You are clearly not consciously noting what your neurons are actually doing.
It is undeniable that human reasoning is a stochastic process. Otherwise it wouldn't be reasonable for people to make mistakes after learning something. Especially inconsistent mistakes, like when we give people 10,000 addition problems to do in a row it'd be reasonable for them to get a few of them wrong.
It can still be a deterministic process. If anything came out of the whole LLM story for me it is that I am even more convinced that it is.
My (somewhat educated, but still naive) idea why it looks like a stochastic process is that the brain gets incredible amounts of random input. We literally get bombarded with particles and energy ever instance we live, from photons hitting out retinas , molecules transferring "heat" energy into our skin to sound waves hitting our ear drums.
Ever noticed that you get more productive when you get up from your screen? Or how some people work better while listening to music? How you find your answer just as you start to explain it to a colleague?
I would argue that this is due to a limited "entropy" pool available to the brain. Just changing the input to the system replenishes the pool.
That’s a bit of a stretch when we don’t actually know if QM is objectively random, but it could be sure. But then what about things like, is it random that 1+1=2. No…what are you really saying is random when a human answers this? I think even if you make the assumption QM is objectively random, thought is the hard problem after all and we might not want to jump so far head. Math certainly isn’t random and we can think about it.
As a crude anecdote, certain words when I learned them allowed me to think differently. Gestalt is one of those words.
Interesting to think about and reminds me of the story by Ted Chiang.
workspace :: nested forests of binary trees of syntactic structures (with no label order) (= here, thoughts and meanings are assumed to be composites of mental syntax objects that can be re-combined with others. Big assumption? Maybe)
externalization process :: some mental faculty that decides the order to use when outputting thoughts into ordered strings (eg vocalization of thoughts into sentences)
The thing is, you can put a probability theory onto anything that you can count or record states of. Of course, counting the external observations may lack the richness of the internal process. I feel that this linguistic program will work its way into a lot of future LM tooling, in some incarnation or another.
Words seem more like a protocol to express some internal model/state in the brain and can never capture the entire actual state, only a small part of it. But since we're not telepaths, we obviously need to use words to exchange information.