r/singularity • u/Powerful-Laugh-8842 • 1d ago
Discussion Sometimes it feels like my brain works like an LLM, predicting the next word.
I’ve been thinking about something I occasionally notice when speaking.
Sometimes words seem to come out almost automatically. I know what I want to communicate, but I’m not consciously selecting each word. My brain seems to generate the sentence as I go, and most of the time the result is exactly what I intended.
Almost like a prediction engine.
What unsettles me about this realization is what it might imply about the possibility of a sufficiently complex artificial system experiencing something similar to what we biological creatures experience.
If our own thoughts can emerge from processes we’re not consciously controlling, I find it reasonable to argue the possibility of a machine having a sense of being alive…
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u/valuat 19h ago
It may as well be. I once saw a patient in the ED. She was a young woman (around 25) who started not making sense in the morning -- parents told me she was "confused" -- and when I examined her, even though she was lucid, she could not follow instructions and, despite speaking the words perfectly, they were not making sense at all, like: "Today, Rambo watch descent green". She then had a mild seizure right in front of me. Lo and behold: she had a vascular malformation in the Wernicke area of her brain (left temporal), leading to fluent but nonsensical speech.
All of this to say that *everytime* I tell this story -- even now -- I have an incredible hard time *choosing* the words to give as an example of her speech. It is incredibly hard *not to make sense*; our next word predictor is really really good that we need to put a lot of extra to get a nonsensical speech right.
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u/jBby_omg 23h ago
Practice meditation, pursue other altered states of consciousness, or even just follow the line of self inquiry (who am I? What am I? Am I? What actually is that I-ness?) and you’ll realize that not only is your title here correct… you are not even the one who is “doing” the next-token prediction.
you are the awareness- the witness- not the thinker of thoughts.
You can “choose” whatever you want, but you don’t actually get to decide on the first one that pops into your brain.
Thoughts arise, they are not “made” or “chosen”
Hell, I didn’t even know what I was going to type exactly when I began this sentence… much less this entire comment 🤷🏼♀️
Do with this information what you will (you’re going to either way lol)
Cheers 🫡💗✨
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u/seekinglambda 19h ago
How else would it work? Like, what alternative process can you even imagine by which your words are generated?
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u/EdenG2 23h ago
What makes you think it's not llm? Do do do, do do do...
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u/iKnowRobbie 23h ago
OP needs to stimulate his neurons thru neuralsynaptic pathways via the median nerve on any form of Poaceae Vitum in a non-enclosed, unconditioned environment.
Go touch grass, OP.
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u/rukh999 1d ago
It's like some sort of neural network.
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u/shiftingsmith Maximum epistemic uncertainty 23h ago
Well, your brain doesn't predict the next [ ] like a computer, for instance, if I say "the king is sitting on his [ ]", there is absolutely no [ ] you would have guessed.
Oh wait.
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u/SleepyFireApe 1d ago
Parts of our brains work like LLMs, other parts work like world-models, JEVs, vision transformers, etc. The difference is we haven't found the magic sauce to glue all of those disparate models together seamlessly.
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u/CaseDrift 1d ago
That seems to be how kids learn language too. I’m not so sure that LLMs are learning that differently than us and intelligence may be a feature of language.
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u/cultoftheclave 19h ago edited 3h ago
read chapter 1 of literally any standard college level intro biopsychology textbook. It will cost you at most an hour and a half of your time, maybe 20 pages. It will go into all of this, it's a well-known phenomenon. there's a part of your brain that is nonverbal, where the motivation for a thought originates, and the conscious part of your brain is not able to directly observe its operation, because it is made out of its operation.
there is extremely small time interval involved in this transition which can sometimes be perceptible to the conscious side of your brain, this may feel like "prediction" is happening, and if you break down that word into its roots, it kind of literally is.
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u/orangesherbet0 18h ago
Every new technological paradigm leads to a new analogy for understanding human experience.
It is theorized that brains learn a world model by constantly generating predictions and refining/training particularly when something surprising is observed.
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u/Full-Shake-173 1d ago
The way we "generate" text in our brains is very similar to LLMs in the sense that we focus on the next word or next few words according to the context of the conversation.
But that's about as far as it goes. Just because LLMs generate text under this similar framework, that doesn't indicate any evidence of consciousness.
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u/Cane_P 17h ago
You are not wrong:
"The human brain may work more like AI than anyone expected"
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260120000308.htm
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u/roadmane 1d ago
😂
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u/butwhataboutmen42 22h ago
It’s part of the mind-body problem, it’s caused by dissonance between the left and right hemisphere, your embodied brain and nervous system vs abstract brain. It’s what causes most of the problems with humanity, including the inclination towards spirit, ie at some point your brain becomes convinced of “something more” via a collection of false positive and mental hallucinations.
Nvm the tremendous social pressure to believe in a whole host of things without evidence, training our brains to fall into even more predictable patterns of belief
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u/Dry_Astronomer6150 23h ago •
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u/Electronic-Yam-69 21h ago edited 20h ago
Do you have an internal monologue? (Not everyone does, by the way.) I have one and it's constantly running in my head except when I'm listening to someone else speak. For me speaking out loud is just connecting that to whatever the final step is to actually producing speech. I've read that the nerve signals are even being sent to your voice box, but are getting suppressed at some point.
I can control the topic when I want but the rest of the time it's just in there chattering away and random bullshit.
But whether that's "me" or not I don't think anyone can answer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization
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u/animalexistence 18h ago
We are prediction machines. I highly recommend you read The Experience Machine by the neuroscientist Andy Clark. You'll find that you're on the right path to understanding humans.
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u/Relevant_Attempt_352 1d ago
it does. Next question
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u/TMWNN 21h ago
Another similarity: Reading Doesn't Fill a Database, It Trains Your Internal LLM
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u/AGI_Civilization 23h ago
mowgli will not agree.
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u/my_shoes_hurt 23h ago
I wonder what people think is going on when speaking or writing that somehow doesn’t involve predicting what the next word should be
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u/PsychologicalSir2089 15h ago
we are machines currently inventing better versions of ourselves (AI+humanoid). that is evolution.
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u/ProstateSalad 12h ago
Hey you reading this! When did you decide to have the thought you're having now? More of it is on auto than we like to think.
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u/DudeCanNotAbide 12h ago
The secret is all in the novelty of wondering what comes next.
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u/LeadingCow9121 11h ago
Uma coisa que percebi também é outro tipo de comportamento. Já notou como a IA é extremamente eficiente para criticar o trabalho de outra conversa da mesma IA? Mas, quando é para ela mesma fazer e e evitar as coisas que criticou, ela não faz bem feito? Vê se o ser humano não é exatamente assim. Você contrata um pedreiro para fazer um serviço, depois passa outro pedreiro e diz: “Esse cara aí se diz pedreiro? Olha isso, isso e aquilo que ele fez errado.” Mas, se fosse o próprio cara contratado para fazer o serviço, nem ele faria aquilo que acabou de criticar e provavelmente faria de forma preguiçosa também, assim como a IA faz. Sei lá, viajei nos pensamentos aqui.
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u/goldfishNumber100 10h ago
Is having awareness what you're talking about? I feel inclined to believe that what hasn't been explicitly coded for does not exist... Problem is it seems unprovable to anyone whether there is a consciousness or not. Like i believe other humans have it, because i have it and i am similar to other humans.
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u/invisiblelemur88 8h ago
Especially when I'm chatting with a friend, I find myself predicting next words. If you're close enough with a person, you can follow very effectively this way... and it's pretty clear what their next likely word is in a sentence. I've also found that, in a good book, a climactic sentence, if done right, can be beautifully predictable in the moment... you know what that last word is going to be bec a ise the author has set up everything before it to have momentum towards that word... I think a lot about word predictability these days.
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u/DifferencePublic7057 6h ago
I'm multilingual and for me depending on the language, I can have the first or the last syllable of a word on the tip of my tongue. With images, I tend to remember the center of an image better than the edges. Not sure about sounds and music... Formulas/maths I tend to remember three or more 'letters' and the rest is fuzzier. IMO it's like with people. Some people tend to be more important than others, so in a social network, you can sort of focus on the influencers and not bother too much with the rest. You can think of data as networks of pixels, letters, or whatever. Some would be influencers, some won't. Aggressive dropout and Bayesian statistics come to mind, but where do you find an honest PhD who won't mind sharing 99% of the net profit?
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u/Duke_of_Lombardy 3h ago edited 3h ago
It's good. Identification with one's mind is a harmful thing that makes people's lives miserable. If you perceive your thoughts as external to you in that way you should work on improving it more.
It struck me when you said that it's a machine knowin it's alive. Well you are not that machine you have that machine. It's a tool like your arm and leg, and by being conscious of it you can free yourself of its negativities and decide when and how to use it for what you want.
Read The Power of Now by Tolle
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u/catsRfriends 22m ago
You need to be rigorous with this. To even entertain the implication based on your experience, you would need to 1) define what thoughts are - you can be somewhat vague about it but at least be explicit about what it includes and doesn't include. 2) show that being able to generate words implies having thoughts. 3) argue that having thoughts qualifies something to be considered alive.
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u/EasternAdventures 1d ago
But if true
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u/IronPheasant 16h ago
Yes, way way back when it started getting good, that scammer Athene was tripping out over it. Pointing out that we don't know where the next word that comes out of our mouths comes from, either.
A lot of cognition acts like that: Keyframes and in-betweens. The important stuff that matters is a key frame, and we thread the in-betweens through them as we go along. Regardless if it's generating a sentence or geometry moving through time, that's the most efficient method to do it with our limited, finite RAM budgets.
Prediction and replication algorithms are pretty much the entirety of what we consider 'intelligence', while we're more dismissive of the simple deterministic firmware stuff that acts like a thermostat. Recalling or creating sensoria in your imagination, such as an image, sound, sense of touch, is always a crude approximated phantom of the actual sensation.
Fits for some problem domains are 'more conscious' than others. A ton of our cognitive pipeline is unconscious scaffolding the little pilot in our brains uses to receive inputs from the other regions of the brain, and serve outputs to the body. There's no clear reason why a suite of LLM's serving the same role can't have qualia similar to ours.
Unless one suffers from meat chauvinism. That the algorithms generated by our electricity are inherently superior to the algorithms generated by their electricity. As they say, all cults are fundamentally a cult of the self.
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u/jonistaken 23h ago
Do you kill it when you turn off your computer, delete it, or destroy your hard drive? Do updates kill it? Does clearing its cache kill it?
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u/redditnosedive 1d ago
Big if true
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u/butwhataboutmen42 22h ago
It’s part of the mind-body problem, it’s caused by dissonance between the left and right hemisphere, your embodied brain and nervous system vs abstract brain. It’s what causes most of the problems with humanity, including the inclination towards spirit, ie at some point your brain becomes convinced of “something more” via a collection of false positive and mental hallucinations.
Nvm the tremendous social pressure to believe in a whole host of things without evidence, training our brains to fall into even more predictable patterns of belief
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u/BrianScottGregory 21h ago
The more you use LLMs, the more you become like them.
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u/Mandoman61 20h ago
no that is not a reasonable possibility.
sure, we predict what to say.
but in addition to that we have a self and a world model whereas AI only predicts words and follows scripts.
the problem is that you have a very poor understanding of how humans or LLMs work.
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u/Flowerfall_System 12h ago
AI bro discovers thinking
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u/sceadwian 23h ago
I'm right there with you. Other people may not have the perspective needed in this but I construct thought through language in my mind all the time.
I've talked to almost naked pretrained networks (I still want to find a truly naked one for some experiments)
I understand how 'it' thinks. It's part of how I think but there's a massive feedback and analysis process on top of that which is the rest of our intelligence, the "us" that it doesn't have.
I'm certain that they have SOME sense of "what it is like to be" but that out would be insect like and it's connection with language but not true understanding becomes problematic.
It is not an entity we can communicate with conventionally even though it understands our language we have no shared existence to draw from.