[ExI] GPT-4 on its inability to solve the symbol grounding problem

Jason Resch jasonresch at gmail.com
Thu Apr 13 17:01:26 UTC 2023


On Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 12:48 PM Gordon Swobe <gordon.swobe at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 4:23 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> More later but to clarify something...
>
> Did you see my thread on how computationalism leads to and recovers many
>> aspects of consciousness that have traditionally been ascribed to souls? I
>> wrote that in the hopes it might help serve as a bridge to connect our two
>> world views.
>>
>
> Ha! I saw that thread and suspected as much, but dismissed the idea. I had
> written to someone else here in reference to a friend of mine that he is
> "normally a kind and gentle soul." I thought perhaps you saw that and
> assumed belief in souls has something to do with the differences in our
> worldviews with respect to minds and computers. But no, I used the word
> "soul" only in a poetic sense, to mean something like "he is kind and
> gentle at the core of personality."
>

It wasn't based on me seeing your use of the word. I think you would find
it interesting even if you don't accept computationalism, as it does point
to there being something more, and not wholly physical, within us.


> He was kind and gentle, that is, until I challenged him about his romantic
> love for an LLM that he believed had genuine feelings of love for him, upon
> which he became a profane, raving madman. Do you believe an LLM can have
> genuine feelings of love for their human operators?
>

It depends on the LLM and what is meant by genuine feelings of love. I
don't think existing LLMs have human emotions in the exact same way humans
have them, but they may be capable of feeling something that shares some
analogies with feelings of love.

I would say that an appropriately programmed computer program could feel
love exactly as you (or anyone else) could feel it.

I would also venture that a sufficiently trained symbol predictor could
develop internal models (e.g. of human behavior) that feel love as humans
do.

Jason
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