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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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[+] [S] -6 points 2 months ago (9 children)

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.

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

    That's a very simplistic interpretation. A popular book that counters it is https://bookwyrm.social/book/29025/s/thinking-fast-and-slow

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

    I can tell you didn't listen to the podcast. A lot of it is about how System I / production systems are very similar to simple one-pass LLM outputs, and how Reasoning models closely match System II

    Which BTW has very little directly to do with the notion that minimizing surprise -- predicting the next thing -- is the basis of much neurology and psychology.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    I wouldn't think that your advertising of the podcast is so successful as to make people listen to it.

    But somehow you seem to be leaking the idea that reasoning models are something different than autoregressive LLMs. Yes, they do have different fine-tuning and system prompts, but little beyond that. Subbarao Kambhampati has worked a lot on this, e.g. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.15339 or https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.15125

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    I can tell you're an AI shill...

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

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I personally have huge doubts about the methodological merits of phenomenology. Consider this as a starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(psychology)

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 months ago*

    Oh, completely agree! In a way that was the point being made by the interviewee (Sripada)

    That cognitive psych had been stuck for decades with a well-documented robust phenomenology, but no really good, biologically-plausible, mechanistic models.

    And then suddenly LLMs show up -- an actual technological artifact non-trivially displaying much of the same phenomenology, biologically motivated, and completely mechanistic.

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