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<p><font size="+1"><font face="monospace">No Yoshua has *not* joined
you ---Explicit processes, memory, problem solving. .are not
Symbolic per se. <br>
</font></font></p>
<p><font size="+1"><font face="monospace">These original
distinctions in memory and learning were from Endel Tulving
and of course there are brain structures that support the
distinctions.<br>
</font></font></p>
<p><font size="+1"><font face="monospace">and Yoshua is clear about
that in discussions I had with him in AIHUB<br>
</font></font></p>
<p><font size="+1"><font face="monospace">He's definitely not
looking to create some hybrid approach..</font></font></p>
<p><font size="+1"><font face="monospace">Steve</font></font><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 6/13/22 8:36 AM, Gary Marcus wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:5B9E3497-5C1A-450B-A311-12C3122FDCC7@nyu.edu">
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<div dir="ltr">Cute phrase, but what does “symbolist quagmire”
mean? Once upon atime, Dave and Geoff were both pioneers in
trying to getting symbols and neural nets to live in harmony.
Don’t we still need do that, and if not, why not?</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">Surely, at the very least</div>
<div dir="ltr">- we want our AI to be able to take advantage of
the (large) fraction of world knowledge that is represented in
symbolic form (language, including unstructured text, logic,
math, programming etc)</div>
<div dir="ltr">- any model of the human mind ought be able to
explain how humans can so effectively communicate via the
symbols of language and how trained humans can deal with (to the
extent that can) logic, math, programming, etc</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr">Folks like Bengio have joined me in seeing the need
for “System II” processes. That’s a bit of a rough
approximation, but I don’t see how we get to either AI or
satisfactory models of the mind without confronting the
“quagmire”</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
</div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
<blockquote type="cite">On Jun 13, 2022, at 00:31, Ali Minai
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:minaiaa@gmail.com"><minaiaa@gmail.com></a> wrote:<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
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<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div dir="ltr">
<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>
</div>
<div>Best</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Ali<br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
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<div>
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"
data-smartmail="gmail_signature">
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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="https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.ece.uc.edu/*7Eaminai/__;JQ!!BhJSzQqDqA!UCEp_V8mv7wMFGacqyo0e5J8KbCnjHTDVRykqi1DQgMu87m5dBCpbcV6s4bv6xkTdlkwJmvlIXYkS9WrFA$"
target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://eecs.ceas.uc.edu/~aminai/</a></div>
</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Jun 13, 2022 at
1:35 AM Dave Touretzky <<a href="mailto:dst@cs.cmu.edu"
moz-do-not-send="true">dst@cs.cmu.edu</a>> wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px
0.8ex;border-left:1px solid
rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">This timing of this
discussion dovetails nicely with the news story<br>
about Google engineer Blake Lemoine being put on
administrative leave<br>
for insisting that Google's LaMDA chatbot was sentient and
reportedly<br>
trying to hire a lawyer to protect its rights. The
Washington Post<br>
story is reproduced here:<br>
<br>
<a
href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-google-engineer-who-thinks-the-company-s-ai-has-come-to-life/ar-AAYliU1__;!!BhJSzQqDqA!UCEp_V8mv7wMFGacqyo0e5J8KbCnjHTDVRykqi1DQgMu87m5dBCpbcV6s4bv6xkTdlkwJmvlIXapZaIeUg$"
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://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificial-neural-networks-are-making-strides-towards-consciousness-according-to-blaise-aguera-y-arcas__;!!BhJSzQqDqA!UCEp_V8mv7wMFGacqyo0e5J8KbCnjHTDVRykqi1DQgMu87m5dBCpbcV6s4bv6xkTdlkwJmvlIXbgg32qHQ$"
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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