How the Mind Works

What Hacker News says

1. hybrid_studyMay 2025
   From a layman's perspective I've yet to find a better understanding of psychology than what Steven Pinker posits in hist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Mind_Works (1997), and even today it doesn't seem like the basic paradigm (the evolutionary constraints) has changed much.
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2. hn_throwaway_99Jan 2025
   There are some great examples and detailed explanations IMO of this general phenomenon in the book "How the Mind Works" by Stephen Pinker. It essentially discusses how your brain is doing statistical work to build the 3D model from these 2 stereoscopic images.
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3. hn_throwaway_99Sep 2024
   You are completely mischaracterizing my comment.

   > Humans have a long list of cognitive shortcomings. We find them interesting and give them all sorts of names like cognitive dissonance or optical illusions. But we don't currently make silly conclusions like humans don't reason.

   Exactly! In fact, things like illusions are actually excellent windows into how the mind really works. Most visual illusions are a fundamental artifact of how the brain needs to turn a 2D image into a 3D, real-world model, and illusions give clues into how it does that, and how the contours of the natural world guided the evolution of the visual system (I think Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" gives excellent examples of this).

   So I am not at all saying that what LLMs do isn't extremely interesting, or useful. What I am saying is that the types of errors you get give a window into how an LLM works, and these hint at some fundamental limitations at what an LLM is capable of, particularly around novel discovery and development of new ideas and theories that aren't just "rearrangements" of existing ideas.

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4. rerdaviesJul 2024
   Also a must read: How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker.

   Pinker advocates for a model of mind that has multiple streams of consciousness. In Pinker's model of mind, there are multiple agents constructing models of the world in parallel, each trying to predict future states from current state plus current input data. A supervisory process then selects the model that has made the best prediction of current state in the recent past for use when reacting in the current moment. The supervisor process is free to switch between models on the fly as more data comes in.

   Pinker grounds his model of mind in curious observations of what people remember, and how our short term memories change over a period of sometimes many seconds as our mind switches between different agent interpretations of what's going on. Witnesses are notoriously unreliable. Pinker concerns himself with why and how witnesses are unreliable, not for legal reasons, but for how those unreliabilities might reveal structure of mind. Pinker's most interesting observation (I think) is that what we seem to remember is output from the models rather than the raw input data; and that what we remember seeing can change dramatically over a period of many seconds as the supervisory process switches between models. Notably, we seem to remember, in short term memory, details of successful models that make "sense", even when those details contradict with what we actually saw. And when those details are moved to longer-term memory, the potentially inaccurate details of model are what are committed.

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5. hn_throwaway_99Mar 2024
   I've been reading Steven Pinker's book "How the Mind Works", and even if you're not a particular Pinker fan like myself (apparently he's quite controversial in certain circles, though I'm not quite sure why), the book is really quite an impressive feat, and there are a bunch of great sections about theories behind the evolutionary bases for relationships (specifically romantic relationships and friendships), love and other emotions, and altruism. I learned a lot, and at the very least made me more aware of some of my subconscious mental feats that go on when navigating relationships.

   One thing I'd point out about the theories presented in the article is there is not much (if any?) evidence that says if you start with "People in successful relationships tend to have these traits" that then if you try to emulate those traits that you will find better relationships. The first in no way implies the latter, and I see this unwarranted leap a lot when discussing these types of sociological issues.

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6. hn_throwaway_99Jan 2024
   I just recently read "How the Mind Works" by Steven Pinker. It's quite old at this point (originally 1997, though updated in 2009), and one thing he argues quite convincingly (and which has been pretty much born out in decades of research) is that the brain essentially has "modules", e.g. a module for vision, a module for language, a module for physical object interaction. These modules obviously overlap (e.g. language touches on lots of different domains), but they do have genetically independent structures.

   I was thinking about this when I read the following section from the article, and I very much agree with LeCun. We're amazed by LLMs but that's just one module (and not even necessarily at the level of human language "understanding"). I agree there will be no "scale up" in LLMs to approach human-level intelligence, and that other areas will need to be investigated and developed.

   > “The systems are intelligent in the relatively narrow domain where they’ve been trained. They are fluent with language and that fools us into thinking that they are intelligent, but they are not that intelligent,” explains LeCun. “It’s not as if we’re going to be able to scale them up and train them with more data, with bigger computers, and reach human intelligence. This is not going to happen. What’s going to happen is that we’re going to have to discover new technology, new architectures of those systems,” the scientist clarifies.

   > LeCun explains that there is a need to develop new forms of AI systems “that would allow those systems to, first of all, understand the physical world, which they can’t do at the moment. Remember, which they can’t do at the moment. Reason and plan, which they can’t do at the moment either.”

   > “So once we figure out how to build machines so they can understand the world — remember, plan and reason — then we’ll have a path towards human-level intelligence,” continues LeCun, who was born in France. In more than one debate and speech at Davos, experts discussed the paradox of Europe having very significant human capital in this sector, but no leading companies on a global scale.

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