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Sense impressions are mediated by fairly simple neuronal firing mechanisms, somewhat different, but similar in concept to the wires we use to encode language to

Sense impressions are mediated by fairly simple neuronal firing mechanisms, somewhat different, but similar in concept to the wires we use to encode language tokens. I'm not really trying to make a point here about consciousness, although I was interested by the article - it seems to imply that gpt-3 performs better at some tasks when it has a train of thought / stream of consciousness. People keep saying that there's a giant gap, but I still don't really know what they think it is, and there seem to be a lot of points of similarity. It's very clear that these large language models are, despite their problems, much more capable than was expected by nearly everyone not very many years ago.

throwaway4aday 4y ago
To me, it comes down to whether or not you think the sum total of a human being is language. If your life consists almost entirely of communication based activities then it's easy to see why one would think that is the case but if you spend any appreciable amount of time doing work that deals with physical objects and their interactions with the environment you find that language is only one tool in the box and isn't capable of replacing the others. That's not even bothering with the metaphysics of consciousness or subjective experience.