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.
This, this this. This is something the prevailing armchair opinion is really missing. Their blatantly-wrong assumptions about human cognition.
It feels as proudly ignorant as my grandmother’s generation who proudly declared Evolution to be patently ridiculous (“my grerat-gramma was no monkey swingin’ from a tree!”)
I am not a researcher in the area, but I am the kind of nerd who watches university colloquia and sometimes does in fact read the paper.
“I don’t hallucinate all the time”
YES, YES YOU DO, do you not understand how the sensory system works? You interpolate between inputs. This is why optical illusions work! Your fovea is a tiny tiny spot and is the only area that’s actually in focus!
Learning by statistical sampling, reward/repress feedback loops, production system-based computation giving rise to “fast” (System I) thinking, “hallucinating” to interpolate between sensory inputs … the list goes on and on