How do you know my cat isn't constantly solving calculus problems? I also can't come up with a "mechanistic model" for what it means to do that either.
Further, if your rubric for "can reason with intelligence and have an opinion" is "looks like it" (and I certainly hope this isn't the case because woo-boy), then how did you not feel this way about Mark V. Shaney?
Like I understand that people live learning about the Chinese Room thought experiment like it's high school, but we actually know it's a program and how it works. There is no mystery.
> but we actually know it's a program and how it works. There is no mystery.
You're right, we do know how it works. Your mistake is concluding that because we know how LLMs work and they're not that complicated, but we don't know how the brain works and it seems pretty complicated, therefore the brain can't be doing what LLMs do. That just doesn't follow.
You made exactly the same argument in the opposite direction, asking if my rubric for "can reason with intelligence and have an opinion" is "seems like it", and your rubric for "thinking is not a token predictor driven by matrix multiplications" is "seems like it".
You can make a case for the plausibility of each conclusion, but that's doesn't make it a fact, which is how you're presenting it.
Dude it's a token predictor. This all sounds very nice until you snap back to reality and remember it's a token predictor and you're not a scientist. You're a web developer. You have no evidence, you have no studies, you have no proof. You're making a claim on the basis that everyone has as much understanding of the field as you and that's just wrong.
I'll take your silence as indication that you realize that I'm not making any claims beyond: we have no evidence to support your claims because, as I said from the very beginning, we lack a robust and detailed mechanistic model for what it means to think, so any claims that depend on the assumption that we do have that knowledge are speculation at best.
In fact, I think an even stronger case could be made that prediction is central to how our brains work, and the evidence is the rise of predictive coding models in neuroscience. It's too early still to say what form that prediction takes, but clearly your dismissal of "token prediction" as somehow meaningless or irrelevant to human thinking seems frankly silly.
