[mensetmanusman]

It’s a reasonable axiom, because for many people understanding involves qualia. If you believe LLM have qualia, you also believe a very large Excel sheet with the right numbers has an experience of consciousness and feels pain or something where the document is closed.

[madsbuch]

As I wrote, I appreciate that the author wrote it out as they did. It might be reasonable in the context of the article. But fixing it as an axiom just makes the discussion boring (for me).

> If you believe LLM have qualia, you also believe a ...

You use the word believe twice here. I am actively not talking about beliefs.

I just realise, that the author indeed gave themselves an out:

> ... currently computers do not really understand words.

The author might believe that future computers can understand words. This is interesting. Questions being _what_ needs to be in order for them to understand? Could that be an emergent feature of current architectures? That would also contradict large parts of the article.