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> Humans are constantly predicting the next moment This is really not my experience of consciousness. Is it yours?? Do you sit in meetings predicting what’s

> Humans are constantly predicting the next moment This is really not my experience of consciousness. Is it yours?? Do you sit in meetings predicting what’s going to happen next? No, you sit there bored out of your f$$@ing mind, daydreaming about being somewhere else and doing something useful with your life. God help me if that’s what LLMs are doing when I ask them to build me a web site.

drfloyd51 3d ago
If someone in that meeting quickly raised a hand in an arc, you would notice the “about to throw something” pattern, look and notice the hand holds an eraser, analyze the arc and predict possible flight paths of the eraser. Then possibly notice the hand is now holding its position and the owner is actually looking down at the table. Maybe to squash somethingMust be something on the table. Maybe a spider! Better look. Wait now many people are moving away, oh someone spilt some water and the eraser is actually the guys phone and he is checking to see if his laptop is safe from the spilt water. Fortunately you are on the other side of the table and predict the water isn’t going to splash for otherwise flow onto your stuff. All your possible responses result in you tossing a napkin towards the spill. Our brains are always pattern matching and predicting. I bet you tried to reason out where I was going with my comment before you finished reading it.
- schrodinger 3d ago
  This is a fascinating illustration that I can't help but agree with. However I feel like there's something more — that this part of my brain is a bunch of supportive background processes running without my real awareness. It's how I can drive home safely with no memory of how I got there (…sober), even though driving is an action that's incredibly demanding of intelligence. I can be driving home while thinking about a really hard problem at work that I haven't solved. However, if I came around a corner and saw a car in the wrong lane, a tree across the road, a fire raging — I'd very quickly jump into the mental driver's seat and turn my conscious intelligence fully at this problem and come up with the best possible outcome I can think of in a short period of time — losing all ability to think about that work problem. I'd remember that incident for sure. Similarly, in your story, all those predictive moments are happening below the person's level of consciousness. They're possibly even speaking to the group about a problem at the same time and thinking deeply about something. I'm not smart enough to know, but I tend to feel like LLMs are much more like the predictive part of our thinking that you described, but that human cognition has something more — the single-threaded, creative, problem-solving part that is very conscious. Is it possible that LLMs represent only one part of the way we think? And there's a whole separate mechanism that's fundamentally different, and not based on pattern matching and prediction?
twobitshifter 3d ago
They have shown that your mind is doing exactly that due to the delays in consciousness. There are very simple examples that you can try to see it. It’s especially clear in perception. https://discoverwildscience.com/neuroscience-says-the-brain-predicts-the-next-few-seconds-of-your-life-before-they-actually-happen-1-409013/ https://discoverwildscience.com/neuroscience-says-the-brain-... It’s interesting that our conscious interpreter doesn’t let us know that this is going on like you are experiencing, it must be that it’s advantageous for us to not think about the prediction part of our mind.

drfloyd51 3d ago

If someone in that meeting quickly raised a hand in an arc, you would notice the “about to throw something” pattern, look and notice the hand holds an eraser, analyze the arc and predict possible flight paths of the eraser. Then possibly notice the hand is now holding its position and the owner is actually looking down at the table. Maybe to squash somethingMust be something on the table. Maybe a spider! Better look. Wait now many people are moving away, oh someone spilt some water and the eraser is actually the guys phone and he is checking to see if his laptop is safe from the spilt water. Fortunately you are on the other side of the table and predict the water isn’t going to splash for otherwise flow onto your stuff. All your possible responses result in you tossing a napkin towards the spill. Our brains are always pattern matching and predicting. I bet you tried to reason out where I was going with my comment before you finished reading it.

schrodinger 3d ago
This is a fascinating illustration that I can't help but agree with. However I feel like there's something more — that this part of my brain is a bunch of supportive background processes running without my real awareness. It's how I can drive home safely with no memory of how I got there (…sober), even though driving is an action that's incredibly demanding of intelligence. I can be driving home while thinking about a really hard problem at work that I haven't solved. However, if I came around a corner and saw a car in the wrong lane, a tree across the road, a fire raging — I'd very quickly jump into the mental driver's seat and turn my conscious intelligence fully at this problem and come up with the best possible outcome I can think of in a short period of time — losing all ability to think about that work problem. I'd remember that incident for sure. Similarly, in your story, all those predictive moments are happening below the person's level of consciousness. They're possibly even speaking to the group about a problem at the same time and thinking deeply about something. I'm not smart enough to know, but I tend to feel like LLMs are much more like the predictive part of our thinking that you described, but that human cognition has something more — the single-threaded, creative, problem-solving part that is very conscious. Is it possible that LLMs represent only one part of the way we think? And there's a whole separate mechanism that's fundamentally different, and not based on pattern matching and prediction?

twobitshifter 3d ago

They have shown that your mind is doing exactly that due to the delays in consciousness. There are very simple examples that you can try to see it. It’s especially clear in perception. https://discoverwildscience.com/neuroscience-says-the-brain-predicts-the-next-few-seconds-of-your-life-before-they-actually-happen-1-409013/ https://discoverwildscience.com/neuroscience-says-the-brain-... It’s interesting that our conscious interpreter doesn’t let us know that this is going on like you are experiencing, it must be that it’s advantageous for us to not think about the prediction part of our mind.