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An article about AI "cognition" is written by LLM. You kidding.
So you're stumbling onto a position that's closest to "Biological Naturalism", which is Searle's philosophy. However, lots of people disagree with him, saying he's a closeted dualist in denial.
I mean, he was a product of his time, early 80's was dominated by symbolic AI, and that definitely wasn't working so well. Despite that, he got a lot of pushback from Dennett and Hofstadter even back then.
Chalmers recently takes a more cautious approach, while his student Amanda Askell is present in our conversation even if you haven't realized it yet. ;-)
Meanwhile the poor field of Biology is feeling rather left out of this conversation, having been quite steadfastly monist since the late 19th century, having rejected vitalism in favor of mechanism. (though the last dualists died out in the 50's-ish?)
And somewhere in our world's oceans, two sailors might be arguing whether or not a submarine can swim. On board a Los Angeles class SSN making way at 35 kts at -1000feet.
I agree with what's written, and I've been talking about the harm seemingly innocuous anthropomorphization does for a while. If you do correct someone (a layperson) and say "it's not thinking", they'll usually reply "sure but you know what I mean". And then, eventually, they will say something that indicates they're actually not sure that it isn't thinking. They'll compliment it on a response or ask it questions abou…
An article about AI "cognition" is written by LLM. You kidding.
Ha - I used Claude to help organize and edit it, yeah. Didn't see much point in pretending otherwise. The irony isn't lost on me, but I'm not arguing these tools aren't useful, just that we should call them what they are. Same way I'd use a calculator to write a math paper without claiming the calculator understands arithmetic
For example, try
x_next = r * x * (1 - x)
I agree with what's written, and I've been talking about the harm seemingly innocuous anthropomorphization does for a while. If you do correct someone (a layperson) and say "it's not thinking", they'll usually reply "sure but you know what I mean". And then, eventually, they will say something that indicates they're actually not sure that it isn't thinking. They'll compliment it on a response or ask it questions abou…
Accusations of Anthropomorphism are sometimes Anthropocentrism in a raincoat. O:-)
I think that's compatible with optimism towards LLM's though. It just removes all of the nonsensical conflation with humanity and human intelligence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Accusations of Anthropomorphism are sometimes Anthropocentrism in a raincoat. O:-)
Ha. Well I'm OK with being accused of bias towards biological life and intelligence. I know Larry Page and friends think this is 'speciesist' -- I strongly disagree. I think that's compatible with optimism towards LLM's though. It just removes all of the nonsensical conflation with humanity and human intelligence.
This framing makes sense. What we call “AI thinking” is really large-scale, non-sentient computation—matrix ops and inference, not cognition. Once you see that, progress is less about “intelligence” and more about access to compute. I’ve run training and batch inference on decentralized GPU aggregators (io.net, Akash) precisely because they treat models as workloads, not minds. You trade polished orchestration and SL…
"Yeah that's exactly the point - when you're actually working with these models on the infrastructure side, the whole 'intelligence' narrative falls away pretty fast. It's just tensor operations at scale. Curious about your experience with decentralized GPU networks though - do you find the reliability trade-off worth it for most workloads, or are there specific use cases where you wouldn't go that route?"
> "Cognition" has a meaning. It's not vague. In psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, cognition refers to mental processes in organisms with nervous systems. Except if you actually look up the definitions, they don't mention "organisms with nervous systems" at all. Curious.
Fair pushback - you're right that strict dictionary definitions are broader. I probably should've been more precise there. My point is more about how the term is used in the actual fields studying it (cogsci, neuroscience, etc.), where it does carry those biological/embodied connotations, even if Webster's doesn't explicitly say so. But you're right to call out the sloppiness.
It seems a bit like saying cars don't run, we have to stop saying they are flying along. I mean Gemini doesn't think the same or as well as a human but it does something along those lines.
I think there may be a bit of a losing battle here. In the title you have AI doesn't think but then in the Gemini API docs you have the section on "Generating content with thinking" and how to print the thought summaries https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/thinking It seems a bit like saying cars don't run, we have to stop saying they are flying along. I mean Gemini doesn't think the same or as well as a human but…
doesn't mean it's true