LLMs and their "intuitions"

The "LLMs and their intuitions" student conference is organized the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Bucharest (through its Department for Theoretical Philosophy) in partnership with students from the Faculty of Psychology and Education Science, department of Cognitive Science, BA program in Cognitive Science, aims to bring together students and researchers in philosophy of mind, epistemology, cognitive science, philosophy of technology in order to explore the recent claims that LLMs exhibit human-like intuition.

The conference will take place 8 – 9 March, 2025, between 9 AM- 9 PM, local time for Bucharest, Romania. Regular presentations will be 20 minutes long, followed by 10 minutes long Q&A.

It will have a mixed format, in that speakers may choose whether they present online only or face to face at the event's location (if so, their session will enjoy a live audience, but it will also be streamed to remote participants).

Recently, with the development of Large Language Models based applications, some researches have claimed that LLMS exhibit several human-like abilities, such as TOM, empathy, intuitive thought and may others (Welvita and Pu, 2024; Kosinski, 2023; Kosinski, 2024).Since these applications have started to be used in different fields, such as healthcare or psychology, we find that it is important to understand the mechanisms through which they reason, make decisions, or prompt specific lines of text. The conference focuses on one specific new-found capability in LLMs, intuition, either as artificial intuition (Pedwell, 2023) or human-like intuition (Hagendorff et al, 2023), and aims to explore the reasons behind claiming LLMs may or may not be capable of intuitive reasoning.