People always think we are in some sense whatever the most advanced technology is. In 1748, La Mettrie wrote “man is an assemblage of springs that are activated reciprocally by one another.”
The idea that we are essentially a pure prediction engine + RLHF is suspicious on account of the coincidence that this happens to be the technology we have just invented.
I really liked this comment:
Yeah, and there are still a lot of hydraulic and electrical metaphors in psychology, left over from Freud and his cohort.