You’re betraying your ignorance of how biology works and illustrating that you have absolutely no business debating this subject.

Have some humility and willingness to learn.

Efficiency is not the primary fitness function for evolution, it’s survivability.

I didn’t say it was the primary function. I guess all that talk about straw men was just projection. You don’t trust me, fine. Then what about Darwin who literally said, “Natural selection is continually trying to economize every part of the organization.” Now please go and read some introductory texts on biology before trying to explain to me why Darwin is wrong. There’s so much going on when it comes to the thermodynamics of living systems and you’re clearly not ready to have a conversation about it.

Here’s a concrete example for you of just how much of the brain isn’t actually essential for normal day to day function.

You’re baseless assuming that hydrocephalus causes the brain to lose a substantial amount of its complexity. Where is the evidence for that? In most of these cases it seems much of the outer layers of the cerebral cortex are in tact. It’s also really telling that your citation’s first source is an article titled “Is Your Brain Really Necessary” which is followed in the Journal by another article entitled “Math and Sex: Are Girls Born with Less Ability?”. But hey neuroscience hasn’t really advanced at all since 1980 right? The brain is totally redundant right? There’s no possible way a critical and discerning person such as yourself could have been taken in by junk science, right?!!

That’s literally the whole context for this thread, it just doesn’t fit with the straw man you want to argue about.

I took issue with specific statements you made that stand apart from the rest of your comment. That’s not a straw man. Although honestly this is on me. What can I expect from someone who thinks LLMs and the Human Brain are operating on similar principles? You’re so wound up in a pseudoscientific fiction there’s nothing I can do. You might as well start believing in the astrology, crystals, and energy healing. At least those interests will make you seem fun and quirky instead of just an over confident tech bro.

The straw man is you continuing to argue against equating LLMs with the functioning of the brain, something I never said here.

I’m not claiming you ever said they functioned exactly the same way. Im simply stating that you’re way off base when you claim that they appear to operate using the same principles or that all evidence suggests the human mind is nothing more than a probability machine. That’s not a straw man. You literally said those things.

There is zero evidence that all the complexity of the brain is inherent to the way our reasoning functions.

You’re betraying your own ignorance about neuroscience. The complexity of the brain is absolutely linked with its ability to reason and we have plenty of evidence to show that. The evolutionary process does not just create needless complexity if there is a more efficient path.

Again, we don’t have a full understanding of how the brain accomplishes tasks like reasoning. It may be a lot more complex than what LLMs do, or it may not be. We do not know.

This is such a silly statement especially when you’ve been claiming that both the brain and AI appear to work using the same principles. If you truly believe the mind is such a mystery then stop making that claim.

You decided to ignore that to focus on braying about tech companies and LLMs instead.

I don’t really care about your arguments concerning embodiment because they’re so beside the point when you just blowing right by the most basic principles of neuroscience.

I bring up tech companies because they’ve had a massively distorting effect on how many computer scientists think the world works. You’re not immune to it either simply because you’re a critic of capitalism. A ruthless criticism of that exists includes the very researchers whose work you’re taking at face value.

our brains appear to work on similar principles.

Sure in the same way that a horse and a motorcycle operate on similar principles and serve the same function.

Maybe try engaging with that instead of writing a wall of text arguing with a straw man.

Where the straw man? You’ve missed my point entirely. LLMs and the human mind operate on categorically different principles. All the verbiage used to describe neural network models has little to do with how the brain actually works. That’s honestly wasn’t a problem until Tech companies started purposely misusing those terms and now far too many people seem to think “AI” is something it’s not.

All the evidence suggests that our own minds are also nothing more than probability engines.

This completely understates the gulf between what we call AI and how the human brain actually works. The difference is so severe that acting as if they’re quantitatively comparable is basically pseudoscience. You might as well start claiming that we’re not far off from building a Dyson sphere just because we invented solar panels.

Most “AI” these days are built using linear feed forward networks. The brain is constructed using nonlinear recurrent networks which are can do far more with less. Now you could theoretically create the same output from a linear feed forward network but it’s way less efficient and would require many more neurons to achieve such a result. Which is wild when you consider that there are orders of magnitude more synapses in just the regions of the brain associated with language than there are parameters used in even today’s most advanced “AI” models. Now consider that human synapses rely on over a hundred qualitatively different neurotransmitters and not just a single 16-bit number. It’s also not just the scale of the signal that transmits information in a human synapse but the pattern too. Would you be surprised to know that there are a whole variety of signaling patterns neurons use? Because that’s true too. I haven’t even gotten into the differences in complexity in terms of how neurons process the information they receive. As of now there is no “AI” system that comes anywhere close to replicating that kind of complexity. It’s absurd to suggest where dealing with qualitatively similar machines here.

The funny thing is, I imagine this won’t actually save marketers much time. If campaigns become easier to run I think it’s likely the number of campaigns going after a particular market will increase. That might limit their overall effectiveness. Marketers would then have to work harder to find creative ways to get their audience’s attention.