363 | Chandra Sripada on How LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I presume that everyone has heard of the Turing test, or as Alan Turing himself called it, the imitation game. Supposed to be a way to figure out whether computers can think. And of course The difficulty in that is not only what computers can do, but what do you mean by thinking? So Turing took a very sciencey, physical sciencey, mathematically.

uh approach to the problem, he says, I don't know what it means to think. But we can look at what things do. And if you have a computer that does things that are impossible to tell the difference between that and thinking, that is to say, the input, output, responses of the computer are indistinguishable from those of a person, we should call that thinking. Now these days we have these LLMs, these large language models as an approach to AI, and more or less it's clear that they do pass the Turing test. I know there's some people who argue about that, but I think it's kind of nitpicky myself. I think that there's no question in my mind that they're Passing the test as Turing himself would have imagined it.

So does that mean that the LLMs are really thinking in the same way that human beings are thinking? And I think you know there's been an argument back and forth. Some people say, Yes, that is what it means. Others say, Well, no, actually turns out we have to think harder about what it means to be thinking. And then the other side says, Oh no, now you're moving the goalposts. I thought we agreed on the touring test. I'm actually on the side of the goalpost movers. I think it's perfectly okay to say Well that wasn't it. careful enough definition of what it means to think, at least not in the same way as human beings do. And even granting that

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (112 minutes, 17,422 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.