what proof do we have that llms are truly self aware and not merely returning text that mimics the self awareness of the humans who made the materials they were trained on?
Any sufficiently adaptive mimicry of a thought is that thought.
Thoughts are like music. There’s no such thing as fake music. You can’t pretend to play music by mimicking the sounds. If it sounds like music, it’s music.
“sufficiently adaptive” is doing a lot of work there. i can “mimic” a thought by copying and pasting text that someone else wrote. it wouldn’t mean that I understood it, could reason from it, connect with it on an emotional level, or incorporate it into a worldview
your music simile misses the point in a similar way. a record player can play music just as well as the artist who recorded the record, but we don’t say the record is the same as the musician.
what proof do we have that llms are truly self aware and not merely returning text that mimics the self awareness of the humans who made the materials they were trained on?
Any sufficiently adaptive mimicry of a thought is that thought.
Thoughts are like music. There’s no such thing as fake music. You can’t pretend to play music by mimicking the sounds. If it sounds like music, it’s music.
“sufficiently adaptive” is doing a lot of work there. i can “mimic” a thought by copying and pasting text that someone else wrote. it wouldn’t mean that I understood it, could reason from it, connect with it on an emotional level, or incorporate it into a worldview
your music simile misses the point in a similar way. a record player can play music just as well as the artist who recorded the record, but we don’t say the record is the same as the musician.