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LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins – Sean Carroll podcast w/Dr. Chandra Sripada (preposterousuniverse.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 9 points 2 months ago (7 children)

We have no idea how consciousness works, and also we have no idea how LLMs work. So they must be the same!

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] -2 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago*

    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".

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