Connectionists: The symbolist quagmire

[Gary Marcus]

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?

Surely, at the very least
- 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)
- 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

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”


> On Jun 13, 2022, at 00:31, Ali Minai <minaiaa at gmail.com> 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
>           minaiaa at gmail.com
> 
> WWW: https://eecs.ceas.uc.edu/~aminai/
> 
> 
>> On Mon, Jun 13, 2022 at 1:35 AM Dave Touretzky <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
>> 
>> 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
>> 
>> 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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