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Our brains contain a word salad generator and it also contains other components that keep the word salad in check.

Observation of people who suffered from brain injury that resulted in a more or less unmediated flow from the language generation areas all through vocalization shows that we can also produce grammatically coherent speech that lacks deeper rationality



But how do I know you have more parts?

Here I can only read text and base my belief that you are a human - or not - based on what you’ve written. On a very basic level the word salad generator part is your only part I interact with. How can I tell you don’t have any other parts?


> On a very basic level the word salad generator part is your only part I interact with.

My fingers also were involved in the typing of that message, actually they were the last proximal cause of the characters appearing the comment.

Are you saying that on a very basic level my fingers are the my only part you interact with?


I'm saying I have no way of knowing you have fingers. I can see what you write, but I can't know how you did it.


Thus means all you can say about me is that I'm a black box emitting words.

But that's not what I think people mean when they say "world salad generator" or "stochastic parrot" or "broca area emulator".

The idea there is that it's indeed possible to create a machinery that is surprisingly efficient at producing natural language that sounds good and flows well, perhaps even following complex grammatical rules, and yet not being at all able to reason




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