There are no true and untrue claims about how the brain works, because we have no idea how it works.

The reason people give that humans are not auto-complete is "Obviously I am not an autocomplete"

Meanwhile, people are just a black box process that output words into their head, which they then take credit for, and calling it cognition. We have no idea how that black box that serves up a word when I say "Think of a car brand" works.

> because we have no idea how it works

Flagrantly, ridiculously untrue. We don't know the precise nuts and bolts regarding the emergence of consciousness and the ability to reason, that's fair, but different structures of the brain have been directly linked to different functions and have been observed in operation on patients being stimulated in various ways with machinery attached to them reading levels of neuro-activity in the brain, and in specific regions. We know which parts handle our visual acuity and sense of hearing, and even cooler, we can watch those same regions light up when we use our "minds eye" to imagine things or engage in self-talk, completely silent speech that nevertheless engages our verbal center, which is also engaged by the act of handwriting and typing.

In short: no, we don't have the WHOLE answer. But to say that we have no idea is categorically ridiculous.

As to the notion of LLMs doing similarly: no. They are trained on millions of texts of various sources of humans doing thinking aloud, and that is what you're seeing: a probabilistic read of millions if not billions of documents, written by humans, selected by the machine to "minimize error." And crucially, it can't minimize it 100%. Whatever philosophical points you'd like to raise about intelligence or thinking, I don't think we would ever be willing to call someone intelligent if they just made something up in response to your query, because they think you really want it to be real, even when it isn't. Which points to the overall charade: it wants to LOOK intelligent, while not BEING intelligent, because that's what the engineers who built it wanted it to do.

Accepting as true "We don't know how the brain works in a precise way" does not mean that obviously untrue statements about the human brain cannot still be made. Your brain specifically, however, is an electric rat that pulls on levers of flesh while yearning for a taste of God's holiest cheddar. You might reply, "no! that cannot be!", but my statement isn't untrue, so it goes.

>>>There are no true and untrue claims about how the brain works, because we have no idea how it works.

Which is why if you pick up a neuroscience textbook it's 400 pages of blank white pages, correct?

There are different levels of understanding.

I don't need to know how a TV works to know there aren't little men and women acting out the TV shows when I put them on.

I don't need to know how the brain works in detail to know claims that humans are doing the same things as LLMs to be similarly silly.

The trouble is that no one knows enough about how the brain works to refute that claim.

There's no serious claim that needs refuting.

I don't think any serious person thinks LLMs work like the human brain.

People claiming this online aren't going around murdering their spouses like you'd delete an old LLama model from your hard drive.

I'm not sure why people keep posting these sorts of claims they can't possibly actually believe if we look at their demonstrable real life behavior.

We’re obviously more advanced than an LLM, but to claim that human beings simply generate output based on inputs and context (environment, life experience) is not silly.

> People claiming this online aren't going around murdering their spouses like you'd delete an old LLama model from your hard drive.

Not sure what you’re trying to say here.

I'm saying you'd object to being treated like an LLM and don't really have conviction when you make these claims.

I'd also say stringing together A.I. buzzwords (input output) to describe humans isn't really an argument so much as what philosophers call a category error.

That I wouldn’t treat a human like an LLM is completely irrelevant to the topic.

Input and output are not AI buzzwords, they’re fundamental terms in computation. The argument that human beings are computational has been alive in philosophy since the 1940’s brother…

"the argument that human beings are computational has been alive in philosophy since the 1940’s brother"

I recently read a little philosophy on this, to say humans are "computational" you first have to define what you mean by "computational". Depending on the definition you employ, you are either making a wacky claim, a controversial claim, or a noncontroversial claim.

Since you provide no definition, you are saying nothing at all.

The discourse that comes up in AI topics seems more glib language games than actual concern over human nature, computational or otherwise.

>That I wouldn’t treat a human like an LLM is completely irrelevant to the topic.

The fact you wouldn't treat a human like an LLM suggests your constant claim of similarity is not something you actually believe.

Our output is quite literally the sum of our hardware (genetics) and input (immediate environment and history). For anyone who agrees that free will is nonsense, the debate is already over, we’re nothing more than output generating biological machines.

Similar, not identical. Like a bicycle and car are both vehicles with tires, but are still not identical vessels.