[robwwilliams]

I disagree. Can we characterize the difference in thinking between a chimp and a human? In my opinion the genetic and biological differences are trivial. But evidently humans did evolve some secret sauce—language. Language bootstrapped human consciouness to what we now call self-consciousness; to a higher level than in any other vertebrate over a period of a few million years and without the benefit of teams of world-class thinkers and programmers.

I have optimism with reason. Humans are fancy thinking animals. I admit I think the “hard problem” in consciousness research is bogus.

[imiric]

> Can we characterize the difference in thinking between a chimp and a human?

We can, but the difference is not in whether we think or not, but in _how_ we think. We both experience the world through our senses and have conceptual representations of it in our minds. While other primates haven't invented complex written language (yet), they do have the ability to communicate ideas vocally and using symbols.

Machines do none of this. Again, they simply output tokens based on pattern matching. If those tokens are not in their training or prompt data, their output is useless. They have no conceptual grasp of anything they output. This process is a neat mathematical trick, but to describe it as "thinking" or "reasoning" is delusional.

How you don't see or won't acknowledge this fundamental difference is beyond me.

[robwwilliams]

We define basic words differently. Yes, some chimps do have theory of mind. But to be equally aggressive in questioning you: how do you not see qualitative difference between us and chimpanzees?

And how do you not see the amazing progress in LLM output? And how do you not see how close LLMs with “chain-of-thought” has gotten to the “appearance” of thinking. And how is it that I not clear enough for you in my first post in highlighting explicitly that LLMs are not yet thinking?

Do not use me as your straw chimp unthinking human.