links.lmorchard.com - #cogsci

AI Isn’t Outthinking Mathematicians. It’s Out-Remembering Them.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 03:08:53 +0000

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.

Tags: #ai #cogsci #llms #math

Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 22:01:03 +0000

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.

Tags: #ai #claude #codegen #cogsci #emotions #llms

The AI boom is based on a fundamental mistake | The Verge

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 19:49:18 +0000

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.

Tags: #cogsci #genai #language #llms

Emergent introspective awareness in large language models \ Anthropic

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 04:03:31 +0000

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!

Tags: #ai #claude #cogsci #genai #llms

LLM Daydreaming · Gwern.net

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 19:06:02 +0000

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.

Tags: #ai #cogsci #llms #ml

Strange loop - Wikipedia

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 18:27:11 +0000

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.

Tags: #ai #cogsci #llms #ml

Michael Crichton - Wikipedia

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 18:53:10 +0000

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."

Tags: #cogsci #misinformation #news #psychology #social

Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:04:53 +0000

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.

Tags: #anthropology #cogsci #culture #imported:pinboard #psychology #science #to:fb

Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:04:53 +0000

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.

Tags: #anthropology #cogsci #culture #psychology #science #to:fb

Thalience — KarlSchroeder.com

Thu, 03 May 2012 16:04:57 +0000

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.

Tags: #ai #cogsci #fiction #imported:pinboard #science #scifi #thalience

Banishing consciousness: the mystery of anaesthesia - health - 29 November 2011 - New Scientist

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:27:18 +0000

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?

Tags: #anaesthesia #brain #cogsci #consciousness #medicine #mind #science

Merlin W. Donald - Queen's University

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 05:14:08 +0000

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).

Tags: #cogsci #mind #psychology #science

last viridian (21 Jan., 2011, at Interconnected)

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 01:36:14 +0000

Tags: #cogsci

upsideclown: extelligence

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:49:54 +0000

Tags: #cogsci #extelligence #extended #fiction #mind #philosophy #scifi #stories #upsideclown

Moral judgments can be altered ... by magnets

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 01:06:34 +0000

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

Tags: #brain #cogsci #mind #mit #neuroscience #research