I live in the deep south. It's hard to describe how cult-like it is right now. Trump supporters are definitely "deranged". The amount of anger they have over things that will never affect them is unhinged.
You're saying the discovery that humans can process language without being conscious "couldn't possibly" inform the debate about LLMs? When that debate is literal predicated on the assumption that the ability to process language implies consciousness?
This is a counter example to the fundamental assumption of that argument. Without that, you are left with something like "if we ignore their ability to to process language, do we have any reason to suppose that LLMs (as opposed to, say, a spread sheet or stats package) are conscious?"
Sorry to hear that someone rudely thinks that basic logic is "Nuts".
> When that debate is literal (sic) predicated on the assumption that the ability to process language implies consciousness?
This is an incoherent claim. Debates are between people with differing claims and often differing assumptions; they aren't "predicated" on some assumption or another--that's a category mistake.
Someone can easily argue that LLMs are conscious (or have qualia--that was the disputed claim, and they aren't the same thing) without the strong claim that the ability to process language entails consciousness ... perhaps it is the processing of language together with other features that they think indicates consciousness. For instance, George Lemoine and Richard Dawkins didn't base their judgments on consciousness on such an entailment, but rather on the specifics of what the LLMs said to them.
If LLMs did not process language as well as they do, we would not be having the argument.
The only reason we are having the argument at all is that people see LLMs responding appropriately to language, and _from_that_ conclude that LLMs may be conscious. You even sneak this in yourself when you say "George Lemoine and Richard Dawkins didn't base their judgments on consciousness on such an entailment, but rather on the specifics of what the LLMs said to them" -- in other words, they wouldn't have had judgements in the first place if the LLMs had not "said things to them".
Plausibility was never an argument against Searle's Chinese Room Argument ... that's a very deep confusion, since Searle was arguing against the possibility of Strong AI, whereas advocates of Strong AI of course thought it was plausible and that's why they were working to create it. That you conflate the Chinese Room Argument with "the Chinese Room" is one aspect of the confusion.
It’s absolutely about the plausibility of mechanistic intentionality, given the implausibility of intentionality where the person in the experiment doesn’t understand chinese
Searle's argument may well be about the plausibility of "mechanistic intentionalty", whatever exactly that means ("mechanistic" just sounds like bigotry to me ... we are all mechanisms and Searle didn't say otherwise, just that we are meat mechanisms and not purely syntactic mechanisms ... and his argument was intended as a logical proof, not just a plausibility argument), but that's not what the previous comments were about. Apparently you mechanistically see the word "plausibility" and think that any and all statements about it refer to the same thing.
There are arguments made specifically about the implausibility of such a room making the argument itself invalid. Or I guess I should say “we’re”, because that position is now much less tenable with LLMs.
"For [John Searle's] part, he has one argument, the Chinese Room, and he has been trotting it out, basically unchanged, for fifteen years. It has proven to be an amazingly popular number among the non-experts, in spite of the fact that just about everyone who knows anything about the field dismissed it long ago. It is full of well-concealed fallacies. By Searle’s own count, there are over a hundred published attacks on it. He can count them, but I guess he can’t read them, [...]"
Every significant argument has plenty of detractors, that doesn’t mean they’re right. Every argument I’ve heard to the contrary is unconvincing to me, and to the majority:
Mojo has both Python's def and its own fn -- two different flavors of functions. That alone isn't "cleaner". fn is there for high performance -- it's like Rust added to Python. Mojo is still missing Python functionality because it's early in development, so by that measure it's also not a "cleaner Python" ... and the parts that will never be added are because of performance, not cleanliness. Mojo has never been advertised as a cleaner Python so I don't know what vibes you're going on.
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." -- Edsger Dijkstra
It's bizarre that someone would think that it's dumb to say "goto considered harmful" because "all assembly language depends on it" ... Dunning-Kruger effect, anyone? People only write in assembler when it's strictly necessary for many good reasons, its lack of structure being one of them. When Dijkstra wrote that, FORTRAN--the major language for scientific programming in the U.S.--had no structured constructs ... `if` statements had a value and 3 numbered branch labels, for value < 0, value = 0, and value > 0. Dijkstra's paper resulted in an explosion of experiments in structured programming, and a huge improvement in programming languages and programmer tools.
Likewise out of context are the complaints about Dijkstra's statement about BASIC ... while it was hyperbole, it wasn't all that far off at the time, when BASIC variables were a single letter, all global, all statements were numbered, there was no structure, not even named functions.
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