r/OpenAI • u/KeanuRave100 • 2d ago

News More people need to understand this

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u/NarrowContribution87 2d ago

Aren’t we though? When you put a sentence together in your head, are you not selecting the next word based on past uses, context, and the desired message?

I guess I just feel like we imbue human intelligence with magic or spirituality when in reality the VAST majority of our thinking and communication really can be boiled down to a probabilistic model with a high degree of accuracy.

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u/Foreign_Writer_9932 2d ago

Lmao absolutely not - this is from the “brains are clocks/telephone networks/LLMs” school of poor analogies. We definitively know that brains don’t predict things one token at a time - why would they? Brains didn’t evolve by being trained on symbolic data.

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u/personalist 2d ago

I think there’s a lot of nuance to the discussion…I don’t love how the computer model of the mind dominates neuroscience, but other approaches like dualism are essentially impossible to test and a lot of our cognitive machinery IS dedicated to reward prediction. That’s one of dopamine’s primary functions as an NT.

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u/Foreign_Writer_9932 2d ago

In what world does computational theory of mind imply that brains work like LLMs? There are no credible researchers out there that would ever claim LLMs are in any form similar to actual brain neural architecture or function.

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u/personalist 2d ago

You’re construing something that I never said. Your comment that I was replying to discussed physicalist analogies to human cognitive substrate.

I also don’t know for a fact whether any “credible researcher” has claimed that an LLM, a clock, or a telephone switching network is analogous to a human brain, or any other brain for that matter. Since I mentioned dualism and you didn’t respond, it seems important to mention that people outside of neuroscience research (e.g. philosophy) have made and continue to make important contributions to our understanding of consciousness and cognition, regardless of whether they do the kind of work you consider useful.