The distinction you're making reads like substance dualism to me. Are you able to provide a clear and objective metric for assessing "understanding"? If not then you're just handwaving an effectively meaningless semantic distinction.
And where is this objective metric for consciousness? Last I checked we didn't even have a sensible definition for it.
It seems to me you're just kicking the can.
Setting that issue aside. While I certainly don't believe LLMs to be conscious (an entirely subjective and arbitrary take on my part I admit) I don't see any reason that concepts such as "intelligence" and "understanding" should require it. When considering how we apply those terms to humans it seems to me they are results based and highly contextual (ie largely arbitrary).
>humans it seems to me they are results based and highly contextual (ie largely arbitrary).
Is that right? It seems that we generally say that "the computer is programmed to do", instead of "the computer understand" or "the computer knows", even if the programmed computer can produce the same result as a human who does it.
Of course we don't say that. You can't ask the (traditionally) programmed computer a freeform question and get a sensible answer back. We tried that for going on 50 years and it never really worked. (The highest achievement that comes to mind is answering jeopardy questions.)
You can very carefully construct a query in a dedicated language, debug that query, and get useful results back. But that's clearly just a human using a tool, not a machine exhibiting understanding or general knowledge.
Meanwhile you can ask a multi-billion parameter LLM a freeform question in ~any human language and it can produce a coherent and meaningful response. It can one shot pieces of code. Track down bugs based on compiler error messages. It might not (yet) be human level in many cases but to get hung up on that is to miss the point.
This is equivalent to an `if` statement with multi-billion levels of nesting.
It is just a "traditional program", just unimaginably huge.
Just because it is not "traditionally programmed" does not mean that it is not a really huge "traditional program".
Scaling something by many order of magnitude does not put it in a different category. A computer program, no matter how big, is still a computer program.
>Because you can't even define what consciousness is, let alone objectively test for it.
Exactly. So if we understand "hearing" as something registered by consciousness, then implicitly things that are not conscious cannot "hear".
>reduce the human auditory process
Yes, human auditory process, yes. "Hearing" no. I see that you cleverly switched to the "auditory process" instead of "hearing". moving goal posts, are we?
If a tree falls, does it make a sound? It depends on whether there is somebody to ultimately perceive the vibrations that the falling tree made (either directly or via recording).
It is easy to answer this if we define sound as the sensation. If there is no sensor then there is no sensation. If we define sound as the vibration of air. Then yes, it will make a sound.
Most of these questions feels perplexing because some of the underlying terms are loosely defined. If we strictly define those terms, then the question answers itself.
All of these communication can be done without using such words. It would just appear less "magical". This is done is the guise of dumbing it down, but people sometimes take it quite literally, which is what the marketing wants anyway..