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Machine Learning Street Talk / episode intelligence

Abstraction & Idealization: AI's Plato Problem [Mazviita Chirimuuta]

23 Jan 2026 16 published claims 1 attributable person
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Speakers in the public record

Tim Scarfe

Claim mix

belief 8evaluation 6preference 1prediction 1

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16 published records

01 / belief

How do you tie it all together theoretically? But on the other hand I think that if you take that particularity and that shifting quality to biological phenomena, then actually it just forces you to think about knowledge differently.

“How do you tie it all together theoretically? But on the other hand I think that if you take that particularity and that shifting quality to biological phenomena, then actually it just forces you to think about knowledge differently.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

02 / evaluation

Like, we live in imaginative worlds, and it's not so much the social media is always in our face, well, maybe it is, people looking at the screens, but our way of thinking through our own life history and how we project and everything else, there's a whole world that we're also constructing around that. So I think we're co creating this digital world, and it it doesn't work unless we're imaginatively and emotionally invested in this.

“Like, we live in imaginative worlds, and it's not so much the social media is always in our face, well, maybe it is, people looking at the screens, but our way of thinking through our own life history and how we project and everything else, there's a whole world that we're also constructing around that. So I think we're co creating this digital world, and it it doesn't work unless we're imaginatively and emotionally invested in this.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

03 / belief

I think that's an instantiation of this lack of acknowledgement of human finitude because it's human finitude coming from a culture which is expert at some things but not other things, and whose knowledge is grounded in a discrete set of sensory experiences that are not accessible to other people, that boundedness of knowledge.

“I think that's an instantiation of this lack of acknowledgement of human finitude because it's human finitude coming from a culture which is expert at some things but not other things, and whose knowledge is grounded in a discrete set of sensory experiences that are not accessible to other people, that boundedness of knowledge.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

04 / belief

I mean, cybernetics is an interesting stage along the way because they were buildings of little devices that had some degree of autonomy made up of and and supposed to be emulating versions of negative and positive feedback and as hypothesized to occur in the body. But, yeah, I would say at the core of this research idea is that if what's going on in the body is ultimately a mechanistic process, then by redoing engineering with this non living system which is capturing some of the core operating principles that we find in biology, then we can use that device as a map, as a as a resource to then reinterpret what's going on in the biological system.

“I mean, cybernetics is an interesting stage along the way because they were buildings of little devices that had some degree of autonomy made up of and and supposed to be emulating versions of negative and positive feedback and as hypothesized to occur in the body. But, yeah, I would say at the core of this research idea is that if what's going on in the body is ultimately a mechanistic process, then by redoing engineering with this non living system which is capturing some of the core operating principles that we find in biology, then we can use that device as a map, as a as a resource to then reinterpret what's going on in the biological system.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

05 / belief

I think there's also more relevant stuff in the background of what it is to be a biological thing, in that some things are inherently meaningful to you and relevant to you because they're connected with the demands that the challenges of your environment place to you.

“I think there's also more relevant stuff in the background of what it is to be a biological thing, in that some things are inherently meaningful to you and relevant to you because they're connected with the demands that the challenges of your environment place to you.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

07 / belief

Like the Whereas for you, all of these things that happened in the past could be as relevant as anything that happens in the room right now, or your ideas about the future would be relevant to what you're saying right now. So yeah, this this notion of being sensitive to what's not immediately driving you in your surroundings, I think that's a really important, like, thing to latch onto in, like, delineating at least the class of systems that we wanna call cognitive to ones that we would say are sort of merely physical, not intelligent in any important sense of the word.

“Like the Whereas for you, all of these things that happened in the past could be as relevant as anything that happens in the room right now, or your ideas about the future would be relevant to what you're saying right now. So yeah, this this notion of being sensitive to what's not immediately driving you in your surroundings, I think that's a really important, like, thing to latch onto in, like, delineating at least the class of systems that we wanna call cognitive to ones that we would say are sort of merely physical, not intelligent in any important sense of the word.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

08 / belief

I think language is bound up with sensory motor engagement, and how we, likewise, how we perceive the world is shaped by linguistic concept formation and everything like that.

“I think language is bound up with sensory motor engagement, and how we, likewise, how we perceive the world is shaped by linguistic concept formation and everything like that.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

09 / belief

The assumption of the computational theory of mind, and he argues that this is very dominant within cognitive science, is that you can explain this phenomenon, is a phenomenon of the concrete physical world, through this non causal thing, which is computation, and suddenly there's no gap that needs to be closed. And I and I think that's that's a fair point, is that there's something inherently, that needs, like, further justification of why, of all of the things that happen in the concrete physical world that demand explanation, why we reach outside of the concrete realm of physical causation into computation in order to explain this thing, cognition.

“The assumption of the computational theory of mind, and he argues that this is very dominant within cognitive science, is that you can explain this phenomenon, is a phenomenon of the concrete physical world, through this non causal thing, which is computation, and suddenly there's no gap that needs to be closed. And I and I think that's that's a fair point, is that there's something inherently, that needs, like, further justification of why, of all of the things that happen in the concrete physical world that demand explanation, why we reach outside of the concrete realm of physical causation into computation in order to explain this thing, cognition.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

11 / evaluation

We agents because you have consistent beliefs and ideas and you're not just an impulse response machine that's your being actions aren't determined entirely by this situation, you're a person.

“We agents because you have consistent beliefs and ideas and you're not just an impulse response machine that's your being actions aren't determined entirely by this situation, you're a person.”
Speaker
Tim Scarfe
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

12 / preference

I mean, there's a thought experiment that I had a debate with an AI doomer and because I'm a big externalist, I think we're embedded in these cognitive as you do.

“I mean, there's a thought experiment that I had a debate with an AI doomer and because I'm a big externalist, I think we're embedded in these cognitive as you do.”
Speaker
Tim Scarfe
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

13 / prediction

Yeah. And what the researchers found is that you train this big dense neural network, and after it's trained, because you need the density for stochastic gradient descent for training tractability, after it's trained, you can prune away 90% of the connections and it still works the same And, maybe evolution and our biological instantiation, maybe it's the same thing.

“Yeah. And what the researchers found is that you train this big dense neural network, and after it's trained, because you need the density for stochastic gradient descent for training tractability, after it's trained, you can prune away 90% of the connections and it still works the same And, maybe evolution and our biological instantiation, maybe it's the same thing.”
Speaker
Tim Scarfe
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

14 / evaluation

I think if I remember correctly, at 1 point you drew an imaginary kind of graph where you said on 1 axis we have science realism, which is where our scientific theories actually represent things in the world, then we have empiricism, is the idea that facts we receive tell us something about the world.

“I think if I remember correctly, at 1 point you drew an imaginary kind of graph where you said on 1 axis we have science realism, which is where our scientific theories actually represent things in the world, then we have empiricism, is the idea that facts we receive tell us something about the world.”
Speaker
Tim Scarfe
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

16 / evaluation

Of course Pavlov and the dogs, folks at home will know about that. And Newton is still around, we still use that, but we don't use reflex theory anymore.

“Of course Pavlov and the dogs, folks at home will know about that. And Newton is still around, we still use that, but we don't use reflex theory anymore.”
Speaker
Tim Scarfe
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk
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