One thing that is clouding this discussion is that most people are mixing up a lot of different characteristics that animals like humans have as if they were all the same thing.
So for many people they don't really distinguish between things like "reasoning", "self-aware", "conscious", "alive", "sentient", "intelligent", "has world model". They also don't distinguish between different types or varying levels of cognitive abilities.
It seems clear that high functioning LLMs must have some type of world model. But that doesn't mean it's necessarily exactly the same type of highly grounded model that a human would have, especially if it was trained on only text. It might be less rich or different but still quite useful.
Another example, LLMs clearly don't have the same type of fast adaptation in a realtime 3d environment that animals have. (That's not to say that they can't mimic it in some rough ways).
But if you don't really break all of this stuff down carefully in your head then it can be hard to accept that LLMs are doing anything interesting. Because in that worldview, it's all the same thing, so they have to give the LLM all of the other characteristics at the same time.
So for many people they don't really distinguish between things like "reasoning", "self-aware", "conscious", "alive", "sentient", "intelligent", "has world model". They also don't distinguish between different types or varying levels of cognitive abilities.
It seems clear that high functioning LLMs must have some type of world model. But that doesn't mean it's necessarily exactly the same type of highly grounded model that a human would have, especially if it was trained on only text. It might be less rich or different but still quite useful.
Another example, LLMs clearly don't have the same type of fast adaptation in a realtime 3d environment that animals have. (That's not to say that they can't mimic it in some rough ways).
But if you don't really break all of this stuff down carefully in your head then it can be hard to accept that LLMs are doing anything interesting. Because in that worldview, it's all the same thing, so they have to give the LLM all of the other characteristics at the same time.