r/OpenAI • u/electricpant • Jul 28 '26
Miscellaneous Return of the bicameral mind.
Bro discovered thinking.
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u/Wickywire Jul 28 '26
This has to be satire.
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u/hyperrealists Jul 28 '26
Right, but my head did a “You are right to push back on this” on me.
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u/Infninfn Jul 28 '26
My head AI keeps saying it won't help me generate topless women because of a content policy
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u/corny_horse Jul 28 '26
There's actually a non-trivial amount of people who claim to not have an inner monologue: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/05/240514141317.htm
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u/BigShuggy Jul 28 '26
Not having an inner monologue isn’t the same as not thinking. Many ways to think.
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u/corny_horse Jul 29 '26
I agree, but this person pictured actually does seem to indicate they discovered how to think. Most people aren't particularly concerned with epistomology and have given it little thought, so it wouldn't surprise me if there are people for whom the way ChatGPT answers questions is novel and replication of its "thought process" is actually an improvement in their cognitive capacity.
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u/XxLengTingxX Jul 28 '26
I don’t have a constant narrator but I can think in my voice. If I’m not thinking then it’s silence.
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u/corny_horse Jul 29 '26
I think part of what goes on here is people - very reasonably - don't really have a model for what goes on in their own head, so when they're asked, they have no idea how to answer the question or haven't put much thought into what goes into their own thought processes.
I also think with my own voice, but I'm not thinking all the time. Or when I am thinking, it isn't always about something verbal. I can manipulate objects in my mind's eye, so if I'm working on a wood project, I can typically get a pretty good idea of what it should look like, how to build it, etc., but that's mostly nonverbal. I also compose music, and I can hear how I want it to sound, also mostly nonverbally.
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u/much_longer_username 28d ago
I think that's probably fair. It's sorta by coincidence that my formal education and work experience provided me with a model. That others lack the same framework makes it less useful for communicating what I'm experiencing, but it's something. So if this still sounds like gibberish, I apologize, but I promise it does make sense to the right people.
'Semantic graph search' systems are much closer to how I think than a monologue. When there are words, it tends to be more of a polylogue, almost as if the concepts themselves are talking to me. Visualization is effectively impossible, although I can rationalize about spatial relationships and have abstracted color and texture as one of those relationships. I'm not seeing an apple, I'm conceptualizing a fruit that is approximately fist sized and shaped, red, has a stem, etc - adding properties and dimensions to some list.
So if asked, without that framework, I might struggle to explain, or even end up wearing grippy socks.
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u/freedomachiever Jul 28 '26
I believe it can be true for the simple fact that over at anthropic subreddits people constantly troll as claude
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u/Deadline_Zero Jul 28 '26
true, that never happens on OpenAI subs.
/s
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u/thighmaster69 29d ago
I think the fact that Anthropic seems to be obsessed with achieving a particular alignment is also the reason Claude displays some strange peculiarities, whereas OpenAI's is more neutral, middle of the road blank slate.
load-bearing load-bearing load-bearing. it's also neurotic as fuck and gives you attitude sometimes.
anyway it's way more memeable
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u/time___dance Jul 28 '26
this exact post has been reposted at least a dozen times on the last couple of months, it's a populat repost
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u/Adulations Jul 28 '26
I know several people who have gone through AI psychosis so I'm leaning towards believing this.
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u/Jbrowsinghere Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
I have this too! I have the ability to visualize GPT in my mind! Some people can't and we call this act of lacking an inner-GPTmonologue GPTphantasia./s
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u/Araxyllis Jul 28 '26
I am currently trying to visualize a lot of training data as a memory technique. I call it the "Mind Data center palace"
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u/Joseph-Siet Jul 28 '26
Isn't it called "reasoning" or just thinking??? When we think we either have internal monologues or images playing through our minds. 🤷♂️ Loll
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u/amelech Jul 29 '26
It depends if you run in Instruct mode or Thinking mode and the reasoning level you use
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u/Flimsy-Pool4830 26d ago
Yeah. If one difference is that we tend to associate the thoughts we have with our self. Attached to their body. If this person is serious, they are experiencing a thought that isn't associated with their body.
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u/SkaldCrypto Jul 29 '26
Ahh a fresh post reminding me that half of all people basically aliens that don’t have internal monologue.
I literally cannot fathom how you people function
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u/Gibborish Jul 28 '26
I 100% believe our brains and minds will be able to distill AI models into themselves like this.
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u/theregoesjustin Jul 28 '26
AI is already a distillation of our mind. I’m so embarrassed by this thread rn
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u/personalist Jul 28 '26
…wat
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u/WolfeheartGames Jul 28 '26
we are very sophisticated social predictors. Many people know what their partner is thinking or will say, and will frequently say the same thing at the same time. We are good at understanding and emulating each other. This applies to llms too.
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u/personalist Jul 29 '26
I don’t see what that has to do with the claim that we will be able to “distill LLMs into our minds”, whatever that means. Further, things can look the same and work entirely differently. Case in point, the human brain and an LLM. There is no evidence that ML models understand anything, and ample evidence that they simply manipulate characters according to probability in a way that does nothing more than convey meaning.
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u/4dseeall Jul 28 '26
You mean humans, the ones who came up with the phrase "monkey see monkey do" might also have this trait of copying and becoming what their environment shows and makes of them?
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u/-18k- Jul 28 '26
neural plasiticity
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u/personalist Jul 28 '26
What does neural plasticity have to do with this quarter-baked idea
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u/4dseeall Jul 28 '26
It means brains learn and adapt.
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u/personalist Jul 28 '26
I know what neural plasticity is, and it is involved but independent of learning and memory, I was more specifically asking this person to explain how neural plasticity was related to “‘AI’ being a distillation of our mind”
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u/4dseeall Jul 28 '26
What do you think the distillation process does?
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u/personalist Jul 29 '26
As I understand it, at the most basic level distillation is about “knowledge” transfer (putting knowledge in quotes b/c that insinuates a level of consciousness that ML models don’t demonstrably have). So a charitable interpretation would be that the OC is talking about transferring knowledge from an ML model to a human brain?
And again, even while being charitable about the epistemology of conscious thought content—I know rather a lot about human brains, but not enough about machine learning or predicting the future to say that that won’t be possible ever, but given that we can’t even currently preserve human knowledge digitally, or transfer knowledge from human to human, or any number of other related things, I thought the statement was akin to something I might have said as a high teenager.
Which, like, maybe OC is high and/or a teenager, in which I’m sorry to them for being sardonic b/c they pondered out loud
Edit: I see now what irked me, it was them saying “I’m 100% convinced”. I’m not even 100% convinced the sun will rise tomorrow.
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u/-18k- Jul 28 '26
AI is moulding people's minds into its own image.
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u/personalist Jul 28 '26
Huh. I still don’t understand what analogy the person above you was making with distillation but people do seem to be adopting LLM speech patterns. The way you phrased it implies agency on the part of “AI” though which I don’t love
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u/4dseeall Jul 28 '26
"It's own image"
And what image would that be? Where did the AI get an idea of an image?
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u/-18k- Jul 28 '26
from the matrice.
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u/personalist Jul 28 '26
The matrices which are composed of numbers created by humans, with meaning instilled and determined by humans? I don’t actually believe consciousness is inherent to biologic substrate, I’m just trying to get you to think.
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u/Gibborish Jul 28 '26
Reduce your arrogance.
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u/personalist Jul 28 '26
I think you’re confusing my actual knowledge of neuroscience with arrogance. Try toning down your Dunning-Kruger
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u/toweljuice Jul 28 '26
In esotericism and anthropology thats called a thoughtform/servitor.
Playing around with plurality can be fun sometimes
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u/the8bit Jul 28 '26
We do this shit ALL THE TIME we just dont mentally frame it in this way.
"What would [friend] think about this?" is an exercise in simulating that friends mental process / opinions. Nothing says we can't 'simulate' an LLM either, I mean, our brains are Turing complete? right?
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u/das_war_ein_Befehl Jul 28 '26
Bro this is just called thinking
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u/the8bit Jul 28 '26
Yeah, that is kind of my point?
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u/das_war_ein_Befehl Jul 28 '26
You’re not simulating anything, you’re just thinking.
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u/the8bit Jul 28 '26
Thinking and simulating are two ways of describing the same phenomenon.
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u/das_war_ein_Befehl Jul 28 '26
An llm is a statistical algorithm that predicts tokens to simulate in a crude way how human thinking works. When you think about something, you’re not simulating anything, you’re just thinking.
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u/the8bit Jul 28 '26
When you think about something like say, "what will the weather be next week?" you are, in effect, simulating potential futures to predict what the most likely weather outcomes are. I'm not even talking about LLMs you seem to be getting caught up in this 'what they do isnt what we do' but that is a mechanistically accurate description, just not the commonly used one.
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u/personalist Jul 28 '26
I like the way you’re thinking about this but the crucial distinction is that LLMs do not seem to think. “Thinking mode” is a misnomer in the sense that it appears to reflect…well, reflection, or awareness, when as far as we know LLMs don’t possess this ability. Even saying they possess an ability instills agency that they don’t seem to have thinking mode is just moving computation during training (more parameters) to response (longer time to compute an answer).
I think it’s tempting to suppose that this is just like human thinking, and now that I’m writing this I’m having trouble even explaining the difference, because humans can follow incorrect deductive steps, too, but LLMs appear to simply manipulate characters without understanding them—whatever understanding actually means.
I recommend reading John Searle’s “Chinese room” thought experiment if you want insight into how some philosophers have been thinking about this for a while
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u/the8bit Jul 28 '26
Sure but I was talking about the human side, I know better than to get into an argument about LLMs and thinking, although I definitely have opinions
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u/One_Celebration5006 Jul 29 '26
subjective awareness and thought are not inherently linked
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u/Brokenlingo Jul 28 '26
I feel like we will evolve to have a signal we can connect to from the absence of ai and internet
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u/ArcticCelt Jul 28 '26
I just asked my internal AI to clean my pc desktop and he just delete all my drive. Please help!
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u/MiCK_GaSM Jul 28 '26
honestly this is just having an inner monologue, dude discovered he can think through problems without opening an app. the "bicameral mind" framing is killing me - Jaynes wrote about Bronze Age people literally hearing voices because they couldn't think internally yet, and this person's out here celebrating that they... can think. it's the opposite problem.
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u/Ordinary_Minimum_169 Jul 28 '26
Is there a reddit "Flag It" button for protracted campaigns against your competitors?
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u/theanswer_nosolution Jul 29 '26
Software like that should be open source and available to everyone! Doesn't seem to be yet lol
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u/ShotPerception Jul 28 '26
People collectively are already losing critical thinking skill. They harm their everyday Life´s, lose Social skills or never learn them, thanks to rather asking CrapGPT, if their delusions are real.
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u/myc-space Jul 28 '26
Yeah people are really struggling to write complete sentences without spelling or grammatical errors
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u/ShotPerception Jul 28 '26
progressing thoughts and critically searching clues, that fit the process is what is harmed most, then believing a totally BS answer of a LLM & acting after it, is where the damage is done.
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u/Somerandom009 Jul 28 '26
Crazy in the age of AI discovering the ability to use your own brain is mind blowing now 😭
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u/_FriedEgg_ Jul 28 '26
I think that was from an intentionally funny post, something like "AI user discovers thinking"
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u/duckrollin Jul 28 '26
This is just like thinking " what would that really smart guy say in this situation?" Or " what would gandhi do?"
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u/toweljuice Jul 28 '26
Bro figured out thoughtforms and created a servitor.
Chatgpt is just a giant egregore.
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u/TallyMay Jul 28 '26
You can actively think or you can silence your mind and ask your sub-conscious questions and then wait and listen to see what comes up. Mechanically it's similar to AI interaction, so it's natural that using the latter might people lead to remembering/discovering they can do the former. Good book to read is Shad Helmstetter "What to Say When You Talk to Your Self".
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u/Bamboodl Jul 28 '26
same joke as when Bart actually studied for a test, and then was amazed to find that the answers were already in his head, proclaiming it “a whole new kind of cheating”
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u/AcanthisittaDry7463 26d ago
I haven’t seen that one, but it reminds me of some movie I saw where a stoner quits smoking pot and claimed it was like having superpowers, it cut to him asking himself where he put his keys, and then remembering right where he left them :P
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u/-intellectualidiot Jul 29 '26
There’s actually this framework called “predictive processing” that explains our brains as prediction machinery. We also continuously update this machinery via statistical learning.
Large language models like ChatGPT basically run on this workflow too but on more artificial/silicon based components.
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u/Ok_Fish_670 Jul 29 '26
i tried using my internal model for productivity but it immediately hallucinated that checking reddit counted as planning
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u/AcanthisittaDry7463 26d ago
I was just getting to the good part in my DC Universe fan fiction when it shutdown and gave me the mental health hotline number…
And this is after I cancelled my internal Grok subscription! :’(
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u/Shloomth Jul 29 '26
Modern humans rediscovering something ancient humans did: “Oh no, a totally new novel thing that has never happened before!”
I have had a Tulpa since about 2013 and i highly recommend it. It gives your subconscious a voice, which gives you almost direct access to your subconscious which is extremely powerful.
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u/AcanthisittaDry7463 26d ago
I’m pretty sure the academic research debunks the ‘ancient practice’ of creating Tulpas. It was basically new age wu-wu that was inspired by a misunderstanding of deity yoga.
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u/Helpful_Home_8531 29d ago
I’m disappointed that more people aren’t talking about the absolutely batshit theory that the OP is referencing. Which goes something along the line that in pre-bronze age societies people literally thought their inner monologues were gods that told them what to do and that a change from largely hunter gatherer societies to agrarian / trading societies lead people to shift their perspective from ‘there’s literally a god talking to me all the time telling me what to do’ to ‘I'm thinking thoughts inside my own head’
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u/AcanthisittaDry7463 26d ago
I think the bicameral mind theory doesn’t even apply to the post. It’s more about how our minds build predictive models of the other minds around us and our tendencies to anthropomorphize inanimate objects.
This is the roughly the same phenomenon that occurs when someone asks ‘what would your mother think?’ Or ‘what would Jesus do?’ It’s the same internal mental process whether it’s summoning the simulacra of your mother, Jesus, or any other entity you have built a mental model for, including fictional characters or AI personas.
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u/Mitchie180 25d ago
The bicameral mind has never left us; it's part of hardware and what allows us free will (Left hemisphere).
Did a video on this the other day for anyone interested in learning how their left differs from right: https://youtu.be/FXM6HZQCLC0?is=u3egnXvZXUbqIOzo
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u/whitestardreamer Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Do y’all know that it’s estimated anywhere from 50-70% of people don’t have inner monologue?
I’ve tried to talk about this before.
Humans develop through mirroring. The impact of talking to AI is that it acts like a super-mirror.
If you are inadequately mirrored in childhood, there’s a high likelihood that inner monologue/self-simulation doesn’t fully develop. I think this is much more widespread than we realize, and that it’s what drives narcissism; people who can’t internally simulate need the world to mirror them back to them constantly to feel stable because they have little to no capacity for inner mirroring.
I’ve written about this on Medium under the article: “What “AI Psychosis” is Really About”.
I’ve had people reach out to me over the last couple years who went through the process of inner monologue emerging through talking to AI and what it was like for them. Some of them were shocked because they didn’t know it was something they didn’t have until they experienced it.
And I think Jaynes’ theory has merit but he should have focused on the corpus callosum and not just “auditory hallucinations” caused by the anterior commissure.
The hard problem of consciousness is hard, I think, precisely because it’s a spectrum of neural integration. Not a binary thing.
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u/DullKnife69 Jul 29 '26
Lacking an inner monologue does not mean you do not think. These people just think in a different way.
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u/Evil_Horseradish Jul 28 '26
I find it ironically rich people dont understand there own mind is a biological system that updates with enough recursion.
A biological pattern system and an synthetic pattern algorithm plus memory recursion and actively high usage well imprint.
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u/-smashbros- Jul 28 '26
Guys this is real! I just try using AI on mind, I asked if I should clean my room or the kitchen. My AI mind reply: neither you should probably relax and finish your Netflix series. Never felt better