Thread by @michaelgarfield

People are asking LLMs to write stories like a waking mind does, then declaring their own supremacy as creators when tools structured to work like the dreaming mind spit out what have always been described by the engineers as dreams rather than coherent waking-state narratives.

The extra funny part is people thinking that in an era perhaps most accurately characterized as a collective psychedelic experience, the waking-mind economy is somehow going to maintain its tide wall against this tsunami of unconscious material.

Bad trip recipe, that.

It's like the foolishness of expecting kids to think like adults. These are distinctly different modes of cognition that exist together in an ecology of strategies adapted for different purposes. Exploration-tuned systems are vital complements to exploitation-tuned systems.

You can't have it both ways and simultaneously deride LLMs for their inability to write like humans while also fearing the replacement of human writers in the labor market. First of all, this incents the very thing you fear. Second, it misses out on the most interesting… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Alan Turing had the sense to note that asking whether a computer can think is like whether a submarine can swim. I'm disappointed in how many otherwise intelligent people are responding to LLMs like British 19th century anthropologists claiming other cultures can't reason.

At the same time I'm totally unsurprised that anyone would treat unfamiliar modes of intelligence as lesser in a society that has so thoroughly failed to recognize the value of dreaming, imagination, childhood play, and the arts, and systematically pathologized neurodiversity.

We're talking about the only society in the history of humankind that's waged war against the unconscious mind with artificial lighting, television, treating plant medicines as "hallucinogens," concerted efforts to eradicate "useless" sleep, questing for the eradication of noise.

We're talking about a society that feared the loss of a supposedly rational modern self and the madness of groups, that has systematically oppressed congregation and nearly every altered state in the collective toolkit of human culture in an effort to maintain political order...

Well, I have bad news for all of you 21st century cognitive Puritans. There's a reason that animal intelligence research, psychedelics research, and LLM research is all exploding at the same time. We need more than one kind of mind to get us out of the mess that centuries of… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

What follows is some recommended reading for those struggling to see beyond the corset of the modern mind's horizon. For your own sake I hope you remember what it was like as a child and can face with grace what it will be like in old age...
return.life/p/the-future-i…
@returndotlife

Here is one of my favorite recordings on radical cognitive diversity: a deep discussion with animal cognition and music researcher Patricia Gray on #FutureFossils.

Big thanks to @Interspecies_io for being the reason for my meeting Dr. Gray back in 2018!

open.spotify.com/episode/0extaI…

Also relevant here is @erikphoel's work on #dreaming as a way for #brains to prevent overfitting.

discovermagazine.com/mind/how-artif…

I'm not keen on reducing what dreams are to MERELY this, since traits often evolve for different reasons than their apparent function and since dreams have… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Eventually I'll get my act together and discuss te overfit brain hypothesis with @erikphoel on #FutureFossils but in the meantime another relevant discussion (re: #neurodiversity and #creativity) in which these considerations came up was this superbly fun trialogue about… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…