[eihli]

Now show me a writeup that explains how the brain works so I can understand why the brain does those things.

> We know how these machines work, it's not mysterious, there's nothing "extra" happening.

It sounds like you're saying "We don't know how brains work, they're mysterious, there's something 'extra' happening", and using that as justification for why you're saying a computer, an AI, can't "understand".

I think most people on Hackernews now who would use the phrase "my AI worked overnight and hypothesized, compared, etc..." already know how an LLM works, and still chooses to use those words. So the issue isn't that they don't understand. It's that they understand and still use those words. So the disagreement is somewhere else.

[27183]

I'm not claiming there's something "extra" happening in brains. Merely that we just don't know how they work well enough to use that knowledge to do engineering. Neural nets are quite unlike brains, despite the unfortunate shared vocabulary.

OTOH we do know how neural nets work, and they definitely don't do "thinking" or "reasoning".

[fragmede]

First you have to give a specific definition for thinking and reasoning before determining if they definitely do or don't do such a thing.

[27183]

Fair enough, I should have phrased that less strongly. Until you show that your neural net does "thinking" or "reasoning" I'll disregard that and prefer to think about it in terms of what we actually know neural nets actually do. Does that work?

[fragmede]

Just start with your definition for reasoning. If A implies B, and B implies C, does A imply C? Does that count as reasoning?