This 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
Doesn’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’.
Are 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.
Infuriatingly, 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.
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
Conscious agents are creating spacetime. Not the other way around: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4060643/
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’.
What are your thoughts on this?
Have long thought that creativity is little more than a finely tuned filter driven by noise…
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.