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Comment by famouswaffles | Hacker News Reader

I didn't say anything about reasoning no differently.

Suppose you have 2 equations. You don't know what these equations are. However, you know that for any input, the output is the same.

Any mathematician worth his salt will tell you that given said information, those 2 equations are equal or equivalent. It doesn't actually matter what those equations are.

Equation 1 could be say a+b and Equation 2 could be (a-5) + (b-5) + 10

Or more realistically, both equations could look vastly different.

The point I'm driving home here is that true distinction reveals itself in results.

The fallacy of the philosophical zombie is that there is this supposed important distinction between "true understanding" and "fake/mimicry/whatever understanding" and yet you can't actually test for it. You can't show this supposed huge difference. A distinction that can't be tested for is not a distinction.

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This analogy does not make sense to me. We do not have equivalence between all of the infinite inputs and outputs here, we have equivalence in a finite number of cases and known cases where the two functions (human output and llm output) diverge drastically. Any mathematician worth their salt would tell you these functions are definitely not equal.

Now you could make the argument that these functions are close enough most of the time so it won't matter but unless you want to get really rigorous that's more of a stats / engineering perceptive not mathematics. Any more importantly that's very up for debate, especially in a high pressure situation like medicine.

Of course these models are wild and I'm quite impressed with them. I still can be worried about the damage someone who doesn't think things through could cause by assuming GPT-4 has human or super human level intelligence in a niche, high impact field.

The equation example was simply an illustration.

The point I'm making is that I can quite clearly show output that demonstrates reasoning and understanding by any actual metric. That's not the problem. The problem is that when I do, the argument Quickly shifts to "it's not real understanding!". That is what is nonsensical here. It's actually nonsensical whatever domain you want to think about it in.

Either your dog fetches what you throw at it or it doesn't. The idea of "pretend fetching" as any meaningful distinction is incredibly silly and makes no sense.

If you want to tell me there's a special distinction cool but when you can't show me what that distinction is, how to test for it, the qualitative or quantitative differences then I'm going to throw your argument away because it's not a valid one. It's just an arbitrary line drawn on sand.

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