how could an AI running the same program be said to truly understand? GPT-3 responded, “It is obvious that I do not understand a word of the stories,” explaining that the translation program is a formal system that “does not explain understanding any more than a cookbook explains a meal.” This metaphor had never appeared anywhere before but rather appears to be a new adaptation of philosopher David Chalmers’s metaphor that a recipe does not fully explain the properties of a cake. This is precisely the sort of analogizing that helped Darwin discover evolution.
