Sometimes, when I'm feeling especially sadistic, I make sure the matrix does not have full column rank.

how degenerate

For those who are persuaded by this "it's just matrices" argument, are you also persuaded by the argument that it does not matter how you treat a human being because a human being is just a complicated arrangement of atoms?

no.

we understand everything that a transformer does at computational/mechanistic level. you could print out an enormous book of weights/biases and somebody could sit down with a pen and paper (and near-infinite time/patience) and arrive at the exact same solution that any of these models do. the transformer is just a math problem.

but the counterargument that you're getting is "if you know the position/momentum of every atom in the universe and apply physical laws to them, you could claim that everything is 'just a math problem'". And... yeah. I guess you're right. Everything is just a math problem, so there must be some other thing that makes animal intelligence special or worthy of care.

I don't know what that line is, but i think it's pretty clear that LLMs are on the side that's "this is just math so dont worry about it"

We can’t reduce consciousness to a math problem. Maybe that’s the thing that differentiates unfeeling statistics from living beings.

I think intelligence and consciousness must be considered as different concepts .