News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on TimeCapsuleLLM: LLM trained only on data from 1800-1875. Parent comment

Re:TimeCapsuleLLM: LLM trained only on data from 1800-1875 by viccis on Monday January 12, 2026 @04:47PM (#46594730)
>The problem with all this is that we don't actually know what human cognition is doing either.

We do know what it's not doing, and that is operating only through reproducing linguistic patterns. There's no more cause to think LLMs approximate our thought (thought being something they are incapable of) than that Naive-Bayes spam filter models approximate our thought.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:TimeCapsuleLLM: LLM trained only on data from 1800-1875 by PaulDavisThe1st on Monday January 12, 2026 @04:52PM (#46594797)
My point is that we know very little about the sort of "thought" that we are capable of either. I agree that LLMs cannot do what we typical refer to as "thought", but I thnk it is possible that we do a LOT less of that than we think when we are "thinking" (or more precisely, having the experience of thinking).
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:TimeCapsuleLLM: LLM trained only on data from 1800-1875 by viccis on Monday January 12, 2026 @05:06PM (#46594927)
How does this worldview reconcile the fact that thought demonstrably exists independent of either language or vision/audio sense?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:TimeCapsuleLLM: LLM trained only on data from 1800-1875 by PaulDavisThe1st on Monday January 12, 2026 @05:17PM (#46595028)
I don't see a need to reconcile them.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:TimeCapsuleLLM: LLM trained only on data from 1800-1875 by viccis on Monday January 12, 2026 @05:55PM (#46595337)
Which is why it's incoherent!
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:TimeCapsuleLLM: LLM trained only on data from 1800-1875 by PaulDavisThe1st on Monday January 12, 2026 @06:27PM (#46595593)
I'm not clear that it has to be coherent at this point in the history of our understanding of cognition. We barely know what we're even talking about most of the time ...
[ Parent | on HN ]