I hate how much I’m reflexively trying to find a "but" here, because "carbon nanrcissist" is a hell of an insult. It’s hard to swallow that we’re just first gen firmware being ported to better hardware, and my gut still wants to scream that there's a qualitative difference between a synaptic firing and a logic gate. But honestly, if I saw a person and an LLM output the exact same breakthrough, I’d call the human a visionary and the machine a statistical fluke, and I can't actually point to a mathematical reason why other than the fact that I’m made of meat and I want to feel special. We’re basically just the computers of 1935. But I disagree that my soul might is just high dimensional data compression that haven't been optimized yet

> We grant the human a “soul” because we cannot see the trillions of calculations happening in the dark of the skull. We deny the machine a soul simply because we can see the code. We are like children who think a puppet is alive until they see the strings, failing to see how we are just products of the strings of evolution.

Much like children grow up to understand that puppets aren't alive, we'll grow up to understand that LLMs aren't alive.

> ethics boards will strictly prohibit a scientist from testing or manipulating a petri dish of human neurons under certain painful or destructive conditions because of the “sanctity” of the biological material.

This doesn't seem to be true. The closest thing I've found is this paper that suggests maybe eventually we should consider discussing the ethical implications of playing with cerebral organoids: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-quarterly-...

Consciousness & souls are defined by feelings.

Feelings need chemicals - dopamine, seratonin, oxytocin.

Our meat substrate has these, silcon doesn't.

While mirrors, TVs, Tiktoks, LLMs can evoke emotions in us, that's not sufficent to assign feelings, consciousness or souls to that substrate.

We must have been thinking the same thoughts over the past few days, I posted mine a few hours ago also. Your blog post went a different direction to mine but I went through all these same thoughts while writing it.