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The Computational Theory of Mind (2015)

plato.stanford.edu

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Re: The Computational Theory of Mind (2015)

#11

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

firasd wrote: post #5

Doesn’t the concept of a subconscious, or inner voice, invalidate any tight analogies to Turing Machines? What logical process is putting the Fur Elise into my head (earworms etc) I think this article is right that definitions really matter here cause one could argue “CTM is trivial, because we can describe almost any physical system as executing computations.” So we have a dual problem here—not just the difficult di…

Infuriatingly, computation is subjective. The experience of the inputs, the results, and the processes depends on qualia. So does logic itself.

Automating the processes doesn't change that. There's a very large number of possible processes and operations, but only a small number are perceived as valuable.

Re: The Computational Theory of Mind (2015)

#13

Post by bofadeez »

Just as the amplitudes program suggests that spacetime itself may be an emergent structure rather than the fundamental substrate of reality [1], the computational theory of mind may be mistaking an emergent representation for the source of consciousness. A more fundamental theory must therefore treat neural computation as an emergent interface within conscious-agent relations, rather than as the mechanism that generates consciousness.

Even the loosest, "multiply realizable" version of computationalism this entry lays out still needs something physical to run on like neurons, silicon, spacetime, whatever. Problem is, natural selection was never selecting for accurate perception of that substrate, just for fitness payoffs [2].

So computationalism has the order backwards: you can't generate a mind by computing over a brain when the brain, like any object in spacetime, is just a species-specific icon evolution gave you to see, not the hardware underneath it.

[1] https://vod.video.cornell.edu/media/1_sfv907qp

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4060643

Re: The Computational Theory of Mind (2015)

#14

Post by timshell »

This was the core premise behind my research during grad school and beyond. My favorite project — which ultimately became my dissertation — was a proposal to connect reinforcement learning algorithms, neuronal data, psychological behavior, and phenomenology. Specifically, the idea was the feeling of cognitive fatigue is a mathematical signal to ‘rest’, in which the value of rest is defined by offline mechanisms that contribute to decision-making. I proposed a connection to hippocampal replay, and was able to leverage fMRI and choice data to evaluate the hypothesis.

Zooming out of my specific work, the “best” success stories were connections across math/CS, neuro, and psych and the golden child is the dopamine model of reinforcement learning where firing patterns encode the TD prediction error

Re: The Computational Theory of Mind (2015)

#15

Post by bofadeez »

timshell wrote: post #14

This was the core premise behind my research during grad school and beyond. My favorite project — which ultimately became my dissertation — was a proposal to connect reinforcement learning algorithms, neuronal data, psychological behavior, and phenomenology. Specifically, the idea was the feeling of cognitive fatigue is a mathematical signal to ‘rest’, in which the value of rest is defined by offline mechanisms that…

That's not going to work: https://vod.video.cornell.edu/media/1_sfv907qp

Conscious agents are creating spacetime. Not the other way around: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4060643/

Re: The Computational Theory of Mind (2015)

#17

Post by timshell »

firasd wrote: post #10
cat-whisperer wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree, but I recently read https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.html which is quite interesting in it's own right. What are your thoughts on this?

Are LLMs even covered by ‘computational theory of mind’? Cause if I say “I like to bake” the LLM is only able to recognize and respond to that sentence due to the neural network making emergent connections between the tokens in the words—very different from the kind of computer programs these guys seem to have been thinking about.

I think many cognitive scientists think language is a core part of human cognition, and that LLMs were a major advance in AI/cognitive science due to connecting AI algorithms with language production, but LLMs aren’t considered (or even aiming) to be accurate models of human cognition

Re: The Computational Theory of Mind (2015)

#19

Post by randomImmigrant »

I believe machines could be made that think. But not purely digital ones. The brain most certainly isn’t a thinking machine precisely because it doesn’t have the luxury of unlimited time. Its design is not based on executing best algorithms, but rather finding good enough solutions among many time constrained but interlinked signal cascades.

The brain and body instead construct time, a cohesive internal one,from the ground up, with nesting oscillators driving the sequence of all functions and behaviors, over long and short time closes.

What we call “thinking” is a filtered layer of it, a slice that the attention spotlight is focussed on, and in humans this process can be turned to cognition over multilayered abstractions, and using language or other symbolic communications to communicate some of the dynamics of this process, and even evoke them in others.

Turing machines, and modern digital computers with their Von Neumann bottleneck, and LLMs are outside of time. They do not experience time. They can check the clock. They can count steps. But they are not active and agentic in time. Till we change that we won’t make machines that “think”. We can certainly make machines that simulate thinking, and that’s often good enough. But make the problem a real time one, with several conflicting verbal streams to parse and respond to serially and LLMs on their own fail catastrophically.

I think so long as the memory-processing divide remains, the simulation has to break apart processes for thinking in a way that’s alright for some cases, but not for others. And this is why we have the jaggedness of LLM intelligence I believe. They do not have internal timekeeping like almost all biological agents do.

Re: The Computational Theory of Mind (2015)

#20

Post by hexer292 »

randomImmigrant wrote: post #19

I believe machines could be made that think. But not purely digital ones. The brain most certainly isn’t a thinking machine precisely because it doesn’t have the luxury of unlimited time. Its design is not based on executing best algorithms, but rather finding good enough solutions among many time constrained but interlinked signal cascades. The brain and body instead construct time, a cohesive internal one,from the…

I'm probably way off the mark here, but my instinct tells me there's nothing intrinsic about the human condition that makes it the exclusive vessel of thought.

It is theoretically possible, after all, to simulate a human brain at a subatomic level. Sure, the complexity is absurd and interface required to measure it seems far fetched, but technically there's no restriction.

Because of this I believe what we know as "thought" or consciousness exists in the space between the physical world. It's just a way to represent the world around us, with the ability to reference the past and systems to predict the future.

LLMs to me are like a simplified version thats stretched across the domain of active memory. The "thought" process is the same, an active state (current token) guided by the past state (previous tokens).

I think the next step is to reduce what a token is. Right now they are vectors that are linked to words. If instead of words we fed it direct video and audio, and a way to translate the raw data into something resembling the information passed from our eyes and ears in real time, and train it like a child learns from its parents, it's hard to draw the line on where thought begins.

It's an interesting experiment, but I still consider it anti-human.

In the future, when we have "robot" rights for robots that identify as humans, you'll find me on the side of "they aren't a real human". We'll be called bigots, and I'm okay with that.

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