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

[Jason Resch]

On Fri, Mar 24, 2023, 3:00 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Would anyone dare to give a definition of 'understanding'?
> Please cite what epistemologies you are using.  bill w
>

The difficulty is that "understanding" is adjacent to knowledge and
knowledge is adjacent to consciousness. All these are quite difficult to
define but I will attempt by best:

"Understanding" is knowledge concerning the relations or workings of
something.

"Consciousness" is possession of knowledge.

"Knowledge" is a true belief.

"Belief" I have great difficulty defining, but I would say it is a mind
state correlated with some proposition.

"Truth" is undefinable, as proved by Tarski.


I welcome any assistance or corrections to the above.

Jason



>
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 1:40 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 1:21 PM Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 2:12 AM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> But really the meaning of words are quite arbitrary and determined by
>>>> the people who use them. Thus the referential meanings of words evolve
>>>> and change over time and come to refer to different things
>>>
>>>
>>> I agree this is a reason for many human miscommunications, but the
>>> speaker understands his words to meaning *something* and the hearer
>>> understands those words to mean *something*.
>>>
>>> As a computational linguist, Bender is on our side.  She is obviously
>>> very excited about the progress these language models represent, but is
>>> reminding that the models do not actually understand words to mean anything
>>> whatsoever.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> What's her evidence of that?
>>
>> Jason
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