Tim Scarfe: belief

Transcript context

…Part of what's so interesting about language is it's still an area of such controversy amongst cognitive psychologists, linguists, even AI people. And so much is still, you know, unsettled about it. There are still, you know, debates today. I mean, there's debates today about whether language is primarily a tool for thinking or communication. And and most people were, you know, Chomsky is the most famous proponent of the idea of language for thinking. So, you know, and he has evolutionary arguments that language initially evolved not as a tool for communication, but for our own process of thinking and then later was accepted or used for communication. That's a minority view. And then other people argue, which I'm more amenable to, that language was primarily used as a tool for communicating. And these ideas actually are reemerging with language models because, the way language models learn about the world in some sense is language becomes the reasoning tool itself, which is more Chomsky like. Even though, you know, there's a lot of, you know, I think the the success of language models, I think, in a lot of ways discredits a lot of Chomsky's ideas, and we can talk about that. But but interestingly, the fact that we're using language as the fundamental mechanism for reasoning and thinking is actually somewhat Chomsky like. Versus language as communication, the idea is language is a a condensed set of tokens that I'm passing between minds. But the goal, the real communication I'm trying to share with you is what's going on in my mind. In other words, the mental simulation, the more mammalian component here. The rendered 3 d world is what I'm trying to transfer to you. And I condense it into this code that then you, you know, reverse engineer back into a mental simulation. And theory of mind, 1 reason why language might might be so rare in the animal kingdom is mentalizing theory of mind, which is relatively rare in the animal kingdom, is a prerequisite. Because in order for me to reverse engineer the language code you've provided me, I need to be able to infer what you might have meant by what you're saying and reason about why you would have said this and what knowledge you have and and etcetera, etcetera. So so yes. So I think language is is intended to cue to another person to render something in their mind. This is also where, you know, teaching is so important is is such a key aspect of language learning because, we can infer, you know, what declarative labels is this person aware of. And when they're confused, then you can start you have to start trying to iterate to understand what are they confused about that I'm saying that I can disambiguate for them. So there's also a disambiguation process where you ask follow-up questions when you feel like you don't fully understand what's going on in someone else's head. Yeah. I mean, the the guardrails thing is interesting because they they are they're not necessarily thinking guardrails. They're also pragmatic guardrails. And there's a really interesting, figure in in in the book, actually. Yeah. Here it is. And it talks about how language is is sharing information over generations. So without language, you know, we learn a little bit inside a generation, then it goes to, you know, pretty much back to 0 again. But now we have the ability to to pass on these memetic bits of information over several generations. But the thing is, there's a real structure to it. I think of it as a bit like, you know, a directed acyclic graph. So it's a tree structure, and every single bit of knowledge that we discover kind of stands on the shoulders of giants. So it needs all of the things that we discovered beforehand. So in a sense, you know, we're all of these little agents, and we're doing this epistemic foraging. So we're, you know, we're finding new skill programs, we're sharing them, and so on. But it's almost like we shouldn't think of the mass as being like an entire convex hull. It's only on the boundary where all of the creativity and and all of the information sharing happens, you know, like on the surface of this object that that's being created. And what I mean by that is, like, now in modern cities, for example, you can't live without a driver's license. You can't live without the Internet. You need to do things a certain way. And even though it's not technically constraining our brains and how we think, like, live in a very, very constrained and weird world now. Yeah. Totally great point. There's we are there's a biological constraint as to how much knowledge a given human brain can contain. And so 1 lens through which to see the last, you know, 100000 years, especially the last, you know, hundred years, is us finding solutions to getting past the biological constraint of human brains. Language was 1 tool because it used to be the case that all of the information that a given entity learned needed to be learned by my brain, within my lifetime. And language enables us to our group to have shared knowledge, but not every brain contains all of the knowledge. So if you think about a troop of a 100 a 100 people, it's possible for that 100 people and all their descendants for 1000 years to have tons of skills despite the fact that any 1 brain never had all of the skills. So someone becomes really good at, you know, hunting. Someone becomes really good at weaving animal skins into clothing and all of these types of skills. And actually, there are cases in anthropology of groups of humans that get separated from each other of their technology degrading because there is a limit. There is a a minimum number of brains needed to contain, and store a certain amount of information in the absence of writing. And so writing, language was maybe innovation 1 here. Writing was another innovation, which is great. Now we can more reliably transfer these ideas across generations even if there are gaps. In other words, even if there's a period of time for maybe 2 generations, no brains contain it. A third generation go back to the writing and pick up that knowledge. And then, of course, now with, you know, with the Internet, have just scaled up writing even more. But you're absolutely right. You know, sometimes I think about this as like, you know, if me and a group of 20 friends ended up on an island, how much of human and we were the only 20 humans left, not that I think about this all the time. But it is it is crazy how little of human knowledge would be contained in our 20 brains. How how dramatically we would degrade.…

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