You can simulate a NAND gate using balls rolling down a specially designed wood board. In theory you could construct a giant wood board with billions and billions of balls that would implement the inference step of an LLM. Do you see these balls rolling down a wood board as a form of interiority/subjective experience? If not, then why do you give it to electric currents in silicon? Just because it's faster?
Your point of disagreement is the _medium_ of computation? The same point can be made about neurons.
Do you think you could have the same kind of cognitive processes you have now if you were thinking 1000x slower than you do? Speed of processing matters, especially when you have time bounds on reaction, such in real life.
Another problem with balls would be the necessity of perception, that you can't really do with balls alone, you need different kind of medium for perception and interaction, that humans, (and comuputers) do have.
> Your point of disagreement is the _medium_ of computation?
No. My point is that we should not impute interiority onto computation. The medium is a thought experiment meant to stimulate your intuition that computational sophistication does not imply interiority. Unless you do think that the current state of balls rolling down a board does entail a conscious experience?
To adjust the speed, just imagine the balls rolling down in 100000000x time. I don't know where you stand, but I still don't think there is a conscious experience on the board.
Are you familiar with Searle's work[1] on the subject? It's fun how topical it is here. Anyhow maybe the medium doesn't matter, but the burden of proof for that claim is on you, because it's contrary to experience, intuition, and thought experiment.
Really out-of-ignorance: Is 'proof' the right word here? A more substantial philosophical counter-argument may be needed, but proof sounds weird in these "metaphysical" (for now) discussions.
You raise a valid point. Proof is an overloaded term with differing meanings in metaphysics, math, and law. However in all three cases it's obviously different attempts to grasp at the same ultimate thing: truth.
My take on Searle is that he was a hack. It's possible I judge too harshly, that _I_ am a hack (the likeliest, tbh) or that I and his writing have some fundamental life outlooks different.
Regardless, I think the Chinese room experiment is bunk and proves nothing. And I fail to gather where the medium of computation steps in the Chinese room experiment. The "computer" might as well be a bunch of neurons in a petry dish.
I guess the proof will be in the pudding when we develop superhumanly intelligent AI.
> I guess the proof will be in the pudding when we develop superhumanly intelligent AI.
I'm not sure that's the case. The universe itself is already capable of superhuman intelligence. There's nobody alive that can predict how wind will flow over an airfoil better than a wind tunnel.
The actual proof will be in the pudding if we develop superhumanly creative AI.
Tangentially, Peirce has a diagrammatic logical system that's built entirely on conjunction and negation which is isomorphic to propositional logic. He also defined extensions for what we now call predicate logic and modal logic.
John Sowa annotated Peirce's tutorial and it's quite interesting[1].
