Noam Chomsky discusses how the "mechanical philosophy" that originated in the 17th century with thinkers like Galileo, Descartes and Newton viewed the universe as a grand machine that could in principle be understood through science. However, Newton's discovery of gravity, which involved "action at a distance" rather than direct physical contact, undermined this mechanical view. Full title: The Ghost in the Machine and the Limits of Human Understanding. Please support us: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst Professor Noam Chomsky is the most significant thinker of our generation. Chomsky argues that since Newton, the goal of science has become more modest - rather than trying to understand the true nature of the universe, which may be beyond human comprehension, science aims to construct abstract models that are intelligible to us, even if the underlying reality remains a mystery. He suggests there may be inherent biological limits to human understanding, just as other animals have limits to their cognitive capacities. The upshot is that we shouldn't necessarily expect a complete unification of scientific knowledge or for complex phenomena like mind and language to be fully explainable in terms of physics. Chomsky provocatively states that after Newton "exorcised the machine" by showing the mechanical philosophy was untenable, only the "ghost" of intelligibility was left in science, which now relies on human-constructed models rather than grasping the true essence of nature. Achieving a direct, intuitive understanding - "exorcising the ghost" - may simply lie beyond the cognitive horizons of the human species. Panel: Dr. Tim Scarfe Dr. Keith Duggar Dr. Walid Saba Pod version: https://anchor.fm/machinelearningstreettalk/episodes/MLST-78---Prof--NOAM-CHOMSKY-Special-Edition-e1l0760 Transcript of Chomsky interview; https://whimsical.com/chomsky-transcript-WgFJLguL7JhzyNhsdgwATy Original corrupt recording: https://share.descript.com/view/N9KNaZTav27 00:00:00 Kick off 00:02:24 C1: LeCun's recent position paper on AI, JEPA, Schmidhuber, EBMs 00:48:38 C2: Emergent abilities in LLMs paper 00:51:32 C3: Empiricism 01:25:33 C4: Cognitive Templates 01:35:47 C5: The Ghost in the Machine 02:00:08 C6: Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis by Fodor and Pylyshyn 02:20:12 C7: We deep-faked Chomsky 02:29:58 C8: Language 02:34:34 C9: Chomsky interview kick-off! 02:35:32 Q1: Large Language Models such as GPT-3 02:39:07 Q2: Connectionism and radical empiricism 02:44:37 Q3: Hybrid systems such as neurosymbolic 02:48:40 Q4: Computationalism silicon vs biological 02:53:21 Q5: Limits of human understanding 03:00:39 Q6: Semantics state-of-the-art 03:06:36 Q7: Universal grammar, I-Language, and language of thought 03:16:20 Q8: Profound and enduring misunderstandings 03:25:34 Q9: Greatest remaining mysteries science and philosophy 03:33:04 Debrief and 'Chuckles' from Chomsky References; LeCun Path to Autonomous AI paper https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf Tim’s marked up version: https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:8c5260f5-8959-3f11-bb3b-befb3bc65f13 Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models [Wei et al] 2022 https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682 Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis [Fodor, Pylyshyn] 1988 http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-zenon-pylyshyn/docs/jaf.pdf Ghost in the machine https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Ghost_in_the_machine https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/in-an-aristotelian-sense.3350478/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26448901 (thanks to user tikwidd for your analysis) Noam Chomsky in Greece: Philosophies of Democracy (1994) [Language chapter] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kL0UNWcWFc Richard Feynman clip https://vimeo.com/340695809 Chomsky Bryan Magee BBC interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxvSQnmcYLo Randy Gallistel's work (question 3) Helmholtz “NNs : they’ve damn slow” Purkinje cells Barbara Partee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA_T20HAzyY Iris Berent https://cos.northeastern.edu/people/iris-berent/ Penrose Orch OR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind Fodor “The Language of Thought” https://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought/dp/0674510305 Least Effort http://materias.df.uba.ar/dnla2019c1/files/2019/03/scaling_in_language.pdf structure dependence in grammar formation https://www.jstor.org/stable/415004 https://www.amazon.com/Minimalist-Program-MIT-Press/dp/0262527340 three models https://chomsky.info/wp-content/uploads/195609-.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_grammar https://www.amazon.com/Aspects-Theory-Syntax-Noam-Chomsky/dp/0262530074 Darwin's problem https://chomsky.info/20140826/ Descartes's problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem Control Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_(linguistics)