Because of the buzz around ChatGPT, I’ve been thinking about its nature as a generative text predictor and how humans might be similar in some ways. Not because biological circuits in our brains mimic the Transformer architecture (as far as I know, they don’t) but because the brain has been proposed to be a generative prediction machine for sensory inputs.
As predictive processing theories have also been linked to subjective experience, I believe this provides an interesting lens through which to analyze the phenomenology of reading. As in my previous articles, when I say consciousness, I’m referring to phenomenal consciousness (see