alt Hacker NewsI'm a neurologist, and as a consequence of my profession, I understand how humans work under the hood.
The average human is so easily convinced that humans "know", "think", "lie", "want", "understand", etc.
But really it's all just a probabilistic chain reaction of electrochemical and thermal interactions. There is literally nowhere in the brain's internals for anything like "knowing" or "thinking" or "lying" to happen!
Strange that we have to pretend otherwise
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>I'm a neurologist, and as a consequence of my profession, I understand how humans work under the hood.
There you go again, auto-morphizing the meat-bags. Vroom vroom.
There are no properties of matter or energy that can have a sense of self or experience qualia. Yet we all do. Denying the hard problem of consciousness just slows down our progress in discovering what it is.
It doesn't strike you as a bit...illogical to state in your first sentence that you "understand how humans work under the hood" and then go on to say that humans don't actually "understand" anything? Clearly everything at its basis is a chemical reaction, but the right reactions chained together create understanding, knowing, etc. I do believe that the human brain can be modeled by machines, but I don't believe LLMs are anywhere close to being on the right track.
I upvoted you.
This is a fundamentally interesting point. Taking your comment as HN would advise, I totally agree.
I think genAI freaks a lot of people out because it makes them doubt what they thought made them special.
And to your comment, humans have always used words they reserve for humanity that indicates we're special: that we think, feel, etc... That we're human. Maybe we're not so special. Maybe that's scary to a lot of people.