alt Hacker News>And Plato had no grounding in biology, and so his work here was quite interesting but also quite wrong.
Defining what a word should mean doesn't require any understanding of biology unless you make the assumption that it's a biology-related word. Why should the definition of "thinking" have any reference to biology? If you assume it does, then you're basically baking in the assumption that machines can't think.
Because until recently (I'm talking last 150-40 years here depending on how we want to define thinking) the only things that could think were various animals. And so 100% of their systems for thinking were rooted in biology. If an LLM can think (and I'm partial to thinking that it can) it's going to different in a number of ways from how a person would think. They may be some overlap, but there will be all these human / biology / evolutionary psychology things which are really person-specific. Even just basic stuff such as seeing faces in the clouds, or falling prey to appeals of emotion. (ie, because our thinking is wrapped up in other processes such as status / ego / survival / etc.) Thinking has only been biological for a long, long time. Non-biological thinking is pretty new, even if you extend it back to the early days of computing.