YouSaid · the spoken record

Jay McClelland

lines on the record: 125
first: 2021-09-20
most recent: 2021-09-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, thank you so much. And this has been an amazing opportunity for me to let ideas that I've never fully expressed before come out because you ask such a wide range of the deeper questions that we've all been thinking about for so long. So thank you very much for that.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that's very personal, it's very individual. It's like meaning will come for you through the particular combination of synergistic elements that are your fabric and your experience and your Context and you're And, you know, you should It's all made in a certain kind of a local context, though, right? Here I am at UCSD with this brilliant man Rumbleheart who's having Know these doubts about, um, Symbolic artificial intelligence that resonate with my desire to see it grounded in the biology. Let's make the most of that, you kn”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I myself think that we make meaning for ourselves and that Find inspiration in the meaning that other people have made in the past Religious thinkers. Of the first millennium BC and, you know, few. Few that came in the early part of the second millennium. Laid down some important foundations for us. But I do believe that we are an emergent. Result of a process that happened naturally without guidance and Meaning is what we make of it, and that the creation of Efforts to reify meaning in religious traditions and so on is just a part of the expression of that goal that we have to Know not. Find out what the meaning is, but to Make it ourselves. And so to me.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not what I wanted to do. And so when I got to my assistant professorship, although I continued to do experiments because I knew I had to get some papers out, I also, at the end of my first year, submitted my first article to psychological review, which was the theoretical journal where I took that section and elaborated it and wrote it up and submitted it to them. And they didn't accept that either. But they said, oh, this is interesting. You should keep thinking about it this time. And then that was what got me going to think, okay, you know, so it's not a superhuman thing to contribute to the development of theory. You know, you don't have to be. You can do it as a mere mortal.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I had submitted the paper to the Journal of Experimental Psychology. So I got back a letter from the editor saying, thank you very much. These are great experiments. We'd love to publish them in the journal. But what we'd like you to do is to leave the theorizing to the theorists and take that part out of the paper. And so I did. I took that part out of the paper. But I almost found myself labeled as a non theorist, right, by this. And I could have succumbed to that and said, okay, well, I guess my job is to just go on and do experiments, right?”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I could just say one more thing here, this was something that really contributed to energizing me in a way that I feel it would be useful to share. My PhD Dissertation project was completely empirical experimental project. And I wrote a paper based on the two main experiments that were the core of my dissertation. And I submitted it to a journal. And at the end of the paper, I had a little section where I laid out The beginnings of my theory about what I thought was going on that would explain the data that I had collected.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A partially formed thought in the mind of one person gets crystallized a little better in the discourse and becomes the foundation of some exciting concrete piece of actual scientific progress. And I feel like that moment happened when Rummelhard and I were doing the interactive activation model and when Rummelhard heard Hinton talk about gradient descent and having the objective function to guide the learning process. It happened a lot in that period, and I sort of seek that kind of thing in my collaborations with my students, right? So, you know, the idea that this is a person who contributed to science by finding exciting collaborative opportunities to engage with other people through is something that I certainly hope is part of the paragraph.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would want it to sort of highlight. A couple things that I was. Able to see One path. That was more exciting to me than the one that seemed already to be there for a cognitive psychologist, but not for any... Super special reason other than that I'd had the right context prior to that, but that I had gone ahead and followed that lead, you know, and then I forget the exact wording, but I said in this preface that The joy of science is the moment in which”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're not going to go on forever. And so, um, So, yeah, I got to keep thinking about the questions that I think are the interesting and important ones for sure.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think it was more in terms of, well, I got 15 more years possibly of useful life left. Let's imagine that it's only Den. I'm actually getting close to the end of that now, maybe three or four more years, but I'm beginning to feel like, well, I probably have another five after that. So, okay, I'll give myself another six or eight.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that it can be motivating to people to think they have a limited period left. I think in my own case, it's like seven or eight years ago now that I was sitting around doing experiments on decision making that were Satisfying in a certain way because I could really get closure on whether the model fit the data perfectly or not. And I could see how one could test the predictions in monkeys as well as humans and really see what the neurons were doing. But I just realized, hey, wait a minute, you know, I may only have about 10 or 15 years left here. I don't feel like I'm getting towards the answers to the really interesting questions while I'm doing this particular level of work. And that's when I said to myself, Okay, let's pick something that's hard. So that's when I started working on mathematical cognition.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The migrated sort of conception of mind and continuous sort of way of thinking about most things makes it so that to me the Discreetness of that transition is less”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and collaborate with other people who are themselves. Really helping to push these ideas forward. So yeah. What about?”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that I am not as much afraid of death as I am of degeneration. And I say that in part for reasons of having seen some tragic degenerative situations. Unfold. It's exciting when you can. Continue to participate and feel like you're near the place where the wave is breaking on the shore. I feel like And I think about You know, my own future potential. If I were to undergo a begin to suffer from dementia Alzheimer's disease or semantic dementia or some other condition, I would sort of gradually lose the thread of that ability. So one can live on for several decade after having to retire because one no longer has these kinds of abilities to engage. And I think that's the thing that I feared the most.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think we've come a long way in that regard and that you're absolutely right that nowadays this is something that's accessible to people through the pathway in through computer science or the pathway in through neuroscience. You know, you can get derailed in neuroscience down to the bottom of the system where you might find the cures of various conditions But you don't get a chance to think about the higher level stuff. So it's in the systems and cognitive neuroscience and computational intelligence miasma up there at the top that I think these opportunities are most. Our richest right now. And so yes, I am indeed blessed by having had the opportunity to fall into that space.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I ended up in the psychology laboratory running experiments on pigeons. And so I had these profound sort of like dissonance between, okay, the kinds of issues that would be explored when I was thinking about what I read about in modern British literature versus what I can study with my pigeons in the laboratory, that got resolved when I went to graduate school and I discovered cognitive psychology. And so for me, that was the path out of this sort of like extremely sort of ambivalent divergence between the interest in the human condition and the desire to do, you know, actual mechanistically oriented thinking about it.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it was Frome and Young more than Freud that was sort of initially kind of like made me feel like, oh, this is really amazing and interesting. And I want to explore it further. I actually, when I got to college and I lost that thread, I found more of it in sociology and literature than I did in Any place else. So I took quite a lot of both of those disciplines as an undergraduate Know, I was actually deeply ambivalent about the psychology because I was doing experiments after the initial flurry of interest in why people would occupy buildings during insurrection and consider, you know, be sort of like so over committed to their beliefs.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely alienated me from the institute and from all of its prior policies, which had been much more holistic, I think, really at some level. And the other people on the board were psychiatrists, right? Very biological psychiatrists. It didn't pan out, right? That nothing has changed in our ability to help people with mental illness. And so 20 years later, that particular path was a dead end, as far as I can tell.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you're absolutely right. So I was actually a member of the. National advisory mental health council, that is to say the board of scientists who advised the director of the National Institute of Mental Health. And that was around the year 2000. And in fact, at that time, the man who came in as the new director, I had been on this board for a year when he came in. Said okay Schizophrenia is a biological illness. It's a lot like cancer. We've made huge strides in curing cancer, and that's what we're going to do with schizophrenia. We're going to find the medications that are going to cure this disease. And we're not going to listen to anybody's grandmother anymore. Good old behavioral psychology is not something we're going to support any further. Know”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I wasn't exposed to the. Sort of the biomedical slash pharmacological aspects of psychiatry at that point because I didn't, I dropped out of that whole idea of pre-med that I never even found out about that until much later.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From each other, we've all gone in our own different directions. And, you know, I mentioned my younger brother who was very musical. I had my other younger brother was like this amazing, like intuitive engineer. One of my sisters was passionate about Water conservation well before it was such a hugely important issue that it is today. So we all sort of somehow find a different thing. And I don't mean to say it isn't. Tied in with something about us biologically, but it's also when that happens, where you can find that, then you can do your thing and you can be excited about it. So people can be excited about fitting people on bicycles as well as excited about making neural networks achieve insights into human cognition, right?”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know the person who was born as the fourth member of the family's drink quartet, right? And they handed in the violin he was six weeks old. All right, start playing. You know, it's like, and so the level of immersion there was amazingly profound, but hopefully he also had something maybe this is where the more Sort of the genetic part comes in sometimes, I think, you know, something in him resonated to the music so that the synergy of the combination of that was so powerful. So that's what I really considered to be the most artifact. It's sort of the synergy of something with experience that then results in the unique flowering of a particular mind. So I know my siblings and I are all very different.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think The motivational engagement results in the immersion that then creates the opportunity to obtain the expertise. We could call it the Mozart effect, right? I mean, when I think about Mozart, I think about...”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Connect with them somehow. Yeah, and there was something that it fed into and you're extremely lucky if you have that and if you can nurture it and can let it grow and let it be an important part of your life.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the opportunity to do it myself and to bring together a certain set of things that. That engaged me intrinsically And I think it has something to do with why certain people turn out to be profoundly. Amazing musical geniuses, right? They get immersed in it at an early enough point. And it just sort of gets into the fabric. So my little brother had intrinsic motivation for music as we witnessed when he discovered how to put records on the phonograph when he was like 13 months old and recognize which one he wanted to play not because he could read the labels because he could sort of see which one's head which scratches which were the different, you know, oh, that's Rapid Espanol and that's”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like, I. What I did intrinsically motivating to me. Well, that's interesting, and I don't know all the answers to it, and I don't think I want anybody to think that you should be sort of in any way. Don't know sanctimonious or anything about it. You know, it's like. I really enjoyed doing statistical analysis of data. I really enjoyed. running my own experiment which was what I got a chance to do in the psychology department that chemistry and physics had never I never imagined that mere mortals would ever do an experiment in those sciences except one that was in the textbook that you were told to do in lab class but in psychology we were already like even when I was taking psych one it turned out we had our own rat and we got to after two set experiments we got to okay do something you think of you know with your rat you know so”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought I was great. They wanted me to go to graduate school. They nominated me for Phi Beta Kappa. And I went to the Phi Beta Kappa ceremony and this guy came up and he said, oh, you Magnar Suma? And I wasn't even getting honors based on my grades. They just happened to have. Thought I was interested enough in ideas to belong to Phi Beta Kappa. So”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I happen to have taken mathematical statistics. I happen to have been taking psychology that quarter at just psych one. And somehow things in that space all ran together in my mind and got me really excited about asking questions about why people, what made certain people go into the buildings and not others and things like that. And so suddenly I had a path forward and I had just been wandering around aimlessly. At the different points in my career, you know, and I think, okay, well, should I take this class or should I? Read that book about Some idea that I want to understand better, or should I pursue the thing that excites me and interests me, or should I meet some requirement? You know, that's I always did the latter, so I ended up my professors in psychology were.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was this big revolution happening. I was at Columbia University in 1968, and the Vietnam War is going on. Columbia is building a gym in Morningside Heights, which is part of Harlem. And people are thinking, oh, the big, bad, rich guys are stealing the parkland that belongs to the people of Harlem. And they're part of the military-industrial complex, which is enslaving us and sending us all off to war in Vietnam. And so there was this big revolution that involved a confluence of black activism and SDS and social justice and the whole university blew up and got shut down. And I got a chance to sort of think about. Why people were behaving the way they were in this context?”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“first semester of a three quarter physics class and it was mechanics and this was so far from what it was I was interested in but it was also too early in the morning and the winter quart semester so I never made it to the physics class but I wondered about the rest of my freshman year and most of my sophomore year. Until I found myself in the midst of this situation where around me.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finding the thing that you are intrinsically motivated to engage with. And then celebrating that discovery is what What it's all about. When I was in College, I struggled with that. I had thought I wanted to be a psychiatrist I think I was interested in human psychology in high school and at that time the only sort of information I had that had anything to do with the psyche was, you know, Freud and Eric From and sort of popular psychiatry kinds of things. And so, well, they were psychiatrists, right? So I had to be a psychiatrist. That meant I had to go to medical school. And I got to college and I find myself taking, you know,”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that we really ought to be much more cognizant of in general as human beings is that our own insight into exactly why we hold the beliefs that we do and we hold the attitudes and make the choices and feel the feelings that we do is not something that we We totally control or totally observe. And it's subject to Are culturally transmitted understanding of what it is that is the mode that we give to explain these things when asked to do so as much as it is about anything else. And so even our ability to introspect and think we have access to our own thoughts is a product of culture and belief, you know, practice”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, one of the threads of psychological research that's always been very, um, Know important to me to be aware of is the idea that Our explanations of our own behavior. Aren't necessarily Part of the causal process that caused that behavior to occur or even valid observations of the set of constraints that led to the outcome. But they are post-hoc rationalizations that we can give based on information at our disposal about what might have contributed to the result that we came to when asked. And so this is an idea that was introduced in a very important paper by Nisbet and Wilson about the limits on our ability to be aware of the factors that cause us to make the choices that we make. Think it's.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think, oh, that man must be brilliant. He must have this special insight. But he must have some, you know, biological sort of bit that's different, right, that makes him so that he or she could have that insight. But I am. Although I don't want to dismiss biological individual differences completely, Find it much more interesting to think about the possibility that. It was that difference in the dinner table conversation at the Chomsky House He was growing up that made it so that he had that cast of mind.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is just an example to me and where a certain mode of thinking about language itself or a certain mode of thinking about Geometry and those kinds of relations, so become so second nature that you don't know what it is that you need to teach. And in fact, we don't really teach it all that explicitly anyway. It's, you know, you take a math class. The professor sort of teaches it to you the way they understand it. Some of the students in the class sort of like, you know, they get it. They start to get the way of thinking and they can actually do the problems that get put on the homework that the professor thinks are interesting and challenging ones. But most of the students who don't kind of engage as deeply don't ever get, you know.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That somehow or other, you know, the basic fundamentals of discrete quantities being countable and innumerable and indefinite in number was not something that had to be Discovered But he was wrong. It turns out that many cognitive scientists agreed with him for a time. There was a long period of time where the natural numbers were considered to be a part of the innate endowment of core knowledge or to use the kind of phrases that Spelkey and Carrie used to talk about what they believe are the innate primitives of the human mind. They no longer believe that it's actually Been more or less accepted by almost everyone that the natural numbers are actually a cultural construction. And it's so interesting to go back and sort of like study those few people who still exist who don't have those systems”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you're right. I think that's a great way of characterizing it. I also think that It's related to the concept of beginner's mind. Another concept called the expert blind spot. So The expert blind spot is much more prosaic seeming than this point that you were just making, but it's something that plagues experts when they try to communicate their understanding to non-experts. And that is that Things are self evident to them. They can't begin to even think about how they could explain it to somebody else because it like, well. It's just like so patently obvious that it must be true. Kronacher said God made the natural numbers, all else is the work of man. He was expressing that intuition.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And, you know, this is where. Things about human belief and so-called knowledge that we consider Private Not our business Manipulate in others. We are not entitled to tell somebody else what to believe about certain kinds of things What are those beliefs? Well, they are the product of this sort of immersion. Incultur That is what I believe.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It recently has become much more salient. I happen to have learned about this when I myself was a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, but I never knew how to put it together with all of my other thinking about these things. So I actually currently have the hypothesis that formally trained linguists and other formally trained Academics, whether it be linguistics, philosophy Cognitive science, computer science, machine learning, mathematics. Have a motive engagement with experience that is intuitively deeply structured to be more Organized around Systematicity and ability to be conformant with the principles of a system than is actually true of the natural human mind without that immersion.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to use the word but the The actual intuitive knowledge of these things only goes so far and does not go as far as it does in people like Chomsky himself. And this was something that was discovered in the PhD dissertation of Lila Gleitman, who was actually trained in the same linguistics department with Chomsky. So, what Lila discovered Was that The intuitions that linguists had About even the meaning of a phrase. Not just about its grammar, but about what they thought a phrase must mean were very different from the intuitions of an ordinary person who wasn't a formally trained thinker.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a very interesting question And I think it's one of the ones that I'm actually very interested in right now. But I think the answer is Important ways, it is important to draw that line, but then to come back and look at it again and see some of the subtleties and interesting aspects of the difference. If we think about Chomsky himself as He, uh, Was born into an academic family. His father was a professor of rabbinical studies at a small rabbinical college in Philadelphia And he was deeply inculturated in. You know, a culture of thought and reason. Brought to the effort to understand natural language this profound engagement with these formal systems. And, you know, I think that There was tremendous power in that and that Chomsky had some amazing insights into the structure of natural language. But that”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Academia has created for us what those early philosophers in their academies in Athens and Alexandria and other places allowed was the development of these Schools of thought, modes of thought that then become deeply ingrained and it becomes what it is that makes it so that somebody like Jerry Fotor would think that Systematic thought is The essential characteristic of the human mind as opposed to an acquired characteristic that results from acculturation in a certain mode. That's been invented by humans”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of the touch point of a Of a coherent document that sort of laid out this idea of an actual formal system within which these objects were characterized and the system of inference. Allowed new truths to be derived from others was sort of like established as a paradigm. And what What I find interesting is The idea that the ability to become A person who is capable of thinking In this abstract formal way A result of the same kind of immersion. In experience. Thinking in that way, you know, we now begin to think of our understanding of languages being, right? So we immerse ourselves in a particular language. In a particular world of objects and their relationships, and we learn to talk about that, and we develop intuitive understanding of the real world in a similar way, we can think that”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I think that I think Demisabis is some. Know, he's spoken about those things. I heard him. describe a move that was made in one of the go matches against Lis et al. in a very similar way. It caused me to become really excited to kind of collaborate with some of those guys at DeepMind. So, I think, though, that what What I like to really emphasize here is One part of what I like to emphasize about mathematical cognition, at least, is that Philosophers And logicians Going back Three are even a little more than 3,000 years ago. Began to develop these formal systems. Gradually Whole idea about thinking formally Got constructed. And it's preceded Euclid. Certainly present in the work of Thales and others, and I'm not the world's leading expert in all the details of that history, but Euclid's elements were the”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A fun and interesting little story to tell, or something like that. It just sort of wells up out of the... Letting the thing play out its own imagining of what somebody might say given this prompt as a input to get it to start to generate its own thoughts. And to me, that sort of represents the potential of capturing the intuitive side of this.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The kinds of things that we're beginning to see deep learning systems do of their own accord Kind of gives me This feeling of. I don't know, hope or encouragement that ultimately it'll all. Happen. So, in particular, Many people now have become really interested in thinking about neural networks that have been trained with massive amounts of Can be given a prompt and they can then sort of generate some really interesting, fanciful creative story from that prompt. There's kind of like a sense that they've somehow synthesized something like novel out of the, you know, all of the particulars of all of the billions and billions of experiences that went into the training data that gives rise to something like this sort of intuitive sense of what would be a”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. And so what for me, the essence of the project. Is to understand how to bring the intuitive connectionist resources to bear on letting the intuitive discovery arise Engagement in thinking with this formal system. So I think of Of somebody like Hinton or Newton or Einstein or Rummel Heart or Poincar ⁇ to Archimedes, this is another example, right? Suddenly a flash of insight occurs. It's like the Constellation of all of these simultaneous constraints that somehow or other causes the mind to settle into a novel state that it never did before and give rise to a new idea that Then you can say, okay, well, now how can I prove this? How do I write down the steps of that theorem that allow me to make it rigorous and certain? And so I feel like the”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The insights that human mathematicians have had is a combination of the kind of the Intuitive Kind of connectionist like knowledge that makes it so that something Is just like obviously true. So that you don't have to think about why it's true. That then makes it possible To then take the next step Ponder and reason and figure out something that you previously didn't have that intuition about. Then ultimately becomes a part of the intuition that Next generation of Mathematical thinkers have to ground their own thinking on so that they can extend the ideas even further. I came across this quotation From Henri Poincar ⁇ while I was walking. The woods with my wife in a state park in Northern California late last summer. And what it said on the bench was. It is”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Idealized objects The mathematical notation system that we unfortunately focus way too much on is just our way of expressing propositions about these properties.”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a fundamental problem of. Human society that you damn well better bring back the same number of sheep as you started with. And, you know, it allows commerce. It allows contracts. It allows the establishment of records and so on to have systems that allow these things to be notated. But they have an inherent aboutness to them. That's one and the same time sort of abstract and idealized and generalizable while at the other hand potentially very, very grounded and concrete. And one of the things that makes For the incredible achievements of the human mind The fact that humans invented these idealized systems that leverage the power of human thought. Such a way as to allow all this kind of thing to happen. And so Mathematics to me is the development of systems for thinking about The properties and relations among sets of”
2021-09-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #222 – Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source