Sperry's experiments makes it quite clear that the comparison is not nonsensical: humans can't reliably tell why we do things either. It is not imbuing AI with anything more to recognise that. Rather pointing out that when we seek to imply the gap is so huge we often overestimate our own abilities.
Humans at least have a mental state that only they are privy to to work from, and not just their words and actions. The LLM literally cannot possibly have a deeper insight into the root cause than the user, because it can only work from the information that the user has access to.
> Humans at least have a mental state that only they are privy to to work from
Maybe. How do you tell? What would you expect to be different if they didn't?
> The LLM literally cannot possibly have a deeper insight into the root cause than the user, because it can only work from the information that the user has access to.
Insight is not solely a function of available input information. Arguably being able to search and extract the relevant parts is a far more important part of having insights.
>Maybe. How do you tell? What would you expect to be different if they didn't?
I think you're asking how I would know if other people were P-zombies. That's an inappropriate question because I didn't talk about subjective experience, just about internal state. There's no question about whether other people have internal states. I can show someone a piece of information in such a way that only they see it and then ask them to prove that they know it such that I can be certain to an arbitrarily high degree that their report is correct.
Unvoiced thoughts are trickier to prove, but quite often they leave their mark in the person's voiced thoughts.
>Insight is not solely a function of available input information. Arguably being able to search and extract the relevant parts is a far more important part of having insights.
LLMs are notoriously bad at judging relevance. I've noticed quite often if you ask a somewhat vague question they try to cold-read you by throwing various guesses to see which one you latch onto. They're very bad at interpreting novel metaphors, for example.
It is non-sensical because you're simply bringing in comparisons without anything linking the two. You might as well be talking about how oranges, and bicycles think as well as that is just as relevant as how humans think in this discussion.
In fact, talking about "thinking" at all is already the wrong direction to go down when trying to triage an incident like this. "Do not anthropomorphize the lawnmower" applies to AI as much as Larry Ellison.
The thing linking the two is that neither are able to accurately introspect and explain the actual reason why they made a decision.
If thinking is the wrong direction to go down, then it is also the wrong direction to go down when talking about humans.
If your plane fails to fly and humans can't fly then we should be looking at the musculature of humans when working on the plane?
Slight pushback - I think there's still a lot more consistency and coherence in a human's recollection of their motives than an LLM.
Sometimes I think we're too eager to compare ourselves to them.
We have pretty much evidence to support that human recollection includes the right data to be able to ascertain why we actually did something.