Joys and pains of insects
One of the thought provoking consequences of our progress with AI is how we are being forced to re-examine the philosophical underpinnings of “existence” as a being.<p>“I think, therefore I am” has been the gold standard for millennia, but is falling into a crisis in the face of thinking machines that are algorithmically incapable of an inherent sense of existence.<p>LLMs have demonstrated that symbolic intelligence is a product of a vast corpus of symbolically represented memetic data. It can be taught to and interpreted by both biological and digital neural networks, and it enables us to reason about the world. Much of what we understand as being human lies within this cultural-linguistic framework of data, so it is unnerving to watch a machine parse this data with a similar facility as a person.<p>Despite their uncanny ability to access and express the memetic code of human culture, LLMs are merely windows into human intelligence, devoid of an existence or a self outside of symbolic manipulation.<p>On the other hand, we experience a state of “being” that is impulsive and emotional in character, that can exist without the use of symbols or tokens. In this framework we can experience pain, pleasure, desires, needs, happiness, and distress. We have no reason to expect that this experience exists within a large language model, and we can derive that this is the critical feature of sentience through the process of elimination now that we have evidence that “thinking” can exist outside of “being”.<p>Yet, we can see clear evidence of this experience in other animals, including insects.<p>Is it then, “I feel, therefore I am?”<p>This has extremely profound implications across the board that we have yet to touch on as a species.<p>One of the most obvious and far reaching of these implications is what it is to be human.<p>If we are to accept that a sense of being does not a human make, and neither does the ability to think in symbolic terms, then what?<p>Are we -primarily- genetic in nature, or primarily memetic creatures?<p>Which is less human? A specimen of homo-sapiens with no access to the memetic code, or an LLM augmented dog that shares both our experience of existence and our culture?<p>What if it were an LLM enhanced honey bee?<p>We can easily presume that a lab gestated biological human, given access to culture is fully a human. What if they were gestated from fully synthesised germ cells? What if they were modified to include synthetic inference instead of biological inference, but maintained the biological sense of self? What if it was all digital?<p>We have a new tool to differentiate the human experience, and it is going to change humanity in ways we have not even imagined yet.