#78 - Prof. NOAM CHOMSKY (Special Edition)

Patreon: Discord: In this special edition episode, we have a conversation with Prof. Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics and the most important intellectual of the 20th century. With a career spanning the better part of a century, we took the chance to ask Prof. Chomsky his thoughts not only on the progress of linguistics and cognitive science but also the deepest enduring mysteries of science and philosophy as a whole - exploring what may lie beyond our limits of understanding. We also discuss the rise of connectionism and large language models, our quest to discover an intelligible world, and the boundaries between silicon and biology. We explore some of the profound misunderstandings of linguistics in general and Chomsky’s own work specifically which have persisted, at the highest levels of academia for over sixty years. We have produced a significant introduction section where we discuss in detail Yann LeCun’s recent position paper on AGI, a recent paper on emergence in LLMs, empiricism related to cognitive science, cognitive templates, “the ghost in the machine” and language. Panel: Dr. Tim Scarfe Dr. Keith Duggar Dr. Walid Saba Pod version: 00:00:00 Kick off 00:02:24 C1: LeCun’s recent position paper on AI, JEPA, Schmidhuber, EBMs 00:48:38 C2: Emergent abilities in LLMs paper 00:51:32 C3: Empiricism 01:25:33 C4: Cognitive Templates 01:35:47 C5: The Ghost in the Machine 02:00:08 C6: Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis by Fodor and Pylyshyn 02:20:12 C7: We deep-faked Chomsky 02:29:58 C8: Language 02:34:34 C9: Chomsky interview kick-off! 02:35:32 Large Language Models such as GPT-3 02:39:07 Connectionism and radical empiricism 02:44:37 Hybrid systems such as neurosymbolic 02:48:40 Computationalism silicon vs biological 02:53:21 Limits of human understanding 03:00:39 Semantics state-of-the-art 03:06:36 Universal grammar, I-Language, and language of thought 03:16:20 Profound and enduring misunderstandings 03:25:34 Greatest remaining mysteries science and philosophy 03:33:04 Debrief and ’Chuckles’ from Chomsky References; (Currently incomplete, we will add to this) LeCun Path to Autonomous AI paper Tim’s marked up version: Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models [Wei et al] 2022 Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis [Fodor, Pylyshyn] 1988 Ghost in the machine (thanks to user tikwidd for your analysis) Noam Chomsky in Greece: Philosophies of Democracy (1994) [Language chapter] Richard Feynman clip Chomsky Bryan Magee BBC interview: Randy Gallistel’s work (question 3) Helmholtz “NNs : they’ve damn slow” Purkinje cells Barbara Partee Iris Berent Penrose Orch OR Alan Turing “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals” CAS/Turing/Turing-1939 Sysyems of logic based on :// Fodor “The Language of Thought” Least Effort structure dependence in grammar formation three models Darwin’s problem Descartes’s problem –body_problem Control Theory (linguistics) Thanks; Thanks to Pikachu for helping us get the Chomsky NVidia Tacotron 2 model working 😍.