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Comment by adlpz | Hacker News Reader

It is meaningless to me because the term is imprecise. Is it precise when I do something bone headed and say "sorry I wasn't thinking"? Do cats think? Do worms?

Depends on what you mean by thinking in that particular case.

In my opinion what LLMs do is close enough to thinking for some definition of the word.

And, by the way, I think there's no need to be unpleasant to state your point.

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There's a difference between a term being imprecise and being equivocal. Yeah, we use the term "think" in different ways. But it primarily refers to the operations unique to the human intellect with which we're all familiar.. deduction, analysis, synthesis, judgment, deliberation, abstraction, etc.

The thing that's special about these operations is that they deal with immaterial concepts. What's right? What's good? What's true? And so on. Computers have never achieved this and they never will, because they are only material arrangements, and so can only handle things on the material level. The human mind is clearly not reducible to that, because it can handle purely immaterial concepts.

I see where we differ in opinion. I do believe that the human mind is just a very particular material arrangement. Therefore while different in scale to an LLM and likely also differing in structure, I do think both systems are fundamentally in the same category.

Given that, we could never agree. But that's fine.

And by the way, I actually hope you're right.

Yes that is the key contention. I don't think that our minds are material, because if they were then we couldn't handle any immaterial concepts. Although obviously our brains are involved in the operation of the mind, they cannot be an exhaustive explanation of what the mind is, given that he mind is perfectly comfortable to leave the material world behind.

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