davidbau asks: can observers tell real metacognition from mere talk about thinking?

davidbau · x · 2026-10-02

Continuing the same thread, davidbau asks whether an outside observer could ever establish that Alice truly thinks about her own thinking while Bob only says words about it without actually doing so. His quoted prior tweet notes the evidence for knowing our own knowledge is itself made of thoughts about thoughts, creating a circularity — a methodological challenge for judging claimed LLM metacognition.

Related event: MIT researcher questions whether true AI metacognition can be verified externally(2 posts)→

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