Why has no one brought up John Searle and the Chinese room? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
There are no significant new philosophical issues arising from recent large language models which haven’t already been discussed to death in philosophy since Searle published on this in 1980. If you believe in functionalism then you will continue to believe in functionalism when presented with the evidence from LLMs and if you don’t believe in functionalism then you will continue to not believe in it when presented with the evidence from LLMs. (same applies to naturalism/materialism/determinism) Nothing about LLMs is different in principle from what Searle addressed or is going to move the needle in any direction.
I would suggest next time asking an LLM if anyone’s made your argument before and responded to it before.
(later edit) BTW, I have a sneaking suspicion of why nobody’s brought up John Searle. It might be because #MeToo was used to cancel him in 2019 in order to push his argument about AI and philosophy of mind out of the mainstream. Can’t have credible intellectuals around who might make you question what government, megacorporations and AI say.
I think that any credible argument against this is going to center not on AI or LLMs, but on what we know or believe about human intelligence. I posted the following on Twitter:
You haven’t expanded AI to replicate human thought. You’ve only reduced your estimation of human thought down to whatever you happen to be able to train your software monkey to do. Just like the ape communication researchers of the previous century.
There is another more sinister side to this, which is the suspicion I have that the development of AI hasn’t even been primarily technological: it’s been biological. Humans have been deliberately bred to be dumber over the past half century or more in order to make AI look good.
There’s considerable evidence for this. Your average rural American farmer of the latter half of the 19th century had a better reading level & larger vocabulary than the vast majority of Americans today. Read the Lincoln Douglas debates & compare them to the 2016 or 2020 debates.
So, in short, computers aren’t getting smarter: humans are getting dumber.