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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