Our subconscious minds do the real thinking, and once they reach a conclusion, the conscious part of our mind is notified. At least that’s what I used to assume before reading Nick Chater’s The mind is flat, which proposes a radical and well-argued departure from this model. According to Chater, there’s no subconscious with its own beliefs, goals or values, of which the conscious is the surface. Instead, the subconscious is just running dumb pattern recognition and processing algorithms, and the conscious is all the real thought there is.
The mind is flat came out before the advent of large language models, which is a shame because in some ways LLMs are an example of a flat mind. To be sure, there are weights behind the model, but they don’t indicate depth. Instead, the output of the model is all there is.
Nehaveigur 
3 responses to “The Mind is Flat”
[…] the opportunity cost, but there’s also not that much to be gained: Our minds may be less rich than we like to think and our family histories may not be that important. There are also those who are harmed by therapy. […]
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[…] The only way I can describe what reached out through my hand is intuition, but that’s not a satisfying explanation of what’s going on. I wonder if comparing our minds to large language models is instructive. Our experiences are equivalent to the LLM’s training data and our memories, at least the implicit ones, are equivalent to the LLM’s parameters. Our learning occurs continuously, while LLM training occurs in massive, one-off training runs. In this comparison, the chain-of-thought the LLM provides about its thinking process is equivalent to our consciousness, maybe in the way described by Nick Chater. […]
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[…] in Mathematica, which I reviewed a few weeks ago. It’s also diametrically the opposite of the flat mind thesis advanced by Nick Chater, at least on the […]
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