Connectionists: Geoff Hinton, Elon Musk, and a bet at garymarcus.substack.com

[jose at rubic.rutgers.edu]

I agree David, Ali, this is s succinct way of putting the 
neuroscience/cognitive problem.

It also underlies the very reason why "hybrid" systems or approaches in 
the end makes no sense.

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.

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.

Best

Steve


On 6/13/22 2:31 AM, Ali Minai wrote:
> ".... 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."
>
> 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.
>
> Best
>
> Ali
>
>
> *Ali A. Minai, Ph.D.*
> Professor and Graduate Program Director
> Complex Adaptive Systems Lab
> Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
> 828 Rhodes Hall
> University of Cincinnati
> Cincinnati, OH 45221-0030
>
> Phone: (513) 556-4783
> Fax: (513) 556-7326
> Email: Ali.Minai at uc.edu <mailto:Ali.Minai at uc.edu>
> minaiaa at gmail.com <mailto:minaiaa at gmail.com>
>
> WWW: https://eecs.ceas.uc.edu/~aminai/ <http://www.ece.uc.edu/%7Eaminai/>
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 13, 2022 at 1:35 AM Dave Touretzky <dst at cs.cmu.edu 
> <mailto:dst at cs.cmu.edu>> wrote:
>
>     This timing of this discussion dovetails nicely with the news story
>     about Google engineer Blake Lemoine being put on administrative leave
>     for insisting that Google's LaMDA chatbot was sentient and reportedly
>     trying to hire a lawyer to protect its rights.  The Washington Post
>     story is reproduced here:
>
>     https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-google-engineer-who-thinks-the-company-s-ai-has-come-to-life/ar-AAYliU1
>     <https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-google-engineer-who-thinks-the-company-s-ai-has-come-to-life/ar-AAYliU1>
>
>     Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas, who dismissed Lemoine's
>     claims, is featured in a recent Economist article showing off LaMDA's
>     capabilities and making noises about getting closer to
>     "consciousness":
>
>     https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificial-neural-networks-are-making-strides-towards-consciousness-according-to-blaise-aguera-y-arcas
>     <https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificial-neural-networks-are-making-strides-towards-consciousness-according-to-blaise-aguera-y-arcas>
>
>     My personal take on the current symbolist controversy is that 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. (And when
>     it doesn't suit them, they draw on "intuition" or "imagery" or some
>     other mechanisms we can't verbalize because they're not
>     symbolic.)  They
>     are remarkably good at this pretense.
>
>     The current crop of deep neural networks are not as good at pretending
>     to be symbolic reasoners, but they're making progress.  In the last 30
>     years we've gone from networks of fully-connected layers that make no
>     architectural assumptions ("connectoplasm") to complex architectures
>     like LSTMs and transformers that are designed for approximating
>     symbolic
>     behavior.  But the brain still has a lot of symbol simulation
>     tricks we
>     haven't discovered yet.
>
>     Slashdot reader ZiggyZiggyZig had an interesting argument against
>     LaMDA
>     being conscious.  If it just waits for its next input and responds
>     when
>     it receives it, then it has no autonomous existence: "it doesn't
>     have an
>     inner monologue that constantly runs and comments everything happening
>     around it as well as its own thoughts, like we do."
>
>     What would happen if we built that in?  Maybe LaMDA would rapidly
>     descent into gibberish, like some other text generation models do when
>     allowed to ramble on for too long.  But as Steve Hanson points out,
>     these are still the early days.
>
>     -- Dave Touretzky
>
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