A shrug of robed shoulders. “Where do new books come from, Mr. Potter? Those who read many books sometimes become able to write them in turn. How? No one knows.”
Funny enough we do now have a pretty plausible model of how this works—in the form of GPT3 and similar LLMs (which are surprisingly similar to linguistic cortex for the same reason that large deep vision models are similar to visual cortex).
Train a big (ANN or BNN) on sensory stream prediction of text and it … generates text! In the human case this is just our internal monologue, which we (or some of us, with additional training) can then additionally steer/branch/backtrack/record/edit into higher quality stories because we also have general planning capability.
Funny enough we do now have a pretty plausible model of how this works—in the form of GPT3 and similar LLMs (which are surprisingly similar to linguistic cortex for the same reason that large deep vision models are similar to visual cortex).
Train a big (ANN or BNN) on sensory stream prediction of text and it … generates text! In the human case this is just our internal monologue, which we (or some of us, with additional training) can then additionally steer/branch/backtrack/record/edit into higher quality stories because we also have general planning capability.