What is it like to be a neural net?

A condensed presentation of Gradland and Metabolic Fire. Code is here. This is intended as the first of two posts. Thomas Nagel argued we cannot know what it is like to be a bat, because a bat's experience is organised around biophysical apparatus we lack. The obstacle is that we cannot imagine the structure of echolocation from the inside. That is a failure of imagination; it is not an argument that structure is irrelevant. We know a lot about the structure of large language models. Not everyth...