Cognitive Behaviors That Enable Self-Improving Reasoners

Even things like confession, or therapy, leverage this - people letting go of bad things that are hanging around in their memory.

Look at these people that will declaim Pi digits, just because.

Also there are difference in education over different cultural era, not only through time but also space. I heard that India for example value more repetition, where western culture is more in love with innovation. These are of course nothing like exclusive tendencies.

Now if you look at antic Greece, it's certainly not like everyone would be able to restitute Homer word for word. Actually it's easy to forget how divided in term of linguistic and social classes this societies where, and focus solely on the most renowned figures as if they where all part of a tight social group full of solidarity and genius. Actually even a guy like Hippias of Elis can be both depicted by plato as exhibiting all the tremendous admirable feats of the time, including mastering the art of mnemonics, and yet turned into a clueless bragger that isn't even able to recognize that he just doesn't know how to define beauty.

Is this the case? I was under the impression they memorized the plot beats and filled in details on the fly. Also using set phrases or epithets like "Gray-eyed Athena" to slow down the narration and let them plan further.

I store numbers as pictures of numbers, or a geometric representation depending on how big or precise the number is.

Are you saying when you think of the concept of 'twelve plus twelve' you have the equivalent of someone in your head saying 'hmm, well twelve is 2 more than ten, so if I add up ten and ten and two and two I get twenty four?'

That's wild if so.

For your reference, I would follow the procedure above approximately, but visually with numbers that just do the thing that feels right. I think under the hood we're probably doing the same thing, just with a different interface layer

If you see a cat walking along the road, do you have to think to yourself "oh, that's a cat" or do you just know that it's a cat without verbalizing anything? It has its own abstract concept, right? Same thing with sufficiently simple numeric transformations.

> you are still aware of the numbers in Arabic form or whatever equivalent you're using, right?

Not sure if you're in a Fahrenheit or Celsius sort of place but if someone says that it's 70 degrees out do you really think in terms of numbers? Or do you just "know" what 70 degrees is without thinking about it?

For LLMs, the tokens (i.e. words) are what the weights are based on, as there isn't other input into them.

I have moderate inattentive type ADHD that manifests as me being hyper focused on specific sometimes minor things and failing to effectively plan larger picture things and often results in poor executive function outcomes. Maybe that's part of it.

In a fast debate you have no time for inner single dimension explicit reasoning. It flows more directly.

Compare it to running on uneven terrain. Somehow decisions are being made where to put the next foot, but most of the time not after an introspective deliberation (although these would occur sometimes in e.g. very tricky rock climbing moves). The steering of where to go occurs at a much higher level, and the steps flow from higher level coarse grained directions.

Now in hindsight you can go back and analyze a recording or memory of the debate and see how it all makes sense as if it was rationally reasoned at every step of the way, but during the debate it most certainly is not an "inner voice", homunculus reasoning before consciously uttering the next phrase.