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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

It’s hard to be sure that anything has understanding beyond being able to be emit finely tuned responses though. It’s entirely plausible that humans differ from chatGPT only in that:

- we are more finely tuned

- and we have a wider variety of inputs that we can respond to and outputs by which we can respond

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Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. You are correct it is difficult to be sure what true understanding is. Philosophers have been debating this for longer than computer scientists.

We have so much muddled thought in our language.

Even adding "true" is not ideal as that implies there is "true understanding" and just plain old understanding that is a lesser form of true understanding.

Now we have gone and built large language models from all this muddled thought.

To me, chatGPT is filled with a new type of invisible super bug. Millions of them.

> It’s hard to be sure that anything has understanding beyond being able to be emit finely tuned responses though. It’s entirely plausible that humans differ from chatGPT only in that:

This is a non-response.

Unlike an algorithm, humans have the faculties of creativity, intelligence and sentience. Furthermore, we have the crucial traits of self-awareness and being able to have experiences. We humans do many, many things that cannot be reduced down to algorithmic or computable steps.

That's not a valid argument; it's just the kind of nice sounding chain of claims a biological LMM would regurgitate.

> We humans do many, many things that cannot be reduced down to algorithmic or computable steps.

What makes you think this is the case?

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