When you say “understand”, are you not realizing that it’s not just reporting what it found in other lists of africa. It’s correlating all the times when someone requested “a list of X not including Y” and how all the Y was not in the resulting list of Xes. And regurgitates some fuzzy average of all the times it saw the word “in” and where country names appeared relative to continent names in sentences that had “in” between them.

All of these correlations, these intuitable rules about how a word causes other words to arrange around it, IS understanding.

Understanding is being able to generate true statements about a thing. What else are we doing as well listen and talk to ourselves about a topic but building an understanding by listening and absorbing fire-together-wire-together correlations between phonemes?

People are so quick to dismiss text prediction as a source of “real” intelligence, but there’s a hell of a lot going on in the statistical relationships between words. Language evolved from clicks and grunts that happened to result in dopamine, and it worked better when the sounds correlated to the environment. People forming the same fire-together-wire-together correlations as other people allowed the sounds to transmit knowledge. Those correlations grew up organically in the brain.

All I’m saying is that I’m not sure what there is to language other than probability boundaries enforcing certain word sequences and those allowable word sequences being altered by other preceding word sequences. Like, given what’s been said so far, only certain words make sense next.

Spelling is like that, syntax is like that, grammar is like that, and knowledge of the world is like that.

You understand the spelling (ie set of allowed words) if you know the next letter must be a T or an N here: “THA_”

You understand syntax insofar as you know that you need a noun or adjective or adverb next here: “Jane handed me the ____”.

You understand grammar insofar as you know the next character should be an s or a d here: “Liberty never die_”

You understand life in a gravity well if you know the next word here is likely to be “floor”: “I held out my hand and let go of the brick. It fell straight to the ____”

You understand dreaming if you know the next couple words here are likely to be “woke up” here: “I let go of the brick and it sank to the floor slowly, like a leaf. When I looked again it had become a toad, staring at me. That was the last thing I remember before I _____”

Like, the system didn’t have to read a report of a dream with a toad staring at someone, or in simpler terms where “toad” preceded “woke up”, in order to be able to predict that. It can correlate relationships to other correlations of relationships. That’s all the layers in the neural net.

All it has to do is somehow encode the correlation between “something that doesn’t make sense happening” with “waking up”. And that “something that doesn’t make sense” is itself a huge evaluation based on correlations of how things work, and the types of things that tend to all be linked by people responding with “wait, that doesn’t make sense”.

There’s a lot of information about the world in those connections.