Abstract
Recent advances in LLMs have sparked a debate on whether they understand text. In this position paper, we argue that opponents in this debate hold different definitions for understanding, and particularly differ in their view on the role of consciousness. To substantiate this claim, we propose a thought experiment involving an open-source chatbot Z which excels on every possible benchmark, seemingly without subjective experience. We ask whether Z is capable of understanding, and show that different schools of thought within seminal AI research seem to answer this question differently, uncovering their terminological disagreement. Moving forward, we propose two distinct working definitions for understanding which explicitly acknowledge the question of consciousness, and draw connections with a rich literature in philosophy, psychology and neuroscience.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2024 - Proceedings of the Conference |
Editors | Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar |
Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) |
Pages | 7137-7143 |
Number of pages | 7 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9798891760998 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2024 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | Findings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2024 - Hybrid, Bangkok, Thailand Duration: 11 Aug 2024 → 16 Aug 2024 |
Publication series
Name | Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics |
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ISSN (Print) | 0736-587X |
Conference
Conference | Findings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2024 |
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Country/Territory | Thailand |
City | Hybrid, Bangkok |
Period | 11/08/24 → 16/08/24 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2024 Association for Computational Linguistics.