| I had this thought the other day that the whole chain of thought reasoning pattern contributing to improved performance in LLM-based systems seems to sit parallel to Kahneman's two-system model of the mind that he covers in 'Thinking, Fast and Slow'. Haven't read it in a few years, but I recall the book suggests that we use one 'System 1' in our brains primarily for low-effort, low computation thinking - like 1+1=? or "the sky is ____". It then suggests that we use a 'System 2' for deliberate, conscious, high-cognitive tasks. Dense multiplication, reasoning problems, working with tools - generally just decision-making. Anything that requires focus or brain power. Our brain escalates tasks from S1 to S2 if they feel complex or dangerous. Maybe I'm being too cute, but it feels like critique that "LLMs aren't intelligent because they are stochastic parrots" is an observation that they are only equipped to use their 'System 1'. When we prompt an LLM to think step-by-step, we allow it a workspace to write down it's thoughts which it can then consider in it's next token prediction, a rudimentary System 2, like a deliberation sandbox. We do a similar thing when we engage our System 2 - we hold a diorama of the world in the front of our mind, where we simulate what the environment will do if we proceed with a given action - what our friend might respond to what we say, how the sheet steel might bend to a force, how the code might break, how the tyres might grip. And we use that simulation to explore a tree of possibilities and decide an action that rewards us the most. I'm no expert, but this paper seems to recognise a similar framework to the above. Perhaps a recurrent deliberation/simulation mechanism will make it's way into models in the future, especially the action models we are seeing in robotics. |
A few weeks back I was in that limbo state where you're neither fully awake nor fully asleep and for some reason I got into a cycle where I could notice my fast-thinking brain spitting out words/concepts in what felt like the speed of light before my slow-thinking brain would take those and turn them into actual sentences
It was like I was seeing my chain of thought as a list of ideas that was filled impossibly fast before it got summarized into a proper "thought" as a carefully selected list of words
I have since believed, as others have suggested in much more cogent arguments before me, that what we perceive as our thoughts are, indeed, a curated output of the brainstormy process that immediately precedes it