This blogpost was inspired by a short discussion with @brandon:
mstdn.social/@brandon@ioc.dev/…

I want to be clear that it's not meant to be a subtoot, and I don't think he makes that preposterous argument himself!

It's just that that particular conversation dislodged something in my brain and helped me understand a thing about the "ChatGPT can think" discourse.

I think you're kind of relying on the assumption that “not being able to clearly delineate X” is the same as “having no usable concept of X”. It isn't.

The problem with the concept of “thinking” is that it often hides essentionalist thinking about human mind. “Thinking” is whatever cognitive function we can't replicate in a machine, because it's precisely what only “real minds” can do.

There was a time when calculating moves when playing chess was thought of as thinking. Well, really, it kind of still is! When I'm teaching children to play chess, I encourage them to analyze the situation, look for possible moves and try to plan a few moves ahead, and I definitely unequivocally conceptualize this process as *thinking* about the next move.

Since computers started doing it, though, we dismiss it as purely computational.

So it's kind of a dialectic: every time computers' cognitive ability improves somewhat, it can be claimed that it now moves into the area of “thinking” — and at the same time the claim can be instantly dismissed. Because it's not that there's a threshold where cognitive ability emerges as “real thinking” — the threshold is a moving goalpost. It's always the thing beyond what computers can do.

@fool yeah, "gablergh" is just a stand-in for "under-defined, difficult to delineate term like think". I might re-write that blogpost a bit.

Basically, once you get below the separator, it should become clear what's going on.

@fool This seems to be a lexical discussion. So here is the definition of "thinking - using thought or rational judgment; intelligent."

To me, any annotation on whether an #ai "thinks" or is "intelligent" is again lexical. We all understand that electrical signals stored in a computational matrix perform actions. (Oh wait, that's the human mind...)

@fool The point is, humans have been trying to wrestle with any #intelligence similar to our own since before we realized dolphins and whales have complex societies.

It poses a ton of #philosophical challenges and it's easier to write off other intelligences as though they "don't count" - but I think it's important to consider the reverse perspective and what it would be like to have an internal monologue and have another species never recognize your intelligence.

@tomw @fool Again, this is just a lexical distinction. What one chooses to call a machine thinking is secondary to the fact that at some point, an artificial general intelligence #agi will pass every #Touring test and walk around in a body indistinguishable from ours on the outside.

If we toss around terms like "fancy autocomplete engine" we really just kick the can down the road. AGI is not hokey science fiction anymore.

@brandon @fool No, what I am saying is that the AI sounds like it is thinking because it is trained on the text of basically the entire web, then selecting the most likely next word.

It may sound like it is thinking. It may say it is thinking. But we know that it isn't. We know, very precisely, that it is a set of numbers in n-dimensional space generated using all that existing human-written text.

@tomw @fool Here is a citation: gcrinstitute.org/papers/055_ag…

"While most AI research and development (R&D) deals with narrow AI, not AGI, there is
some dedicated AGI R&D. If AGI is built, its impacts could be profound"

I'm not talking about "Clippy" from MS Word. Something simply parroting data back is also not part of this discussion.

Again, focusing on the lexical aspect is a distraction. Call it what you will, this is more than "squawk I am sentient"