Comment by King-Aaron

> that the argument of them being just a probabilistic word matching engine can also be applied to our own brains

But that of course is only as it relates to language. Which isn't at all the primary function of the brain and driver of it's experience. It's the other way around because it's all of the other stuff that drives language. Considering the human brain a probabilistic word matching engine fails to capture the underlying forces that direct the language output because a human can say completely different things about the same scenario based on a huge number of non-language inputs or factors. Language is just what humans have come up with to communicate all of the other things.

Do you ever find yourself thinking about something deeply and then someone appears (it could be a child… for me it usually is) and asks you a question completely unconnected to whatever it was you were thinking about, and then - this is the bit that astonishes me - you find yourself answering the question verbally, maybe almost in full before you even re-focus your attention on the little person and whatever it was they asked ?

When I experience this it’s like the conceptual formulation and language expression part of my brain is quite happy to run itself for a few moments before I - the qualia of being me - has decided to experience that moment.

Utterly bonkers. I love it when it happens. It gets me thinking about how weird language and knowledge and consciousness really are.

> I definitely agree that the argument of them being just a probabilistic word matching engine can also be applied to our own brains lol.

You can apply anything you want. You can also apply the argument that our owns brains are just a block of cheese too, if you want. (Nobody will stop you.)

Agreed. It's quite hilarious that its basically biological probabilistic machine flexing on silicon probabilistic machine. On top of that that silicone one is right here.