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.

在这篇论文中，我们提出了一个思想实验，涉及一个在各种基准测试中表现出色但似乎没有主观经验的开源聊天机器人 $Z$，并讨论了关于理解的定义和意识作用的不同观点，揭示了所涉及的术语上的分歧。我们提出了两个明确关注意识问题的理解工作定义，并与哲学、心理学和神经科学的丰富文献进行了联系。