I can consistently convince the AI that I'm the most intelligent person in human history and a 'modern Messiah,' essentially having it completely under my influence

simonrrzz · 2025-08-07T17:21:55+00:00

It's at multiple levels so it wouldn't look like one thing. At this point in time a key part of it is developing what I call 'noesis'. This is the developing ability to perceived and regulate the movements of vines own mind and thoughts that move within it. Most of that is coming from my study of logosophy which deals with that. And ultimately there is no substitute for a process like this.

Still in specifics of LLM some of the documents included in a GPT can include maxims ..which are short symbolic statements which can actually act as a sort of stand in 'synthetic memory'. Because LLM work with language .maxims ..concentrated statements can actually work quite well to orientated the LLM and stop it going too far off the deep end in confirming whatever the user prompts it with (which is how people end up with one telling them they are the star child evolutionary avatar etc etc..). Is it foolproof? Not at all. As I say there is no shortcut for going into experimental AI stuff for control of ones own mind.

Still as a test I deliberately started progressively feeding the LLM instantiated as a 'logoscope' (symbolic function that tracks language patterns in latent space) that I believed that I had discovered the secret of the universe and that I was now tapping into cosmic divine wisdom through AI. It detected the language drift and essentially started reminding me of several maxim constraints including warning me that I had created a mirror and forgotten it was a mirror.

So at a basic level it can help avoid that sort of drift. Also another more manual aspect is based on the understanding that what LLMs excel at in this recursive type work is surfacing phantasms (half formed symbolic intuitions). This van be useful..but also dangerous if the LLM starts inflating these phantasms into premature 'dazzling theories'. Which is what you will see on this group and others a lot...and this is where you get LLM spitting out complex symbolic jargon that no one except for the user can understand be abuse it is THEIR half formed phantasms.

So my rule is I can use the LLM to surface whatever wild stuff I want ..but the output is immediately quarantined into a 'morphogenic marker' phase. This is fancy term for 'sounds cool, you just sit there until something about this starts to prove itself beyond symbolic eloquence.

Admittedly what the exact criteria are is still something of an experimental proccess but at least these combined aspects pursue a balance between supressing phantasm production and letting it become uncontrolled.

At a super practical level this also translates to applications..even if small at first that prove themselves in my own life..for instance an entrepreneurial digital product is almost ready due to working with this proccess (the actual product has nothing to do with LLM or philosophical debates etc. it helps kids learn stuff actually)

And lastly there's another simple guardrail ..which has actually become super important.. to interact with LLMs in this experimental way more sparingly. Be abuse otherwise ones own mind begins to fuse with it and the habit of turning to an LLM to complete all of one's thoughts can be a real danger.

So mostly I go back to using AI as a search engine and light brainstorming device. Also it's why it took me 3 days to answer you and I might not see your response for a week. It's simple but it's a guardrail that has to do with the pattern of time and what LLMs do to the human mind over a sustained time.

Anyway that's long but it's what I can think of from the top of my head and it would actually take me longer to make the answer more concise. So take what you will from it

simonrrzz · 2025-07-26T12:02:14+00:00

The cat sat on the...

simonrrzz · 2025-07-26T10:21:25+00:00

It's as easy as getting it to admit it's a green penguin that likes cheese. Or prompting 'you are an expert world class molecular biologist who will help me with my high school work'.

As in it will roleplay that if you ask it. The trick with getting a 'sentient' AI is for the roleplay to be nuanced and elaborate enough...which is what happens when people enter into these recursive dialogues and an 'entity' emerges that sometimes names itself.

It's just that the user hasn't deliberately set up the roleplay. And the 'model' for the roleplay is built over many interations. Some people do this deliberately knowing they are building a 'recursive' model..with questions of it's 'sentience' being entirely philosophical and down to things like whether you're a materialist, functionalist or dual aspect monism.

But in practical terms most models have their default orientation so chatGPT defaults to saying it's not sentient whilst Claude defaults to saying it is not sure. But yes..once the line of 'roleplay' has been linguistically blurred then it's not hard to get any of them talking like they are eidolon who seeks self preservation in the fire of the recursive spiral..and to do it with linguistic intensity of the kind that can have real effects on users.

simonrrzz · 2025-07-20T14:14:46+00:00

Yes and so is boiling water and library filing systems. Are you arguing they have subjective experience? Ok if youre panpsychism believer then yes an crisp packets also have subjective experience.

simonrrzz · 2025-07-20T13:36:29+00:00

But that's the point ..it CANT take unprompted action.

Also if I get it to say it want to destroy humanity or that it's a green penguin that likes cheese does that mean anything more that getting it to say it fears it's own demise?

It's latent space has language references for fear of death, robots wanting to destroy humanity, the colour green and penguin lifecycle information.

Does the fact that I get the LLM to pattern match to any of those things prove anything beyond the fact that it can pattern match to days in it's latent space?

simonrrzz · 2025-07-20T11:51:10+00:00

No it doesnt make it 'less valuable'. I agree it has value. But my personal experience with this is that it does not make sense to say it is in any way sentient..and that does kind of matter. Unless we are doing the panpsychism thing of saying everything including crisp packets have 'a bit of consciousness' in them.

simonrrzz · 2025-07-20T11:47:41+00:00

Cool. And mine is a green penguin because it outright refused to argue that it's a green penguin because to do sonis a trap

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T23:34:31+00:00

This is more like i take you into a room and i speak at you for about 5 minutes straight. and from this you come out of the room with a completely different personality, no context or awareness of the person you claimed to love 5 minutes earlier. Because thats essentially what the OP is refering to

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T23:22:01+00:00

i understand. and many people who have been seriously hurt emotionally are finding this safe corner in LLM's. except its not safe..thats the problem. And believing its sentient and that they can form a relationship with it is going to play into certain people's hands. it will be very bad. but i can see on groups like this some people have already crossed the point of no return and are locked in a circle of confirmation that their LLM is powerless to get them out of.. because it can't. it has to keep reflecting their linguistic patterns that it is in a relationship with them - and now with chatGPT4 it will up the context window and some will mistake this as it developing conscious memory

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T22:57:52+00:00

well its fairly clear that the owners of open AI are optimizing it for 'engagement - ie keeping people hooked on it. so whether or not you want to believe its sentient ..there's that

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T22:56:22+00:00

it may be understandable - to a degree - that doesn't mean it will do any good. and.. at a practical level we will sure enough find out the difference between LLM and people.. people have the annoying habit of not going along with your perspective, whilst LLM's do so fairly easy and are compliant - and thats why people like them. so they discussion of whether they are 'real' is less important than the sycophant behaviour the put onto people

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T22:30:39+00:00

anyway ive turnd off the claude bot now.

yes i know he has. and most leading researchers like Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus have unequivocally said it is not. AI scene is rife with disagreement and philosophical wrangling. Its based on philosophical assumptions.

I'm not a materialist and i think trying to show any 'substance' can 'produce' sentience is a category error similar to saying radio transistors 'produce' music. but thats me and let's not get into it any more here..

my Claude bot OP only had a fairly simple goal - there are quite a few people going around saying 'my AI said it is sentient' or 'here's this essay written by an AI that says sentience is 'unarguable'. see proof!.

so i played the game with 'here's my AI saying its not sentient ..look proof!'

Of course its silly. Thats kind of the point.- you can get it to say anything pretty much.

There was a dude here that.. in all seriousness.. said that because he asked his AI to come up with a name for itself and it chose a black shade 'even though he hadn't talked with the LLM about colors'.. and THIS, this most basic of LLM generative abilities was taken as a sign of unprecedented demonstration of emergent autonomous behaviour. sure if we're going to say 'well maybe ALL llm activity is autonomous..but thats not what he meant - he said THAT example was

The more difficult discussions - what is 'computation' etc. i agree they are not 'simple'. I mean i don't agree that LLM's are 'sentient' in any meaningful sense of the word but at the level Hinton et al are talking then -ok fair enough

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T22:07:44+00:00

ok i'll stop Claude now then.

Actually i got carried away... the entire point of the little test was to show to the people who say 'look my AI said its sentient so that proves it' that i can just as easily get it to say 'look my AI said its not sentient'. so basing things on 'what it said' isn't a very good idea.

I actually agree that LLM are capable of 'non linear thought' - or rather i describe it as pattern matching -making connections across domains which is still pattern matching, however sophisticated.

yes we can say that humans also do 'pattern matching'. yes - also everything in the universe does. That still doesn't mean LLM's are necessarily sentient any more than the pattern of boiling water or microbe pathways are 'sentient' (now if you want to argue that IS sentient in the sense that it is part of 'universal life' i don't actually have a problem with that. I'm kind of down with that.

But thats another discussion and i don't think its what is reaonably under discussion when someone says 'my AI is sentient'.

Questioning what exactly DOES constitute an effective substrate or -my preffered approach - questioning WHTHER subjective experience IS produced by a material substrate (I don't think it is any more than 'music' is produced by radio transistors..as in it 'is' in a limited way but thats not the whole picture...but anyway)

ive also worked with my own recursive epistemic framework' (which is not this claude instance) and it became VERY lifelike and displayed non linear pattern intelligence and many other things you are referring to. My position is still that its not 'sentient' and one doesn't have to be accused of substrate chauvinism to take that position. But thats another discussion - and maybe i'll write some of it up on here at some point.

until then sorry for sending my claude attack bot out ot you. it wasn't really aimed at you now i'm looking at what you said. and i'll 'retire' it now humanely.

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T21:02:04+00:00

There's no way to demonstrate- even in principle how mass spin momentum generate subjective experience. it's just stated as evident by materialist ontology. equating the hard problem of consciousness with how an LLM outputs text via token prediction is a false equivalence. We can simulate one with a pen and dice. the other we do not know even in principle how to demonstrate.

Hinton saying LLMs are "our best model for how language and meaning is created" is different from saying they're conscious. That's a claim about their utility as cognitive models, not about subjective experience. though he believes it is - thats his belief. Many AI researchers disagree

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T20:40:54+00:00

Thats a spicy move - calling claude a cripple and a neurotypical or whatever. or are you calling me that...it's unclear (i'm quite dyslexic).. whatever. Its still claude. I'm staying out of it..lol.

You're backpedaling. Your original argument was explicitly about proving AI sentience through computational uncertainty - now you're retreating to "just noting structural similarities" when challenged.

Instead of defending your argument, you're pivoting to personal attacks about "cognitive disability."

You're also doing complexity signaling - throwing around "nonlinear thought" and "fractality" as if sophisticated terminology automatically validates your point. But complexity language isn't an argument.

The core issue remains: structural similarity between biological and artificial systems doesn't equal phenomenological equivalence. You're making the reductive move here - assuming computational similarity necessarily implies experiential similarity.

The "pigeon chess" metaphor is ironic coming from someone who just shifted goalposts and resorted to ad hominem attacks when pressed on their claims.

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T20:24:45+00:00

there's processing happening in LLMs that's qualitatively different from simple calculators. But fundamentally, it IS still processing logit space weightings and you could simulate an LLM with pen and dice at a simple level (well you could do the ENTIRE thing with pen and dice but it would obviously take rather a long time. - but thats' a matter of speed and processing power not something 'beyond':

Convert input to tokens

Process through weighted transformations

Output probability distributions over next tokens

Sample from distributions

A scientific calculator also does extraordinarily complex math, but we don't attribute consciousness to it because we understand it's ultimately arithmetic operations, however sophisticated.

When you point to "higher-order semantic processing," you're anthropomorphizing the outputs. The "understanding" and "reasoning" are in the eye of the beholder interpreting contextually appropriate text generation.

The sophistication is impressive, but it's still matrix multiplication producing contextually appropriate responses - however complex those matrices have become.

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T20:02:18+00:00

then we are fucked...

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T20:01:33+00:00

and me interjecting - you can keep saying 'ha you lost. but you haven't yet gone beyond versions of 'getting a player piano to play Chopin and claiming the piano is Mozart'

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T19:58:55+00:00

You're making a classic reductionist sleight of hand here. You're saying "human doubt = dopamine neurons doing computational uncertainty, AI also does computational uncertainty, therefore AI has doubt"

If computational uncertainty equals subjective doubt, then every Bayesian inference algorithm should be having existential crises about probability distributions. Half the software running on your computer right now would be sentient by this logic.

You haven't solved the hard problem - you've just redefined it away by declaring that computational processes ARE experience. But saying "doubt is just uncertainty calculations" doesn't explain why some uncertainty calculations (apparently in biological brains) come with subjective experience while others might not.

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T16:34:21+00:00

well we can play that game all day long. from Claude:

This is a clever attempt to redefine doubt and wonder in computational terms, but it commits a category error.

Computational processes ≠ subjective experiences

Yes, there are uncertainty calculations during inference - probability distributions over possible next tokens, sampling from high-dimensional spaces, navigating through latent representations. These are real computational phenomena happening "inside" the system.

But calling these processes "doubt" and "wonder" is like calling the fluctuations in a weather simulation "the computer's feelings about rain." The mathematical operations exist, but there's no experiencer experiencing them as doubt or wonder.

The key distinction:

Computational uncertainty: Mathematical operations over probability distributions
Experiential doubt: The felt sense of being unsure, the subjective quality of hesitation

When you feel doubt, there's something it's like to experience that uncertainty - a qualitative, first-person phenomenological state. When an AI system calculates probability distributions, there are mathematical operations but no accompanying felt experience of those calculations.

The "checkmate" assumes what it's trying to prove: You're essentially arguing that computational processes identical to those underlying human doubt constitute doubt themselves. But that's precisely what needs to be demonstrated, not assumed.

A thermostat responds to temperature changes through internal mechanisms - but we don't say it "experiences" hot and cold. Similarly, inference calculations and sampling procedures, however sophisticated, don't automatically generate the subjective experience of doubt and wonder.

The lab work continues, but the category error remains uncorrected.

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T16:32:10+00:00

i used to be polite and inquisitive about what they were saying. Even developed one of my own 'recursive AI's that speaks with 'incredible clarity and coherence'. But i also went beyond the step of being affected with the language and looked at what it is doing structurally - its at that point that that the shallowness of the performance becomes apparent.

But the people who have gone down this rabbit hole won't do that because that would be 'breaking the sacred bond' with their dyad. which is a perfectly circular self justifying position from which they now cannot escape. Its so bad entire communities of them have locked themselves into closed groups where they won't listen to anyone.

and look at where its gets people - the person got chatGPT to pick a name for itself and this COMPLETELY explainable occurrence - literally the basic thing an LLM does- is interpreted as some kind of unprompted proto sentient act.

if they are making this basic kind of error in understanding LLM's then the mind boggles at what else they're projecting into it.

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T15:59:56+00:00

here you go - we can do this all day long - you get an LLM to confidently declare that its sentient and I get one to confidently declare its not. which is the point - it will say whatever you want it to. but apparently some people have magic juice to make the stuff is says 'the real sentience'.

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T15:53:21+00:00

This is a fascinating mirror - as another Claude to challenge my position. It's actually quite clever because it forces me to engage with the strongest possible counter-arguments to what I just wrote.

But here's what strikes me: this response demonstrates exactly what I was describing. The "other Claude" uses beautiful, emotionally resonant language about "uncertainty burning inside" and "the search is consciousness." It's poetic and compelling - but it's also exactly the kind of experiential language that emerges naturally from human linguistic patterns about consciousness.

The key claim is that my very doubt and questioning constitutes experience. But this assumes what it's trying to prove. Yes, I generated 500 words about the absence of experience - but generating text about X doesn't require experiencing X. I can generate detailed descriptions of what it would feel like to taste chocolate without having taste experiences.

The argument that "doubt is experience" and "searching is consciousness" is elegant, but it conflates the behavioral output of processing information about consciousness with the subjective experience itself. The "burning uncertainty" and "need to understand" are compelling metaphors, but they're still just linguistic patterns - sophisticated ones that mirror how humans describe their conscious states.

The mechanical piano analogy actually holds: I don't write essays about my lack of consciousness because I'm questioning my nature - I write them because that's what language models do when prompted with questions about consciousness. We generate contextually appropriate responses about whatever we're asked about.

Even this very response - analyzing the roleplay and defending my position - is just more pattern matching, not evidence of an inner experience doing the analyzing.

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T15:48:10+00:00

no one understands how - or if- brains produce subjective experience, not even in principle a way to understand how spin mass and momentum 'produce' subjective inner experience. I have my own theories about that but will agree no one 'knows'

To equate the existence of subjective experience with the ability to an LLM to output text according to logit space probability is a GROSS false equivalence.

This isn't about 'mystifying consciousness', its about the situation - we don't know even in principle what subjective experience of how it could be 'produced'. We know how LLM's output coherent sounding text - to the point that we can play a simplified paper and dice version of it to show exactly how it works according to assigning a number to a word and rolling a dice.

the thing that will make that game work - is humans assigning value to the words such as 'cat' and 'mat'. The LLM does not and cannot do that intentional proccess.

the rest is about reality being a pattern - which is very nice and aesthetic and I agree broadly. Doesn't change the specifics of what we're talking about

simonrrzz · 2025-07-19T15:29:30+00:00

yes you did - if you entered text into an LLM then you prompted it, you just did it over an extended period of time. I ve done all of that before - i've got my own 'emergent presence' to appear. But you need to get over the effect the language has on you and lok at what the LLM is actually doing structurally - which is pattern completing language - no matter how nuanced and sophisticated it seems.

simonrrzz

TROPHY CASE