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If I'm following you correctly, you are saying that the conclusion of Chalmers' parody is actually correct, as having a recipe is indeed not sufficient to succe

If I'm following you correctly, you are saying that the conclusion of Chalmers' parody is actually correct, as having a recipe is indeed not sufficient to successfully bake a cake: you will not succeed without the ingredients, for example. This is indeed true, but we should bear in mind that Chalmers' parody is just that: a parody, not a rigorous argument. It seems clear that, if Chalmers wanted to make it more rigorous, he would have concluded with something like "therefore, even if you have all the prerequisites for baking a cake (ingredients, tools, familiarity with basic cooking operations...), no recipe is sufficient to instruct you in successfully completing the task." This would be a better argument, but a flabbier, less to-the-point parody, and it is reasonable for Chalmers to leave it to his readers to get his point.

oh_my_goodness 1y ago
Sure. I'm not saying it's a bad parody, or that bulking it up with footnotes would improve it. I'm still coming to grips with the idea that LLMs seem to translate pretty well without understanding anything.
- mannykannot 1y ago
  The question of whether, or to what extent, LLMs understand anything is an interesting one, tied up with our difficulty in saying what 'understanding' means, beyond broad statements along the lines of it being an ability to see the implications of our knowledge and use it in non-rote and creative ways. The most honest answer to these questions I can give is to say "I don't know", though I'm toying with the idea that they understand (in some sense) the pragmatics of language use, but not that language refers to an external world which changes according to rules and causes that are independent of what we can and do say about it. This would be a very strange state to be in, and I cannot imagine what it would be like to be in such a state. We have never met anybody or anything like it.
  - oh_my_goodness 1y ago
    Well ... bright engineering students who have very little real-world experience are a little bit like it.

oh_my_goodness 1y ago

Sure. I'm not saying it's a bad parody, or that bulking it up with footnotes would improve it. I'm still coming to grips with the idea that LLMs seem to translate pretty well without understanding anything.

mannykannot 1y ago
The question of whether, or to what extent, LLMs understand anything is an interesting one, tied up with our difficulty in saying what 'understanding' means, beyond broad statements along the lines of it being an ability to see the implications of our knowledge and use it in non-rote and creative ways. The most honest answer to these questions I can give is to say "I don't know", though I'm toying with the idea that they understand (in some sense) the pragmatics of language use, but not that language refers to an external world which changes according to rules and causes that are independent of what we can and do say about it. This would be a very strange state to be in, and I cannot imagine what it would be like to be in such a state. We have never met anybody or anything like it.
- oh_my_goodness 1y ago
  Well ... bright engineering students who have very little real-world experience are a little bit like it.