[Philisophy] Can computers think? No. They cant actually do anything. Alva Noe

Oct 27, 2024

An essay by Alva Noë, professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, on “Can computers think?”, and his answer is “No”. He wrote many insightful papers/books on action and perception, qualia, etc.

Here’s the last paragraph from this essay:

But this should not be taken to show that we become what we are (painters, musicians, speakers) by doing what, for example, LLMs do – ie, merely by getting trained up on large data sets. Humans aren’t trained up. We have experience. We learn. And for us, learning a language, for example, isn’t learning to generate ‘the next token’. It’s learning to work, play, eat, love, flirt, dance, fight, pray, manipulate, negotiate, pretend, invent and think. And crucially, we don’t merely incorporate what we learn and carry on; we always resist. Our values are always problematic. We are not merely word-generators. We are makers of meaning.

We can’t help doing this; no computer can do this

https://aeon.co/essays/can-computers-think-no-they-cant-actually-do-anything

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