We repeatedly encounter claims that the brain is an LLM, or a computer, or very like one of these things. What effect does repeatedly encountering this debate have on how we understand ourselves? I think it’s worth asking, because, in my view, the debate isn’t one we would be having were it not for the historical circumstances.

I’ve argued against this view plenty. Today, I dig deeper. What effect is it having that many of us believe this view is true? Or, even if we do not believe it, what effect is it having that everywhere we read articles about it, suggesting it is at least possibly true?

My classrooms are tech free this term and I am witnessing more palpably than ever the effect that LLMs are having on our students, but really on our society. As someone who has spent over a decade being nothing short of fascinated with the human mind —yes, I went to undergraduate to enthusiastically pursue psychology only to take a somewhat winded path into Columbia’s philosophy halls for my PhD— I want to bring this theoretical work into a shared practice of exploring and exercising our own cognitive capacities, our own minds. After almost 10 months on Substack experimenting with how to turn my philosophy practical, that day has come.

In this post, I am going to preliminarily sketch my decade+ thinking on brains and minds, and how I think we can use this knowledge to examine our relationships to our own minds in this AI-obsessed age.

Here is my hypothesis: being told on repeat that the brain is a computer of some form (whether in the traditional sense of a something like a digital computer, or, an LLM, see a breakdown here on these views) is having an impact on our relationship to our own cognitive capacities, to our own minds.

There has been much talk about cognitive de-skilling and cognitive decline. These topics are incredibly important, but the question I am asking is a different one.

I’m asking — holding constant whether de-skilling and cognitive decline is a problem for you, and to what extent — whether how we conceive of our minds is impacted, the more we are required to use AI at work, or the more we default towards using it in other aspects of our lives.

Another way to motivate the question is this: most of our mental lives happens below conscious awareness. Assuming this, what kinds of assumptions might we be harbouring about our own minds in the face of how we are told to think about human brains today?

Have we started to believe that LLMs really are better at thinking than us? That they really are more creative than us? Have we started confusing speed, with intelligence? Confident sounding sentences, with knowledge? I think that these are not just questions for research, but conversations we need to be having together and with ourselves.

Let me tell you my unique reasons for believing we desperately need to have these conversations, because it’s rooted in years of thinking about human brains.

I’ve been writing on Substack now for almost 10 months. When I first started out, I did not know what I was doing —I still don’t, obviously — but I did have two general goals. I wanted to share my work in accessible ways, and I wanted to figure out how to turn my insights into something that could make a difference.

I started with the first goal —substantially more achievable — which included writing articles that argued the brain is not a computer, that it’s not an LLM, that mainstream philosophy of mind is also wrong, imho, in how it frames questions of mind, that LLMs do not have language, as well as building a framework that shows why current efforts to understand AI consciousness are, I think, completely off the mark.

Detecting a pattern in any of this? My astute Substack subscribers sure did. Everything I wrote was about what the mind isn’t, what the brain isn’t, and what LLMs don’t have. All my work is showing what’s wrong with the current frameworks.

But what about a positive proposal, Ellen?! Let me explain.

I stand by all of the intellectual arguments I’ve made. And I stand by my decision to only argue negative proposals in theoretical terms (for now, at least). However, today I am in a place where I can explain what the positive proposal might have to look like. All of my thinking here is preliminary of course, but many of you have asked me to push my work into a positive proposal space, and I’m trying to do just that.

Because here’s the thing: There’s a reason that all my intellectual work is about showing where we go awry in our thinking about brains/minds.

It’s because I think there are limits to what we can theoretically or scientifically understand about the mind. Human judgement, human creativity, human thought, I believe we can study aspects of these things scientifically, but I also think that a lot of it escapes scientific frameworks. They are things we have to understand in different ways, through novels, art, or music, for example, or through exercising those capacities for ourselves. Some things about the mind we can only know through experience.

Experiencing these kinds of intellectual moments for myself, for instance, has helped me come to terms with the limits of scientific understanding of minds (though of course, so have the years of study I have done on these topics).

I think back to when I wrote my dissertation, for example, and how there was no way that an LLM could have ever produced it.

The ideas were too sparse in existing literature, the connected thoughts across fields were not well-trodden paths, the intuitions I used to decide what to read, and what not to read, what to focus on, and what not to focus on, could never have been identified by an LLM. I can’t systematise the intuitive knowledge I worked on myself, how could I have even begin to tell an LLM how to do it for me?

And I don’t say these things to toot my own horn. I think every single human being is just like me—infinitely creative and exploratory if given the opportunity, though not infinitely capable of articulating, let alone developing a scientific understanding, of what those intuitive processes look like, or how they work.

But these intuitions and creative urges can be suppressed, if, for example, we never think to exercise them, because —oh, I don’t know — everyone is telling us that LLMs are bigger and better than our own brains… You see where this is going.

With that said, here are some questions I invite you to ask yourself, either by yourself or with others, to see if a broader conversation could happen around these kinds of questions in ways that might help us better relate to AI.

(1) Do I ever think my own mind is inadequate in comparison to an LLM? Why might I think this? This could look like having an idea, plugging it into an LLM, and deciding based on the LLMs response that you don’t want to pursue the idea.

Why exactly might this happen? Why think the LLM is any kind of authority in this situation? What would you have done with the idea prior to the existence of LLMs?

In my view, we shouldn’t compare the ourselves to LLMs, especially not when it comes to our relationship to our own minds and cognitive capacities vs that of LLMs. The human brain should be appreciated on its own terms. Secondarily, we can decide what we think LLMs are good at doing and not doing, where it can help and where it can hinder.

(2) How do you think of the human brain if you were asked about it? Do you think of it as one big computer as you’ve likely seen a lot in the media the last few years? Do you have no conception at all? Whatever ideas you have about the brain, where did you get them? Do you think any of this impacts how you view your own mind?

Sometimes I worry that the simplistic narratives making the headlines will impact our relationship to our minds in daily small ways. For example, the generative capacities of human brains are not understood, though we know the mind is generative from work on language, for instance, and we recognize it intuitively.

The ‘generative’ capacities of LLMs, on the other hand, are well-understood, and the technology produces outputs in an instant. But humans generating ideas can take time. Sitting with an idea. Reading another book that stimulates your mind further and helps you sharpen an idea. Going for a walk, etc.

In the case of our own generative minds, we need patience, we need exposure to an array of ideas, we need reading, we need writing, we need time, and ideally, we need to talk to other humans interested in the same ideas. Being exposed to LLMs that spit out ideas in seconds, might mean that we need to work harder than ever to remember that our brains work differently, and that that’s not a bad thing.

(3) What do you do with inchoate ideas, ideas that are not yet well-formed? Do you let yourself have fragments of ideas, intuitions, or thoughts, and sit with them before being able to clearly articulate what you mean by them? How does your relationship to LLMs influence this process? Does using an LLM help you articulate your ideas more clearly, or does it just give you a thought that feels acceptably like what you were sitting with? Do you hold enough awareness around your thinking to know?

(4) Are there parts of your life that shape your thinking and beliefs in valuable ways that you might not necessarily get from an LLM? Do you pay enough attention to those things? The thought your friend mentioned to you the other day, your child’s curiosity, your partners musings?

(5) Are there things you value about your cognition that you want to preserve for just you, i.e., that you don’t want to outsource to an LLM? Things that give you joy even if the finished product isn’t ‘as good’ or as polished as if you put it through an LLM? Exercising our cognitive capacities as human beings is a good in and of itself. That’s something to bear in mind.

One of the main ideas I keep coming back to in my work is that today, we keep confusing models of the mind with what minds are. One of the deepest consequences of this mistake is that we systematically erase all those parts of our minds that we do not understand, that we cannot neatly fit into the latest, ‘model’ of the mind. Consequently, I am increasingly concerned, we do not pay enough attention to those parts of our mind, and in doing so subconsciously undermine them, through for example not exercising those capacities.

I hope these questions can serve as a way to generate a broader conversation between yourself and others in thinking through these issues.

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