Jesus fuck… did you actually read your definition?

1. the act or action of grasping with the intellect

Okay, we’ve replaced the concept of “intelligence” and just swapped it out with “grasping with the intellect”.

2. knowledge gained by comprehending

Nice, using the verb word of “comprehending” to define “comprehension”.

3. the capacity for understanding fully

Okay, maybe that’s a start, but it’s incredibly vague.

Also, clicking on the links just resolves back to the most generic circular definition possible. Remind me to never use Merriam-Webster.

At least this gets further: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/comprehension

If we settle on “A thorough understanding” and define understanding as… fuck, we’re back to this circular bullshit again.

Okay, fine, let’s just look at intelligence:

The capacity of mind, especially to understand principles, truths, facts or meanings, acquire knowledge, and apply it to practice; the ability to comprehend and learn; the ability to process sentient experience to generate true beliefs with a justified degree of confidence.

Breaking this down:

• Understand principles, truths - Sure, sounds like an LLM to me. If you ask it to define a scientific principle or fact or Newton’s laws, it can tell you what it is.
• facts or meaning - And, depending on the kind of thing we’re talking about, it can you tell you why it exists.
• acquire knowledge - While it’s not permanent (because context are just thrown away like short-term memories), LLMs have MCPs and other tools to acquire new knowledge.
• apply it in practice - It takes the knowledge it has naturally (training data), acquires new knowledge from its tools, and then applies it to the task it’s looking at.
• the ability to comprehend and learn - Here we go with “comprehension” again. But, let’s assume we all know what “learn” is. A LLM can learn about things, but the main problem is the context size and how we throw that away each session. But, that can be solved by storing facts elsewhere, Markdown rules, other techniques to condense the immediate context into long-term storage. In humans, we call that “long-term memory”. We have our own process to stash short-term memory into long-term memory. We just haven’t experimented enough with the long-term storage part in LLMs.
• the ability to process sentient experience - sentient… well, that’s a pretty weighted word. I also feel like there’s a clear difference between intelligence and sentience. We’re now entering the realm of sensation, thought, and feelings, which are entire different parts of the brain.

I also don’t think “sensations” are impossible to emulate, either.

anyone can quote a dictionary without comprehension.