Cognitive Science
4 posts · all posts
Is Centaur a model of the mind? An LLM fine-tuned on 160 psychology experiments
In 1973 Allen Newell asked psychology for one system that performs all its tasks. In 2025 a Llama fine-tuned on 160 experiments was presented as that system. What Centaur predicts, what happens when you take away its instructions, and why its own authors went on to beat it with half a million parameters
Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis: the body in decision-making
A patient who could reason about everything and decide nothing, a card game whose decks are rigged, and a theory that puts the body inside decisions: Damasio's somatic markers, the evidence for them and the evidence against
Is the mind a computer? The computational theory of mind
Symbols, rules and meaning: the computational theory of mind from McCulloch and Pitts to the Chinese Room, and what language models add to an old argument
Can AI be creative?
What happens in a brain that has a new idea, where recombination stops, and what the measurements of machine creativity show, from AlphaGo's move 37 to GPT-4 on the Alternate Uses Task