Noam Chomsky discusses how the "mechanical philosophy" that originated in the 17th century with thinkers like Galileo, Descartes and Newton viewed the universe as a grand machine that could in principle be understood through science. However, Newton's discovery of gravity, which involved "action at a distance" rather than direct physical contact, undermined this mechanical view.

Full title: The Ghost in the Machine and the Limits of Human Understanding.

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Professor Noam Chomsky is the most significant thinker of our generation. Chomsky argues that since Newton, the goal of science has become more modest - rather than trying to understand the true nature of the universe, which may be beyond human comprehension, science aims to construct abstract models that are intelligible to us, even if the underlying reality remains a mystery. He suggests there may be inherent biological limits to human understanding, just as other animals have limits to their cognitive capacities.

The upshot is that we shouldn't necessarily expect a complete unification of scientific knowledge or for complex phenomena like mind and language to be fully explainable in terms of physics. Chomsky provocatively states that after Newton "exorcised the machine" by showing the mechanical philosophy was untenable, only the "ghost" of intelligibility was left in science, which now relies on human-constructed models rather than grasping the true essence of nature. Achieving a direct, intuitive understanding - "exorcising the ghost" - may simply lie beyond the cognitive horizons of the human species.

Panel:
Dr. Tim Scarfe
Dr. Keith Duggar
Dr. Walid Saba

Pod version: https://anchor.fm/machinelearningstre...
Transcript of Chomsky interview; https://whimsical.com/chomsky-transcr...
Original corrupt recording: https://share.descript.com/view/N9KNa...

00:00:00 Kick off
00:02:24 C1: LeCun's recent position paper on AI, JEPA, Schmidhuber, EBMs
00:48:38 C2: Emergent abilities in LLMs paper
00:51:32 C3: Empiricism
01:25:33 C4: Cognitive Templates
01:35:47 C5: The Ghost in the Machine
02:00:08 C6: Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis by Fodor and Pylyshyn
02:20:12 C7: We deep-faked Chomsky
02:29:58 C8: Language
02:34:34 C9: Chomsky interview kick-off!
02:35:32 Q1: Large Language Models such as GPT-3
02:39:07 Q2: Connectionism and radical empiricism
02:44:37 Q3: Hybrid systems such as neurosymbolic
02:48:40 Q4: Computationalism silicon vs biological
02:53:21 Q5: Limits of human understanding
03:00:39 Q6: Semantics state-of-the-art
03:06:36 Q7: Universal grammar, I-Language, and language of thought
03:16:20 Q8: Profound and enduring misunderstandings
03:25:34 Q9: Greatest remaining mysteries science and philosophy
03:33:04 Debrief and 'Chuckles' from Chomsky

References;

LeCun Path to Autonomous AI paper
https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1...

Tim’s marked up version:
https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/review...

Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models [Wei et al] 2022
https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682

Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis [Fodor, Pylyshyn] 1988
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/perso...

Ghost in the machine
https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Gh...
https://forum.wordreference.com/threa...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=... (thanks to user tikwidd for your analysis)

Noam Chomsky in Greece: Philosophies of Democracy (1994) [Language chapter]
   • Noam Chomsky in Greece: Philosophies ...  

Richard Feynman clip
https://vimeo.com/340695809

Chomsky Bryan Magee BBC interview:
   • The Ideas of Chomsky - Bryan Magee & ...  

Randy Gallistel's work (question 3)
Helmholtz “NNs : they’ve damn slow”
Purkinje cells

Barbara Partee
   • "Math Does Not Represent" by Erik Curiel  

Iris Berent
https://cos.northeastern.edu/people/i...

Penrose Orch OR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchest...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows...

Fodor “The Language of Thought”
https://www.amazon.com/Language-Thoug...

Least Effort
http://materias.df.uba.ar/dnla2019c1/...

structure dependence in grammar formation
https://www.jstor.org/stable/415004
https://www.amazon.com/Minimalist-Pro...

three models
https://chomsky.info/wp-content/uploa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfo...
https://www.amazon.com/Aspects-Theory...

Darwin's problem
https://chomsky.info/20140826/

Descartes's problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2...

Control Theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control...)