Podcasts · Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
363 | Chandra Sripada on How LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins
· 1 h 52 min · Episode 363
Episode 363 | Chandra Sripada on How LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins
Large Language Models display an uncanny ability to construct human-sounding speech, and can synthesize concepts in novel ways. Is this because they are truly thinking like human beings in some way, or have they found a way to be human-like without reproducing the internal mechanisms of human thought? Chandra Sripada argues that LLM cognition is more human-like than we suppose, and offers evidence from the ways that cognitive scientists study actual humans.
Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/08/10/363-chandra-sripada-on-how-llms-and-humans-are-cognitive-cousins/
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Chandra Sripada received an M.D. from the University of Texas and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Rutgers University. He is currently a professor of philosophy and psychiatry at the University of Michigan, where he holds the Theophile Raphael Research Professorship and directs the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science. He writes Cognition, Decoded, a Substack newsletter about AI, cognitive science, and philosophy.
• Web site • Google Scholar publications • PhilPeople profile
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Links in the notes 8
- https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/08/10/363-chandra-sripada-on-how-llms-and-humans-are-cognitive-cousins/
- https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll
- https://chandrasripada.substack.com/
- https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/sripada/
- https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=8N_cfXsAAAAJ&hl=en
- https://philpeople.org/profiles/chandra-sekhar-sripada
- https://babbel.com/MINDSCAPE
- https://incogni.com/mindscape
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