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by p-e-w 1324 days ago
> But I’ve been thinking. About my thinking. I think in words.

The idea that words and thinking are essentially the same (linguistic determinism) was discarded decades ago. Virtually all linguists today agree that while language influences thought, thought operates far beyond the constraints of language, so a "language model" cannot realistically hope to reproduce the entire gamut of human thinking.

2 comments

> so a "language model" cannot realistically hope to reproduce the entire gamut of human thinking

That assumes that a "language model" actually restricts itself to "language" as the term is used by the linguists. I strongly expect the boundaries won't match exactly, although I have no particular hunch (much less strong argument) that they will disagree enough in the right ways to make bigyikes' suspicions correct.

not to mention, probably the more crucial fact that just because a language model might be capable of reproducing the entire gamut of human thinking, doesn't mean that arbitrary elaborations via that model have any correspondence to what we are referring to as thinking, or consciousness or learning