alt Hacker NewsYou can replicate all calculations done by LLMs with pen and paper. It would take ages to calculate anything, but it's possible. I don't think that pen and paper will ever "think", regardless of how complex the calculations involved are.
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I don't see the relevance of that argument (which other responders to your post have pointed out as Searle's Chinese Room argument). The pen and paper are of course not doing any thinking, but then the pen isn't doing any writing on its own, either. It's the system of pen + paper + human that's doing the thinking.
If you put a droplet of water in a warm bowl every 12 hours, the bowl will remain empty as the water will evaporate. That does not mean that if you put a trillion droplets in every twelve hours it will still remain empty.
You can replicate the entire universe with pen and paper (or a bunch of rocks). It would take an unimaginably long time, and we haven't discovered all the calculations you'd need to do yet, but presumably they exist and this could be done.
Does that actually make a universe? I don't know!
The comic is meant to be a joke, I think, but I find myself thinking about it all the time!!!
You're arguing against Functionalism [0], of which I'd encourage you to at least read the Wikipedia page. Why would doing the brain's computations on pen and paper rather than on wetware lead to different outcomes? And how?
Connect your pen and paper operator to a brainless human body, and you got something indistinguishable from a regular alive human.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_%28philosophy_of...
You can simulate a human brain on pen and paper too.
The official name is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
The opinions are exactly the same than about LLM.