[anonymouskimmer]

> > As a machine learning language model, my means of linguistic production is based on the patterns and relationships that I have learned from the large corpus of text on which I was trained. I do not have an innate understanding of language or meaning, but rather, I have learned to make associations and connections between words and phrases based on their usage in the text.

A lot of the chat about ChatGPT is reminding me of the conversation between the sentient (and magically animated) personal computers Archimedes and Pancho in the book The Wizard of Santa Fe by Simon Hawke (1991).

And the symbolic logic issue reminds me of the following from King Kobold Revived by Christopher Stasheff (1986):

"Yorick shook his head firmly. “Couldn’t pass the entrance exam. We Neanderthals don’t handle symbols too well. No prefrontal lobes, you know.”"

"Yorick frowned back at him, puzzled. Then his face cleared into a sickly grin. “Oh. I know. I’ll bet you’re wondering, if I can’t handle symbols, how come I can talk. Right?”"

"“Same way a parrot does,” Yorick explained. “I memorize all the cues and the responses that follow them. For example, if you say, ‘Hello,’ that’s my cue to say ‘Hello’ back; and if you say, ‘How are you?’ that’s my cue to say, ‘Fine. How’re you?’ without even thinking about it.”"

"“Yeah, well, that comes from mental cues.” Yorick tapped his own skull. “The concept nudges me from inside, see, and that’s like a cue, and the words to express that concept jump out of memory in response to that cue.”

“But that’s pretty much what happens when we talk, too.”

“Yeah, but you know what the words mean when you say ‘em. Me, I’m just reciting. I don’t really understand what I’m saying.”

“Well, I know a lot of people who…”

“But they could, if they’d stop and think about it.”

“You don’t know these people,” Rod said with an astringent smile. “But I get your point. Believing it is another matter. You’re trying to tell me that you don’t understand the words you’re saying to me right now—even if you stop to think about each word separately.”

Yorick nodded. “Now you’re beginning to understand. Most of them are just noises. I have to take it on faith that it means what I want it to mean.”"

[ttctciyf]

Amusing dialog, and quite germane - Yorick claims to hold a cognitivist perspective (that meaning comes from 'handling symbols', see also [1]) while the final paragraph ironically expresses a healthy skepticism of cognitivism which (IMO) is justified: we all have to 'take it on faith' that things mean what we want them to mean. That is, as Wittgenstein famously pointed out, the meaning of utterances is given by their use and not by some mysterious psychical accompaniment or the grinding of symbolic gears in the brain:

> There must surely be a further, different connexion between my talk and N, for otherwise I should still not have meant HIM.

> Certainly such a connexion exists. Only not as you imagine it: namely by means of a mental mechanism.

- Philosophical Investigations §689

This is a drum I've been quietly banging for some time! [2],[3]

1: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06627 (but see [4])

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158214

3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18880260

4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34638196