Comment by bsenftner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsenftner | Hacker News Reader

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Sure: comprehension is the ability to instantaneously create virtualized simulations of observation, and then decompose them into component parts that simultaneously and instantaneously evaluate each and every one of our observations for both individual plausibility and their composed combined plausibility as the observation.

This occurs constantly and continually inside the mind of every conscious human, it is what we call "being conscious".

This constant and never ending evaluation of all observations cannot be turned off, when turned off a person is "unconscious".

This is our human security and survival system, impressed into us for survival in a predator and prey environment, and is the seat of our consciousness: comprehension is a running simulation of all our observations for the purpose of our safety and self preservation.

Today, our environment is largely social and abstracted from "fight or flight", but our predator and prey dynamic is as present and strong and required as it ever was.

I won't discuss your definition of comprehension, which is interesting if rather handwavy. But you still didn't provide any proof that humans have it (not even yourself), nor a proof that machines don't or can't have it.

Well, you proved you have it with your declaration of my statement as "handwavy". That assessment requires comprehension, so you've got it. To "prove" a person has comprehension, if they "learn" without a statistical coverage of all possible inputs and outputs, that's comprehension in action: they created a simulation of the learned thing and ran in to assess, to comprehend the phenomenon. If you want a mathematical proof, you're expecting too much from hacker news.

> you proved you have it with your declaration of my statement as "handwavy". That assessment requires comprehension

Look, I totally agree with you here. It does require comprehension (by any definition, not necessarily yours), and most humans display it in many areas [1]. The problem is that any good LLM could and would have provided the exact same assessment [2]. Which is enough for me to declare them capable of comprehension.

[1] But not in all areas. For example buzzword-filled company and marketing communication, pseudoscience, and some particularly obscure continental philosophy, prove that humans can behave as if they had comprehension even when they have none.

[2] I gave it to Claude Fable 5.1 without any other context than "what do you think of this definition" and it answered: "interesting, with some real insight, but I think it overreaches".

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