Manolis Kellis

And once you have the ability to make models of others, it might be a small evolutionary leap to start making models of yourself.

So now you have a model for how others functions, and now you can kind of, as you grow, have some kind of introspection of, hmm, maybe that's the reason why I'm functioning the way that I'm functioning.

And maybe what ChatGPT is doing is in order to be able to, again, predict the next word, it needs to have a model of the world.

So it has created now a model of the world.

And by having the ability to capture models of other entities, when you say it in the tone of Shakespeare, in the tone of Nietzsche, et cetera, you suddenly have the ability to now introspect and say, why did you say this?

Oh, now I have a mental model of myself and I can actually make inferences about that.

The scene that comes to mind is from the movie Memento, where it's this absolutely stunning movie where every black and white scene moves in the forward direction and every color scene moves in the backward direction.

And they're sort of converging exactly at a moment where, you know, the whole movie's revealed.

And he describes the lack of memory as always remembering where you're heading, but never remembering, you know, where you just were.

And sort of this encapsulating the sort of forward scenes and the back scenes.

But in one of the scenes,

The scene starts as he's running through a parking lot.

And he's like, oh, I'm running.

Why am I running?

And then he sees another person running like beside him on the other line of cars.

He's like, oh, I'm chasing this guy.

And he turns towards him and the guy shoots at him.

He's like, oh no, he's chasing me.

So in a way, I like to think of the brain as constantly playing these kinds of things where you're walking to the living room to pick something up and you're realizing that you have no idea what you wanted, but you know exactly where it was, but you can't find it.

So you go back to doing what you were doing, like, oh, of course, I was looking for this.