[nosianu]

> So any and all human communication is divination in your book?

Words from an AI are just words.

Words in a human brain have more or less (depending on the individual's experiences) "stuff" attached to them: From direct sensory inputs to complex networks of experiences and though. Human thought is mainly not based on words. Language is an add-on. (People without language - never learned, or sometimes temporarily disabled due to drugs, or permanently due to injury, transient or permanent aphasia - are still consciously thinking people.)

Words in a human brain are an expression of deeper structure in the brain.

Words from an AI have nothing behind them but word statistics, devoid of any real world, just words based on words.

Random example sentence: "The company needs to expand into a new country's market."

When an AI writes this, there is no real world meaning behind it whatsoever.

When a fresh out of college person writes this it's based on some shallow real world experience, and lots of hearsay.

When an experienced person actually having done such expansion in the past says it a huge network of their experience with people and impressions is behind it, a feeling for where the difficulties lie and what to expect IRL with a lot of real-world-experience based detail. When such a person expands on the original statement chances are highest that any follow-up statements will also represent real life quite well, because they are drawn not from text analysis, but from those deeper structures created by and during the process of the person actually performing and experiencing the task.

But the words can be exactly the same. Words from a human can be of the same (low) quality as that of an AI, if they just parrot something they read or heard somewhere, although even then the words will have more depth than the "zero" on AI words, because even the stupidest person has some degree of actual real life forming their neural network, and not solely analysis of other's texts.

[tempodox]

I can only agree with you. And I find it disturbing that every time someone points out what you just said, the counter argument is to reduce human experience and human consciousness to the shallowest possible interpretation so they can then say, “look, it's the same as what the machine does”.

[kenjackson]

I think it’s because the brain is simply a set of chemical and electrical interactions. I think some believe when we understand how the brain works it won’t be some “soulful” other worldly explanation. It will be some science based explanation that will seem very unsatisfying to some that think of us as more than complex machines. The human brain is different than LLMs, but I think we will eventually say “hey we can make a machine very similar”.

[tempodox]

It looks like you did exactly what I described in my parent comment, so it doesn't add anything of substance. Let's agree to disagree.

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

The logic is that you preemptively shut down dissenting opinions so any comments with dissenting opinions are necessarily not adding anything of substance. They made good points and you simply don't want to discuss them; that does not mean the other commenter did not add substance and nuance to the discussion.

[tempodox]

Nope. I understood the counterargument the first 513 times, there's no need to repeat it.

[kenjackson]

Why bring up the argument then?

[rdtsc]

The deconstruction trick is a bit like whataboutism. It sort of works on a shallow level but it's a cheap shot. You can say "this is just a collections of bites and matrix multiplications". If it's humans -- "it's just simple neurons firing and hormones". Even if it's some object: "what's the big deal, it's just bunch of molecules and atoms".

[ben_w]

> People without language - never learned, or sometimes temporarily disabled due to drugs, or permanently due to injury, transient or permanent aphasia - are still consciously thinking people.

There are 40 definitions of the word "consciousness".

For the definitions pertaining to inner world, nobody can tell if anyone besides themselves (regardless of if they speak or move) is conscious, and none of us can prove to anyone else the validity of our own claims to posess it.

When I dream, am I conscious in that moment, or do I create a memory that my consciousness replays when I wake?

> Words from an AI have nothing behind them but word statistics, devoid of any real world, just words based on words.

> […]

> When a fresh out of college person writes this it's based on some shallow real world experience, and lots of hearsay.

My required reading at school included "Dulce Et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen.

The horrors of being gassed during trench warfare were alien to us in the peaceful south coast of the UK in 1999/2000.

AI are limited, but what you're describing here is the "book learning" vs. "street smart" dichotomoy rather than their actual weaknesses.

[BlueTemplar]

> Human thought is mainly not based on words. Language is an add-on.

What does 'mainly' mean here ?

Language is so very human-specific that human newborns already have the structures for it, while non-human newborns do not.