Comment by voidhorse

Thanks for the links! I'll have to dig into this more for sure. Looking at the bulleted summary, I'm not sure your argument is sufficiently nuanced or being made in good faith.

The article argues that the brain "predicts" acts of perception in order to minimize surprise. First of all, very few people mean to talk about these unconscious operations of the brain when they claim they are "thinking". Most people have not read enough neuroscience literature to have such a definition. Instead, they tend to mean "self-conscious activity" when they say "thinking". Thinking, the way the term is used in the vernacular, usually implies some amount of self-reflexivity. This is why we have the term "intuition" as opposed to thinking after all. From a neuronal perspective, intuition is still thinking, but most people don't think (ha) of the word thinking to encompass this, and companies know that.

It is clear to me, as it is to everyone one the planet, that when OpenAI for example claims that ChatGPT "thinks" they want consumers to make the leap to cognitive equivalence at the level of self-conscious thought, abstract logical reasoning, long-term learning, and autonomy. These machines are designed such that they do not even learn and retain/embed new information past their training date. That already disqualifies them from strong equivalence to human beings, who are able to rework their own tendencies toward prediction in a meta cognitive fashion by incorporating new information.