Comment by TexanFeller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TexanFeller | Hacker News Reader

I listened to an interview with a researcher a while back who hypothesized that human reasoning probably evolved not mostly for the abstract logical reasoning we associate with intelligence, but to “give reasons” to motivate other humans or to explain our previous actions in a way that would make them seem acceptable…social utility basically. My experience with next token predicting LLMs aligns with human communication. We humans rarely complete a thought before we start speaking, so I think our brains are often just predicting the next 1-5 words that will be accepted by who we’re talking to based on previous knowledge of them and evaluation of their (often nonverbal) emotional reactions to what we’re saying. Our typical thought patterns may not be as different from LLMs’ as we think.

IIRC the researcher was Hugo Mercier, probably on Sean Carroll’s fantastic Mindscape podcast, but it might have been Lex Fridman before he strayed from science/tech.

Hugo Mercier is the originator of this: https://philpapers.org/rec/MERTSO-7

"reasoning evolved not to complement individual cognition but as an argumentative device" -- and it has more positive effects at social level than at individual level

https://www.dan.sperber.fr/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Mercie...

Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory

> and it has more positive effects at social level than at individual level

Now it raises the question should we be reasoning in our head then? Is there a better way to solve intractable math problems for example? Is math itself a red herring created for argumentative purposes?

> human reasoning probably evolved [...]

We can never know, but I personally favour the rise of "handedness" and the tool-making (technological) hypothesis. To make and use tools, and to transfer the recipes and terminology, we must educate one another.

"In the physical adaptation view, one function (producing speech sounds) must have been superimposed on existing anatomical features (teeth, lips) previously used for other purposes (chewing, sucking). A similar development is believed to have taken place with human hands and some believe that manual gestures may have been a precursor of language. By about two million years ago, there is evidence that humans had developed preferential right-handedness and had become capable of making stone tools. Tool making, or the outcome of manipulating objects and changing them using both hands, is evidence of a brain at work." [1]

[1] _ https://assets.cambridge.org/97811084/99453/excerpt/97811084...

Not choosing exactly what words you want to use is something very different than not completing a thought IMO. When you speak you may not know exactly which words you're going to use to communicate an idea, but you already know the idea that you're communicating. By contrast LLMs have no such concept as an idea - only words.

And it's also important that language and words are just another invention of humanity. We achieved plenty before we had any meaningful language whatsoever. At the bare minimum we reproduced - and think about all that's involved in forming a relationship, having a child, and then successfully raising that child for them to go on and do the same, all without any sort of language. It emphasizes that ideas and language are two very different concepts, at least for humans.

Interesting. N.J. Enfield (Linguist, Anthropologist) makes a similar point about the purpose for which language evolved for in "Language vs Reality". I'm paraphrasing loosely, but the core argument is that the primary role of language is to create an abstraction of reality in order to convince other people, than to accurately capture reality. He talks about how there are 2 layers of abstraction - how our senses compress information into higher order concepts that we consciously perceive, and how language further compresses information about these higher order concepts we have in our minds.

Why would a human need to develop the ability to convince others if truth should be enough? One would have to make the argument that convincing others and oneself involves things that are not true to at least one party (as far as they know). I don't know why a species would develop misunderstanding if truth is always involved. If emotions/perception are the things that create misunderstanding, then I can see the argument for language as necessary to fix misunderstanding in the group. On some level, nature thought it correct to fix misunderstanding on a species level.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that “truth” is a word, and therefore not “enough” be definition of not being a physical thing in the world. Without communication there can be no lies, so truth doesnt mean anything.

If by “truth” you mean more like Kants “the thing in itself”, then the problem there is we need abstraction. If I show you how to make an arrowhead, somehow I need to convey that you can follow the same process with your own piece of flint, and that they are both arrowheads. Without any language abstraction my arrowhead and your arrowhead are just two different rocks with no relation to each other.

I have had the same suspicion. I can propose a new kind of ongoing Turing-like test where we track how many words are suggested on our phones (or computers) as we type. On my phone it guesses the next single word pretty well, so why not the next two? Then 3... imagine half-way through a message it "finishing your sentence" as close friends and family often do. Then why should it wait for halfway? What are the various milestones of finishing the last word, last 5 words, half the sentence, 80%, etc?

There's also the whole predictive processing camp in cognitive science whose position is loosely similar to the author's, but the author makes a much stronger commitment to computationalism than other researchers in the camp.

This just doesn't explain things by itself. It doesn't explain why humans would care about reasoning in the first place. It's like explaining all life as parasitic while ignoring where the hosts get their energy from.

Think about it, if all reasoning is post-hoc rationalization, reasons are useless. Imagine a mentally ill person on the street yelling at you as you pass by: you're going to ignore those noises, not try to interpret their meaning and let them influence your beliefs.

This theory is too cynical. The real answer has got to have some element of "reasoning is useful because it somehow improves our predictions about the world"

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