Comment by jimmaswell
4 hours ago
I strongly suspect that if you dug deeply enough into how a human brain does reasoning, the answer would boil down to "it tries a bunch of pathways and picks the one that seems right". Pathways weighted by experience, but ultimately still guess-and-check. What would the alternative be?
Maybe our ability to reason is not as mystical and special as our ego might hope it to be, and discomfort over LLM's bringing that to light is the root of some people's urge to continuously downplay and discredit them.
(As far as I can tell as a non-neuroscientist, the literature on how our default mode network and prefrontal cortex interact agrees with my assessment - free association and logical verification respectively)
You have introspection, you can see a part of your thoughts, you know how that introspective part works since its what we call consciousness, you are conscious about it.
That introspection isn't an illusion, what your consciousness see of your thoughts obviously are tings that has been calculated and aggregated by the brain, so we know the brain calculates and aggregates those thoughts and feelings to produce its results. And we know LLM doesn't do that, it doesn't have a side system that does that sort of introspection.
It actually is an illusion though. The narrative the brain makes up after the fact for why we did something is not perfectly correlated with the actual reason. It's just very good at its job of spinning a convincing narrative, even to itself. This is demonstrated in split brain patients: they're given instructions to do something that are shown only to one eye, the one connected to the non-speaking hemisphere, and when asked why they did it, the speaking hemisphere confidently hallucinates a wrong answer that the person seems to fully believe.
> The narrative the brain makes up after the fact for why we did something is not perfectly correlated with the actual reason
But it does that introspection, we evolved to make it. If its not useful for anything we wouldn't have evolved it, it can't have been easy to evolve a consciousness so there has to be purpose for it.
Or do you think our consciousness is a magical ghost thing unrelated to the brains workings? I think its pretty obvious that our smarts in part depend on the computations that results in our conscious experience, you need a very strong argument as to why that wouldn't be the case. And broken brains being broken doesn't answer this.