Thank you, Elan and Tommy! I have mostly praise, but also some critique, as you, Elan, encouraged.
I'm very happy to discover someone expressing the similarities between brains and LLM's as clearly as you do. This is very much in line with my views. Crucially, there seems to be a widespread misconception of LLM's as non-recursive - with a myopic focus on a single token generation. Even Hofstadter, the “king of recursion”, made this slip in a YouTube interview. If you zoom in enough on any recursive system, of course you are not going to find recursion! But this is not the level at which LLM's are impressive. I found your thoughts about short term memory especially clear!
I do think this is presented a bit too much as a ‘new’ model of cognition. To me, as a computational functionalist, this is not a radical new idea. As I see it it is very much in line with what Dennett and even more Hofstadter have been saying for many decades. Of course, newer predictive models and the demonstated “proof” LLM's provide change the playing ground a whole lot, making the ideas a lot more tractable. I do think your focus on comparing with LLM's is very constructive and enlightening, though!
My largest issue though, is your use of the word ‘real’. I'm an illusionist about consciousness, but as Dennett and others state clearly, illusionism is not questioning the realness of consciousness. The illusion is merely the sense of being an observer - a mental subject - that experiences consciousness as a mental object (or scene). Introspection isn't what it naively seems to be.
As such, I'm an illusionist about short - and long term memory, language, and so forth - but I still think they sure as hell are real! Weights and residual activition DOES store facts. It DOES “record” in a sense, a very real sense, even though it might not be anything like recording with a camera.
This parallels every child's realisation that video is ‘just’ still pictures in succession. Isn't video real? Notably, video is encoded in bit streams that are not even recognisable as video or pictures if you don't have the coded. Still perfectly real.
Anyway. A great listen, and I think your take and emphasis is really needed. I really wish I could work on this myself. Keep it going!
I agree on the "real" thing--to charitably interpret Elan, I think he's just saying these things don't exist in the same way we might think (e.g. like a file on a harddrive), but are still "as real as it ever gets" in the words of Dennett.
I'm a big fan of Dennett and Hofstadter and certainly think everything Elan is saying is consistent with their views. I don't know if either explicitly stated a sort of autoregressive thesis about cognition, though, did they? Regardless, I agree, the analogy and existence proof of LLMs gives the idea much more meat.
I have read Hofstadter's Strange Loop thesis as a kind of autoregressive thesis. And I take Dennett's Joycean Machine and multiple drafts with self-manipulation to be one too. But I don't think they used the word auto-regressive (did it exist?) and Dennett's work certainly didn't have the emphasis on the recursiveness that I do take Hofstadter and Barenholtz to do. Perhaps I am pattern matching too much here, making unfit comparisons. In any case, this was a very elaborate and clear presentation, and I do think the emphasis is novel.
Perhaps this is an expression of my belief that true novelty is an illusion. And I'm probably envious that I wasn't in this conversation lol...
Great stuff! Really thought provoking!
Thank you, Elan and Tommy! I have mostly praise, but also some critique, as you, Elan, encouraged.
I'm very happy to discover someone expressing the similarities between brains and LLM's as clearly as you do. This is very much in line with my views. Crucially, there seems to be a widespread misconception of LLM's as non-recursive - with a myopic focus on a single token generation. Even Hofstadter, the “king of recursion”, made this slip in a YouTube interview. If you zoom in enough on any recursive system, of course you are not going to find recursion! But this is not the level at which LLM's are impressive. I found your thoughts about short term memory especially clear!
I do think this is presented a bit too much as a ‘new’ model of cognition. To me, as a computational functionalist, this is not a radical new idea. As I see it it is very much in line with what Dennett and even more Hofstadter have been saying for many decades. Of course, newer predictive models and the demonstated “proof” LLM's provide change the playing ground a whole lot, making the ideas a lot more tractable. I do think your focus on comparing with LLM's is very constructive and enlightening, though!
My largest issue though, is your use of the word ‘real’. I'm an illusionist about consciousness, but as Dennett and others state clearly, illusionism is not questioning the realness of consciousness. The illusion is merely the sense of being an observer - a mental subject - that experiences consciousness as a mental object (or scene). Introspection isn't what it naively seems to be.
As such, I'm an illusionist about short - and long term memory, language, and so forth - but I still think they sure as hell are real! Weights and residual activition DOES store facts. It DOES “record” in a sense, a very real sense, even though it might not be anything like recording with a camera.
This parallels every child's realisation that video is ‘just’ still pictures in succession. Isn't video real? Notably, video is encoded in bit streams that are not even recognisable as video or pictures if you don't have the coded. Still perfectly real.
Anyway. A great listen, and I think your take and emphasis is really needed. I really wish I could work on this myself. Keep it going!
I agree on the "real" thing--to charitably interpret Elan, I think he's just saying these things don't exist in the same way we might think (e.g. like a file on a harddrive), but are still "as real as it ever gets" in the words of Dennett.
I'm a big fan of Dennett and Hofstadter and certainly think everything Elan is saying is consistent with their views. I don't know if either explicitly stated a sort of autoregressive thesis about cognition, though, did they? Regardless, I agree, the analogy and existence proof of LLMs gives the idea much more meat.
I have read Hofstadter's Strange Loop thesis as a kind of autoregressive thesis. And I take Dennett's Joycean Machine and multiple drafts with self-manipulation to be one too. But I don't think they used the word auto-regressive (did it exist?) and Dennett's work certainly didn't have the emphasis on the recursiveness that I do take Hofstadter and Barenholtz to do. Perhaps I am pattern matching too much here, making unfit comparisons. In any case, this was a very elaborate and clear presentation, and I do think the emphasis is novel.
Perhaps this is an expression of my belief that true novelty is an illusion. And I'm probably envious that I wasn't in this conversation lol...
If you want to read a too long reply to Elan on this, here it is (but I can't guarantee it's worthwile ) https://open.substack.com/pub/elanbarenholtz/p/is-the-brain-like-chatgpt?r=3zjzn6&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=107939912
I definitely see the connection with Dennett/Hofstadter's view, I just wasn't sure how explicit they ever were about it, thanks!