zlacker

They both affect the weather, but in a totally different way, and by completely different means. Similarly the mechanisms in which the human brain produces output is completely different from the mechanism in which an LLM produces output.

What I am trying to say is that the intrinsic properties of the brain and an LLM are completely different, even though the extrinsic properties might appear the same. This is also true of the wind and the sunshine. It is not unreasonable to (though I would disagree) that “cognition” is almost the definition of the sum of all intrinsic properties of the human mind (I would disagree only on the merit of animal and plant cognition existing and the former [probably] having similar intrinsic properties as human cognition).

>>runarb+(OP)
Artificial cognition has been an established term long before LLMs. You're conflating human cognition with cognition at large. Weather and cognition are both categories that contain many different things.

>>Kiro+u62
Yeah, I looked it up yesterday and saw that artificial cognition is a thing, though I must say I am not a fan and I certainly hope this term does not catch. We are already knee deep in bad terminology because of artificial intelligence (“intelligence” already being extremely problematic even with out the “artificial” qualifier in psychology) and machine learning (the latter being infinitely better but still not without issues).

If you can‘t tell I find issues when terms are taken from psychology and applied to statistics. The terminology should flow in the other direction, from statistics and into psychology.

So my background is that I have done both undergraduate in both psychology and in statistics (though I dropped out of statistics after 2 years) and this is the first time I hear about artificial cognition, so I don‘t think this term is popular, and a short internet search seems to confirm that suspicion.

Out of context I would guess artificial cognition would mean something similar to cognition as artificial neural networks do to neural networks, that is, these are models that simulate the mechanisms of human cognition and recreate some stimulus → response loop. However my internet search revealed (thankfully) that this is not how researches are using this (IMO misguided) term.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-84784-001

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08606

What the researchers mean by the term (at least the ones I found in my short internet search) is not actual machine cognition, nor claims that machines have cognition, but rather an approach of research which takes experimental designs from cognitive psychology and applies them to learning models.