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<p><font size="+1" face="monospace">I agree David, Ali, this is s
succinct way of putting the neuroscience/cognitive problem.<br>
</font></p>
<p><font size="+1" face="monospace">It also underlies the very
reason why "hybrid" systems or approaches in the end makes no
sense.<br>
</font></p>
<p><font size="+1">I think, on the other hand, the rush to
consciousness of transformers and the laMDA (Lemoine's "friend"
in his computer) is a also a need to capture symbol processing
just through claims of human-like performance without the
serious toil this will take in the future.</font></p>
<p><font size="+1">Again, I think a relevant project here would be
to attempt to replicate with DL-rnn, Yang and Piatiadosi's PNAS
language learning system--which is a completely symbolic-- and
very general over the Chomsky-Miller grammer classes. Let me
know, happy to collaborate on something like this.<br>
</font></p>
<p><font size="+1">Best</font></p>
<p><font size="+1">Steve<br>
</font></p>
<p><font size="+1"></font><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 6/13/22 2:31 AM, Ali Minai wrote:<br>
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<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CABG3s4tP+7+fC215Map996ptQb3YKPk_z+KQGQoQ+bLRAyYrhw@mail.gmail.com">
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<div>"....
symbolic representations are a fiction our non-symbolic brains
cooked up because the properties of symbol systems
(systematicity, compositionality, etc.) are tremendously
useful. So our brains pretend to be rule-based symbolic
systems when it suits them, because it's adaptive to do so."</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Spot on, Dave! We should not wade back into the symbolist
quagmire, but do need to figure out how apparently symbolic
processing can be done by neural systems. Models like those of
Eliasmith and Smolensky provide some insight, but still seem
far from both biological plausibility and real-world scale.</div>
<div><br>
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<div>Best</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Ali<br>
</div>
<div><br>
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<div><b>Ali A. Minai, Ph.D.</b><br>
Professor and Graduate Program
Director<br>
Complex Adaptive Systems Lab<br>
Department of Electrical Engineering
& Computer Science<br>
</div>
<div>828 Rhodes Hall<br>
</div>
<div>University of Cincinnati<br>
Cincinnati, OH 45221-0030<br>
</div>
<div><br>
Phone: (513) 556-4783<br>
Fax: (513) 556-7326<br>
Email: <a
href="mailto:Ali.Minai@uc.edu"
target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">Ali.Minai@uc.edu</a><br>
<a
href="mailto:minaiaa@gmail.com"
target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">minaiaa@gmail.com</a><br>
<br>
WWW: <a
href="http://www.ece.uc.edu/%7Eaminai/"
target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://eecs.ceas.uc.edu/~aminai/</a></div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Jun 13, 2022 at 1:35
AM Dave Touretzky <<a href="mailto:dst@cs.cmu.edu"
moz-do-not-send="true">dst@cs.cmu.edu</a>> wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px
0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">This
timing of this discussion dovetails nicely with the news story<br>
about Google engineer Blake Lemoine being put on
administrative leave<br>
for insisting that Google's LaMDA chatbot was sentient and
reportedly<br>
trying to hire a lawyer to protect its rights. The Washington
Post<br>
story is reproduced here:<br>
<br>
<a
href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-google-engineer-who-thinks-the-company-s-ai-has-come-to-life/ar-AAYliU1"
rel="noreferrer" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-google-engineer-who-thinks-the-company-s-ai-has-come-to-life/ar-AAYliU1</a><br>
<br>
Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas, who dismissed
Lemoine's<br>
claims, is featured in a recent Economist article showing off
LaMDA's<br>
capabilities and making noises about getting closer to
"consciousness":<br>
<br>
<a
href="https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificial-neural-networks-are-making-strides-towards-consciousness-according-to-blaise-aguera-y-arcas"
rel="noreferrer" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificial-neural-networks-are-making-strides-towards-consciousness-according-to-blaise-aguera-y-arcas</a><br>
<br>
My personal take on the current symbolist controversy is that
symbolic<br>
representations are a fiction our non-symbolic brains cooked
up because<br>
the properties of symbol systems (systematicity,
compositionality, etc.)<br>
are tremendously useful. So our brains pretend to be
rule-based symbolic<br>
systems when it suits them, because it's adaptive to do so.
(And when<br>
it doesn't suit them, they draw on "intuition" or "imagery" or
some<br>
other mechanisms we can't verbalize because they're not
symbolic.) They<br>
are remarkably good at this pretense.<br>
<br>
The current crop of deep neural networks are not as good at
pretending<br>
to be symbolic reasoners, but they're making progress. In the
last 30<br>
years we've gone from networks of fully-connected layers that
make no<br>
architectural assumptions ("connectoplasm") to complex
architectures<br>
like LSTMs and transformers that are designed for
approximating symbolic<br>
behavior. But the brain still has a lot of symbol simulation
tricks we<br>
haven't discovered yet.<br>
<br>
Slashdot reader ZiggyZiggyZig had an interesting argument
against LaMDA<br>
being conscious. If it just waits for its next input and
responds when<br>
it receives it, then it has no autonomous existence: "it
doesn't have an<br>
inner monologue that constantly runs and comments everything
happening<br>
around it as well as its own thoughts, like we do."<br>
<br>
What would happen if we built that in? Maybe LaMDA would
rapidly<br>
descent into gibberish, like some other text generation models
do when<br>
allowed to ramble on for too long. But as Steve Hanson points
out,<br>
these are still the early days.<br>
<br>
-- Dave Touretzky<br>
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