The biggest contributions from linguistics are probably "human languages mostly have statistical regularities rather than hard rules" and "the sum of data humans get from birth to language acquisition is insufficient to learn a language from scratch". Which LLMs already work with, and work around, respectively. From there, nothing.
And philosophy just exists to be a distractor. "Subjective experience" is too subjective to matter in practice. "Task performance" is measurable, "consciousness" isn't. "Agency" is something an LLM in a tool calling loop, a rat in a maze and a human in an office tower may or may not have, depending on your favorite definition. Agentic LLMs are years in the making, and that's a product of engineering, not philosophy: "agentic" is whatever gets the job done.
We are yet to discover any physical process whatsoever that can't be represented as mathematical operations and implemented by a Turing machine. So all of that "treating human mind as a machine is wrong" amounts to "human mind must be powered by magic fairy dust" paired with "a functionally similar magic-free replacement is impossible". I'm not about to give much weight to any hypothesis that requires undiscovered magic fairy dust. At least find the hyper-computational magic fairy dust first - not just assume it absolutely must be there because you want the human mind to be unique and special.
Want to know why Turing did what he did? It's because he didn't want to engage with any of that "what is mind" bullshit either. So he proposed actual metrics - measurables that are harder to argue in circles about. Not that it stopped anyone. But at least he tried.
> The biggest contributions from linguistics are probably "human languages mostly have statistical regularities rather than hard rules" and "the sum of data humans get from birth to language acquisition is insufficient to learn a language from scratch". Which LLMs already work with, and work around, respectively. From there, nothing.
Again, what's the source for 'biggest contributions from linguistics are...'? It is a big contribution to the development of LLMs, but different cognitive linguistics authors already challenged this idea already 20-30 years ago. LLMs work with and around the problems you cite because of massive data/money, not at the fundamental level. It is all a game of statistics and data, which has been already challenged by cog. ling.
> And philosophy just exists to be a distractor. Well, this is just telling me that you either know too much about philosophy and reached that conclusion (which might make sense, know of some philosophers who also think that) or you just read too little.
> So all of that "treating human mind as a machine is wrong" amounts to "human mind must be powered by magic fairy dust"
This is the common fallacy people in AI/IT make . One of the benefits of reading philosophy is that you find your way out of them.
> Want to know why Turing did what he did? The actual tests Turing though about are themselves flawed (not that I discovered that, has been known for some time already)