Comment by FeepingCreature
6 months ago
(Not the parent)
It doesn't have a name, but I have repeatedly noticed arguments of the form "X cannot have Y, because <explains in detail the mechanism that makes X have Y>". I wanna call it "fallacy of reduction" maybe: the idea that because a trait can be explained with a process, that this proves the trait absent.
(Ie. in this case, "LLMs cannot think, because they just predict tokens." Yes, inasmuch as they think, they do so by predicting tokens. You have to actually show why predicting tokens is insufficient to produce thought.)
It's much simpler than that. X is in B therefore X is not in A is what being said, and this statement simply doesn't make sense unless you have a separate proof that A and B don't intersect.