Max Bennett: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, yeah. I just wanted to touch on a couple So of things Hawkins said that the reason mean, he said, first of all, that we overcome the binding problem by having this kind of profusion of individual sensory motor models rather than having this kind of, you know, feed forward enrichment of representations. And that was really interesting. But he also said the reason why having let's say we've got a 150,000 mini cortical columns that are just wired to different sensory motor signals. And he said it's the it's the kind of diversity and sparsity that gave the robustness of recognition. And then you can kind of think, okay. Well well, what do the rep representations look like? So if our brain builds some kind of a model of the world, some kind of topological model, it it must be a representation, not necessarily it's not like a a homunculus well, it's not like a stapler inside the brain if I'm modeling a stapler. It's actually some weird structure of the stapler, but as seen by every way I can touch, feel, hear, and, you know, lick a stapler or or whatever. So it's difficult for us to imagine what that is. But the the reason I'm the reason I'm going down down this road though, because that's a bit weird, isn't it? So we have this very weird representation of things. And then I come to Hinton's Helmholtzian generative model. And you can get it to generate, let's say, a a number 8 if it's trained to do numbers. Right? And Hinton would argue, and I would disagree with him, that that the model understands what an 8 is. Now this is weird, isn't it? Because we understand what a mouse is, but intuitively, we feel that a neural network doesn't understand what an 8 is. And I would argue that we're getting into semantics here. So I think the reason we understand things is because there's a relational component to understanding. So semantics is is about the ontology, know, our rep the way we feel about things, where the thing came from, what was the intention guiding the creation of the thing, what was the provenance of the thing. It's almost like the interconnectedness of the thing tells you more about the meaning of the thing than the actual thing itself in a weird way. Mean, what what do you think? Well, do think I think this is where the word understanding, I think, can mean different things to different people. Could understand the word understanding in different ways. I think there is absolutely something to the idea that just because you can recognize something so that would be a feed forward network that can observe a stapler alone is insufficient to what most people would mean when they use the word understanding. And just to talk about interrelatedness, if I have a feedforward network that, you know, let's say it's just a binary classifier, is this thing a stapler or not? Now I can't ask lots of things of that feed forward network that I would expect of an agent or a model that understands what a stapler is. I couldn't ask it, for example, what would happen if I burned the stapler? What would happen if I opened it? What would you see inside of it? I can't ask what does a stapler do? I can't say show a human holding a stapler and a set of objects in front of them and what do you think the person's going to do next with this stapler? And so clearly understanding most of our intuitive understanding of the word understanding contains some richness that's not included in just classifying or recognizing the presence of objects. So I think that's absolutely the case. My intuitions sort of fall in the direction of what we mean typically when we use the word understanding, it comes to having something that can be mentally explored. And so I think that requires what you're describing, which is the interrelatedness of things. Because when I see someone holding a stapler and you ask me the question, what are the things they would likely do? Well, I start imagining what they might do with that stapler and then I can evaluate which ones seem plausible to me. And so in the imagination and evaluation of which things seem plausible, there's interconnectedness between the thing and the world around it. But yes, absolutely agree with you that just recognizing objects clearly lacks something that we mean when we say understanding. Yeah. Do do you take into consideration the meme sphere? So, know, we've got this kind of, we've got ideas that are quite collective as well. I thought I guess I I was gonna explore this with you later, but, maybe maybe let me frame it like this. I I have this, intuition that a lot of our intelligence is outside of the brain. So it's almost like if if I was in the wilderness and, you know, disconnected from society, I would be much, you know, a lesser human being. In a weird way, I might have more agency, but, you know, I I wouldn't have access to all of these rich cultural tools and knowledge and patterns and and so on. So it it's almost like that's where a lot of our intelligence comes from rather than and and and also meaning as well, rather than than just being able to plan in the brain and so on. And there must be some kind of interplay, so culture must shape the development of our brain and and vice versa, but culture seems to be more dynamic. But how how do you wrestle with that?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.