You are misrepresenting the point of contention. The question is whether LLMs lack of consistency undermines the claim that they "understand" in some relevant sense. But arguing that lack of consistency is a defeater for understanding is itself undermined by noting that humans are inconsistent but do in fact understand things. It's as simple as that.
If you want to alter the argument by saying humans can engage in focused effort to reach some requisite level of consistency for understanding, you have to actually make that argument. It's not at all obvious that focused effort is required for understanding or that a lack of focused effort undermines understanding.
You also need to content with the fact that LLMs aren't really a single entity, but are a collection of personas, and what you get and its capabilities do depend on how you prompt it to a large degree. Even if the entity as a whole is inconsistent between prompts, the right subset might very well be reliably consistent. There's also the fact of the temperature setting that artificially injects randomness into the LLMs output. An LLM itself is entirely deterministic. It's not at all obvious how consistency relates to LLM understanding.
Feel free to do some conceptual work to make an argument; I'm happy to engage with it. What I'm tired of are these half-assed claims and incredulity that people don't take them as obviously true.
If you want to alter the argument by saying humans can engage in focused effort to reach some requisite level of consistency for understanding, you have to actually make that argument. It's not at all obvious that focused effort is required for understanding or that a lack of focused effort undermines understanding.
You also need to content with the fact that LLMs aren't really a single entity, but are a collection of personas, and what you get and its capabilities do depend on how you prompt it to a large degree. Even if the entity as a whole is inconsistent between prompts, the right subset might very well be reliably consistent. There's also the fact of the temperature setting that artificially injects randomness into the LLMs output. An LLM itself is entirely deterministic. It's not at all obvious how consistency relates to LLM understanding.
Feel free to do some conceptual work to make an argument; I'm happy to engage with it. What I'm tired of are these half-assed claims and incredulity that people don't take them as obviously true.