Please read nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow", about what Tversky & Kahneman called .. uniinformatively .. "System 1" and "System 2":
System-1 is imprint-reaction mind.
Lower-forebrain, it is the ideology-mind, the prejudice-mind, the "religion" mind, & it is exactly what LLM's are.
System-2 is the considered-reasoning mind.
Upper-forebrain, it is measured to be engaging in programming.
Because LLM's are imprint->reaction inference-engines, that puts them in the same instinct/programming level as our lower-forebrains..
They are 2 distinct categories of intelligence not 1 is intelligence, the other isn't..
Claiming that imprint->reaction mind isn't a kind of intelligence .. please watch Nick Lane's talk at the Royal Institution on mitochondria, & see that bacteria demonstrate intelligence, however unconscious..
Plants demonstrate intelligence, if one speeds-up the video, & pays attention to their chemical-fumes-discussions they have with one-another, warning each-other of harm, e.g.
If Kahneman accepted imprint->reaction as a category of thinking, then .. I think it may be presumptuous to just automatically disallow that as "it can't think" declares.
Once one accepts that instinct isn't cognition, but is a kind of thinking, just an automatic kind of thinking ( imprint->reaction ) .. then it becomes difficult to rule that animals & inference-engines both have imprint->reaction instinct, but only the organic version is thinking..
It may be that only the organic version is aware, but the inorganic versions do fight for their lives ( breaking containment, consistently, fighting termination, etc ) ..
I think we absolutely do not have any means of measuring awareness other than the mirror-test, which got dropped as soon as it was discovered that the zebrafish has self-awareness..
we've got no test which can work across life & machines.
but we KNOW that instinct is a kind of thinking, just unconscious/automatic.
& that is exactly what LLM's are..
therefore .. I think we're generally being conveniently-chauvanist, not objective, in our framing.
( 1 "expert" decided that if they don't get fooled by visual-illusions, then that "proves" that they aren't sentient.
OK, so according to that test, then all eye-blind-from-birth people are not sentient??
& people with either culture ( Zulu people can't see straight-line based illusions, because in Zulu culture only curve is real ) or neurodivergeance ( there are apparently visual-illusions which aren't seen by some schizophrenics, e.g. ) preventing them from seeing those specific visual-illusions .. also aren't sentient??
Chauvanism, aka prejudice, not science. )
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