[Zababa]

Can you give examples of how that "LLM's do not think, understand, reason, reflect, comprehend and they never shall" or that "completely mechanical process" helps you understand better when LLM works and when they don't?

Many people are throwing around that they don't "think", that they aren't "conscious", that they don't "reason", but I don't see those people sharing interesting heuristics to use LLMs well. The "they don't reason" people tend to, in my opinion/experience, underestimate them by a lot, often claiming that they will never be able to do <thing that LLMs have been able to do for a year>.

To be fair, the "they reason/are conscious" people tend to, in my opinion/experience, overestimate how much a LLM being able to "act" a certain way in a certain situation says about the LLM/LLMs as a whole ("act" is not a perfect word here, another way of looking at it is that they visit only the coast of a country and conclude that the whole country must be sailors and have a sailing culture).

[encyclopedism]

We know what an LLM is in fact you can build one from scratch if you like. e.g. https://www.manning.com/books/build-a-large-language-model-f...

It's an algorithm and a completely mechanical process which you can quite literally copy time and time again. Unless of course you think 'physical' computers have magical powers that a pen and paper Turing machine doesn't?

> Many people are throwing around that they don't "think", that they aren't "conscious", that they don't "reason", but I don't see those people sharing interesting heuristics to use LLMs well.

My digital thermometer doesn't think. Imbibing LLM's with thought will start leading to some absurd conclusions.

A cursory read of basic philosophy would help elucidate why casually saying LLM's think, reason etc is not good enough.

What is thinking? What is intelligence? What is consciousness? These questions are difficult to answer. There is NO clear definition. Some things are so hard to define (and people have tried for centuries) e.g. what is consciousness? That they are a problem set within themselves please see Hard problem of consciousness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

[Zababa]

>My digital thermometer doesn't think. Imbibing LLM's with thought will start leading to some absurd conclusions.

What kind of absurd conclusions? And what kind of non absurd conclusions can you make when you follow your let's call it "mechanistic" view?

>It's an algorithm and a completely mechanical process which you can quite literally copy time and time again. Unless of course you think 'physical' computers have magical powers that a pen and paper Turing machine doesn't?

I don't, just like I don't think a human or animal brain has any magical power that imbues it with "intelligence" and "reasoning".

>A cursory read of basic philosophy would help elucidate why casually saying LLM's think, reason etc is not good enough.

I'm not saying they do or they don't, I'm saying that from what I've seen having a strong opinion about whether they think or they don't seem to lead people to weird places.

>What is thinking? What is intelligence? What is consciousness? These questions are difficult to answer. There is NO clear definition.

You see pretty certain that whatever those three things are a LLM isn't doing it, a paper and pencil aren't doing it even when manipulated by a human, the system of a human manipulating a paper and pencil isn't doing it.

[amenhotep]

A cursory read of basic philosophy would surely include the arguments against Searle's Chinese room, no? It's hardly settled.