[grumbel]

See System Reply, the Chinese Room is a pseudo problem begging the question rooted in nothing more than human exceptionalism. If you start with the assumption that humans are the only thing in the universe able to "understand" (whatever that means), then of course the room can't understand (except for every reasonable definition of "understanding" it does).

[globnomulous]

It isn't a pseudo problem. In this case, it's a succinct statement of exactly the issue you're ignoring, namely the fact that great poets have minds and intentions that we understand. LLMs are language calculators. As I said elsewhere in this thread, if you don't already see the difference, nothing I say here is going to convince you otherwise.

[grumbel]

Define "intentions" and "understand" in a way that is testable. All you are doing here is employing intuition pumps without actually saying anything.

> LLMs are language calculators.

And humans are just chemical reactions. That's completely irrelevant to the topic, as both can still act as Universal Turing machine just the same.

[globnomulous]

And System Reply, too, ignores the central problem: the man in the room does not understand Chinese.

[grumbel]

That's only a "problem" if you assume human exceptionalism and begging the question. It's completely irrelevant to the actual problem. The human is just a cog in the machine, there is no reason to assume they would ever gain any understanding, as they are not the entity that is generating Chinese.

To make it a little easier to understand:

* go read about the x86 instruction

* take an .exe file

* manually execute it with pen&paper

Do you think you understand what the .exe does? Do you think understanding the .exe is required to execute it?

[globnomulous]

Just an aside while I think about what you wrote: John Watts' Blindsight and Echopraxia are phenomenal sci-fi novels that deal with these issues.