Thanks to @[email protected] for the links!
Here’s a link to Caltech’s press release: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/thinking-slowly-the-paradoxical-slowness-of-human-behavior
Here’s a link to the actual paper (paywall): https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(24)00808-0
Here’s a link to a preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234
Try to read this next part without understanding it. If you know English you will find it impossible to NOT find meaning in these letters displayed in a row. That’s more like a subconscious processing. If you’re learning to read English then there’s likely an active “thought” appearing in your experience. See a difference?
I absolutely do, which is why I concentrated on the THOUGHT part, as in understanding. You obviously can’t have understanding without thought. That’s the difference between data and information.
Please I have 40 years of experience in philosophic issues regarding intelligence and consciousness, also from a programmers perspective.
Sorry if my replies are annoying, I merely find this subject interesting. Feel free to ignore this.
It is not obvious to me why a being couldn’t have an “understanding” without a “thought”. I do not believe it’s possible to verify if a creature has a subjective experience but an “understanding” of the environment could be attributed to how a being performs in an environment (a crow gets foods that was just out of reach inside a tube of water by adding rocks to raise the water level). I have some experience on game-dev programming and limited understanding on consciousness as a personal interest, if that’s helpful.
Oh no this is not annoying, this is a very interesting question.
I suppose with the crow, it doesn’t need to understand volume of water and rocks displacing it, but merely has a more basic understanding that adding rocks raise the water, or maybe even just makes the food easier to get at.
So I suppose we can agree that there are multiple levels of understanding.
But still the crow must have observed this, unless it actually figured it out? And some thought process must have led it to believe that dropping stones in the water might have the desired effect.
Now even if the crow had observed another crow doing this, and seen this demonstrated. Ir mist have had a thought process concluding that it could try this too, and perhaps it would work.
But there are other situations that are more challenging IMO, and that’s with LLM, how do we decide thought and understand with those.
LLM is extremely stupid and clever at the same time. With loads of examples of them not understanding the simplest things, like how meany R’s are in Strawberry, and the AI answering stubbornly that there are only 2! But on the other hand being able to spell it out and count them, then being able to realize that there are indeed 3, which it previously denied.
IMO animal studies are crucial to understand our own intelligence, because the principle is the same, but animals are a simpler “model” of it so to speak.
It seems to me that thought is a requirement to understanding. You think about something before you understand it.
Without the thought process it would have to be instinctive. But I don’t think it can be argued that crows dropping rocks in water is instinctive.
But even instinctive understanding is a kind of understanding, it’s just not by our consciousness, but by certain behavior traits having an evolutionary advantage, causing that behavior to become more common.
So you are absolutely right that thought is not always required for some sort of “understanding”. which is a good point.
But what I meant was conscious understanding as in really understanding a concept and for humans understanding abstract terms, and for that type of understanding thought is definitely a requirement.
Understanding it is active thought. And processing the words, as words with meaning, is required to formulate a relevant response.
The more than 10 bits each word is are part of your active thought.
I think we may disagree on term definitions.
I perceive “active thought” when trying to decipher parts of a sentence I do not already have an understanding of. If I already understand a part then no active thought is perceived by me - like driving a car when nothing eventful is happening. [Note: I don’t believe I have 100% accurate perception of my own subjective experience. Trying to focus on subjective experience at all instead of constantly being “lost in thought” is very short lived]