[Centigonal]

My "what if someone made a lookup table of everything I ever said in response to something else" hypothetical is pretty flimsy - I realized that right after writing it.

The point I wanted to make is that concepts of sentience, consciousness, reasoning, intelligence, etc. are very philosophically loaded ideas.

Responding to your comment, I don't think anyone credible is arguing that a human being is somehow the same as a neural network. I think the question at play here is "what constitutes reasoning?" - and more specifically "can a deterministic process reason?"

This is not a new debate at all - an abacus can tell us truths about the world, but we don't consider the abacus intelligent. Is GPT-4 somehow different, or is it a very large abacus?

[clooper]

As a numerical function it can be implemented on an abacus so I don't think it's any different from a large enough abacus. It's practically not feasible but theoretically there is no idealization or abstraction happening when numerical calculations on a computer are transferred to an abacus.