Noam Chomsky: belief

Transcript context

…Neuroscientists are more than passive observers of brains. They poke them, they prod them, they stimulate them, they model them. And in doing that, they change what they find. The patterns that emerge are real, but they're also partially created by the process of investigating itself. It takes all the messiness of biological cognition and it reduces it to 1 imperative, minimize free energy. Everything else supposedly follows from that. Now Simplicius loves this. I mean, finally, the simple truth, the 1 principle to explain it all. But ignorantio says, wait a minute. The math is elegant, the framework is unified, but does that mean it's captured what brains actually are? Or did we just build another beautiful simplification and started forgetting that it was a simplification? So Chiromuta said to me that we should ask different questions, right? Not is this true, but what does this help us do? What does this light up? What does it leave in the darkness? And the other thing of course is that we are finite biological creatures. Right? We There are limits to our cognition. And Chomsky spoke about this fascinating concept of a cognitive horizon when we when we chatted with him. If we are organic creatures, we're going to be like other organic creatures, and that there are bounds to our cognitive capacities. So for example, a rat can be trained to run pretty complicated mazes, but it can't be trained to learn a prime number maze. Turn right at every prime number, it just doesn't have the concept. And no matter how much training you do, you're not going to get anywhere. Well, I suspect there's reasons to suppose we're like rats. We have capacities, we have a nature, we have a structure, they yield all sorts of extensive range of things that we can do, but they probably impose limits. And I think we could even make some guess about what these limits are. So our best theory is they bump up against the walls of the limits of our cognition, of our cognitive horizon. And maybe that's fine, but maybe even knowledge of where the walls are is useful in of itself. Science makes things simple and it's not a flaw. Right? Without simplification, we'd have nothing. You can't study everything at once. But simplification has risks. Right? You forget your model is a model, you mistake elegance for truth and you think you found solid ground when really you're just building another floor. So look at Opus 4.5, right? Foundation models today, they are artifacts of staggering complexity. We've trained them on everything humans have ever written. We treat their outputs like they came from somewhere authoritative, somewhere outside of us, somewhere that knows. But the knowing was ours all along, right? Just compressed, refracted, reflected back to us from the silicon. Whether that reflection captures the actual thing, that is a question that we're barely starting to ask. You can use powerful frameworks like the free energy principle, but just remember they're frameworks, right? They're tools for building, they're not the final word. So the brain is not a hydraulic pump, It's not a computer. It's not a telephone network. It's probably not a free energy minimizer either. I mean, least not in some like literal way. What the brain actually is, we will only ever caps glimpses of. Right? That is through our limited instruments and theories. And that's okay because that's what it means to be finite. So Chirimutus, had this amazing example from Greek mythology called Proteus. Right? And if you could pin him down, he'd have to answer your question correctly. But if you let go and you let him get away, then he would shape shift and shape shift. Nature is like that. Right? You can pin it down, you can ask questions, but it's always perspectival. As soon as you let go, there's always a myriad of other perspectives that can be interpreted from reality. Carl Friston's Wood Lies, they were doing something very similar, right? So slow down in the sun, move faster in the shade. But Friston isn't a woodlouse and neither are you.…

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