Not sure about that, I'd more say the Western reductionism here is the assumption that all thinking / modeling is primarily linguistic and conscious. This article is NOT clearly falling into this trap.
A more "Eastern" perspective might recognize that much deep knowledge cannot be encoded linguistically ("The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao", etc.), and there is more broad recognition of the importance of unconscious processes and change (or at least more skepticism of the conscious mind). Freud was the first real major challenge to some of this stuff in the West, but nowadays it is more common than not for people to dismiss the idea that unconscious stuff might be far more important than the small amount of things we happen to notice in the conscious mind.
The (obviously false) assumptions about the importance of conscious linguistic modeling are what lead to people say (obviously false) things like "How do you know your thinking isn't actually just like LLM reasoning?".
dang|21 days ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
D-Machine|21 days ago
A more "Eastern" perspective might recognize that much deep knowledge cannot be encoded linguistically ("The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao", etc.), and there is more broad recognition of the importance of unconscious processes and change (or at least more skepticism of the conscious mind). Freud was the first real major challenge to some of this stuff in the West, but nowadays it is more common than not for people to dismiss the idea that unconscious stuff might be far more important than the small amount of things we happen to notice in the conscious mind.
The (obviously false) assumptions about the importance of conscious linguistic modeling are what lead to people say (obviously false) things like "How do you know your thinking isn't actually just like LLM reasoning?".
mirekrusin|21 days ago
Regarding conscious vs non-conscious processes:
Inference is actually non-conscious process because nothing is observed by the model.
Auto regression is conscious process because model observes its own output, ie it has self-referential access.
Ie models use both and early/mid layers perform highly abstracted non-conscious processes.
FpUser|21 days ago
I am not really fond of us "westerners", but judjing how many "easterners" treat their populace they seem to confirm the point
nwhnwh|21 days ago
bfung|21 days ago
tbrownaw|21 days ago
nwhnwh|21 days ago
swyx|21 days ago
Xmd5a|21 days ago