Here's a quote from one of those links:

"Of course, it reinforces the idea that human creativity and so forth come from the brain's hardware. There is nothing else than the brain's hardware, which is neural nets. But one thing that has completely surprised me is that these LLMs and other systems like them are all feed-forward. It's like the firing of the neurons is going only in one direction. And I would never have thought that deep thinking could come out of a network that only goes in one direction, out of firing neurons in only one direction. And that doesn't make sense to me, but that just shows that I'm naive.

It also makes me feel that maybe the human mind is not so mysterious and complex and impenetrably complex as I imagined it was when I was writing Gödel, Escher, Bach and writing I Am a Strange Loop. I felt at those times, quite a number of years ago, that as I say, we were very far away from reaching anything computational that could possibly rival us. It was getting more fluid, but I didn't think it was going to happen, you know, within a very short time."

The guy literally flipped bro. He literally just admitted what he wrote in his books are wrong. The books may not be wrong but he believes it now. Degrading hundreds of pages of his own writing and his own core beliefs is a display of incredible rationality, scientific thinking and lack of bias.

You seem to be convinced I'm scared of something and in some sort of denial. However, I did say "I don't think there's anything especially magical or sacred about conscience and the human brain (or the brain of other animals, for that matter), and I'm sure it must be possible to arrive at different forms of intelligence starting with the "inanimate" building blocks of hardware and software". I just don't see that in LLMs, or at least not in the ChatGPT version I've interacted with.

I very much respect Hofstadter and the fact that he changed his opinion on GPT (I'm based on what you're saying, I have not read the links you provided yet). I'm not sure that means he changed his core beliefs though, even if he said so. At least, my understanding and interpretation of his work is that we're not the only substrate that can develop "strange loops", and that this is not limited only to organic substrates/living beings. He may have changed his view in GPT, but if he was true to his words, he must have always been open to software being able to develop a being.

I very much think AGI is possible, but:

- I don't think it will happen through LLMs, or at least not through LLMs alone, and

- I don't think it will be human-like. In fact, I expect it will feel very alien to us, and we'll feel very alien to them too. Mostly because we're not brains in jars. We eat, sleep, get laid, feel pain, etc., and all of that feeds back into the loop to make us what we are.

I don't think you're scared but I do think you're in denial.

Read what he says. He literally says it's depressing to watch all his core beliefs get dismantled. I'm not making this up. These words came out of his mouth. Follow the links. This is not some minor realization he went through. His entire world view was changed and he's the one claiming this... Not me.

His books which I read are all about recursion and strange loops and he's shocked that LLMs are simply feed forward networks with zero feedback. He claims it debunks everything he wrote.

He has the most to lose in disbelieving what's happening with LLMs. But he's to rational to do what you or most people do. He has to accept the truth and basically admit to being utterly wrong.

Once you read the links you will not agree with him. That's the most likely behavior for most people. But think on this. He has the most to lose and he thinks the books he wrote is wrong while you think the books he wrote is right.

Given the context the conditions are ripe for him to be the most biased and you to be less so, but he believes the opposite against his own self interest. From this you know he's not biased. Most likely you are.

It has nothing to do with fear or dislike of agi. It's just common human bias no one is sure where this lunacy comes from.