#cogsci

A human mathematician can hold only a small number of unfamiliar elements in mind simultaneously. An AI model can keep the entire problem statement, hundreds of intermediate equations, several abandoned approaches, definitions, constraints and earlier conclusions inside its context window. We normally interpret the resulting performance as evidence of superior reasoning. But some of it may instead reflect the removal of one of the most important biological limits on human reasoning: our extremely restricted working-memory capacity.

Large language models (LLMs) sometimes appear to exhibit emotional reactions. We investigate why this is the case in Claude Sonnet 4.5 and explore implications for alignment-relevant behavior. We find internal representations of emotion concepts, which encode the broad concept of a particular emotion and generalize across contexts and behaviors it might be linked to. These representations track the operative emotion concept at a given token position in a conversation, activating in accordance with that emotion’s relevance to processing the present context and predicting upcoming text. Our key finding is that these representations causally influence the LLM’s outputs, including Claude’s preferences and its rate of exhibiting misaligned behaviors such as reward hacking, blackmail, and sycophancy. We refer to this phenomenon as the LLM exhibiting functional emotions: patterns of expression and behavior modeled after humans under the influence of an emotion, which are mediated by underlying abstract representations of emotion concepts. Functional emotions may work quite differently from human emotions, and do not imply that LLMs have any subjective experience of emotions, but appear to be important for understanding the model’s behavior.

But this theory is seriously scientifically flawed. LLMs are simply tools that emulate the communicative function of language, not the separate and distinct cognitive process of thinking and reasoning, no matter how many data centers we build.

Q: Couldn’t the models just be making up answers to introspective questions? This is exactly the question we designed our experiments to address. Models are trained on data that includes examples of people introspecting, so they can certainly act introspective without actually being introspective. Our concept injection experiments distinguish between these possibilities by establishing known ground-truth information about the model’s internal states, which we can compare against its self-reported states. Our results suggest that in some examples, the model really is accurately basing its answers on its actual internal states, not just confabulating. However, this doesn’t mean that models always accurately report their internal states—in many cases, they are making things up!

De­spite im­pres­sive ca­pa­bil­i­ties, large lan­guage mod­els have yet to pro­duce a gen­uine break­through. The puz­zle is why. A rea­son may be that they lack some fun­da­men­tal as­pects of human thought: they are frozen, un­able to learn from ex­pe­ri­ence, and they have no “de­fault mode” for back­ground pro­cess­ing, a source of spon­ta­neous human in­sight.

A strange loop is a cyclic structure that goes through several levels in a hierarchical system. It arises when, by moving only upwards or downwards through the system, one finds oneself back where one started. Strange loops may involve self-reference and paradox. The concept of a strange loop was proposed and extensively discussed by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach, and is further elaborated in Hofstadter's book I Am a Strange Loop, published in 2007. A tangled hierarchy is a hierarchical consciousness system in which a strange loop appears.

In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann amnesia effect to describe the phenomenon of experts reading articles within their fields of expertise and finding them to be error-ridden and full of misunderstanding, but seemingly forgetting those experiences when reading articles in the same publications written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, which they believe to be credible. He explained that he had chosen the name ironically, because he had once discussed the effect with physicist Murray Gell-Mann, "and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have."

Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics—and hoping to change the way social scientists think about human behavior and culture.

Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics—and hoping to change the way social scientists think about human behavior and culture.

Now maybe you can see how science could have a successor: thalience would use objective truth as an artistic medium and merge subjectivity and objectivity in a creative activity whose purpose is the re-sanctification of the natural world. To believe in an uplifting and satisfying vision of your place in the universe, and to know that this vision is true (or as true as anything can be) would be sublime. Thalience would be an activity worthy of post-scientific humanity, or our own biological or post-biological successors.

The development of general anaesthesia has transformed surgery from a horrific ordeal into a gentle slumber. It is one of the commonest medical procedures in the world, yet we still don't know how the drugs work. Perhaps this isn't surprising: we still don't understand consciousness, so how can we comprehend its disappearance?

Merlin Donald is a Emeritus Professor in the Department of Psychology and Faculty of Education, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. A cognitive neuroscientist with a background in philosophy, he is the author of many scientific papers, and two influential books: Origins of the Modern Mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition (Harvard, 1991), and A Mind So Rare: The evolution of human consciousness (Norton, 2001).

"By disrupting brain activity in a particular region, neuroscientists can sway people’s views of moral situations."

"You are never more alive, more awake, more conscious, than when in excruciating conflict with yourself. If self-awareness is the hallmark of humanity, then Sophie’s Choice may be its most mind-expanding exemplar."

Did sharp rocks warp our brains? Did cooking warp our brains? Did speech warp our brains? Did writing warp our brains? The net is the sharpest, hottest, chattiest, wordiest thing to hit since all the above.

"Because of these two books I came up with my current working explanation of death: when you die, you become a fictional character."

""Cognizing" (e.g., thinking, understanding, and knowing) is a mental state. Systems without mental states, such as cognitive technology, can sometimes contribute to human cognition, but that does not make them cognizers. Cognizers can offload some of their cognitive functions onto cognitive technology, thereby extending their performance capacity beyond the limits of their own brain power."

"Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes. "

"The Extended Mind refers to an emerging concept within the philosophy of mind that addresses the question as to the division point between the mind and the environment by promoting the view of active externalism. This view proposes that some objects in the external environment are utilized by the mind in such a way that the objects can be seen as extensions of the mind itself. Specifically, the mind is seen to encompass every level of the cognitive process, which will often include the use of environmental aids."

"which is 150, represents a theorized cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships,"

"Appreciating these differences may be crucial to understanding the mechanisms of neural information processing, and ultimately for the creation of artificial intelligence."

"These kinds of bots -- attention filters, perhaps, or focus assistants -- are likely to become important parts of how we handle our daily lives."

"These rules (and their runes) create a scaffold for the brain, which, now able to engage with complex ideas in contemplative solitude as opposed to interlocution, begins to conceive of itself as an individual entity rather than as part of a collective. L

"Although humans and non-human primates differ in a variety of seemingly more important ways, Tomasello suggests that "shared intentionality" is the most critical: a propensity for social interaction allowed each of these other capacities to evolve to the

"No component of the system is itself stable but the entire production locks together to have stable existence. This is how you can manage to persist even though much of you is being recycled by day if not the hour."

"I know a little about a lot of things and quite a bit about how all those things hook up."

"Everything I've described is possible today, and a lot of it is going on right now in the MyLifeBits project."

"It may yet turn out that the hard problem of consciousness is not so hard after all."

"research on multiple fronts in digital technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology may, over the next half century, alter the way we think about computers and information, and our relationship to them"

"Scientists study how bonobos, orangutans anticipate need for tools"

"It took nearly a year to reach her house, by which point, Alba had aged almost twenty minutes."

"The eyes in humans and their closest relatives in the primate world are geared to detect subtle changes in skin tone caused by blood oxygen levels, according to a new study from Caltech."

"My entire brain, the organ by which my very consciousness is controlled, was reorganized one day ten years ago."

"It's rare to find such a carefully considered and well-informed account of brain damage from someone who has suffered the consequences."

Free will seems to dissolve as you draw away from it - as an individual I don't feel manipulated, but when i look at other people - especially groups of other people, it seems like I can see manipulation going on.

"New computer simulations lend further support the notion that cooperation helped early humans escape becoming prey for other animals, researchers report."

"Stanford neuroscientist Bill Newsome wants to implant an electrode in his brain to better understand human consciousness."

"Although perhaps we can be a bit suspicious of the claim that they have "few, if any, ill effects", as the history of new drugs shows that major effects are often not discovered until several years after the marketing claims them to be virtually side-eff

"Mental rehearsal of performances is an excellent way to support skill development."

Attack of the Pod Roaches

"In very broad terms, individuals with Asperger's have normal or above average intellectual capacity, and atypical or less well developed social skills, often with emotional/social development or integration happening later than usual as a result."

"Churches have given us great treasures. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter."

"A far more dangerous idea is that brains cannot become minds without bodies, that two-way interactions between mind and body are crucial to thought and health, and the brain may partly think in terms of the motor actions it encodes for the body's muscles

"In the coming decades, our concept of free will, based as it is on ignorance of its actual mechanisms, will be destroyed by what we learn about the actual workings of the brain."

"We humans can, and do, make up our own purposes, but ultimately the universe has none."

"If this ratio of one real life to ten simulated lives turned out to be representative of human experience, this means that right now, you only have a one in ten chance of being alive on the actual date of today."

"these systems operate on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics, which sacrifices perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale."

Welcome to meditation, Matt. It's hard work, not working. 'After a bit more, I was just saying to myself "let it go, let it go" whenever something new came to mind, and then realising I was getting fixated on saying those words so having to let those go

"What if the goblins were bands of teenage boys, and fairies and elves were groups of young children?"

"Conversational implicature is a nonconventional implicature based on an addressee's assumption that the speaker is following the conversational maxims or at least the cooperative principle."

"As good as the social networks and tags in sites like del.icio.us and Flickr are, we need more vias and more back-at-yas to shape the flow and promote the conversation, and therefore the implicature, that is necessary for the personal, meaningful, helpfu

"a researcher at the University of Alberta says most people have the ability to reverse the mental declines that come with aging."

"Gödel didn't believe that truth would elude us. He proved it would."

"In brief: gather a bunch of terms for things, write onto a card each, ask some users to sort these into "like" piles, ask them to name the piles. Discover what categories exist for your information, and what goes into each category."

"An exocortex (speculative) is an external information processing system that augments, in a subtle and seamless fashion via a brain-computer interface, the brain's biological high-level cognitive processes."

"Researchers at Harvard University have found evidence that the retina actively seeks novel features in the visual environment, dynamically adjusting its processing in order to seek the unusual while ignoring the commonplace"

"CAN WE LEARN TO THINK LIKE A PLANT?"

"Our relationships with others are akin to social prosthetics for the mind, argues one leading Harvard psychologist. We’re hardwired to care as much as we are to compete, says another, and the clues lie in the biology of our brains."

"Genius cannot exist without mental disorder, according to a study that names George Orwell, LS Lowry and Lewis Carroll among 21 artists who suffered a form of autism."

"A team of researchers will use technology to extend the human senses, allowing people to sense magnetic fields, experience sight via tactile vibrations and see behind them."

"As an example of what happens when "theory of mind" is limited or missing, autistic children have problems interpreting irony, the more general category of social communication into which sarcasm falls."

"They've shown for the first time how a particular brain region in birds serves as the source of vocal creativity."

"Imagine being blind for 25 years, and suddenly being able to see again - using your ears."

"The ultimate goal is to provide synthetic vision with truly visual sensations by exploiting the neural plasticity of the human brain." Whoa.

"Welcome to the World Wide Web where the only thing that is completely predictable is its total unpredictability."

"...cows have a complex mental life in which they bear grudges, nurture friendships and become excited by intellectual challenges, researchers have found."

"This page has pointers to the chapters of my notes on Machine Learning."

"900 articles on every aspect of the brain and consciousness and over 300 contributors from the world's leading scholars"

"Self-control, whether used to pass up the office cookie plate or to struggle against temptations like alcohol and tobacco, operates like a renewable energy source rather than a learned skill or an analytical thought process, according to new research."

"All models are false, but some are useful, as they say."

"Bottom line: embrace lifelong learning. Do something new. Physical exercise is repetitive; mental exercise is eclectic."

"Hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study."

"...it could be that higher levels of mental demands result in increased brain cell activity, which may help maintain a ‘reserve’ of brain cells that resists the effects of Alzheimer’s disease..." Not the only solid conclusion, but just to be safe:

"Now if you'll just excuse me. GODDAMN THIS IS SO BLOODY BRILLIANT. Sorry, I've been wanting to say that for ages." Brain Hacks. As fast as it hits the bookstore, it'll be on my shelf.

"The other task of visual processing is to throw information away."

"Anthropic reasoning, the theory of how to detect, diagnose and cure the biases of observation selection effects, is a philosophical goldmine."

"As video games have developed increasingly realistic graphics, they have begun to suffer more and more from this same conundrum. Games have unexpectedly fallen into the Uncanny Valley."

"For the first time in humans, a team headed by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis has placed an electronic grid atop patients' brains to gather motor signals that enable patients to play a computer game using only the signals from their br

"Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work."

"Horny surfers drive massive windfarms. They are the power for our engines, a Pacific current."

"A research team has found that the human brain makes much more extensive use of highly complex statistics when learning a language than scientists ever realized."

"The Memory Glasses is a wearable, proactive, context-aware memory aid based on the MIThril platform and wearable sensors."

Single spot in brain determines size of visual scratch pad

Rarely does anyone weigh facts before deciding what to believe

"You can't erase your boyfriend from your brain, but the movie gets the rest of it right."

"Intelligent life is, in essence, the reproductive organ of the cosmos" Interesting. Actually found this via a Christian news site, but I think they missed the implication of this theory that *we* might someday become creator gods of another universe.

A neuroscience study of morality

"I PROPOSE to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'"

"Losing this linguistic diversity will be a blow not only for cultural studies but also for cognitive science, they say."

"So, looks like the toybox full of memories stays full until some of them fade away..."

"This is the last transmission of Alan Gerrard, the first diplomat of Earth to speak to a strange alien race in the only language they understand."

"The folks who get N.A.D.D. know that when they summon their own bizarre set of desktop rituals, they are able to construct a healthy mental space where they can successfully surf waves of information that would baffle your average multitasker."

"Qualia are the experiences of sensory input (as opposed to the describable facts of such input)"

"There are all sorts of gaps in our conscious experience which has prompted some to argue that we don’t actually see the world as it really is."

"Juggling and probably other visual skills that take time to master increase the size of your brain."

Very interesting in the context of Gödel, Escher, Bach, which I'm currently reading