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.
I can tell you’re an AI shill…
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.
I personally have huge doubts about the methodological merits of phenomenology. Consider this as a starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(psychology)
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.
I was wrong. You’re not an AI shill, you’re just an AI that was told to justify its existence…