Episode 8.44: If chatGPT “doesn’t yet understand as humans understand”, what do humans understand?

We explore the process of generating writing, or speaking in a way that satisfies the condition that we only know that we think we believe it when we hear ourselves saying it. We compare this with the generation of responses by chatbots using predictive text, probabilities and so forth. We ask, if that doesn’t involve understanding, then what does? What does human understanding really amount to other than the ability to produce words and perform actions that make sense to other human beings and to themselves?