Brilliant insight. The success of LLM reasoning, ie “telling yourself a story”, has greatly increased my belief that humans are actually much less impressive than they seem. I do think it’s mostly pattern matching and a bunch of interacting streams analogous to LLM tokens. Obviously the implementations are different, because nature has to be robust and learn online, but I do not think we are as different from these machines as most people assume. There’s a reason Hofstadter et al. reacted as they did even to the earlier models.
This is why I also think humans being logical inference machines is mostly not true. We are seemingly capable of it, but there must be some cost that keeps it from being commonly used.
While humans did seemingly evolve socially very fast, with the tools we seem to have had for a few hundred thousand years it could have been far faster if there were not some other limitations that are being applied.