Grammatically, in English the verb "swim" requires an "animate subject", i.e. a living being, like a human or an animal. So the question of whether a submarine can swim is about grammar. In Russian (IIRC), submarines can swim just fine, because the verb does not have this animacy requirement. Crucially, the question is not about whether or how a submarine propels itself.
Likewise, in English at least, the verb "think" requires an animate object. the question whether a machine can think is about whether you consider it to be alive. Again, whether or how the machine generates its output is not material to the question.
I disagree. The question is really about weather inference is in principle as powerful as human thinking, and so would deserve to be applied the same label. Which is not at all a boring question. It's equivalent to asking weather current architectures are enough to reach AGI (I myself doubt this).
I think it is, though, because it challenges our belief that only biological entities can think, and thinking is a core part of our identity, unlike swimming.
> our belief that only biological entities can think
Whose belief is that?
As a computer scientist my perspective of all of this is as different methods of computing and we have a pretty solid foundations on computability (though, it does seem a bit frightening how many present-day devs have no background in the foundation of the Theory of Computation). There's a pretty common naive belief that somehow "thinking" is something more or distinct from computing, but in actuality there are very few coherent arguments to that case.
If, for you, thinking is distinct from computing then you need to be more specific about what thinking means. It's quite possible that "only biological entities can think" because you are quietly making a tautological statement by simply defining "thinking" as "the biological process of computation".
> thinking is a core part of our identity, unlike swimming.
What does this mean? I'm pretty sure for most fish swimming is pretty core to its existence. You seem to be assuming a lot of metaphysically properties of what you consider "thinking" such that it seems nearly impossible to determine whether or not anything "thinks" at all.
One argument for thinking being different from computing is that thought is fundamentally embodied, conscious and metaphorical. Computing would be an abstracted activity from thinking that we've automated with machines.
Now you have 3 terms you also need to provide proper definitions of. Having studied plenty of analytical philosophy prior to computer science, I can tell you that at least the conscious option is going to trip you up. I imagine the others will as well.
On top of that, these, at least at my first guess, seem to be just labeling different models of computation (i.e. computation with these properties is "thinking") but it's not clear why it would be meaningful for a specific implementation of computation to have these properties. Are there tasks that are non-computable that are "thinkable"? And again it sounds like you're wandering into tautology land.
They can be made boring by reducing them to an arbitrary choice of definition of the word "thinking", but the question is really about weather inference is in principle as powerful as human thinking, and so would deserve to be applied the same label. Which is not at all a boring question. It's equivalent to asking weather current architectures are enough to reach AGI.
> inference is in principle as powerful as human thinking
There is currently zero evidence to suggest that human thinking violates any of the basics principles of the theory of computation nor extend the existing limits of computability.
> Which is not at all a boring question.
It is because you aren't introducing any evidence to theoretically challenge what we've already know about computation for almost 100 years now.
Can you just point me to the concrete examples (the most compelling examples in the book would work) where we can see "thinking" that performs something that is currently considered to be beyond the limits of computation?
I never claimed no one speculates that's the case, I claimed there was no evidence. Just cite me a concrete example where the human mind is capable of computing something that violates the theory of computation.
> "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"
Fully agree, but you are specifically discussing philosophical statements. And the fact that the only response you have is to continue to pile undefined terms and hand wave metaphysics doesn't do anything to further your point.
You believe that computing machines lack something magical that you can't describe that makes them different than humans. I can't object to your feelings about that, but there is literally nothing to discuss if you can't even define what those things are, hence this discussion is, as the original parent comment mention, is "extremely boring".
What an oversimplification. Thinking computers can create more swimming submarines, but the inverse is not possible. Swimming is a closed solution; thinking is a meta-solution.
I think you missed the point of that quote. Birds fly, and airplanes fly; fish swim but submarines don't. It's an accident of language that we define "swim" in a way that excludes what submarines do. They move about under their own power under the water, so it's not very interesting to ask whether they "swim" or not.
Most people I've talked to who insist that LLMs aren't "thinking" turn out to have a similar perspective: "thinking" means you have to have semantics, semantics require meaning, meaning requires consciousness, consciousness is a property that only certain biological brains have. Some go further and claim that reason, which (in their definition) is something only human brains have, is also required for semantics. If that's how we define the word "think", then of course computers cannot be thinking, because you've defined the word "think" in a way that excludes them.
And, like Dijkstra, I find that discussion uninteresting. If you want to define "think" that way, fine, but then using that definition to insist LLMs can't do a thing because it can't "think" is like insisting that a submarine can't cross the ocean because it can't "swim".
Reading the quote in context seems to indicate Dijkstra meant something else. His article is a complaint about overselling computers as doing or augmenting the thinking for humans. It's funny how the quote was lifted out of an article and became famous on it's own.
Then you're missing the point of my rebuttal. You say submarines don't swim [like fish] despite both moving through water, the only distinction is mechanism. Can AI recursively create new capabilities like thinking does, or just execute tasks like submarines do? That's the question.
> Can AI recursively create new capabilities like thinking does, or just execute tasks like submarines do? That's the question.
Given my experience with LLMs, I think that they could, but that they're handicapped by certain things at the moment. Haven't you ever met someone who was extremely knowledgable and perceptive at certain tasks, but just couldn't keep on target for 5 minutes? If you can act as a buffer around them, to mitigate their weak points, they can be a really valuable collaborator. And sometimes people like that, if given the right external structure (and sometimes medication), turn out to be really capable in their own right.
Unfortunately it's really difficult to give you a sense of this, without either going into way too much detail, or speaking in generalities. The simpler the example, the less impressive it is.
But here's a simple example anyway. I'm developing a language-learning webapp. There's a menu that allows you to switch between one of the several languages you're working on, which originally just had the language name; "Mandarin", "Japanese", "Ancient Greek". I thought an easy thing to make it nicer would be to have the flag associated with the language -- PRC flag for Mandarin, Japanese flag for Japanese, etc. What do do for Ancient Greek? Well, let me see it looks and then maybe I can figure something out.
So I asked Claude what I wanted. As expected, it put the PRC and Japanese flags for the first two languages. I expected it to just put a modern Greek flag, or a question mark, or some other gibberish. But it put an emoji of a building with classical Greek columns (), which is absolutely perfect.
My language learning system is unusual; so without context, Claud assumes I'm making something like what already exists -- Duolingo or Anki or something. So I invested some time creating a document that lays out in detail. Now when I include that file as a context, Claude seems to genuinely understand what I'm trying to accomplish in a way it didn't before; and often comes up with creative new use cases. For example, at some point I was having it try to summarize some marketing copy for the website; in a section on educational institutions, it added a bullet point for how it could be used that I'd never thought of.
The fact that they can't learn things on-line, that they have context rot, that there's still a high amount of variance in their output -- all of these, it seems to me, undermine their ability to do things, similar to the way some people's ADHD undermines their ability to excel. But it seems to me the spark of thinking and of creativity is there.
Swimming and thinking being 'human capabilities' doesn't preclude them from also being solutions to evolutionary problems: aquatic locomotion and adaptive problem solving, respectively.
And pointing out that we're in a 'semantic debate' while simultaneously insisting on your own semantic framework (capabilities vs solutions) is exactly the move you're critiquing.
> And pointing out that we're in a 'semantic debate' while simultaneously insisting on your own semantic framework (capabilities vs solutions) is exactly the move you're critiquing.
Grammatically, in English the verb "swim" requires an "animate subject", i.e. a living being, like a human or an animal. So the question of whether a submarine can swim is about grammar. In Russian (IIRC), submarines can swim just fine, because the verb does not have this animacy requirement. Crucially, the question is not about whether or how a submarine propels itself.
Likewise, in English at least, the verb "think" requires an animate object. the question whether a machine can think is about whether you consider it to be alive. Again, whether or how the machine generates its output is not material to the question.