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In this special edition episode, we have a conversation with Prof. Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics and the most important intellectual of the 20th century. 


With a career spanning the better part of a century, we took the chance to ask Prof. Chomsky his thoughts not only on the progress of linguistics and cognitive science but also the deepest enduring mysteries of science and philosophy as a whole - exploring what may lie beyond our limits of understanding. We also discuss the rise of connectionism and large language models, our quest to discover an intelligible world, and the boundaries between silicon and biology.


We explore some of the profound misunderstandings of linguistics in general and Chomsky’s own work specifically which have persisted, at the highest levels of academia for over sixty years.  


We have produced a significant introduction section where we discuss in detail Yann LeCun’s recent position paper on AGI, a recent paper on emergence in LLMs, empiricism related to cognitive science, cognitive templates, “the ghost in the machine” and language. 




Panel: 


Dr. Tim Scarfe


Dr. Keith Duggar


Dr. Walid Saba 




YT version: https://youtu.be/-9I4SgkHpcA




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


01:59:21 C6: Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis by Fodor and Pylyshyn


02:19:25 C7: We deep-faked Chomsky


02:29:11 C8: Language


02:34:41 C9: Chomsky interview kick-off!


02:35:39 Large Language Models such as GPT-3


02:39:14 Connectionism and radical empiricism


02:44:44 Hybrid systems such as neurosymbolic


02:48:47 Computationalism silicon vs biological


02:53:28 Limits of human understanding


03:00:46 Semantics state-of-the-art


03:06:43 Universal grammar, I-Language, and language of thought


03:16:27 Profound and enduring misunderstandings


03:25:41 Greatest remaining mysteries science and philosophy


03:33:10 Debrief and 'Chuckles' from Chomsky