> It cannot reason or make deductions. It can't re-write sentences to use completely different words/structures but imply the same meaning. I agree that it doe

> It cannot reason or make deductions. It can't re-write sentences to use completely different words/structures but imply the same meaning. I agree that it doesn't meet these definitions of understanding. I'm arguing that it meets the definition of "semantics from syntax". > Well, yeah, there's a representation of language. But it isn't "semantic" -- it's vector of parameters for a decoder, which then output symbols in a second language. What is it that makes a vector of parameters not semantic? Would it be semantic if they were stored in a different format? If I tell you I have a system in which the concept of being hungry is stored as the number 5, would you say "that's not a concept, that's a number"? If that vector of parameters represents being hungry in any language, what is it if not a semantic representation of hunger? There's no need to imagine a huge magical network that implements a grandiose vision of intelligence. We're talking about a small, non-magical network that implements a very modest vision of intelligence. Bacteria are still alive even though they're a lot less complex than we are. What would you expect the single-celled equivalent of intelligence to look like? Something with a very minor capacity for inference? Something with rudimentary abstraction across different representations of the same underlying idea?