Yeah, I know. Sorry. But if we listen to Turkle and Dave more charitably, the "channel" is over the
web. Even when we allowed multiple protocols (voice, VR, etc.), it's still a limited (set of)
"channels", quite a bit fewer¹ than human face-to-face interaction. The obvious next step is the
embodiment. And one could argue that, e.g., while sitting in or leaning on your Tesla, we're getting pretty
close. And *then* the only difference would be the locality of the "mind". When arm wrestling with
your android, it'll have access to a bank of GPUs out there in the cloud. And you won't ... unless you're
wealthy enough for some good cyborg equipment.
So this line of rhetoric won't last long. Once that rhetoric's out of gas, the
only thing left is the structural analogy and arguments like hypercomputation 🙄
or maybe along the lines of Wolpert's physical limits of inference or Rosen's
modeling relation. I was just out ahead of our skis.
[1] They have to admit, though, that the channel(s) isn't obviously *smaller*.
I can submit way more text/video/code to an LLM through that limited channel
than I'll ever be able to submit to anyone at the pub. The only way we can
really defend Turkle, here, is in the diversity and parallelism of the media
... and maybe the continuity of the input.
On 8/26/25 1:37 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
I'm not the one making trivially falsifiable claims like "The problem is that they
have very limited, Turkle implies but one, channel for communication—language."
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2025 12:51 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] interiority
OK. But I suspect the layers aren't the same ... or even analogous. I was probably even wrong to call the brain
regions "layers". And as long as we're equivocating, "deep" is polysemous, too. Part of the
"depth" of the brain is the diversity of cell types. There was a burst of news articles about that a
year or two ago. An ecology is deeper than a monoculture, even if they have the same depth. >8^D
The point isn't really to argue that there's some non-sterile complexity measure that
reliably shows humans are "more than" LLMs in any sense. The point is simply to
express doubt about any analogy or equivalence between them.
In that vein, I found this interesting:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09215-4#citeas
https://huggingface.co/marcelbinz/Llama-3.1-Centaur-70B
If there are stuctural analogies to be made between LLMs and brains, it seems
reasonable to look for them in LLMs trained to predict behaviors as opposed to
words.
On 8/26/25 12:31 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
The Llama 3.2 vision encoder has 32 layers. I would think the frontier LLMs
are at least that deep.
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2025 10:55 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] interiority
Absolutely. I'm still a fan of the vocal grooming hypothesis. It really doesn't
matter what people are saying to each other over coffee or pints. What matters
is that they're *there*, the oxytocin's flowin', the hands are wavin' around
knocking over cups ... conspiratorial whispers, grandiose postures, spittle
flying, bacteria and viruses floating in the air alongside the farts and BO,
people sharing snacks, etc.
This isn't even slightly about exchanging information through words and anyone
who thinks it is must be severely dim-witted.
But both Dave and Marcus are right. Yes, anything can be (partly) serialized
and fed to the machine. And yes, the streams are of different types and
parallelism matters. (cf https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11851)
The thing that concerns me most about the streams is the composition (of course ... I know, I
know). When humans "see" something, there are ... what? ... 6 layers of processing it
goes through? We can imagine a brain in a vat (without V1-V5), knead "visual stimulus"
into a stream and feed it directly in V5 language. Or we can encode 5D (3 space, 1 time, 1 color)
world scenes into a stream and feed it into an artificial retina. Those 2 setups are (must be) very
different. Human visual processing is *deeper*, *thicker* than LLM visual processing. Does that
matter? IDK.
On 8/26/25 10:21 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
Interacting with real people as if they were stochastic parrots is a time
honored conversational tradition.
-- rec --
On Tue, Aug 26, 2025 at 10:58 AM Prof David West <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
My take was different, and probably a result of previous
bias/opinions/readings.
Whether or not LLMs have an "interior" is mostly irrelevant. The problem
is that they have very limited, Turkle implies but one, channel for
communication—language.
Asserting that humans are limited to that channel does "devalue the richness
and complexity of the human," or at least the myriad and complex means humans use to
communicate.
Eric Charles—in a different venue— noted that: "opponents claim AI knows next
to nothing, proponents claim AI has Ph.D. level intelligence. Both are right."
davew
On Tue, Aug 26, 2025, at 11:02 AM, glen wrote:
> Sherry Turkle on AI, empathy, and the fight for human connection
> https://www.afterbabel.com/p/reclaiming-conversation-age-of-ai
<https://www.afterbabel.com/p/reclaiming-conversation-age-of-ai>
>
> My guess is some of you know Turkle personally. Anyway, I thought this
> was a good document. I *think* I reject her assertion that:
>
> "[transactional conversation|pretend empathy|info-only conversation] is
> a new form of behaviorism that devalues the richness and complexity of
> the human."
>
> That assertion seems to imply no interior to the LLMs (where humans
> have an interior). As I've argued here before, I am a behaviorist, just
> maybe not a simplistic one. Everything that goes on inside is encoded
> on our surface to some lossy extent. Similarly, the LLMs have an
> interior. Their sensitivity to prompts seems to push them slightly out
> of the category of pure simulus-response machines. And that's true for
> the ones I run locally on my own machine. Add in all the bells and
> whistles of the cloud LLMs who can search the web, write and run
> simulations, etc. and it seems too naive to claim the interactions are
> "flat" or "thin".
>
> Regardless, I'm on board with her primary gist. The bots are not
> *alive*. I don't go to the pub to learn about time crystals. It's some
> kind of category error to think inter-human conversation is solely, or
> at all, about information transfer.
>
--
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