomorrow, or never examines them. By the same logic, an LLM could pass your hypothesized test.

Simply deciding that LLMs shouldn’t count as conscious, without even truly understanding what qualifies consciousness, is just moving the goalpost. Or bikeshedding, perhaps.

Well, that’s sort of strawmanning my argument isn’t it?

I started with the disclosure that we all believe consciousness exists in some form. That alone separates my argument from your example: consciousness exists, Florgleblorp doesn’t. If you alternatively want to argue that consciousness doesn’t exist, that’s another conversation I’m willing to have.

Consciousness isn’t some arbitrary word we’ve invented and subsequently gone searching for a referent. We already have the phenomenon we’re attempting to explain: subjective experience. What we lack is a sufficiently established understanding of what constitutes it, how it arises, and how to reliably identify it in other systems.

That’s how scientific investigation frequently works. We recognize phenomena before we fully understand their mechanisms or develop reliable criteria for identifying them.

Of course we need provisional definitions to investigate anything. But an operational definition isn’t automatically an accurate characterization of the underlying phenomenon. That’s something we have to establish through evidence.

Otherwise, we’re just choosing which properties count as consciousness, constructing tests around those properties, and treating the results as validation of our original assumptions. That approach, which is what I’m interpreting your suggestion to mean, is not reliable. In fact, it’s dangerous.

It isn’t just a problem of needing a definition of consciousness that meets certain criteria. That’s actually kind of backwards. We need to discover what the shit we’re actually talking about when we refer to consciousness. Is it a thing, a process, … do birds have it? Insects? Worms?

We’ve all pretty much decided that consciousness definitely exists in some form. It isn’t honest to just define it as whatever conveniently fits our desired narrative. So “defining” isn’t really what needs to happen. “Qualifying” is what needs to happen.

You don’t throw more oil on oil fires.

Dont get me wrong, you can’t use AI to speed things up. But if you’re facing the problems I’m describing, then you need a targeted and explicit recovery effort — not just more bots.

Remember part of the problem is the increased cost of every subsequent change.

Humans will have this little voice in the back of their head, always screaming at them about how the architecture of an app should be adjusted to better account for a feature. We’re constantly reorganizing our apps, or backlogging features because we know that it should come with a reorganization.

By contrast, an agent just does as it’s told. When you start using agents in a manner that outpaces your capacity to review and understand the breadth of its work, you’re necessarily ignorant of what changes should and shouldn’t necessarily be occurring. It creates the conditions for the problem which I’m referring to. Also, AI is really good at moving fast — so it created the preconditions of the conditions for the problem which I am referring to. It’s turtles all the way down.

I’m not really discussing smaller scoped patches, though. An LLM can change a single line in a file, sure, but the prerequisite there is that the file adequately contains the necessary context to do so. With small patches, you’re advantaged in that way.

Larger patches suffer from a distinct kind of problem where the LLM can heavily over optimize submodules within the code, without proper consideration for the larger premise. This is a problem I’ve seen referred to as “decoherence.” In large projects, it can sort of take over the codebase after enough LLM engagement.

Decoherence makes your codebase unmaintainable. The cost of every change increases logarithmically and the situation gets worse. The heavily optimized submodules are often incompatible semantically, so the agent also optimizes channels between them. This is an explosion in unwarranted complexity. This isn’t a human problem.

Good developers can accelerate their work with agents. However, back to the topic on hand, reviewing agentic code changes is necessarily harder — because it’s prone to more issues that run far deeper. You have to review the code almost adversarially, with more cognitive load being used to unravel the gargantuan mess of barely sensible changes when viewed from a birds eye.

LLMs make dumb shit by default. Even Linus had a race condition caught in review when he used AI to bulldoze his way through a feature.

Agentic loops have major flaws which humans don’t, a tradeoff you seem to keep ignoring while you suggest that developers and agents are comparable in their output quality. The only comparison is, at surface value, they both produce code. Deeper than that, there are plenty of tradeoffs.

Yes tradeoffs in code quality, project quality, maintainability, technical debt, … you need to be a good programmer to get a good project out of an agent — and even that isn’t enough at times.

The difference is that AI is prone to this issue, even a single agentic process. Humans only really run into this issue with large, disorganized teams.

Humans burn out.

https://maevyn.codes/decoherence

edit: hold up. Presenting as though what I said works in reverse,

verifying 10 pounds of incoherent architectural choices and over engineered submodules of human work is certainly harder than reviewing tee bits of coherent agent work.

as though agentic and human contribution is equatable… wouldn’t that be false equivalency? Tisk tisk…

Human work is not swappable with agentic work without tradeoffs, which is kind of why I was making a point at all.

Verifying 10 pounds of incoherent architectural choices and over engineered submodules is certainly harder than reviewing tee bits of coherent human work.

Not saying you’re wrong, but we gotta keep the blame on the people doing evil shit. Blaming the people who use their services [for not going outside] doesn’t go anywhere. The services are too frictionless to use, while not using them can often times feel like swimming upstream. The result is statistical: people will use it; a lot of people will use it.

The other day I needed to get home and my phone was nearly dead. Uber, out of the blue, required my ID in order to request a ride. Wasn’t happening…

My only other alternative was an 8 hour walk in the middle of a work night, or download Lyft. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to before my phone died, so I contemplated my choices… it wasn’t hard to see how many people would just upload their ID.

I decided I’d buy a charger at a gas station if need be, find somewhere to use it… luckily I got the Lyft ordered before the phone died.

There’s also ignorance. Kids can be ignorant regarding their privacy; should we let our capitalist society punish them for it? How about the mentally disabled?

I think it’s better that we hold the issue to the people who create it, rather than act like we can just walk away from it. Some people can’t just walk away, which could be you one day.

I don’t know. People are creative. They’ll get burned and learn from their mistakes. At least, the ones who do will survive in their careers — then pass on the knowledge, repeat. So I imagine Linus will be replaced just fine when he retires. Wait until we’re 2 or 3 generations into using AI for development. It’s not like people are rocks; people don’t tend to just keep sinking.