> Animals form mental representations of their environment, which are directly caused by that environment in conjunction with their prior models of it. On top o

> Animals form mental representations of their environment, which are directly caused by that environment in conjunction with their prior models of it. On top of these states they combine motivational and emotional attitudes to form goals, to intend, to play, and so on. And I take it that you're arguing that ChatGPT does not have a mental representation of its environment? Obviously, we could quibble about 'mental', but for all of its limitations and problems, ChatGPT is very little more than a condensed representation of its environment. What about motivation and emotion? I don't think we have a clear enough definition of how these things are instantiated in humans to properly debate here. ChatGPT acts as if it has certain motivations (to be helpful, to avoid controversy), and has been coached to avoid expressions of emotion. If you start from a view point of 'a next-word prediction engine obviously cannot have emotion, plans, or a world model', then of course you'll conclude that ChatGPT does not have these things and cannot. If you start from the view that we don't really know what mechanisms we need to instantiate these things anyway, then you're much more likely to look at the areas that ChatGPT seems to behave similarly to humans and wonder if big chunks of our brain are actually next token prediction engines, just structured by evolution to work in particular ways. This view was not new with ChatGPT of course, predictive coding has been an interesting approach to human cognition for a while now.