Tim Scarfe: belief

Transcript context

…Well, mean, that's undeniably true. I mean, the first example that comes to mind is just writing. I mean, what would humans be if you removed the technology of writing? I mean, we would all realize we're not that smart. I mean, writing is a technology that externalizes a feature of the brain, which is memory, which brains are not that great at. We do a good job of condensing aspects of a memory. So we for episodic like things and procedural memory, we're relatively good at. But for semantic memories, we're terrible. And so externalizing that with writing is 1 of the key technologies that enables us to be way smarter than we are in fact, because we now have this external device that enables us to store largely infinite numbers of memories and translate them across generations. So that alone I think proves your point, which is, what humans are capable of is clearly some relationship between brains and external things that can be writing tools, that can be other brains, you know, sharing ideas and getting challenged. So, yeah, you're absolutely. I agree with you. Intelligence is like the it's the dynamics, isn't it? It's it's all of the low level, you know, dynamics of things interacting with each other and we can take a snapshot of language and and we might say, well, yeah, you know, language isn't isn't the intelligence, but but language itself is a form of intelligence. So I'm not just talking about the words and language models and so on. We're talking about the actual language in in our culture. And I guess I I think of that as as almost a distinct form of intelligence. Yeah. I mean, I I think it we all it almost gets into a a philosophical territory as where do you draw the bounding boxes over the things that are imbued with intelligence and the things that are supportive mechanisms that that allow those things to have intelligence. So through 1 lens, you could you could think about brains as the physical entity in which intelligence is instantiated and then language as a supportive tool. You could take a very perhaps odd view, which is language is the thing that's evolving and it's just instantiated in these brains that sort of produce the language, consume the language, but it's language that's evolving. The same way that, you know, we don't think about intelligence on the level of an individual neuron. We don't imbue a neuron with intelligence, but we think on the scale of the 86,000,000,000 neurons, something has emergently appeared that we do deem intelligent. You know, there's some great sci fi books where, you know, intelligence gets instantiated in colonies of ants where each individual ant isn't not intelligent, but somehow the colony itself is capable of doing incredible abstractions and whatever. So so yes, I think there's there's very interesting ways to and it's not obvious how 1 divides the lines between what are the physical entities in which these are instantiated. That said, I have a particular interest in brains because I think if we're looking what is the physical manifestation that we can learn from and thus try to, 1, to understand ourselves, just I think all species have an interest in understanding ourselves, But then also, if we wanna try and borrow some ideas from how biological intelligence works into AI, I think the of all the physical things to examine, the brain to me seems clearly the 1 that is probably the most rich with insight. But I no, I agree. I I think your point is well taken.…

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