(Updated in September, 2024)
Paul College of Business and Economics
May, 2024
Input:
This question in Chinese means “What brings happiness?”
Output:
The answer is in red:
“Be the stream of the universe!” (from Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching)
“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” ― A. Einstein3
“You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird.” ― R. Feynman4
is a hallmark of human thought, enabling the capacity to shift from perceiving the immediate environment to an alternative, imagined perspective. Mental representations of counterfactual possibilities (e.g., imagined past events or future outcomes not yet at hand) provide the basis for learning from past experience, enable planning and prediction, support creativity and insight, and give rise to emotions and social attributions (e.g., regret and blame).6
By analogy:
How can we use large language models in education to help learners understand (in addition to knowing)?
How can we help learners avoid the illusion of a thinking machine that understands, so as not to lend their cognition?
Asking simple and broad questions can lead to rote answers and opinions. This does not promote understanding.
Treating LLMs as knowledge aggregators (rather than oracles with the right answers) can help move from knowing to understanding by keeping the learner in the loop.
Deconstructing questions (offline) before interacting with an LLM is one way to do this. Deconstructing questions triggers a reasoning process and promotes deeper understanding.
Using enriched LLM tools like Perplexity instead of just GPTs can help this process because they are designed to be knowledge aggregators, not oracles of answers.
Mind the AI Gap: Understanding vs. Knowing
Gorkem Turgut (G.T.) Ozer - May, 2024
(Updated in September, 2024)
Searle, J. R. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 417-424.
Anderson, D. L., Stufflebeam, R., & Cox, K. (2018). Searle’s Chinese Room Argument. Illinois State University.
Christian, James Lee. 1990. Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Feynman, R. P. (1988). What Do You Care What Other People Think? W. W. Norton & Company.
Kant, I. (1908). Critique of pure reason. 1781. Modern Classical Philosophers, Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 370-456.
Van Hoeck, N., Watson, P. D., & Barbey, A. K. (2015). Cognitive neuroscience of human counterfactual reasoning. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 420.
Queries were executed using gpt-4o-2024-05-13 on May 22, 2024. Sample query adapted from Jingjing Li and Reza Mousavi.
Queries were executed using gpt-o1-preview on September 13, 2024.
This does not imply unbiased or complete knowledge. The issues of bias and ethics are outside the scope of this discussion.