> I don't re-read the whole sentence before every word I type
Maybe you don't do it consciously, but your brain is quite aware of every word you typed before the word you're typing.
Maybe you don't do it consciously, but your brain is quite aware of every word you typed before the word you're typing.
How would you know that?
Sincere question, because to me it feels like my brain is improvising word by word when typing out this sentence. I often delete and retype it until it feels right, but in the process of typing a single sentence, I'm just chaining words one after another the way they feel right.
In other words, my brain doesn't exactly know the sentence beforehand - it improvises by chaining the words, while applying a fitness function F(sentence) -> feeling that tells it whether it corresponds to what I wanted to say or not.
I think we know where we are going in a conceptual sense, the words start feeling right because they are taking us to that destination, or not.
If I leave a sentence in the middle for some reason, when I return I often have zero idea how to finish the sentence or even what the sentence fragment means.
Interesting. Perhaps the question then becomes, does your inner dialogue simply chain the words one after another, or does it come up with sentences as whole?
The fact that ChatGPT does so well is perhaps a sign we do somewhat generate sentences on the fly. Obviously we mostly listen and read sequentially.
One could test it by using an external random bell to signal you should try and make a significant sentence change e.g. from English to Spanish. How much practice would it take?
From 1984: In the middle of Hate Week, the speaker is halfway through a sentence about hating Eurasia, he is given a note, and he continues the sentence except now Oceania is not, and has never been, at war with Eurasia, and it is Eastasia that is now hated.
I think if our eyes can deceive us at a fundamental level, it’s arrogant to think we aren’t deceived by our thoughts.
We can form a counter-argument to anything, to be precise. :)
It's very hard to analyze ourselves only from our own consciousness. Especially since the consciousness itself is very likely an illusion [0].
That’s your conscious experience, but it doesn’t necessarily match what your subconscious mind has actually been doing. I’d hazard a guess that it’s thinking several moves ahead, like a good chess player. What you end up being consciously aware of is probably just the end product of multiple competing models - including ones that want to stop writing altogether and go do something else.
I don’t think that what ChatGPT does is anything remotely like what I do to communicate. But maybe I’m weird.
Its like a juggling act. The ball with the conclusion is thrown up highest, a bunch of other balls are thrown up in between, and they should all start arriving back in your hands, in the correct order, one at a time, without having known the exact sequence to expect when they were first thrown.
Sometime the juggler misjudges and the train of thought is scrambled and lost.
"experience tranquility"
--zenyatta overwatch
Yeah, that metaphor works. ;) As an extremely ADHD person, every thought comes with extra bonus thoughts (and parentheticals!), and the trick is knowing when to introduce each supporting point without re-introducing concepts needlessly but also try to have my bizarre brain make sense. Internet arguing and trying to preemptively address counterarguments with supporting points has seriously broken my brain and it leads to very longwinded posts. Keeping it short and coherent is specifically something I really have to work at because I love to write and people don't want to read a novel every comment. It's a matter of effective communication though.
Personally the description of the transformer as "writes words and then edits the output as a unit once the words are complete" really describes my writing at both a sentence and paragraph level. I'll go back and edit a comment a ton to try and tune it and clarify exact meaning/nuance with the most precise language I can.
A ton of people read my comments and are like "did an AI write this!?" and yeah only the finest biological neural net.
Another friend described it as "needing to slow his brain down" and perhaps a similar metaphor would be a database pivot - taking sparse facts and grouping them into a clustered dense representation as an argument. It's an expensive operation especially if there's more there than you thought.