YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Botvinick

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126
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2020-07-03
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2020-07-03
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1
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  1. “I agree with you, but at the same time, one thing that I found Really exciting about that first wave of deep learning models in cognition was the fact that the people who were building these models were focused on the richness and complexity of human cognition. So an early debate in cognitive science, which I sort of witnessed as a grad student, was about something that sounds very dry, which is the formation of the past tense. But there were these two camps. One said, well, the mind encodes certain rules, and it also has a list of exceptions, because, of course, the rule is add ED, but that's not always what you do, so you have to have a list of exceptions. And then there were the connectionists who, you know, evolved into the deep learning people who said, well, if you...”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, I mean, there are many layers to full bore human experience. And in some ways, it's not enough to say, oh, well, don't worry, we're talking about cognition, but we'll add emotion. There's an incredible scope to what humans go through in every moment. And yes, so that's part of what fascinates me is that our brains are producing that. At the same time, it's so mysterious to us. How? Like, we literally, our brains are literally in our heads producing this experience. And yet it's so mysterious to us, and the scientific challenge of getting at the actual explanation for that is so overwhelming. That's just, I don't know. Certain people have fixations on particular questions, and that's always just always been mine.”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The experience. Well, I definitely resonate with that latter thought. And I often find Discussions of artificial intelligence to be disappointingly narrow speaking as someone who has always had an interest in art”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “When people think of scientific inspiration, the metaphor is often, well, look to the stars. The stars will inspire you to wonder at the universe and think about your place in it and how things work. And I'm all for looking at the stars. But I've always been much more inspired and my sense of wonder comes from the not from the distant mysterious stars, but from the extremely intimately close brain. There's something just endlessly fascinating to me about that.”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “What had always fascinated me, even when I was a pretty young kid, I think, was the The paradox that lies in the fact that the brain is so mysterious. And so it seems so distant. But at the same time, it's responsible for the full transparency of everyday life. The brain is literally what makes everything obvious and familiar. And there's always one in the room with you. I used to teach when I taught at Princeton, I used to teach a cognitive neuroscience course. And the very last thing I would say to the students was, you know,”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So, I was in medical school, and I was doing a psychiatry rotation, and my kind of advisor in that rotation asked me what I was interested in. And I said, well, maybe psychiatry. He said, why? And I said, well, I've always been interested in how the brain works. I'm pretty sure that nobody's doing scientific research that addresses my interests, which are I didn't have a word for it then, but I would have said about cognition. And he said, well, you know, I'm not sure that's true. You might be interested in these books. And he pulled down the PDB books from his shelf, and they were still shrink-wrapped. He hadn't read them, but he had handed them to me. He said, you feel free to borrow these. And that was, you know, I went back to my dorm room and I just, you know, read them.”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Kind of getting into the kind of secret. I mean, maybe you understand this as someone who was interested in psychoanalysis. There's sort of a, you know, there's a cliche phrase that people use now on, you know, like an NPR, the secret life of, right? And that was part of the thrill of surgery, was seeing the secret, you know, the secret activity that's inside everybody's abdomen and thorax.”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Actually, I was quite interested in surgery. I was interested in surgery and psychiatry, and I thought I must be the only person on the planet who was torn between those two fields. And I said exactly that to my advisor in medical school, who turned out, I found out later to be a famous psychoanalyst. And he said to me, no, no, it's actually not so uncommon to be interested in surgery and psychiatry. And he conjectured that the reason that people develop these two interests is that both fields are about going beneath the surface.”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Oh, neural networks were very concretely the thing that drew me into science. I was handed, are you familiar with the PDP books from the 80s? When I was in, I went to medical school before I went into science.”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Oh, sure. I mean, the very detailed neuropsychological studies of language language function, looking at production and reception and the relationship between visual function, reading and auditory and semantic. and still are these beautiful models that came out of that kind of research that really made you feel like you understood something that you hadn't understood before about how language processing is organized in the brain. But having said all that, I think you are, I mean, I agree with you that the cost of doing highly controlled experiments is that you, by construction, miss out on the richness and complexity of the real world. One thing that, so I was drawn into science by what in those days was called connectionism, which is, of course, what we now call deep learning. And at that point in history, neural networks were”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “What the specific deficits were that arose from a lesion in a particular part of the brain. And the kind of experimentation that was done and that's still being done to get answers in that context was so creative. And it was so deliberate. It was good science. An experiment answered one question but raised another and somebody would do an experiment that answered that question and you really felt like you were narrowing in on some kind of approximate understanding of what this part of the brain was for.”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “When I was in graduate school, it was early enough that. There was still a thrill in seeing that there were ways of There were ways of doing experimental science that provided insight to the structure of the mind. One thing that impressed me most when I was at that stage in my education was neuropsychology, looking at Looking at analyzing the behavior of populations who had brain damage of different kinds and trying to understand”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “An important part of the whole picture I would be the last person on earth to suggest that. That reality renders psychology in its own right. Productive. I trained as a psychologist. I am fond of saying that I have learned much more from psychology than I have from neuroscience. To me, psychology is a hugely important discipline. And one thing that warms my heart is that Ways of investigating behavior that have been native to cognitive psychology since its, you know, dawn in the 60s are starting to become, they're starting to become interesting to AI researchers for a variety of reasons. And that's been exciting for me to see.”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “There's a reduction that you can do. You can say these psychological phenomena can be explained through a very different kind of causal mechanism, which has to do with neurotransmitter release. And so what we're really trying to do in neuroscience writ large, as I say, which for me includes psychology, is to take these Psychological phenomena and map them onto neural events. I think Remaining forever at the level of Description that is natural for psychology for me personally would be disappointing. I want to understand how mental activity arises from neural activity. But the converse is also true. Studying neural activity without any sense of what you're trying to explain to me feels like at best groping around at random.”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well I'm hesitating because I think. What I want to say could end up being controversial. So, what I want to say is, yes, the interaction of the interactions of neurons, that's not metaphorical. That's a physical fact. That's where the causal interactions actually occur. Now, I suppose you could say, well, even that is metaphorical relative to the quantum events that underlie. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole.”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “You know, I retrieve something from memory, right? You know, a memory retrieval occurs. What is that? That's not a physical mechanism that I can examine in its own right. But it's still worth having that metaphorical level.”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Of time during which people were productively investigating the structure of inheritance using what was essentially a metaphor, the notion of a gene. Oh, genes do this and genes do that. But where are the genes? They're sort of an explanatory thing that we made up. And we ascribe to them these causal properties. Oh, there's a dominant, there's the recessive, and then they recombine it. And then later, there was a kind of blank there that was filled in with a physical mechanism. That connection was made. But it was worth having that metaphor because that gave us a good sense of what kind of cause, what kind of causal mechanism we were looking for.”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Neurons interacting. I'm willing to say that at this point in history. So in psychology, at least for me personally, there was this strange insecurity about trafficking in these metaphors, which were supposed to explain the function of the mind. If you can't ground them in physical mechanisms, then what is the explanatory validity of these explanations? And I managed to soothe my own nerves by thinking about the history of genetics research. So I'm very far from being an expert. the history of this field, but I know enough to say that Mendelian genetics preceded Watson and Crick. And so there was a significant period”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, right. And I think, so I thought about this a lot when I was in grad school because a lot of what I studied in grad school was psychology. And I found myself a little bit confused about what it meant to, it seems like what we were talking about a lot of the time were virtual causal mechanisms. Like, oh, well, you know, attentional selection, then selects some object in the environment and that is then passed on to the information about that is passed on to the motor system. But these are virtual mechanisms. They're metaphors. There's no reduction to going on in that conversation to some physical mechanism that is really what it would take to fully understand how behavior is arising. The causal mechanisms are definitely”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It's both in the sense that. This is what Hope and expect will Bear fruit over the coming decades, but it's also pragmatic in the sense that I'm not sure what we're doing in either psychology or neuroscience if that's not the framing. I don't know what it means to understand the brain if part of the Enterprise is not about understanding the behavior that's being produced.”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “So that's what psychology is about. It's about understanding the structure of that function. And then the rest of neuroscience is about figuring out how those operations are actually carried out at a mechanistic level. That's”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “What the brain is for. If you're a nephrologist and you want to learn about the kidney, you start by saying, what is this thing for? Well, it seems to be for taking blood on one side that has metabolites in it that shouldn't be there, sucking them out of the blood while leaving the good stuff behind, and then excreting that in the form of urine. That's what the kidney is for. It's like obvious. So the rest of the work is deciding how it does that. And this, it seems to me, is the right approach to take to the brain. You say, well, what is the brain for? The brain, as far as I can tell, is for producing behavior. It's from going, it's forgoing from perceptual inputs to behavioral outputs. And the behavioral outputs should be adaptive.”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “One blanket statement I should probably make is that As I've gotten older, I have become more and more reluctant to make a distinction between psychology and neuroscience. To me, The point of neuroscience is to study.”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “The last few years, incredible progress has been made in terms of technologies that allow us to see actually literally see in some cases what's going on at the single unit level, even the dendritic level. And then there's this yawning gap in between. That's interesting. So at the high level,”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Structurally, so in other words, what is the brain for? What kinds of computation does the brain do? What kinds of behaviors would we have to explain if we were going to look down at the mechanistic level? At that level, I feel like we understand much, much more about the brain than we did when I was in high school. But it's at a very, it's almost like we're seeing it through a fog. It's only at a very coarse level. We don't really understand what the neuronal mechanisms are that underlie these computations. We've gotten better at saying, you know, what are the functions that the brain is computing that we would have to understand if we were going to get down to the neuronal level? And at the other end of the spectrum,”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I think we're at a weird moment in the history of neuroscience in the sense that I feel like we understand a lot about the brain at a very high level. A very coarse level.”

    2020-07-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #106 – Matt Botvinick: Neuroscience, Psychology, and AI at DeepMind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source