Humans are capable of intricate complex thought that involves "mental states of recollection, preference, taste". However, LLMs have demonstrated pretty conclus

Humans are capable of intricate complex thought that involves "mental states of recollection, preference, taste". However, LLMs have demonstrated pretty conclusively that most of the thoughts we have do not require any of that. Language turns out to be much simpler than previously assumed. Thinking hard it makes your brain hurt. It's exhausting. Most of the work we do, including programming, is not like that. Some of the work we do is fiendishly difficult but much of it is more like word-completion based on prior experience. Evolutionary processes optimize for energy efficiency. We don't think at 100% brain power all the time because we can't afford to. It makes a ton of sense, in retrospect, that our brains have optimized for language to the point that very little compute is required. And even so, the brain still consumes 20% of our daily calories. Hard thinking is the exception and casual thinking is the norm. Why is it so hard to persuade people of anything on the internet? Because we mostly engage in LLM-like auto-completion. Very little actual thinking is involved and very few calories are spent.