An LLM cannot have genuine understanding like humans do because it is a language faculty artificially detached from the rest of embodied cognition, lacking sensorimotor engagement with the world.
Chirimuuta finds it implausible that an LLM could achieve human-like understanding, since human language is inseparably bound up with sensorimotor engagement and embodied experience that LLMs lack. ✦ AI generated
Mazviita Chirimuuta · Machine Learning Street Talk · 2026-01-23 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 40:15
“Do do you feel that they could understand?”
the idea that you could just sort of detach off a language faculty, have it replicated in an LLM that doesn't have the other bits of our cognition and it doesn't have embodiment, doesn't have the capacity to engage with the world, and that it could have understanding in the same way that we do. I find that implausible.
verbatim transcript · starts at 40:15
40:15shaped by um linguistic um concept formation and everything like that. So the idea that you could just sort of detach off um a language faculty have it replicated in an LLM that doesn't have the other bits of our cognition and it doesn't have embodiment doesn't have the capacity to engage with the world and that it could have understanding in the same way that we do. I find that
40:43implausible. >> Interesting. But but again, you know, if we do the the galaxy brain thing and we say we can embed robots in the physical world, give them sensory motor affordances and all the rest of it. Um, you know, there are many replies to the Chinese room argument about this, like the robot replying. Um, you know, would would they have a little bit more understanding? >> Yeah, I mean that's getting more along
41:05the lines of the kind of thing that could have understanding. Um, I think there's sort of also more relevant stuff in the background of what it is to be a biological thing in that some things are inherently meaningful to you and relevant to you because they're connected with the demands that the challenges of your environment place to you. Like I was saying before, you know, life is a being alive is a way of being
41:34always in a situation that is problematic to you. Um, so saliency and meaning I think are connected to that. Um, it's not to say that you couldn't have robots with more and more precarious lifelike um situations and maybe I don't know it's not beyond the realms of possibility that then you start seeing um understanding uh in ways that are more like that as well. >> Let's talk a little bit about um H
42:00Highiger. So he spoke a lot about our relationship with technology and I know this is something you've been thinking about. Can you tell us about that? So one of the things that Haidiger said and he in many ways he's a grandiose and unpleasant person but he's kind of his grandiosity kind of manifested in how he could have read the importance of philosophy to things about the modern
- ·An LLM is a language faculty detached from the rest of cognition.
- ·It has no embodiment and no capacity to engage with the world.
- ·Without sensorimotor grounding, understanding in the human sense is implausible.
- ·Human language is inseparable from sensorimotor engagement.
- ·LLMs replicate only the language faculty in isolation.
- ·Detaching language from lived experience undermines true understanding.