Michael Levin

The sorting is what we're forcing it to do.

And my only point is, if the bubble sort, which has been gone over and gone over how many times, has these kinds of things that we didn't see coming, what about the AIs, the language model, everything else?

Not because they talk, not because they say that they have an inner perspective or any of that, but just from the fact that this thing is even the most minimal system surprises with what happens.

And I frankly, when I see this,

Tell me if this doesn't sound like all of our existential story.

For the brief time that we're here, the universe is going to grind us into dust eventually.

But until then, we get to do some cool stuff that is intrinsically motivating to us, that is neither forbidden by the laws of physics nor determined by the laws of physics.

But eventually, it kind of comes to an end.

So I think that aspect of it, right, that...

There are spaces, even in algorithms, there are spaces in which you can do other new things, not just random stuff, not just complex stuff, but things that are easily recognizable to a behavior scientist.

You see, that's the point here.

And I think that kind of intrinsic motivation is what's telling us that this idea that we can carve up the world, we can say, okay, look, biology is complex.

Cognition, who knows what's responsible for that?

But at least we can take a chunk of the world aside and we can cut it off and we can say, these are the dumb machines.

These are just these algorithms.

Whereas we know the rules of biochemistry don't explain everything we want to know about how psychology is going to go.

but at least the rules of algorithms tell us exactly what the machines are going to do, right?

We have some hope that we've carved off a little part of the world and everything is nice and simple and it is exactly what we said it was going to be.

I think that failed.

I think it was a good try.