[ExI] i don't know about llms, but I am feeling the pain was: RE: Do LLMs feel pain?

[Adrian Tymes]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2026 at 1:39 PM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> Even if you read down to there, do you know what that equation is claiming?

Yes.  It is stated immediately above: "We define the pain direction as
the difference between the mean activations of the 5 pain categories
and the 5 control categories:".

> Do you know what all those variables are for?  Why don’t you know?  Because the authors didn’t define them.

It is obvious what those variables are.  Clearly:
* the term to the left of the equals sign is the "pain direction", the
thing being measured,
* the term between the equals sign and the minus sign is the mean
activations of the 5 pain categories (P is the set of pain categories,
|P| is 5 since there are 5 pain categories, and the whole thing is
"sum the activations of the categories then divide by the number of
categories to get the mean"), and
* the term to the right of the minus sign is the mean activations of
the 5 control categories (as for the pain categories, except working
with C, the set of control categories, which also has 5 categories).

I have not bothered to try it, but I suspect that just about any
public LLM, if given the paper and asked those questions, could
identify the variables even if they are not identified by name.