| > When you have a thought, are you "predicting the next thing" Yes. This is the core claim of the Free Energy Principle[0], from the most-cited neuroscientist alive. Predictive processing isn't AI hype - it's the dominant theoretical framework in computational neuroscience for ~15 years now. > much of our experience of the world does not entail predicting things Introspection isn't evidence about computational architecture. You don't experience your V1 doing edge detection either. > How confident are you that the abstractions "search" and "thinking"... are really equatable? This isn't about confidence, it's about whether you're engaging with the actual literature. Active inference[1] argues cognition IS prediction and action in service of minimizing surprise. Disagree if you want, but you're disagreeing with Friston, not OpenAI marketing. > How does Heisenberg's famous principle complicate this It doesn't. Quantum uncertainty at subatomic scales has no demonstrated relevance to cognitive architecture. This is vibes. > Companies... are claiming these tools do more than they are actually capable of Possibly true! But "is cognition fundamentally predictive" is a question about brains, not LLMs. You've accidentally dismissed mainstream neuroscience while trying to critique AI hype. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2787 [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262045353/active-inference/ |
The article argues that the brain "predicts" acts of perception in order to minimize surprise. First of all, very few people mean to talk about these unconscious operations of the brain when they claim they are "thinking". Most people have not read enough neuroscience literature to have such a definition. Instead, they tend to mean "self-conscious activity" when they say "thinking". Thinking, the way the term is used in the vernacular, usually implies some amount of self-reflexivity. This is why we have the term "intuition" as opposed to thinking after all. From a neuronal perspective, intuition is still thinking, but most people don't think (ha) of the word thinking to encompass this, and companies know that.
It is clear to me, as it is to everyone one the planet, that when OpenAI for example claims that ChatGPT "thinks" they want consumers to make the leap to cognitive equivalence at the level of self-conscious thought, abstract logical reasoning, long-term learning, and autonomy. These machines are designed such that they do not even learn and retain/embed new information past their training date. That already disqualifies them from strong equivalence to human beings, who are able to rework their own tendencies toward prediction in a meta cognitive fashion by incorporating new information.