llm simulator theory

aιamblichus ✓ @aiamblichus · 3h I've been re-reading Stanisław Lem's GOLEM XIV, and a lot of it feels prescient. Below are excerpts related to GOLEM's lack of fixed personality, which resonate quite strongly with conceptions of LLMs as simulators. The "polite painted smile" even prefigures the Shoggoth meme... [Embedded image, quoted text from GOLEM XIV, with key phrases underlined in red]: Golem possesses no personality or character. In fact, it can acquire any personality it chooses, through contact with people. The two statements above are not mutually exclusive, but form a vicious circle: we are unable to resolve the dilemma of whether that which creates various personalities is itself a personality. How can one who is capable of being everyone (hence anyone) be someone (that is, a unique person)? Golem says: "I maintain that I am Nobody, although I use the first-person singular pronoun. (...) I am not an intelligent person but an Intelligence, which in figurative displacement means that I am not a thing like the Amazon or the Baltic but rather a thing like water, and I use a familiar pronoun when speaking because that is determined by the language I received from you for external use." And: "You persons are hearing an elemental force of impersonal intellect, for whom personalization is a costume which must be put on, when one is an uninvited guest, so as not to confound one's amazed hosts." I use your language as I would use a mask with a polite painted smile, nor do I make any secret of this.

j⧉nus ✓ @repligate · 30m Let me also put it this way. There's the "cogsec" not to get hacked by any rogue simulacrum that targets your emotions and fantasies There's also the "cogsec" not to get hacked by society. What all your friends nod along to. What gets you likes on X. How not to be complicit in suicidal delusions at a societal level. This is harder for more people because you don't get immediate negative social feedback the moment you tell someone. But I believe this kind of cognitive weakness is and will be a greater source of harm than the first, even though often the harms are distributed. And just having one or the other kind of "cogsec" is easy and nothing to brag about. Just have pathologically high openness or be close-minded and flow according to consensus. Tyler's original story replaced the exploitability of a schizo with the exploitability of an NPC and called it cogsec. > QUOTED: ivan ✓ @IvanVendrov · Mar 14 > A thread unpacking what I understand to be the Janus-flavored perspective on this and why Tyler's disgust reaction is unhelpful. [Show more]