Do Zombies Understand? A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Exploration of Machine Cognition

Ariel Goldstein, Gabriel Stanovsky

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

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 languageEnglish
Title of host publication62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2024 - Proceedings of the Conference
EditorsLun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages7137-7143
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9798891760998
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Externally publishedYes
EventFindings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2024 - Hybrid, Bangkok, Thailand
Duration: 11 Aug 202416 Aug 2024

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
ISSN (Print)0736-587X

Conference

ConferenceFindings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2024
Country/TerritoryThailand
CityHybrid, Bangkok
Period11/08/2416/08/24

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 Association for Computational Linguistics.

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