[ExI] LLMs cannot be conscious

[William Flynn Wallace]

Dictionaries do not actually contain or know the meanings of words, and I
see no reason to think LLMs are any different.-gts

As John would say:  we have to have examples to really understand meaning,
 But the words we are talking about are abstractions without any clear
objective referent, so we and the AIs and the dictionary are reduced to
synonyms for 'meaning' and 'understanding' etc.  In science we use
operational definitions to try to solve this problem.  bill w


On Sun, Mar 19, 2023 at 1:05 AM Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Consider that LLMs are like dictionaries. A complete dictionary can give
> you the definition of any word, but that definition is in terms of other
> words in the same dictionary. If you want to understand  *meaning* of any
> word definition,  you must look up the definitions of each word in the
> definition, and then look up each of the words in those definitions, which
> leads to an infinite regress.
>
> Dictionaries do not actually contain or know the meanings of words, and I
> see no reason to think LLMs are any different.
>
> -gts
>
>
>
>
>  Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 3:39 AM Gordon Swobe <gordon.swobe at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I think those who think LLM  AIs like ChatGPT are becoming conscious or
>> sentient like humans fail to understand a very important point: these
>> software applications only predict language. They are very good at
>> predicting which word should come next in a sentence or question, but they
>> have no idea what the words mean. They do not and cannot understand what
>> the words refer to. In linguistic terms, they lack referents.
>>
>> Maybe you all already understand this, or maybe you have some reasons why
>> I am wrong.
>>
>> -gts
>>
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