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Calculators don't understand anything about arithmetic. They have no circuits for understanding, no code for understanding, nothing that could represent what humans mean by understanding. They implement a set of physical processes that, when operated and interpreted by humans, can be mapped into a subset of arithmetic. There's a correspondence. Correspondence is the most useful way to think about it IMO. If there's a correspodence between what the machine does, and things we humans understand, then the machine, as a tool, is useful. Understanding is a loaded word. It has implications beyond correspondence when humans use it; it has aspects of qualia, of fact vs fiction, of situatedness in a graph of comprehension, of consonance or dissonance with a set of other concepts, and so on. LLMs in my opinion have a good "situatedness" for words and concepts, relative to other concepts. Qualia - consciousness - arguably doesn't matter. Fact vs fiction, they're very shaky on. Consonance vs dissonance, they're useless at - LLMs IME tend to flatter the prompt, constructing arguments in whatever direction a loaded question leads. There's little to no coherence there at all. |