[xthrown1]

>but the fact that predicting the next words based on past models does such a good job of masquerading as human thinking indicates that much of human thinking isn't much more than that.

Going in a straight line does such a good job of predicting the next position of the car that it indicates driving isn't much more than going in a straight line.

[LawTalkingGuy]

I know that's meant to be snarky, but yeah. A good portion of driving is simply going where the car is already headed. A good portion of conversation is probably just stochastically stuffing filler words and noises into your ideas to aid in their reception.

Haven't you ever had a situation where you were speaking and you get distracted, but not interrupted, and your speech trails off or gets garbled after ten or so words? It feels sort of like you've got a few embeddings as a filter and you push words past them to speak, but if you lose focus on the filter the words get less meaningful.

I'm sure we're different than an LLM, but seeing how they generate words - not operate on meaning - rings true with how I feel when I don't apply continual feedback to my operating state.

[mderazon]

I like the metaphore.

Politicians are exceptionally great at it, filling up conversations with nothing

[fsckboy]

Alonzo Church showed that lambda calculus can replace all of abstract numerical mathematics with manipulation of meaningless symbols laid out in straight lines, or curved around.

[abc_lisper]

I would give this 10 points if I could! But that’s level 2 driving. It is not nothing.