It reminds me of "At the time we drew boxes labeled 'perception', 'cognition' with arrows between them." An imprecise quote that I can't place.

I guess my box labelled 'subconsciousness' is trying to say that low-level mechanisms that give rise to the observed cognitive phenomena might have nothing to do with neat boxes.

[delayed]

> submitted Oct 5 2021

(In case people miss that before discussion)

It looks like a lot like how data bases query optimizers work, with the exception that in the paper there is also a learning/memory component that conditions the evaluation of the answer provided by the first model.

This is still a great paper, but it's missing the second axis of the quadric -- if the only two options are thinking fast or thinking about thinking, that leaves no room for thinking slow yet deliberately, AKA selfconsciousness. See https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4280/pg4280-images.html for details

I do wonder if any of these folks ever got a chance to try this at one of the big labs, tho...