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Comment by CmdrLoskene | Hacker News Reader

"If it looks like magic to me, it must be magic."

I understand that you may believe your ability to think is magic, but I assure you, you are also just a statistical predictor, and not magic. Thinking and cognition themselves, beyond the medium they happen within, are moving out of the realm of philosophy and into the realm of science now. It just so happens that quite a lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea of not being as special and unique in this way anymore.

A lot of people are quite unhappy with it, yes, but... Consciousness is still very much a philosophical problem. Think of Marr's levels, functionally, LLMs and humans are quite similar, but algorithmically? How about the implementation layer? There are still many, many mysteries to be solved in the realm of philosophy of mind and LLMs should serve as reminders that Consciousness and Intelligence are not the same.

May I suggest this reading? https://qualiacomputing.com/2022/06/19/digital-computers-wil...

> I understand that you may believe your ability to think is magic.

Nobody said that. I am sick of the false dichotomy of being given only two choices:

a) It's magic

b) It's akin to our latest discovery

Yes. I think this is exactly right and feel like I'm waiting for people to get over the shock. It's really interesting (but yes, initially scary) to think about what really makes us human.

In a sense we _get_ to think about all the things we can do that robots can't. I hope at some point most feel a sense of relief that a robot can assist in the robotic things we're often forced to do.

You're positing this with way too much confidence, like GPT. We absolutely do not understand what thinking is. As far as I'm concerned, we are at least self-correcting, conscious, aware statistical predictors.

It's not only prediction either. Some of it is direct response or autonomous behavior (your heart doesn't beat because it tries to predict something).

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