Memes

Nope that does not mean it experienced the world, that’s the reductionist view. It’s reductionist because you said it learnt from a human perspective, which it didn’t. A human’s perspective is much more than a camera and a microphone in a cot. And experience is much more than being able to link words to pictures.

What about people without fully able bodies or minds, do they not experience the world, is their's not a human perspective? Some people experience the world in profoundly unique ways, enriching our understanding of what it means to be human. This highlights the limitations of defining "experience" this way.

Also, Please explain how experience is much more than being able to link words to pictures.

In general, you (and others with a similar view) reduce complexity of words used to descibe conciousness like “understanding”, “experience” and “perspective” so they no longer carry the weight they were intended to have. At this point you attribute them to neural networks which are just categorisation algorithms.

You're overstating the significance of things like "understanding" and imbuing them with mystical properties without defining what you actually mean. This is an argument from incredulity, repeatedly asserting that neural networks lack "true" understanding without any explanation or evidence. This is a personal belief disguised as a logical or philosophical claim. If a neural network can reliably connect images with their meanings, even for unseen examples, it demonstrates a level of understanding on its own terms.

I don’t think being alive is necessarily essential for understanding, I just can’t think of any examples of non-living things that understand at present. I’d posit that there is something more we are yet to discover about consciousness and the inner workings of living brains that cannot be fully captured in the mathematics of neural networks as yet. Otherwise we’d have already solved the hard problem of consciousness.

Your definitions are remarkably vague and lack clear boundaries. This is a false dilemma, you leave no room for other alternatives. Perhaps we haven't solved the hard problem of consciousness, but neural networks can still exhibit a form of understanding. You also haven't explained how the hard problem of consciousness is even meaningful in this conversation in the first place.

I’m not trying to shift the goalposts, it’s just difficult to convey concisely without writing a wall of text. Neither of the links you provided are actual evidence for your view because this isn’t really a discussion that evidence can be provided for. It’s really a philosophical one about the nature of understanding.

Understanding isn't a mystical concept. We acknowledge understanding in animals when they react meaningfully to the unfamiliar, like a mark on their body. Similarly, when a LLM can assess skill levels in a complex game like chess, it demonstrates a form of understanding, even if it differs from our own. There's no need to overcomplicate it; like you said, it's a sliding scale, and both animals and LLMs exhibit it in ways that are relevant.