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Comment by Borealid | Hacker News Reader

Just to make sure I've understood you... Are you arguing that with a set of identically-behaving black boxes, one could be "reasoning" and one could be "not reasoning", and a person would need to look inside the boxes at how they function to decide?

Remember, if the mapping from input to output is identical, there exists no test operating on the machines' output that can differentiate them. You can't tell from "conversing with" a machine whether it is or is not doing what you say around "inspecting" the input.

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>Are you arguing that with a set of identically-behaving black boxes, one could be "reasoning" and one could be "not reasoning", and a person would need to look inside the boxes at how they function to decide?

Absolutely! Inside one of the black boxes could be an audio device replaying a tape. The other could be a person thinking and responding. The massive lookup table construct people like to reference is just another kind of recorder, it takes every possible conversation that could happen in some finite sequence of characters and produces the precomputed continuation on demand. No one ever asks where those conversations came from. If God has to imagine them in his mind, conversing with the lookup table is just conversing with God.

Okay, understood. You are making a variant of the Chinese Room argument in which you allow some types of computer programs (but not others) to have reason/sentience. I'm not entirely sure what specific lines you're drawing between the programs (what makes a deterministic transformer with sampling temperature zero "not a recording" but a hash table "a recording"?) but that's not super important.

There is nothing wrong about having that philosophy, and I respect it, but personally I think if it's impossible to tell two things apart using any external observation there is not a meaningful difference between those two things. "Smells like a rose" and all that.

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