It does not. But it does make the world that little bit more annoying, like whenever someone posts anything about AI these days there’s that select few that love to pose those absurd “okay but we’re just electrical impulses too, how can we be sure LLMs aren’t actually conscious and alive too?” “”””philosophical”””” questions.
Things like these make my blood boil for how unserious and completely off-the-wall stupid they are.
Hell, someone the other day equated a plane to a bird because both can fly… this is the type of thing we ought to expect from children just learning what philosophy is. Not adults.
In German an airship doesn't "fly", it "fährt". One could have reasonably invented new words for 'flying' depending on whether their motion is caused by flapping wings, buoyancy of light gases, rotating propellers, jet engines, or being fired out of a canon's barrel.
This is the thing about language, you can have strong opinions about it but language evolves through use. Historical attempts to stop this sort of natural drift has just resulted in dead languages nobody speaks like Sanskrit and Latin.
Later Wittgenstein said, basically “meaning is use” - words mean their usage, there’s not some root unshiftable core of meaning behind them. If usage shifts because people keep saying LLMs are thinking, then, well they’re thinking.
Yet similarly, Paulg could also come out with “When I put it to sleep, my MacBook really is asleep. We need to better grasp a world where Macs are awake or asleep and perhaps even dreaming”. This points to the issue with assigning the idea of thinking to LLMs, rather than saying they’re calculating or computing or processing when they’re running their digital matrix computations. Something important to us about thinking has nevertheless not been captured in assigning terminology used for the human experience and applying it to an electronic device. And in no world is my thinking process the same thing as an LLM computing an output, even if those outputs lead to the identical sentence “the cat sat on the mat” - functionalists will tell you that this doesn’t matter and functional equivalence is equivalence but it’s hard to believe that without looking at basic empirical facts about what’s behind the outputs.
Ultimately Paul has noticed something about language from his own first principles, not about thinking.
