by lo_zamoyski | 2025-06-30 13:45:11+00:00
The cause of behavior is absolutely relevant. The same apparent effect can often be attained by a variety of causes, after all. Otherwise, there is no difference between simulation and the real McCoy, no difference between truth and deceit. A liar by definition is someone who does not communicate faithfully his true intentions or beliefs and intentionally creates the mere appearance of doing so in order to deceive.

It is not a mystery why computers are not intelligent: they lack semantics.

Take the concept of a triangle (let's call it "triangularity"). This concept has to be distinguished from concrete triangles, because the concept is what we predicate of all triangles, so we cannot identify triangularity with any of these triangles or with all triangles. Why not? Well, if you identified triangularity with a particular triangle, then it would mean that there exists only one triangle; you cannot predicate a concrete thing of other things. And you cannot identify triangularity with all triangles, because this would make your reasoning circular: which objects are part of this class of triangles? Well, the triangles in the class, of course! And furthermore, you could not possibly know the entire class if triangles, and yet, through the analysis of the concept of triangularity, you can come to learn all there is about triangularity and thus everything that can be known about what is common and essential to all triangles.

So triangularity cannot be a matter of image, as images are concrete instances of triangles. Might there be an encoding, then, that encodes this triangularity? The answer again is "no". An encoding is not a carrier of meaning in the way concepts are. They are, in fact, devoid of the meaning they communicate; all meaning they have is assigned by the intelligent observer.

Consider the encoding of this very block of text I've posted. Objectively, these funny little shapes do not contain the concepts they communicate. As physical artifacts, they have no semantic content save for the content of their identity as physical objects (so, in a book, the physical meaning of the blobs of variously shaped pigment on paper are just that; in computers, perhaps the state of pixels or the state of an array of semiconductor cells). The words, the concepts — these belong to the writer (me) and to the reader (you). And if we have our language conventions aligned, communication is possible. But it is always the case that the writer and the reader always bring the semantics to any piece of writing. Without them, there is nothing. So concepts cannot be physical, as the physical is always concrete and particular. And in an interesting analogy: it is the human being reading intelligence into the behavior of LLMs. There is none in the LLM.

Computing devices are, of course, entirely physical, but computers are, strictly speaking, purely mathematical formalisms that physical machines only simulate. But even if we reify these mathematical constructs or identify them with physical machines, we are left with, at best, syntactic machines. And no amount of syntax will ever amount to any semantics. It is magical thinking to believe — and this belief has no justification — that somehow, without explanation (and usually appealing to ignorance), all the lead of syntax will magically implode under its own weight into the gold of semantics. But there is nothing in the nature of syntax that can accomplish this, and this is by definition.

So the tl;dr is: computers lack semantics and intentionality, which means they cannot, even in principle, be intelligent.