Large language models lack deep insights or a theory of mind

Human insight is really easy to break, confidence men wouldn't really be a thing if it were hard to break. Simply putting a statement like "I love you" in front of a statement commonly overrides our intellect. Or offering a chocolate bar in trade of our passwords. If you want a human to tell you how to end the world, you'd just convince them to be your friend first.

Thesis : The very thing (a brain module) which allows for outside object continuity, that same brain module maintains inside self / personality / identity continuity.

Reasoning :

Evolution found out modelling the outside world is helpful for survival. Some eons later, it figured out modelling yourself (self / agent) modelling the outside world is also helpful. In the outside world, we keep track of continuity of objects through a brain module which hones in on the essence of objects (e.g. tracking a prey or predator.) so that EXACT matching algorithms aren't applied but ONLY approximate ones. As soon as a high enough approximate match (>95%) is found, we "register" it to be an exact match. i.e. the Brain bumps up the confidence level to 100%. This is also the reason why we consider our friend Bob to be the same childhood Bob even though he has different hairstyle, clothes, and other such properties. We don't call Bob who looks different than yesterday as an Imposter. The damage to this brain module could lead us to call Bob today an imposter. This same module also tracks continuity of self in a similar manner. Even though our "self" changes from childhood to adult we "register" "changing self" to be the same thing. i.e. internally we bump up the confidence to 100% when memories, etc. match and provide a coherent picture of the self. A multiple personality disorder is just different stable states of neural attractor states. Continuity is local to a personality but not global and hence transient. This local continuity of information could link up globally, giving rise to coherent single personality.

Capgras Syndrome :

Ramachandran Capgras Delusion Case : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xczrDAGfT4

Consider a typical LLM token vector used to train and interact with an LLM.

Now imagine that other aspects of being human (sensory input, emotional input, physical body sensation, gut feelings, etc.) could be added as metadata to the the token stream, along with some kind of attention function that amplified or diminished the importance of those at any given time period -- all still represented as a stream of tokens.

If an LLM could be trained on input that was enriched by all of the above kind of data, then quite likely the output would feel much more human than the responses we get from LLMs.

Humans are moody, we get headaches, we feel drawn to or repulsed by others, we brood and ruminate at times, we find ourselves wanting to impress some people, some topics make us feel alive while others make us feel bored.

Human intelligence is always colored by the human experience of obtaining it. Obviously we don't obtain it by getting trained on terabytes of data all at once disconnected from bodily experience.

Seemingly we could simulate a "body" and provide that as real time token metadata for an LLM to incorporate, and we might get more moodiness, nostalgia, ambition, etc.

Asking for a theory of mind is in fact committing the Cartesian error of making a mind/body distinction. What is missing with LLMs is a theory of mindbody... similarity to spacetime is not accidental as humans often fail to unify concepts at first.

LLMs are simply time series predictors that can handle massive numbers of parameters in a way that allows them to generate corresponding sequences of tokens that (when mapped back into words) we judge as humanlike or intelligence-like, but those are simply patterns of logic that come from word order, which is closely related in human languages to semantics.

It's silly to think that we humans are not abstractly representable as a probabilistic time series prediction of information. What isn't?

This is not how we figure conscious explanations are often(always?) post-hoc rationalizations.

See -

Split brain experiments - https://www.nature.com/articles/483260a

Experiments on Choice preferences -https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3196841/