The LLM Council and the Human Mind

Weeks ago, Andrej Karpathy(ex. director of AI at tesla) launched LLM Council. The concept is brilliant but simple: instead of asking a single AI model (like ChatGPT) to answer a question, you create a "council" of different models. You have one model draft an answer, another critique it, and a "Chairman" model that makes the final decision.

Generative AI is know to hallucinate every now and then, it makes things up or at worst, even reply with nonsense. But when you force it to debate, reflect, and critique, the intelligence skyrockets.

As I read the documentation, I realized this isn't just a new way to code. This is exactly how a healthy human mind works.

The Internal Negotiation

Again, this reminded me of the lessons from Jordan Peterson has on meditation and prayer. The way we progress as individuals is through managing our thoughts. “What is it the I truly want?” He highlighted that we should learn to think deeply on what we aspire to be, or what we feel like the greatest good in the world is, and plan our actions accordingly.

This goes without saying that we should learn to negotiate with ourselves, nothing good comes out of tyranny. This means that we must negotiate a fair reward system for our efforts.

We think of ourselves as a single person, but we are actually a noisy room of internal agents. And just like software, if we don't generate "logs" or if we don't slow down to meditate or pray, we crash.

Internal Agents

If you look inside your own head, you rarely find a single opinion. You find a negotiation.

• The Fear Agent (The Amygdala): You might recognize this as the internal thoughts as a child when you are alone in the dark place of your house, or maybe the voice that speaks whenever you are about to send that crucial email for work.

• The Dopamine Agent: This part of you wants the short-term reward. It wants the sweets, the fast money, the scroll on TikTok. You know it’s successfully taken over you the moment you chose to play video games over doing your work or school. It optimizes for immediate gratification.

• The Long-Term Agent: This is the part of you that wants deep success, health, and meaning.

Most people live their lives on autopilot. They let the loudest agent (usually fear or dopamine) take action without taking a decent time reflecting. They react immediately. In AI terms, this can be thought of as Hallucination, a confident but wrong output. I might be reaching out a bit in terms of comparing hallucination over doing micro-wrong decisions in day to day life of a person, but the idea of doing something wrong because it is not thought of well still stands.

Meditation

I view meditation as a form of First Principles Thinking. It is the act of clearing the "Context Window".

When life gets overwhelming, our internal RAM (random access memory) gets full of noise, stress, opinions, social media, and many other useless (or useful) things. If you try to make a decision in that state, you will fail. Meditation can be thought of as hitting the reset button. It wipes the cache.

It allows me to switch from "Zero-Shot" reacting to Chain of Thought reasoning. I can sit back and look at my thoughts from a third-person perspective. I can "judge the judger." I can ask: Why am I afraid? Is there an actual danger? Can I do it afraid anyway?

It’s not about deleting the existing agents. As Jordan Peterson says, you can't tyrannize yourself. If you try to crush your fear or starve your desires, they will rebel. You have to negotiate. You have to be the Chairman of the Council, listening to the fear, acknowledging it, but ultimately deciding to follow the Long-Term Agent.

Journaling

If a program crashes and you didn't set up a logging system, you will have no idea what happened. You can't fix the bug. You will just keep crashing in the same way, over and over.

Humans do this too. We repeat the same toxic patterns, the same bad habits, the same anxious spirals. Why? Because we never generated the logs.

We didn't slow down. We didn't meditate, pray, or journal.

Meditation and Prayer are the tools we use to generate logs of our existence. They force us to stop the execution of the code and look at the logic, or in real-life’s case, it forces us to evaluate the decisions we made on the day to day.

• What triggered that anger?

• Why did I chase that fast money?

• What truly matters to me right now?

If we don't slow down to "log it out," we are just autonomous agents running trash code, reacting to the world with no direction until we burn out.

But if we take the time to convene the Council, to meditate on first principles and pray for guidance, we stop reacting, and we start living.

Conclusion

For years, AI development optimized for speed. But we reached a point where speed wasn't the problem, reasoning was. The solution wasn't to go faster, it was to introduce agents that think, critique, and work together.

The same applies to us. We cannot define a perfect life through speed or autopilot reactions. We need an architecture of thought. Chain of thought was a good starting point, but then the whole architecture of agents thinking together could still improve. I’m wondering, what would make the perfect agentic chain of thought architecture?

We must define our own "Philosophical Guide" agent. By taking the time to convene the Council, meditate on first principles, and log our internal states, we stop merely reacting to the code and we start writing it.

Now the question also goes, “How do we define an Agent that is a philosophical guide?”.