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The Computational Theory of Mind (2015)
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- soupspaces 2mo agohttps://philosophynow.org/issues/132/About_Aboutness https://philosophynow.org/issues/132/About_Aboutness
- firasd 2mo agoDoesn’t the concept of a subconscious, or inner voice, invalidate any tight analogies to Turing Machines? What logical process is putting the Fur Elise into my head (earworms etc) I think this article is right that definitions really matter here cause one could argue “CTM is trivial, because we can describe almost any physical system as executing computations.” So we have a dual problem here—not just the difficult discussion of ‘what’s going on in minds’, but also ‘what is computation’.
- cat-whisperer 2mo agoI would agree, but I recently read https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.html https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.html which is quite interesting in it's own right. What are your thoughts on this?
- firasd 2mo agoAre LLMs even covered by ‘computational theory of mind’? Cause if I say “I like to bake” the LLM is only able to recognize and respond to that sentence due to the neural network making emergent connections between the tokens in the words—very different from the kind of computer programs these guys seem to have been thinking about.
- timshell 2mo agoI think many cognitive scientists think language is a core part of human cognition, and that LLMs were a major advance in AI/cognitive science due to connecting AI algorithms with language production, but LLMs aren’t considered (or even aiming) to be accurate models of human cognition
- BobbyTables2 2mo agoWonder if the subconscious could simply be another LLM with a higher temperature setting… Have long thought that creativity is little more than a finely tuned filter driven by noise…
- elendilm 2mo agoAgreed. Well said. Trying to maintain that our mind is unreachable by the laws of logic is absurd. If reachable by laws of logic, then it can be stated. If it can be stated, it can be executed. Its funny that the very act of chaining sentences is what logic is. And every human thought can be written as a sentence.
- fragmede 2mo ago> every human thought can be written as a sentence. No they can't. I have things in my brain that I don't have words for, that I'm able to find things other people have done to help me express them. You can attach sentences to music and art, but a picture is worth a thousand words. The thoughts on my head when I saw the latest Banksy, for example. Maybe I'm abberationally ineloquent, but I don't think I'm that exceptional.
- elendilm 2mo agoYes they can. Retreating to "I feel things I can't say" arguments that cannot be falsified is a cope. Either that or you didn't put effort into writing it down or you lack the capability to do it. You can even write sentences like "cows have wings and smells green". Regular thoughts are feeble by comparison in terms of complexity. Claiming "a picture is worth a thousand words" may work out in family gatherings but irrelevant and meaningless in a computation discussion. Picture is represented by concrete symbols.
- fragmede 2mo agoHaving an internal representation doesn’t imply an English sentence exists. Temple Grandin's written about "thinking in pictures". Language is lossy. For a doctor, the question, how much does it hurt, on a scale from 1-10? is the best we can do.
- TheOtherHobbes 2mo agoInfuriatingly, computation is subjective. The experience of the inputs, the results, and the processes depends on qualia. So does logic itself. Automating the processes doesn't change that. There's a very large number of possible processes and operations, but only a small number are perceived as valuable.
- Beijinger 2mo agoNot broad enough. Better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_Space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_Space
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- phoghed 2mo agoIllegal character, no whimsy allowed, get his ass dang
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- bofadeez 2mo agoJust as the amplitudes program suggests that spacetime itself may be an emergent structure rather than the fundamental substrate of reality [1], the computational theory of mind may be mistaking an emergent representation for the source of consciousness. A more fundamental theory must therefore treat neural computation as an emergent interface within conscious-agent relations, rather than as the mechanism that generates consciousness. Even the loosest, "multiply realizable" version of computationalism this entry lays out still needs something physical to run on like neurons, silicon, spacetime, whatever. Problem is, natural selection was never selecting for accurate perception of that substrate, just for fitness payoffs [2]. So computationalism has the order backwards: you can't generate a mind by computing over a brain when the brain, like any object in spacetime, is just a species-specific icon evolution gave you to see, not the hardware underneath it. [1] https://vod.video.cornell.edu/media/1_sfv907qp https://vod.video.cornell.edu/media/1_sfv907qp [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4060643 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4060643
- cyanregiment 2mo agoI can prove things are the way they are outside my mind's perception of them, through the use of extra sensory devices. Even in a Donald Hoffman esque icon:hardware situation - and I think he said - "I don't take the icon literally, but I do take it seriously" meaning that even though it's an illusion, it still performs the function, I have trouble with mind preceding matter. It's the same trouble I have with human-like intelligence preceding worlds. People come out of worlds, not the other way around.
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- timshell 2mo agoThis was the core premise behind my research during grad school and beyond. My favorite project — which ultimately became my dissertation — was a proposal to connect reinforcement learning algorithms, neuronal data, psychological behavior, and phenomenology. Specifically, the idea was the feeling of cognitive fatigue is a mathematical signal to ‘rest’, in which the value of rest is defined by offline mechanisms that contribute to decision-making. I proposed a connection to hippocampal replay, and was able to leverage fMRI and choice data to evaluate the hypothesis. Zooming out of my specific work, the “best” success stories were connections across math/CS, neuro, and psych and the golden child is the dopamine model of reinforcement learning where firing patterns encode the TD prediction error
- bofadeez 2mo agoThat's not going to work: https://vod.video.cornell.edu/media/1_sfv907qp https://vod.video.cornell.edu/media/1_sfv907qp Conscious agents are creating spacetime. Not the other way around: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4060643/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4060643/
- CMay 2mo agoIs this a misunderstanding of what the double slit experiment actually means, or am I misinterpreting it? If this is based on the idea that reality changes strictly as a result of a conscious observer existing and it is somehow related to consciousness, etc, that is not accurate. I learned this years ago from Philip Ball, one of the editors of Nature. There have been other scientists helping to clear up the confusion recently, though. Here is Sean Carroll explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNOJV4G7Ips https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNOJV4G7Ips Here is Sabine Hossenfelder explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npc6Mn2CZV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npc6Mn2CZV8 Philip Ball explained it in Beyond Weird: https://www.audible.com/pd/Beyond-Weird-Audiobook/B07L5XK4BL https://www.audible.com/pd/Beyond-Weird-Audiobook/B07L5XK4BL
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- randomImmigrant 2mo agoI believe machines could be made that think. But not purely digital ones. The brain most certainly isn’t a thinking machine precisely because it doesn’t have the luxury of unlimited time. Its design is not based on executing best algorithms, but rather finding good enough solutions among many time constrained but interlinked signal cascades. The brain and body instead construct time, a cohesive internal one,from the ground up, with nesting oscillators driving the sequence of all functions and behaviors, over long and short time closes. What we call “thinking” is a filtered layer of it, a slice that the attention spotlight is focussed on, and in humans this process can be turned to cognition over multilayered abstractions, and using language or other symbolic communications to communicate some of the dynamics of this process, and even evoke them in others. Turing machines, and modern digital computers with their Von Neumann bottleneck, and LLMs are outside of time. They do not experience time. They can check the clock. They can count steps. But they are not active and agentic in time. Till we change that we won’t make machines that “think”. We can certainly make machines that simulate thinking, and that’s often good enough. But make the problem a real time one, with several conflicting verbal streams to parse and respond to serially and LLMs on their own fail catastrophically. I think so long as the memory-processing divide remains, the simulation has to break apart processes for thinking in a way that’s alright for some cases, but not for others. And this is why we have the jaggedness of LLM intelligence I believe. They do not have internal timekeeping like almost all biological agents do.
- hexer292 2mo agoI'm probably way off the mark here, but my instinct tells me there's nothing intrinsic about the human condition that makes it the exclusive vessel of thought. It is theoretically possible, after all, to simulate a human brain at a subatomic level. Sure, the complexity is absurd and interface required to measure it seems far fetched, but technically there's no restriction. Because of this I believe what we know as "thought" or consciousness exists in the space between the physical world. It's just a way to represent the world around us, with the ability to reference the past and systems to predict the future. LLMs to me are like a simplified version thats stretched across the domain of active memory. The "thought" process is the same, an active state (current token) guided by the past state (previous tokens). I think the next step is to reduce what a token is. Right now they are vectors that are linked to words. If instead of words we fed it direct video and audio, and a way to translate the raw data into something resembling the information passed from our eyes and ears in real time, and train it like a child learns from its parents, it's hard to draw the line on where thought begins. It's an interesting experiment, but I still consider it anti-human. In the future, when we have "robot" rights for robots that identify as humans, you'll find me on the side of "they aren't a real human". We'll be called bigots, and I'm okay with that.
- kimjune01 2mo agoi think it's a rite of passage to have attempted encoding thinking and the scientific process for AI/ML researchers
- dinunnob 2mo agoomg welcome philosophers trying to be noticed by frontier labs, lets see if you can set everyone straight (I point to Einstein deliberately looking to philosophy (Spinozian & Machian) to guide his views - and he did all right.)
- overmann 2mo agoHere's a new, unconventional approach to building a Computational Theory of Mind: https://creatingintelligence.org https://creatingintelligence.org
- alberto_ol 2mo agoPreviuous submissions. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fplato.stanford.edu%2Fentries%2Fcomputational-mind%2F https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fplato.stanford.edu%2...
- cgio 2mo agoMy thinking, tangential to the temporal section, is an Implementation Trilemma, a CAP style theorem. An implementation map can be: 1. instantaneous and faithful, at the cost of depending upon substrate-specific persistence parameters; 2. faithful and substrate-neutral, at the cost of requiring historical information; 3. instantaneous and substrate-neutral, at the cost of losing faithfulness. No implementation map can satisfy all three simultaneously. https://philarchive.org/rec/GIOTIT https://philarchive.org/rec/GIOTIT
- elendilm 2mo agoTo anyone who has ever built, designed or debugged physical hardware, the paper's "groundbreaking conclusion" is a mundane reality of physics that a state isn't practically a state unless it lasts long enough to be read.
- cgio 2mo agoExactly the intent of it! Does not claim inventing any physics, just relating it to implementation in philosophy. The graded theory is a bit more advanced on the physics front but not ready yet.
- elendilm 2mo agoCurious about your paper (assuming you are the author). Clarify if I misunderstood. Doesn't introducing separate time slices automatically forces you into a continuum of time and therefore the "Instantaneous" requirement "I" become meaningless. One can't evaluate physical state transitions without continuous time or atleast some form of mathematical ordering. But if you strip away continuous time and keep only the abstract "ordering", you are again back in the world of pure mathematics where states never decay and memory never fades.
- cgio 2mo agoI wouldn’t call an instant as meaningless in a continuum. It is indeed, though, non primitive and idealised as traditionally in physics (the physical state at time t, given as the limit of arbitrarily fine time resolution). If I understand your question correctly, the interesting issue is not whether instants exist as an idealisation, but how independent observations can be synchronised well enough to assess a physical implementation of an abstract mapping. That is a genuinely difficult problem, and one that appears even if time is discrete. It is one of my current work subjects. Anyone who has worked on distributed systems will recognise that ordering events is one thing, establishing a common notion of “now” is another. Once again, no “grand conclusions“ from me!
- elendilm 2mo agoI am hopeful for a deterministic theory of the mind rather than the probabilistic inference in LLMs. Then execute it as a program.
- oleganza 2mo agoIt may very well turn out that probabilistic approximation would be 1000000x cheaper to compute than the deterministic precise theory. Or even better, even formulating the deterministic theory would require 1000000x energy than approximation. And that's how'd we learn that biological minds do the same trick and skip the hard work :-)
- elendilm 2mo agoOr it may very well turn out to just be a next key lookup which is 100000x cheaper to compute than probabilistic inference. The vast amounts of energy spends on generating text tokens while biology only consumes a fraction of it makes me hopeful. My bet is on the deterministic model. When one appears, the whole Jenga tower of AI comes crashing down if everyone can do it dirt cheap.
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