An AI agent making a frontend for a bot stopping tool in order to appease corporate drones.

It’s robots all the way down!

Turns out putting sawdust into our rice krispies made people stop buying our product.

Apparently they want the “rice premium”.

Buddy, Terraria and Binding of Isaac came out in 2011, they are closer to the 90s than they are to the present.

They’re retro games.

From what I understand, pain is generally defined as our neurons wasting energy.

If we assume the Free Energy Principle is fundamental, then updating information produces free energy, which is more intuitive to think of as wasted energy. Overfitted/overcomplicated beliefs take more energy more often to fix to be more accurate. So free energy is defined at complexity of belief minus accuracy of belief.

The brain over evolution has defined a very ingrained belief that “my pain sensors shouldn’t activate” so when your pain sensors activate it violates this belief.

Emotions are actually condensed representations of your bodily state and some of your mental state, and whether they are good or bad depends on if you can predict your emotions. For instance you feel fear because you are trying to predict your pain sensors will go off to reduce its pain, but you keep predicting it’ll happen when it hasn’t yet. It’s also why anger during a boxing fight could feel good and anger when you stub your toe does not, one was predictable the other a surprise.

Assuming all the links in the chain of theories are true, then current LLMs cannot feel pain or emotion. They care about prediction error and sometimes complexity during training, but during inference it doesn’t get any signal or consequence for delivering the wrong token. It has no internal state except for the context window, which is never surprising for the LLM. The attention layers literally guides the model for what is most expected from the text it’s handed.

Even if the LLM received a negative training signal during inference, acting wounded after pain is the expected response. A random sequence of gibberish would be more “painful” than any torture fantasy.

On top of all this, the Free Energy Principle works because on a cellular neuron level we are built to reduce wasted energy, free energy being one source of wasted energy. LLMs are built on matrix multiplication running through GPUs and neither are even aware of the energy wasted, nor the free energy produced from changing values.

I think a feeling machine is possible, but the foundation of neural networks right now don’t have the necessary components to drive any subjective sensation or emotion.