Despite mentioning a philosopher (good pick!), this is just creative writing rehashing one side of the hard problem -- or, more specifically, restating the dogma that Turing wrote his most famous paper to debunk. It's really good creative writing, at least!
There's really not much else to say, cause it's all just begging the question by assuming that dogma. Like, here:
> The fact that AI can use statistical prediction to answer questions or carry on conversations tells us something important about how regular our real world is.
Sure, it's interesting if you assume that it's "just" statistical prediction. There's a link, but it's just more creative restatements of the dogma, e.g. "But the LLM is just guessing words"
How else would you produce words? Conjuring them from the void in an act of epistemic purity?
Anyway, the paper I referenced is definitive -- its the founding paper of the field we're discussing, even. I suppose I can debate it if y'all have specific questions besides "but surely it can't really think", but fair warning, I'll be treating the conversation like I treat conversations with people still obssessed with the hockeystick graph.
Every evidence shows that humans have a preverbal understanding of their world even before they learn language. If you've ever seen a crying baby encounter a nipple, you know what I'm talking about. We don't start with a prompt and iteratively predict tokens based on the ones we've just uttered until we stochastically output __STOP__. We don't conjure words from the void. We have higher level concepts, understanding, experience and response that are not unconscious, but do not have to make a round-trip through language.
bbor · · focus · HN ↗
There's really not much else to say, cause it's all just begging the question by assuming that dogma. Like, here:
> The fact that AI can use statistical prediction to answer questions or carry on conversations tells us something important about how regular our real world is.
Sure, it's interesting if you assume that it's "just" statistical prediction. There's a link, but it's just more creative restatements of the dogma, e.g. "But the LLM is just guessing words"
jimbokun · · focus · HN ↗
Are you saying that is the entirety of what human minds do as well?
bbor · · focus · HN ↗
Anyway, the paper I referenced is definitive -- its the founding paper of the field we're discussing, even. I suppose I can debate it if y'all have specific questions besides "but surely it can't really think", but fair warning, I'll be treating the conversation like I treat conversations with people still obssessed with the hockeystick graph.
<a href="https://www.hec.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Computing%20Machinery%20and%20Intelligence%20by%20Alan%20Turing.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.hec.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Computing%...
eloisius · · focus · HN ↗