[ExI] Bender's Octopus (re: LLMs like ChatGPT)

[Jason Resch]

On Fri, Mar 24, 2023, 12:14 AM Gordon Swobe <gordon.swobe at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 9:37 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> There's no way to read this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712.pdf
>> and come away with the impression that GPT-4 has no idea what it is talking
>> about.
>>
>
> Hmm, nothing in the abstract even remotely suggests to me that GPT-4 will
> know word meanings any more than does GPT-3. Eventually AI on digital
> computers will far surpass human intelligence, but even then these
> computers will be manipulating the forms of words and not their meanings.
>

It seems to me that you have accepted Searle's arguments. I believe I can
knock down his Chinese room argument. If that is what you are using to base
your decision on you should know almost no philosophers or computer
scientists believe his argument holds water. Here's just one of the many
flaws in the argument: there's more than one mind in the room. Ask the room
about its favorite food, or about its experiences as a child. The answers
given will not be Searle's. Change Searle for someone else, the room will
respond the same way. Searle is an interchangeable cog in the machine. Yet
Searle wants us to believe only his opinion matters. In truth, his position
is no different than the "laws of physics" which "mindlessly" computes our
evolving brain state "without any understanding" of what goes on in our
heads. Searle's Chinese room argument works as any great magic trick does:
through misdirection. Ignore the claims made by the man in the room who is
shouting and waving his arms. Since we've established there are two minds
in the room, we can replace Searle with a mindless demon and there still
will be one mind left.



> Do you believe, like my friend who fell in love with a chatbot, that a
> software application can have genuine feelings of love for you?
>

I think we should defer such a debate until such time we can confidently
define what a "genuine feeling" is and how to implement one.

Jason

>
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