The pipeline of reasoning that powers society… and LLMs.

The vast majority of "reasoning" is actually a fuzzy interpolation of previously cached answers.

The caching is not just in a single brain, but in the collective actions and records of all of society.

At some point, a single brain fires up its expensive System Two to squeeze out a new seed crystal of novel reasoning.

That seed crystal is released into the world: put into practice, maybe written down.

As other people come across it, they make a judgment call: is it useful?

They might try it out themselves, or write it down themselves to share with an even broader audience.

The more likely that seed crystal is to be actually useful, the more likely it is that someone somewhere in society takes the trouble to replicate it, by doing the action, or writing it down again, or sharing it.

That means that at any given point if you sample a random bit of "reasoning" in society, the chance that it's at least good enough (that is, "useful") is very high… especially when you compare it to a randomly generated thought.

LLMs then come along and hover up this broad societal-scale collection of crystals of reasoning (at least, the ones that are written down somewhere).

The LLM is now a hyper-dimensional crystal that captures a whole universe of useful bits of cached bits of reasoning.

The LLM can only do a facsimile of reasoning, but that is also all that humans do the vast, vast majority of the time.

And it is gobsmackingly good at that facsimile!

Humans have an inner monologue so they can string out multiple steps of reasoning, using fuzzy vibes to generalize intermediate cached answers to get a novel multi-stage result that's likely to be good enough.

LLMs don't have an inner monologue by default, but that's why chain-of-thought and other techniques help them get better results.