On thinking and benzene

cliophate.wtf - How to think

This post resonated with me. In a tiny way, I am skeptical about it given how much I found myself agreeing with it. These are the ways I think. I will wait until you go finish reading.

Go. Do it. Now.

When you are back, you can read through the parts that just makes sense.

Disclaimer: The post argues that, by definition, LLMs cannot think. I mathematically agree with this. However, I will also be the first to admit that I am not the expert to define what thinking is.

I am very interested to know and debate if we land on LLMs thinking or not. However, this post is to expand and explore how humans think. I really liked the four parts of thinking that was highlighted in the post:

Thinking in silence; Thinking through inspiration; Thinking by writing; Thinking by not (actively) thinking.

I think they do a great job of highlighting the various parts of thinking as a process. However, each process is best at doing something slightly different. I break the job down as follows:

• exposure: this is the part where you expose your brain to “the lego bricks” as posited by the author. Or the “thinking through inspiration”
• processing: to me, this is your brain taking each lego brick and considering the various perspectives, aspects, pivots of it. This can be done by writing, by typing, in silence
• distilling: This is the part where your brain takes the kernel / lesson of the process and then stores it, in a way to be used in another right context again.

To be clear, I believe the author has hit the various ways in which you empower and encourage thinking accurately. I just wanted to call out that there are different parts of that process that might be encouraged by each of the rituals.

Finally, your brain does something incredibly powerful. I’ve never yet seen this happen by LLMs.

This is thinking by not thinking. It is passive. It happens without you forcing it, in the subconscious, while you do other things. I don’t know why it happens. I don’t understand what processes run in our subconscious mind in the background, I only know that I’ve experienced this before.

I always think back to the (apocryphal) story of the benzene ring structure. Put me in as a believer because it’s happened to me multiple times.

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