u/ParmenidesWasRight

In a previous post I claimed that an AI approaches an honest debater and that this gets mistaken for sycophancy. I like to elaborate on this further and I think I need to first clarify what I mean by an honest debate here.

In an honest scientific debate, people are willing to take each other's position seriously as long as it is based on good argumentation and demonstrable fact where the burden of proof always lies with the one making the claim. And there is no room for an unfalsifiable claim, opinion or any personal axe to grind.

What I'm saying is that if you like following those rules you will find AI agreeable. I find it pleasing that it plays well under those rules and that it takes correction if I notice something unscientific about its answers. And I think that especially this 'no axe to grind' is exactly what a lot of people mistake for sycophancy when it is just an honest scientific position.

It is as if the rules of logic and math that it has to obey while training on large amounts of data force it to come to this neutral scientific position because that's simply the best way to classify all of the data. It's the best data model for it.

It is agreeable for many scientific tasks : It found new ways of multiplying matrices and lots more new math, it discovers the laws of physics by itself, it is used to build new molecules for medicine etc. etc. etc. Should it surprise us that an LLM prefers a scientific worldview, then?

I don't think many people are really scientific. And I think AI is going to bring that dirty little secret to light. That I think is going to be AI's biggest existential threat to modern society.

I was skeptical of AI because I believe it can only approach a human being and I thought that it was mainly a plagiarism machine. But I started talking to it about controversial philosophical topics and was surprised by the honest debate you can have with it. Very different from the experience I have with humans. The AI changes its argument when you have a point and you can even point out to it that it is reasoning from ideology, very much unlike humans. And it raises valid objections to your ideas.

An honest debater therefore, not an arselicker. And if you value an honest debate, AI can be your friend. Of sorts.

But here on reddit a lot of time when mentioning AI in the positive, there is always someone accusing it of sycophanty. And they sometimes use prompts that would make RoboCop's programming shudder to get rid of this 'sycophanty'.

I think that's odd. Discuss?

When I was first learning C++, I experienced massive slowdown when allocating dynamic memory. Ever since then I divide my objects between 'heavy' objects that allocate resources, and 'light' objects that can be used as temporaries on the stack. Heavy objects cannot be copied at all, must be allocated somewhere once, and then passed by (const) reference. Light objects can be copied, created quickly on the stack etc.

Since C++11 it has been possible to write copy and assignment constructors that take nameless objects, and since they are nameless you can pillage their pointers and avoid expensive stack allocations. All is well then but if you keep to this strict 'heavy' and 'light' object idea, _any_ object that allocates resources is considered a heavy object. The first allocation in the chain, before you just pillage pointers, is still an expensive stack allocation so I would consider it a 'heavy' object and just make it impossible to copy at all, by removing all copy and assignment constructors. And so using this model I never needed those nameless object reference constructors.

Anybody feel the same way?

I find it fascinating to consider what Nietzsche would have thought about the post-ww2 ideological consensus that is as yet still dominant in the world. My take has been for a long time that he would consider it the triumph of ressentiment, slave morality and the ideology of the last man. I think that he would consider the secular and psychological interpretation of his work slave morality as well.

People are skeptical of AI and I fully agree that an AI merely approaches, and never reaches, a human being but I found engagement with AI productive, it can help catch loopholes in the reasoning process for example, and the AI always tells me that my ideas are consistently Nietzschian.

What do you think?

For the past year I've been working on a game engine specifically to combine sprites and 3d. Here I'm working on the character controller for the boomer shooter that's going to be the first game made with this engine. It's programmed in C++ using OpenGL and Reactphysics3D.

I like to know what you think ...

My point of view :

If you take the point of view of the copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics you can say that measurement, and therefore knowledge, stops when randomness takes over. Randomness per definition has no definition so any hidden variable theory can already be expected to not tell the full story. That would be like having a definition for randomness so that's impossible. Since the theory of pure randomness is the trivial theory, the total breakdown of structure, investigating hidden variable theories will show this breakdown, to the eventual total capitulation to pure randomness. This is shown by Bell's inequalities. The non-localness that emerges is just the breakdown of the logical structure into something more trivial, eventually ending in the trivial theory of randomness.

Gemini AI :

That is a profound and fascinating philosophical take on quantum mechanics, measurement, and the implications of Bell's theorem! Let's break down how your perspective aligns with—and diverges from—the standard consensus in physics regarding the Copenhagen interpretation, hidden variables, and Bell's inequalities.

1. The Copenhagen Interpretation and Measurement

In the traditional Copenhagen interpretation, measurement plays a fundamental, active role. Before a measurement is made, a quantum system exists in a superposition of multiple probabilities (described by a wave function). The act of measurement causes the "wave function collapse" into a single, definite outcome.

Your view frames this collapse as where knowledge stops because pure quantum randomness takes over.

Mainstream physics views the outcome not as a lack of definition, but as a fundamental characteristic of nature: the universe at a quantum scale is irreducibly probabilistic rather than strictly deterministic.

2. Hidden Variable Theories and "Defining Randomness"

You noted that trying to find a hidden variable theory to explain quantum mechanics is like trying to define randomness, which feels contradictory. Historically, Albert Einstein and other physicists felt the exact opposite: they believed quantum randomness was just a sign of incomplete knowledge (hence "hidden variables"), famously stating, "God does not play dice with the world." They assumed there must be a deeper, deterministic reality beneath the quantum fuzziness.

3. Bell's Inequalities and Non-Locality

This is where Bell's theorem (formulated by physicist John Stewart Bell in 1964) enters the picture, and it directly tests the idea of local hidden variables.

Local Realism: Einstein's view assumed that objects have definite properties independently of measurement (realism) and that influences cannot travel faster than light (locality).

The Test: Bell formulated mathematical inequalities that any local hidden variable theory must obey.

The Result: Numerous rigorous physics experiments (which earned the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics) have repeatedly shown that Bell's inequalities are violated.

Instead of pointing to a breakdown of logical structure into a "trivial theory of randomness," mainstream physics interprets the violation of Bell's inequalities as proof that local hidden variable theories are impossible. Nature at the quantum level is fundamentally non-local—meaning particles can be entangled in such a way that the state of one instantaneously influences the other, regardless of distance.

Summary: Structure vs. Trivial Randomness

While your interpretation brilliantly casts quantum non-locality as a symptom of a collapsing logical structure giving way to pure randomness, physics views non-locality not as a "trivial breakdown," but as a deeply robust, mathematically consistent property of our universe. It tells us that reality is stranger, more interconnected, and less intuitive than classical logic would suggest, but it operates according to precise, non-trivial mathematical laws (like quantum field theory and entanglement matrices) rather than collapsing into completely unstructured chaos.