The problem with all this is that we don't actually know what human cognition is doing either.

We know what our experience is - thinking about concepts and then translating that into language - but we really don't know with much confidence what is actually going on.

I lean strongly toward the idea that humans are doing something quite different than LLMs, particularly when reasoning. But I want to leave the door open to the idea that we've not understood human cognition, mostly because our primary evidence there comes from our own subjective experience, which may (or may not) provide a reliable guide to what is actually happening.

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viccis 7 hours ago | parent [-]

>The problem with all this is that we don't actually know what human cognition is doing either.

We do know what it's not doing, and that is operating only through reproducing linguistic patterns. There's no more cause to think LLMs approximate our thought (thought being something they are incapable of) than that Naive-Bayes spam filter models approximate our thought.

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PaulDavisThe1st 7 hours ago | parent [-]

My point is that we know very little about the sort of "thought" that we are capable of either. I agree that LLMs cannot do what we typical refer to as "thought", but I thnk it is possible that we do a LOT less of that than we think when we are "thinking" (or more precisely, having the experience of thinking).

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viccis 7 hours ago | parent [-]

How does this worldview reconcile the fact that thought demonstrably exists independent of either language or vision/audio sense?

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PaulDavisThe1st 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't see a need to reconcile them.

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viccis 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Which is why it's incoherent!

	▲	PaulDavisThe1st 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not clear that it has to be coherent at this point in the history of our understanding of cognition. We barely know what we're even talking about most of the time ...