this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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That is actually my point. I may not have made it clear in this thread, but my claim is not that our brains behave like LLMs, but that they are LLMs.
That is, our LLM research is not just emulating our mental processes, but showing us how they actually work.
Most people think there is something magic in our thinking, that mind is separate from brain, that thinking is, in effect, supernatural. I'm making the claim that LLMs are actual demonstrations that thinking is nothing more than the statistical rearrangement of that which has been ingested through our senses, our interactions with the world, and our experience of what has and has not worked.
Searles proposed a thought experiment called the "Chinese Room" in an attempt to discredit the idea that a machine could either think or understand. My contention is that our brains, being machines, are in fact just suitably sophisticated "Chinese Rooms".