Comment on LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins – Sean Carroll podcast w/Dr. Chandra Sripada
OpenStars@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
He admits himself that nobody really knows how people think, and so all the talk about LLMs looking like they are “thinking” is based purely on vibes rather than reality.
Then again, the thought occurs to me to ponder, how many actual humans really think also? Do 4-year-olds? Do <insert name of opposing political party here>?
That thought experiment helps me to understand. Even if an LLM does perform a kind of “lower thinking” - i.e. mere imitation, of the kind that a monkey or even a 6-year-old human child might - even then, I still would not trust it to vibe-code anything for me.
And it most definitely does not “think think” i.e. higher-level thinking, though again, neither do many humans, seemingly the largest majority of the time.
nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
You seem to ignore the quantitative, evidence-based studies mentioned. Ex: https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.155.pdf
OpenStars@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
I already posited that LLMs may perform lower-level thinking. Also, in the reference you linked to read their third stated limitation. Perhaps one day some kind of AGI will do “higher-level” aka more realistic thinking… but not yet. Which, I want to add, is not entirely relevant to their utility to us as humans.
Talking about “thinking” gets us distracted from what can actually be done, though if we do want to do it then we’d need to come up with a working definition of what “thinking” actually is.