Connectionists: ?==?utf-8?q? Galileo and the priest

[Claudius Gros]

-- attention as thought processes? --

The discussion here on the list shows, that
ChatGPT produces intriguing results. I guess
everybody agrees. What it means remains open.

Let me throw in a hypothesis. 

With the introduction of the attention framework, 
deep-learning architectures acquired kind of 
'soft links' by computing weighted superpositions 
of other states of the network. Possibly, this may
be similar to what happens in the brain when we 'think',
namely to combine states of distinct brain regions
into a single processing stream.

If that would be true (which remains to be seen), it would 
imply that the processes performed by transformer 
architectures would have a certain resemblance to actual
thinking.

Any thoughts (by human brains) on this hypothesis?

Claudius

==============================================================
 
 
On Friday, March 10, 2023 20:29 CET, Geoffrey Hinton <geoffrey.hinton at gmail.com> wrote: 
 
> In Berthold Brecht's play about Galileo there is a scene where Galileo asks
> a priest to look through a telescope to see the moons of Jupiter. The
> priest says there is no point looking because it would be impossible for
> things to go round Jupiter (this is from my memory of seeing the play about
> 50 years ago).
> 
> I suspect that Chomsky thinks of himself as more like Galileo than the
> priest. But in his recent NYT opinion piece, it appears that the authors
> did not actually check what chatGPT would say in answer to their questions
> about falling apples or people too stubborn to talk to. Maybe they have
> such confidence that chatGPT could not possibly be understanding that there
> is no point looking at the data.
 

-- 
### 
### Prof. Dr. Claudius Gros
### http://itp.uni-frankfurt.de/~gros
### 
### Complex and Adaptive Dynamical Systems, A Primer   
### A graduate-level textbook, Springer (2008/10/13/15)
### 
### Life for barren exoplanets: The Genesis project
### https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10509-016-2911-0
###