I have been recently reading a great book on German philosophy and hit upon a debate on language that can be easily time travelled to today with all the questions surrounding AI. After all they are not called Large Language Models for nothing.
Yesterday evening when reading about Johann Gottfried (ha that is my first name in German Geoffrey 😁)Herder and Johann Georg Hamman both born in the 17 hundreds it suddenly struck me the debates going on back then have taken on a whole new meaning with LLMS. Do LLMs think?
I asked AI about Herder and Hamann’s views:
“Philosophers like Herder and Hamann argued that meaning is rooted in embodied, social, historical experience you can't separate words from the life lived around them. On this view, LLMs produce the shape of language without the substance.”
This is opposed by the Functionalists: The most well known modern one being Alan Turing who broke the German enigma code in WW2:
“if a machine is behaviourally indistinguishable from a thinking human, calling it "not really thinking" is philosophically incoherent. The question "but does it really think?" has no answerable meaning beyond behaviour.”
Or take David Chalmers who is alive today and actively involved in this debate. He takes seriously the possibility that LLMs may have proto-conscious states. He doesn't claim certainty but refuses to dismiss it and his framework offers no principled in-principle barrier.
AI was kind enough (Geoff being careful to be nice and polite with my little friend on the screen 😅 since the debate is still on and I don’t want the terminator knocking at my door at some point in the future 😃) to put this in a nice clear picture:
I personally think, albeit on an intuitive level that there is more to thinking than just the mechanics and creation of speech but at the same time I am keeping my eyes and ears open just in case.
I know many of you are using AI, what is your view? Does AI think? Or is it just an autocompletion system on steroids!
