Recent advances in LLMs have sparked a debate on whether they understand text. In this position paper, we argue that opponents in this debate hold different definitions for understanding, and particularly differ in their view on the role of consciousness. To substantiate this claim, we propose a thought experiment involving an open-source chatbot $Z$ which excels on every possible benchmark, seemingly without subjective experience. We ask whether $Z$ is capable of understanding, and show that different schools of thought within seminal AI research seem to answer this question differently, uncovering their terminological disagreement. Moving forward, we propose two distinct working definitions for understanding which explicitly acknowledge the question of consciousness, and draw connections with a rich literature in philosophy, psychology and neuroscience.

翻译：大语言模型的最新进展引发了关于它们是否理解文本的争论。在本立场论文中，我们认为争论双方对“理解”持有不同定义，尤其是在意识作用方面存在分歧。为佐证这一论点，我们提出一个思想实验：存在一款开源聊天机器人$Z$，它在所有可能的基准测试中均表现优异，但看似没有主观体验。我们追问$Z$是否具备理解能力，并证明人工智能开创性研究中的不同思想流派对此问题给出了不同答案，从而揭示了它们术语上的分歧。在此基础上，我们提出两种明确承认意识问题的“理解”工作定义，并与哲学、心理学和神经科学领域的丰富文献建立联系。