Do LLMs “think” in a similar way to humans? Or is it totally different?
Maybe it’s a good idea to listen to someone who publishes papers on this very subject, and is a professor of both philosophy and psychiatry and directs an Institute for Cognitive Science. That person is Dr. Chandra Sripada and his insights are fascinating.
Sean Carroll (interviewer, scientist and science communicator) says this interview made him lean towards the answer being “yes, they think like humans” whereas previously he favored the opposite view.
LLMs are spicy auto-correct. Anthropomorphizing them isn’t going to suddenly change reality…
Yeah, but it will make rich people even richer. So same difference.
Anthropomorphizing them isn’t going to suddenly change reality…
No more than thought terminating clishes do.
The burden of proof is very much on the people who say a computer is a person (and get paid for it).
auto-correct
I can tell you’re not up to date on cognitive psychology.
The principle of minimizing surprise – of predicting the next thing – is what most people who study this sort of thing have used as the basis for most of our cognitive capacity.
But, please do keep telling us your popular opinion, I’m sure it’s well-informed by detailed published studies.
I can tell you’re an AI shill…
You are objecting to an objectively debatable, scientifically study-able thesis with ad-hominem, tribalism, end emotional groupthink.
I don’t see a lot of critiques about the notion of production systems in LLMs being phenomenologically similar to those in humans, nor to any of the other reasons why this particular expert – which I am not – has the opinion that neural net cognition is usefully describable as akin – “cousin to” – human cognition.
I was wrong. You’re not an AI shill, you’re just an AI that was told to justify its existence…
The principle of minimizing surprise – of predicting the next thing – is what most people who study this sort of thing have used as the basis for most of our cognitive capacity.
Cool unscientific story.
We have no idea how consciousness works, and also we have no idea how LLMs work. So they must be the same!
Consciousness gets mentioned the first time at 1 hour and 26 minutes into the episode. The discussion is about cognition - they’re not the same thing and nobody is claiming that they are.
Your comment inspired me to actually listen to it and there’s a lot more evidence for LLM-mindbrain convergence than I thought. Still seems like we invented something too complex to characterize directly so we’re interrogating it the way we do our own cognition… I wonder what kind of biases this introduces.
The discussion is about cognition
Ah yes the foundation of “AI” research - retreating from obvious meanings to redefining words in order to make absurd claims.
I have no idea what you’re even talking about. Neither of these people is an AI researcher and neither is making the claims you’re here arguing against.
we have no idea how LLMs work
Give me a break. LLMs are completely 100% understood. People developed weighted functions using very very basic statistics. There is absolutely no mystery here.
We have no idea how consciousness works
Misleading.
We have many very plausible, evidence-driven models of how consciousness works: global workspace, CTM (Conscious Turing Machine), IIT, … the problem is figuring out which have the best predictive power. And that problem is being very actively worked.
and also we have no idea how LLMs work
Patently false. Look up “mechanistic interpretability”, CLiP, etc.
There is very much a back and forth synergy right now between the communities of researchers interpreting neural network activations, and biological brain patterns.
We have many very plausible, evidence-driven models
“Plausible” counts for jack shit in science.
There are many models because there’s no convincing evidence for any of them.
the problem is figuring out which have the best predictive power. And that problem is being very actively worked.
Yes, these models have no experimental or “predictive” use even after decades of “research”.
Click bait nonsense based on what a psychiatrist feels. It’s not even possible to make this determination because LLMs don’t think and have no agency and we don’t fully understand how humans think to compare against if they did.
