alt Hacker News> I cannot help but conclude that Searle argues that ‘understanding’ is only something that humans can do, which means…
Regardless of whether Searle is right or wrong, you’ve jumped to conclusions and are misunderstanding his argument and making further assumptions based on your misunderstanding. Your argument is also ad-hominem by accusing people of believing things they don’t believe. Maybe it would be prudent to read some of the good critiques of Searle before trying to litigate it rapidly and sloppily on HN.
The randomness stuff is very straw man, definitely not a good argument, best to drop it. Today’s LLMs are deterministic, not random. Pseudorandom sequences come in different varieties, but they model some properties of randomness, not all of them. The functioning of today’s neural networks, both training and inference, is exactly a book of static rules, despite their use of pseudorandom sequences.
In case you missed it in the WP article, most of the field of cognitive science thinks Searle is wrong. However, they’re largely not critiquing him for using metaphysics, because that’s not his argument. He’s arguing that biology has mechanisms that binary electronic circuitry doesn’t; not human brains, simply physical chemical and biological processes. That much is certainly true. Whether there’s a difference in theory is unproven. But today currently there absolutely is a difference in practice, nobody has ever simulated the real world or a human brain using deterministic computation.
If scientific consensus is that he's wrong why is he being constantly brought up and defended - am I not right to call them out then?
Nobody brings up that light travels through the aether, that diseases are caused by bad humors etc. - is it not right to call out people for stating theory that's believed to be false?
>The randomness stuff is very straw man,
And a direct response to what armada651 wrote:
>I think it's entirely valid to question whether a computer can form an understanding through deterministically processing instructions, whether that be through programming language or language training data.
> He’s arguing that biology has mechanisms that binary electronic circuitry doesn’t; not human brains, simply physical chemical and biological processes.
Once again the argument here changed from 'computers which only manipulate symbols cannot create consciousness' to 'we don't have the algorithm for consiousness yet'.
He might have successfully argued against the expert systems of his time - and true, mechanistic attempts at language translation have largely failed - but that doesn't extend to modern LLMs (and pre LLM AI) or even statistical methods.