> There's considerable debate over whether humans can have a coherent idea before it is reduced into symbolic language, and it's not clear how you would distinguish this sequence of events, anyway.

This sounds like the thing that is so silly a person has to be very educated to believe it.

You know how I know that humans have coherent ideas before rendering it into symbolic language... because they do. The GPT-3 paper, itself, is a bunch of ideas that were formed and then rendered into symbolic language. Literally every new book/work/presentation that a person decided to write because they said to themselves "I have a great idea, I should share it with the world" comes from this.

GPT-3 doesn't even know when it thinks it has a new idea. Contrast this with humans, which have to go out of their way to communicate and promote their idea because they understand it's novel.