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Easy - it's just a Chinese Room.
Searle was wrong.
"The argument, to be clear, is not about whether a machine can be conscious, but about whether it (or anything else for that matter) can be shown to be conscious. It is plain that any other method of probing the occupant of a Chinese room has the same difficulties in principle as exchanging questions and answers in Chinese. It is simply not possible to divine whether a conscious agency or some clever simulation inhabits the room." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Consciousness
Edit: interesting quote from elsewhere on that page:
'The sheer volume of the literature that has grown up around it inspired Pat Hayes to comment that the field of cognitive science ought to be redefined as "the ongoing research program of showing Searle's Chinese Room Argument to be false".' -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#History
That is a hypothetical about outside observation, with no look inside. Programmers and engineers do get to see inside, and they know exactly how a computer works.
There is absolutely no opportunity for a processor to learn a single thing from any of the data it shuffles. It only ever sees its binary representation - it could "read" Hamlet 1,000,000,000,000 times and not "know" who wrote it, since it never at any point saw the words.
They understand how computers work but not how neural nets produce the outputs they do. Ten seconds searching the web:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3pezm/scientists-increasingly-cant-explain-how-ai-works
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/30/1078670/large-language-models-arent-people-lets-stop-testing-them-like-they-were/
This is gobbledygook. They don't know which processes they fire and when, but they know exactly which processes they have. None of them are processes to actually interpret language - only processes to reproduce representations of language. And even if they could coherently interpret language, that still is a long way off from consciousness.
Generative AI is still using the same software and hardware as Microsoft Word. Don't mistake fantasy for reality.
What is?
Who are "they"? What processes are you referring to?
Is English not your first language? This isn't unclear at all.
Humans only work on representations of language too? I don't understand the distinction
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Humans work with language itself: letters, words, speech. Computers work with binary representations of language: just 0s and 1s.
Firstly, written language can be represented in binary without any loss of information.
Secondly, audio of spoken language can be represented in binary with so little loss it's indistinguishable to humans.
Thirdly, and most importantly, written and spoken language are also just representations. We like to think they're special, but they're not. There's nothing fundamentally special about how we process language that can't be reproduced artificially.
It's still not language, though. It's just binary.
Still not language.
Of what? What does this need to be translated to for humans to understand it?
You realise our eyes and ears convert language to a different representation before it reaches our brain, right?
You're making a stretch here. Language is not a representation - it is the thing being communicated. If you really want to get down to it, there's some debate as to whether we communicate the exact same thing - qualia being what it is - but there is nothing shared beneath language for it to be a representation of (partly because of qualia, in fact).
This "different representation" is not an actual layer of meaning - it is just the mere act of recognising the language.