Many Minds By cover art

Many Minds

By: Kensy Cooperrider – Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute
Listen for free

  • Summary

  • Our world is brimming with beings—human, animal, and artificial. We explore how they think, sense, feel, and learn. Conversations and more, every two weeks.
    Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute 2020
    Show more Show less
activate_primeday_promo_in_buybox_DT
Episodes
  • From the archive: What does ChatGPT really know?

    From the archive: What does ChatGPT really know?
    Jul 24 2024
    Hi friends, we're on a brief summer break at the moment. We'll have a new episode for you in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! ---- [originally aired January 25, 2023] By now you’ve probably heard about the new chatbot called ChatGPT. There’s no question it’s something of a marvel. It distills complex information into clear prose; it offers instructions and suggestions; it reasons its way through problems. With the right prompting, it can even mimic famous writers. And it does all this with an air of cool competence, of intelligence. But, if you're like me, you’ve probably also been wondering: What’s really going on here? What are ChatGPT—and other large language models like it—actually doing? How much of their apparent competence is just smoke and mirrors? In what sense, if any, do they have human-like capacities? My guest today is Dr. Murray Shanahan. Murray is Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London and Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind. He's the author of numerous articles and several books at the lively intersections of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and philosophy. Very recently, Murray put out a paper titled 'Talking about Large Language Models’, and it’s the focus of our conversation today. In the paper, Murray argues that—tempting as may be—it's not appropriate to talk about large language models in anthropomorphic terms. Not yet, anyway. Here, we chat about the rapid rise of large language models and the basics of how they work. We discuss how a model that—at its base—simply does “next-word prediction" can be engineered into a savvy chatbot like ChatGPT. We talk about why ChatGPT lacks genuine “knowledge” and “understanding”—at least as we currently use those terms. And we discuss what it might take for these models to eventually possess richer, more human-like capacities. Along the way, we touch on: emergence, prompt engineering, embodiment and grounding, image generation models, Wittgenstein, the intentional stance, soft robots, and "exotic mind-like entities." Before we get to it, just a friendly reminder: applications are now open for the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (or DISI). DISI will be held this June/July in St Andrews Scotland—the program consists of three weeks of intense interdisciplinary engagement with exactly the kinds of ideas and questions we like to wrestle with here on this show. If you're intrigued—and I hope you are!—check out disi.org for more info. Alright friends, on to my decidedly human chat, with Dr. Murray Shanahan. Enjoy! The paper we discuss is here. A transcript of this episode is here. Notes and links 6:30 – The 2017 “breakthrough” article by Vaswani and colleagues. 8:00 – A popular article about GPT-3. 10:00 – A popular article about some of the impressive—and not so impressive—behaviors of ChatGPT. For more discussion of ChatGPT and other large language models, see another interview with Dr. Shanahan, as well as interviews with Emily Bender and Margaret Mitchell, with Gary Marcus, and with Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT). 14:00 – A widely discussed paper by Emily Bender and colleagues on the “dangers of stochastic parrots.” 19:00 – A blog post about “prompt engineering”. Another blog post about the concept of Reinforcement Learning through Human Feedback, in the context of ChatGPT. 30:00 – One of Dr. Shanahan’s books is titled, Embodiment and the Inner Life. 39:00 – An example of a robotic agent, SayCan, which is connected to a language model. 40:30 – On the notion of embodiment in the cognitive sciences, see the classic book by Francisco Varela and colleagues, The Embodied Mind. 44:00 – For a detailed primer on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, see here. 45:00 – See Dr. Shanahan’s general audience essay on “conscious exotica" and the space of possible minds. 49:00 – See Dennett’s book, The Intentional Stance. Dr. Shanahan recommends: Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, by Melanie Mitchell (see also our earlier episode with Dr. Mitchell) ‘Abstraction for Deep Reinforcement Learning’, by M. Shanahan and M. Mitchell You can read more about Murray’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter. Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or ...
    Show more Show less
    55 mins
  • From the archive: Medieval monks on memory, meditation, and mind-wandering

    From the archive: Medieval monks on memory, meditation, and mind-wandering
    Jul 10 2024
    Hi friends, we're on a brief summer break at the moment. We'll have a new episode for you in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! _____ [originally aired May 17, 2023] You know the feeling. You're trying to read or write or think through a project, maybe even just respond to an email, when your attention starts to drift. You may not even notice it until you've already picked up your phone or jumped tabs, until your mind has already wandered way off-piste. This problem of distraction has become a bit of a modern-day obsession. We now fret about how to stay focused, how to avoid time-sucks, how to use our attention wisely. But it turns out this fixation of ours—contemporary as it may seem—is really not so new. My guest today is Dr. Jamie Kreiner, Professor of History at the University of Georgia. Jamie is the author of a new book titled The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell us about Distraction. In the book, Jamie shows that Christian monks in late antiquity and the early middle ages were—like us—a bit obsessed with attention. And their understanding of attention fit within a broad and often remarkably detailed understanding of the mind. In this conversation, Jamie and I talk about why monks in this era cared so much about distraction. We discuss how they understood the relationship between mind and body; how they conceptualized memory, meditation, and mind-wandering. We discuss some of the mnemonic techniques they used, some of the graphical and textual devices that helped keep them focused, and some of the metaphors and visualization techniques they innovated. Along the way we also touch on fasting, sleep, demons and angels, the problem of discernment, the state of pure prayer, the Six Wings mnemonic device, metacognitive maneuvering, and much more. I’ll just say I really enjoyed The Wandering Mind. As Jamie and I chat about here, the book illuminates an earlier understanding of human psychology that feels deeply familiar in some ways, and delightfully strange in others. I think you definitely get a sense of that in this conversation. Alright friends, on to my chat with Dr. Jamie Kreiner. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available here. Notes and links 4:00 – A webpage devoted to the Ark of Hugh of Saint Victor. 6:30 – For a detailed (and positive) review essay about The Wandering Mind, see here. 11:30 ­– The Redwall books, by Brian Jacques, are well known for featuring elaborate feasts. An article about some of the best of these. 18:30 – For more on how the body was understood in the early Christian world, see The Burden of the Flesh. 26:30 – Text written continuously is known as scripta continua. 27:30 – Articles that celebrate medieval marginalia can be found here, here, and here. 40:00 – An article about the Six Wings mnemonic. For more on mnemonic techniques in the medieval world, see Mary Carruthers’ book. 53:00 – On the idea of “pure prayer,” see the book, The Ladder of Prayer and the Ship of Stirrings. 57:30 – Dr. Kreiner’s next book, which comes out in January 2024, is a translation of some of John Cassian’s work on distraction. Dr. Kreiner’s book recommendations can be found in a recent article here. Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 2 mins
  • A new picture of language

    A new picture of language
    Jun 26 2024
    If you've taken Linguistics 101, you know what language is. It's a system for conveying meaning through speech. We build words out of sounds, and then complex ideas out of those words. Remarkably, the relationship between the sounds and the meanings they convey is purely arbitrary. Human language consists, in other words, of abstract symbols. Now, of course, there are also sign languages, but these operate in the same way, just in a different medium. This, anyway, is the view of language that has dominated and defined linguistics for many decades. But some think it gets some pretty fundamental things pretty wrong. Some think we need a new picture of language altogether. My guest today is Dr. Neil Cohn. Neil is Associate Professor at the Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication, in the Netherlands; he is also the director of the Visual Language Lab at Tilburg. For about two decades, Neil has been studying the rich properties of graphic systems—especially comics—and has built an argument that some constitute full-blown languages. His latest book, co-authored with, Joost Schilperoord, is titled A Multimodal Language Faculty. It challenges that longstanding, deeply held view of what language is. Instead, the book argues that the human language capacity combines three different modalities—the vocal modality (as in speech), the bodily modality (as in gesture), and the graphic modality (as in comics and other visual narratives). And each of these modalities is naturally able to support full-blown languages. Here, Neil and I talk about the basic assumptions of modern linguistics and where those assumptions come from. We discuss the idea that there are three expressive modalities that come naturally to humans, with each modality optimized for certain kinds of meaning. We talk about Neil's career, not only as an academic, but as an illustrator. We discuss cross-cultural differences and similarities in comics, and how comics have changed over the last century. And, finally, we consider how Neil's framework challenges current theorizing about the evolution of language. Along the way, Neil and I touch on sign languages and homesign systems, visual style vs visual language, Peircean semiotics, animal tracks, cave art, emoji, upfixes, sand drawing, Manga, the refrain "I can't draw," and the idea that the graphic modality is the only one that's truly unique to our species. After this episode we'll be taking a bit of a summer break, but we'll be posting some old favorites to tide you over. Alright friends, hope you enjoy this one. On to my conversation with Neil Cohn. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available here. Notes and links 3:30 – An earlier paper by Dr. Cohn on the well-worn refrain “I can’t draw.” His more recent Twitter thread covering the topic. 9:00 – An overview of research on homesign systems. For a broader discussion of differences between gesture, homesign systems, and established sign languages, see here. 15:00 – A comic, ‘Chinese Room,’ commissioned by the philosopher Dan Dennett and drawn by Dr. Cohn. 19:30 – The webpage of Dr. Cohn’s graduate mentor, Ray Jackendoff. 25:00 – A brief overview paper by Dr. Cohn and Dr. Schilperoord on the need to “reimagine language.” 25:30 – The classic book, based on lecture notes, by Ferdinand de Saussure, ‘Course in General Linguistics.' 44:00 – For an overview of “bimodal bilingualism,” see here. 50:00 – A study by Dr. Cohn and colleagues on the processing of emoji substituted for words. 56:00 – A recent study by Dr. Cohn and colleagues on anaphora in visual narratives. 58:30 – For our previous audio essay on animal (and human) tracks, see here. 1:01:30 – For examples of scholarship on non-Western methods of visual storytelling, including Aboriginal Australian sand drawing, see Dr. Cohn’s earlier edited volume here. For a deeper dive into sand drawing, see the monograph by Jenny Green here. 1:03:00 – Dr. Cohn also recently published a book on cross-cultural aspects of comics, The Patterns of Comics. The book is the fruit of his lab’s TINTIN project. 1:11:00 – For a video of Aboriginal Australian sand drawing, see here. 1:13:00 – See Dr. Cohn’s earlier book, Who Understands Comics? 1:15:00 – A study on “upfixes” by Dr. Cohn and a colleague. 1:22:00 – A popular article by Dr. Cohn on the linguistic status of emoji. 1:31:00 – For a deep dive into Peircean semiotics, see here. 1:36:00 – For my own general-audience treatment of “gesture first” theories of language evolution and the “modality transition” problem, see here. 1:37:00 – A paper by Dr. Jackendoff and Eva Wittenberg outlining their “complexity hierarchy.” ­­­­1:50:00 – For the Getty museum exhibit associated with Dr. Cohn’s lecture, see here. Recommendations The Texture of the Lexicon, by Jenny Audring and Ray Jackendoff Battle in the ...
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 55 mins
Science
Show more Show less

What listeners say about Many Minds

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Audible.com reviews

Amazon reviews
No Reviews are Available