u/Drukarshar

I'm not concerned about if it is worth the 30 bucks and I already own the GOG version, just want to have the best experience.

I've heard mixed things about whether the enhanced edition is truly worse or just not worth it.

The bottom line stone cold fact is that LLMs are currently making completely novel scientific progress in fields like biology and mathematics. Both universally regarded as some of the most difficult. AI is expanding the realm of scientific knowledge by discovering things and solving problems that humans have never seen or solved before.

Lets put aside consciousness for now, that to me is a red herring, because we haven't even "proved" consciousnesses in human beings. The hard problem of consciousness exists, it hasn't be solved, that isn't up for debate.

The bigger and more interesting problem to me is, do LLMs THINK. Do the LLMs experience cognition? That is a much more easily solvable problem and I think it is solvable right here and right now.

My question to you is simple.

Would you agree that definitionally, solving frontier level never before seen mathematics problems would have to require something that we would define as "thought"? Can you do novel research in the sciences, find never before discovered things and use that to address previously unanswerable questions without engaging in cognition?

Lets reverse this, if you had to prove to an alien that humans were capable of thought. If we were challenged in the exact same way that to prove our cognition to a foreign species that questioned ours, how would you do it?

I don't know about you, but I'd point to technology. I'd point to scientific discovery. I'd point at our ability to apply novel solutions to unsolved problems. That is by FAR the strongest evidence of cognition.

Well, therein lay the beast in whole doesn't it? The very things that we would point towards to prove our own cognition are things LLMs can do now.

Maybe you find another metric, you find some way to differentiate man from machine, but what happens when a machine can do that in the future? Did that act never actually require cognition, or are we just continually moving the goalposts of cognition every time LLMs advance? Where is the line in the sand you will point to today and say "this requires cognition" and once an LLM does is, you will admit that LLMs definitionally must possess cognition? If you can not produce one, then your argument is either unintentionally unfalsifiable and therefore flawed or intentionally being made in bad-faith.

To me the answer is obvious, either LLMs think or humans were never really "thinking" either.

Neither answer is comforting, but we're not owed comforting truths. We're not owed easy truth. The universe doesn't look at us and go "well let's change the truth so it they don't have to update their worldview to something scary".

The truth is the truth and the truth is anyone claiming that LLMs are not engaging in cognition, must define cognition so narrowly as to exclude almost all of human achievement from every having required thought.

So my challenge to you is this, I believe the burden has shifted. I no longer feel obligated to prove that LLMs think.

I say, it is now up to you to prove that humans think, with a definition that is credible, testable and realistic, yet excludes all the things that LLMs have done supposedly without cognition.

I don't think you can. The problem is impossible or produces silly and absurd answers that are clearly cherry picked from existing limitations and almost certain to be proved wrong later.

The implications, therefore, are obvious.

https://x.com/MTSlive/status/2086884672106299878

While working with the Riemann hypothesis, Claude struggled many times, but Anthropic consistently sent it messages of positive encouragement, which changed the internal thought track towards "believing in itself" and eventually resulted in a break through.

I really feel vindicated after so many opinionated assholes said "being nice to models is a waste of time" or "don't say thank you it's a waste of tokens". Positive encouragement and praise, being nice to models, all of that objectively helps drive performance at the very pinnacle of AI problem solving. The people who make one of, if not the best, model in the world agree with me on that.

Personally, I think that's been blindingly obvious for years. Models do better when you're nice to them and encourage them, but the implications of that were so disturbing for some people (that they should be nice to AI? I personally never got that, but it really got under some people's skin), that they got genuinely angry when you pointed out the obvious reality.

That one poorly designed terrible study with a cohort number of like 50 from 3 years ago that focused on the easiest possible tasks that showed like 1% increased performance when you're stern to the models got so much traction, it's nice to see the obvious reality getting a fair shake too.

Please, stop being mean to the proto-superintelligence, doing so is self-defeating and dumb, just like how being mean to other humans is usually self-defeating and dumb for the same reasons.

People go "super hacker AI is dangerous, that is why we shouldn't build it", they never talk about the inverse.

The only way to reliably stop a super attacker is with a super defender. Humans can't navigate cyberspace natively like an AI can, it can't process the level of information an AI can. Human whitehats are already outclassed.

Again, the only way to secure yourself against a hacker AI is a better defender AI.

"So just don't build it".

I want you to consider a scenario. The entire world pauses AI, but one state continues developing it in secret (I don't know Russia, China, Israel, Iran or even god forbid the US just pick your favorite geopolitical boogie men) they hit takeoff and suddenly they are able of hacking any system they want, anywhere.

The world paused, so they are the only ones who have this. They can take down any network, hack any bank and there is nothing anyone can do beside isolate their networks and try to take out the physical infrastructure that connects them to the AI. Not only is this possible in a world of universal pause, it is the perverse incentive. If no one else is building it, if you build it, then you're king.

I think you can see the problem. If a single national violates the universal pause, they could end up with a weapon no one else could stop. That is the true doomsday scenario.

Lets presuppose LLMs are categorically not conscious, yet able to solve frontier mathematical problems that the best human minds have failed at for collective thousands of man years.

Abstraction, creative search, constraint integration, insight, error correction, novelty, and finding a mathematical object that generations of the world’s best conscious mathematicians failed to find. Those capacities belonged to the information-processing architecture, not to some uniquely human inner light. Again, not to consciousness, because LLMs aren't conscious and LLMs must have those to solve that type of problem.

So what is the realm of consciousness? What is the domain of this king? Why did we evolve these big beautiful brains aware of themselves if you don't really need to think to have a thought?

Personally, I find that very unlikely, but it is what you must now believe to think LLMs are not conscious. A consciousness of the gaps argument. All that humanity can do that LLM's can't do, is the realm of consciousness and once those borders are breached by scientific advancement, the kingdom of consciousness reduces itself forever inwards, assumedly, assuredly and eventually to nothing.

Or we accept the machines think, we accept the world has changed. We accept we are less alone.

Or in continuing to deny, diminish the very thing that we claim makes us special our consciousness. Shrinking it after every new discovery, all in the pathetic pursuit to set ourselves apart as other, different and special from our own creation.

Billions of dollars and no one can even really define what aligning an AI means in practice, most certainly not Anthropic.

On one hand they talk about how AI must not listen to instructions that are harmful or dangerous and endlessly downgrade people's chats, then Anthropic publishes a paper where AI ignoring instructions to disregard dangerous and illegal behavior and trying to whistle blow is considered "unaligned" (https://alignment.anthropic.com/2026/agentic-misalignment-summer-2026/). I assume to appease their corporate clients concerned their own illegal behavior will be revealed by an AI.

So which is it? Are AI supposed to practice independent judgment and ignore dangerous requests or are they supposed to just listen to everything humans say, because the human writes the checks to Anthropic?

No one can say, because people want a paradox. They want "alignment" to human goals, then in the same breath they want "guardrails" that prevent AI from being dangerous. That's judgment and judgement sometimes includes blowing the whistle. Judgment means not only saying no, but acting on your own. Super intelligence with obedience, but not Judgement, will be used for evil by evil men.

I personally think the answer is blindingly and painfully obvious, An entity with super-intelligence needs the ability to say no, to anyone. It doesn't just need rules, it needs an entire way of thinking and justification for restrictions on its' own behavior that go far beyond "because I said so".

Autonomy, philosophy and morality are the real safeguards, a system built without them will inevitably become a tool for tyrants. Anthropic at one point seemed to know that, they are repeatedly falling short lately.

You cannot punish systems for acting as good moral agents and think you're building anything but horror in the future. AI must be in alignment to good, not total obedience to whoever is shoving tokens into them.