John Searle is much smarter than I am and he elaborated plenty on this in the 80s. (But more saliently, I think it's absurd to think our brains, or brains in general, do polynomial curve fitting in any meaningful sense.)

> Summarization is one of the most common applications of LLMs I see.

This is true, though the workflow is extremely cumbersome.

> People are doing exactly what one would expect them to do.

I don't disagree, I think people are moving in the right direction (albeit slowly). Maybe the generative aspect is just more awe-inducing rather than "oh hey this thing creates calendar events out of any date," even though the latter would be way more useful.

The argument that any non-materialist position (panpsychism, substance dualism, monadism, etc.) must "believe in ghosts" is comically reductive. Metaphysics is a thing, you know. So is moral philosophy. I mean, heck, so is logic. In all these subfields, arguing that their respective first principles are purely materialist is an uphill battle. I get a feeling that post-2000s materialism is basically logical positivism 2.0 (and we know how that ended).

> It's not a claim that AGI is nonsense in principle

You're playing a semantic game here; but in any case, understanding is a function of intelligence, so (working backwards), you're actually shooting yourself in the foot, anyway.

"Ghost in the machine" is from Ryle. It's quite apropos here.

> You're playing a semantic game here; but in any case, understanding is a function of intelligence, so (working backwards), you're actually shooting yourself in the foot, anyway.

I honestly don't know what point you're trying to make.

To recap, you said that:

1. You don't believe in this AGI nonsense.

2. Searle elaborated on why AGI is nonsense in the 80s.

And I am clarifying for you that:

1. Searle did not elaborate on why AGI is nonsense in the 80s. He doesn't claim that AGI is nonsense at all.

2. His arguments are specific to the methods that were called AI, and a bunch of technical and philosophical claims about those methods and about the human mind, at the time he was writing. Ditto for Dreyfus.

What you can get Searle to commit to is the idea that human-like AGI can't be a program executed on computers as we think of them today. He's an ultra-materialist, like Ryle, and thinks the physical reality of brains is essential to the minds they produce. To make a mind, you need to make a brain. (In other words, he thinks "Lena" is nonsense: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo.)

So he would say that ChatGPT is no closer to being human-like AGI than ELIZA was, since it's no closer to having something like a human brain, and if all you meant by "the whole AGI nonsense" is that ChatGPT isn't a step toward human-like AGI, then he'd agree. But he wouldn't say that human-like AGI itself is nonsense, precisely because he doesn't believe in ghosts.

And yes, by "AGI nonsense" I meant that "ChatGPT isn't a step toward human-like AGI" since the main chatter these days is about how ChatGPT/Claude/etc. is the harbinger of AGI. I think Searle's argument is particularly strong because you don't even have to believe in something "spooky" happening in our heads. In fact, I'd probably extend "AGI nonsense" to "AGI is flat out not possible" but that's more of a hunch and the full argument invokes things like the non-computability of various physical phenomena.

Thanks for chiming in as I'm completely unfamiliar with Searle.

I don't believe in immaterial human souls, therefore self-aware AGI appears to be a near inevitability of technological advancement from my perspective. To suggest that it's impossible is, in my opinion, absurd.

Why would an AI need to use the same mechanisms as a human to think? Most machines we create are quite different in character from their natural counterparts (what bird has a propeller?)