this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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But it's inherently impossible to "show" anything except inputs&outputs (including for a biological system).
What are you using the word "real" to mean, and is it aloof from the measurable behaviour of the system?
You seem to be using a mental model that there's
A: the measurable inputs & outputs of the system
B: the "real understanding", which is separate
How can you prove B exists if it's not measurable? You say there is an "onus" to do so. I don't agree that such an onus exists.
This is exactly the Chinese Room paper. 'Understand' is usually understood in a functionalist way.
But, ironically, the Chinese Room Argument you're bringing up supports what others are saying that LLMs do not 'understand' anything.
It seems to me like you are establishing 'understanding' with a functionalist meaning to be able to say that input/output is equivalent to understanding in order to say the measurable process in itself shows 'understanding'. But that's not what Searle, and seemingly the others here, seem to mean by 'understanding'. As Searle argues, it is not purely the syntactic manipulation in question but the semantic. In other words, these LLMs do not "know" the information they provide, they are just repeating based off the input/output process with which they were programmed. LLMs do not project or internalize any meaning to the input/output process. If they had some reflexive consciousness and any 'understanding', then they could have critically approach the meaning of the information in order to assess its validity against facts rather than just naïvely proclaiming that cockroaches got their name because they like to crawl into penises at night. Do you believe LLMs are conscious?
Because I've felt it, I've felt how understanding feels, because ultimately understanding is a conscious experience within a mind, you cannot define understanding without referencing conscious experience, you cannot possibly define it only in terms of behavior or function. So either you have to concede that every floating point multiplication in a digital chip "feels like something" at some level or you show what specific kind of floating point multiplication does.