[thorum]

> We don't have a clue how to make a computer capable of System 1 thinking.

I think you’re overthinking this. System 1 thinking as the term is being used by AI researchers means making a fast decision based on reasoning processes that are wired into your brain by evolution. For any task that humans have faced for millions of years this works well. It can also work well for experts in a domain who have practiced a task so many times that their brains have adapted to perform it unconsciously.

System 2 thinking is consciously using explicit reasoning techniques to think through a problem, slowly and rigorously, often in ways that feel unnatural due to our cognitive biases but can solve problems that System 1 is unable to.

The analogy to LLMs is straightforward: LLMs learn to solve many kinds of complex problems during training and encode processes for those specific problems. They can then perform these tasks in a single forward pass through their weights. This is System 1 for LLMs and again, works well for any task that they were exposed to repeatedly during training.

However they don’t generalize to tasks that were not well represented in the training data. Training them to use explicit reasoning strategies instead (System 2) is shown to improve performance and let them solve a broader range of problems.

[grupthink]

System 1 and 2 is a myth. There is only memory and computation. For a complex problem, retrieving from memory is fast, and performing computation is slow. Furthermore, when performing computation, there are different heuristics that you can use to think about a problem, e.g. If you want to predict the orbit of a satellite, you can use Kepler's laws which gives you the full sweeping elliptical motion. Alternatively, you can use Newtons laws for which you need to calculate each time step. Alternatively, you can calculate all the quantum interactions between the satellite, earth, and sun (are we going to call this System 3 because it is more rigorous and is "closer to metal"?).

[mewpmewp2]

I don't get how you can conclude it is a myth. These are observations on how people think. What is the myth part. I can clearly observe myself doing fast intuitive decisions which I might even not know the logical reasoning behind, but also I can solve problems by thinking through them using my internal monologue. Are these myths?

[nighthawk454]

The error lies in thinking they're 'real' systems to be taken for granted and blindly reasoned forward from, instead of sometimes-helpful academic categorizations.

You can always factor things into groups. e.g. 'Thoughts about now vs thoughts about the future'. Extending that to say there are therefore two modes of thinking and that the brain must handle your two groups differently, at some fundamental or physiological level, and there are only these two modes and all things are either one or the other ... is perhaps quite misguided without more support.

"It's only a model"

[mewpmewp2]

I don't think we have conclusive evidence, but everything that I see from myself it makes sense to categorize like that. It is either a quick intuitive guess or feel or alternatively I have to hash it out. It just fits perfectly to me.

I do think they are systems in a sense that one is optimsed to be a quick system and the other one requires time, but can solve tougher problems, create something new.

It seems fundamental to me that it is how things would get organized.

[andrewchambers]

Ok, if we can define system 1 as retrieval and system 2 as computation and then we all agree.