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Comment by pwinnski | Hacker News Reader

> You haven't given any alternative answer to how it does this either.

I have. You refuse to accept it, but I definitely have given an answer that involves tokenization and association, the things we already know LLMs use to construct their responses.

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>Whether that specific question was in the training corpus or not, there are enough words in the sentence to suggest a positive association, including, significantly, "worthwhile." That alone possibly serves to narrow the answers down to A or B, with a preference for B, because it's more likely that "worthwhile" and "letter to x mother" are associated with "enamored" in general English-language text.

This is reasoning, what you've described is reasoning.

Is your claim that all reasoning is ultimately math we do unconsciously? That humans "reason" via word-association and probability? That seems to be what you're suggesting, but I don't want to conclude that without your say-so.

If I throw a ball at you and you attempt to catch it do you think the brain is NOT doing unconscious math to predict the likely trajectory of the ball so you know where to place your hand to catch it? What processes outside of Physics and Math and Probability is the brain using to interact with the world?

It was a yes/no question! It's like trying to nail jello to a wall, so I'll stop trying to ask what you actually mean.

If you can't understand my position from my counter question then I don't think it's worth continuing. You believe human brains are special meat with super powers and silicon can't possibly think because it doesn't have a soul or some other new age BS.

> You believe human brains are special meat with super powers and silicon can't possibly think because it doesn't have a soul or some other new age BS.

I believe literally none of those things, and have explicitly stated the opposite of at least one of them on this page.

At this point I think an LLM would do a better job of responding to my comments, based on context and syntax alone.

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