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.
He admits himself that nobody really knows how people think, and so all the talk about LLMs looking like they are “thinking” is based purely on vibes rather than reality.
Then again, the thought occurs to me to ponder, how many actual humans really think also? Do 4-year-olds? Do <insert name of opposing political party here>?
That thought experiment helps me to understand. Even if an LLM does perform a kind of “lower thinking” - i.e. mere imitation, of the kind that a monkey or even a 6-year-old human child might - even then, I still would not trust it to vibe-code anything for me.
And it most definitely does not “think think” i.e. higher-level thinking, though again, neither do many humans, seemingly the largest majority of the time.
You seem to ignore the quantitative, evidence-based studies mentioned. Ex: https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.155.pdf
I already posited that LLMs may perform lower-level thinking. Also, in the reference you linked to read their third stated limitation. Perhaps one day some kind of AGI will do “higher-level” aka more realistic thinking… but not yet. Which, I want to add, is not entirely relevant to their utility to us as humans.
Talking about “thinking” gets us distracted from what can actually be done, though if we do want to do it then we’d need to come up with a working definition of what “thinking” actually is.