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Professor Elan Barenholtz, cognitive scientist at Florida Atlantic University, joins TOE to discuss one of the most unsettling ideas in cognitive science: that language is a self-contained, autoregressive system with no inherent connection to the external world. In this mind-altering episode, he explains why AI’s mastery of language without meaning forces us to rethink the nature of mind, perception, and reality itself...
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Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e
Timestamps:
00:00 The Mind and Language Connection
02:09 The Grounded Thesis of Language
09:29 The Epiphany of Language
13:06 The Dichotomy of Language and Perception
16:24 Language as an Autonomous System
19:48 The Problem of Qualia and Language
23:35 Bridging Language and Action
31:32 Exploring Embeddings in Language
38:21 The Platonic Space of Language
44:17 The Challenges of Meaning and Action
51:05 Understanding the Complexity of Color
52:53 The Paradox of Language Describing Itself
58:19 The Map of Language and Action
1:07:48 Continuous Learning in Language Models
1:11:46 The Nature of Memory
1:22:46 The Role of Context
1:32:18 Exploring Language Dynamics
1:39:44 The Shift from Oral to Written Language
2:11:34 Language and the Cosmic Whole
2:21:35 Reflections on Existence
Links Mentioned:
• Elan’s Substack: https://elanbarenholtz.substack.com
• Elan's X / Twitter: https://x.com/ebarenholtz
• Geoffrey Hinton on TOE: https://youtu.be/b_DUft-BdIE
• Joscha Bach and Ben Goertzel on TOE: https://youtu.be/xw7omaQ8SgA
• Elan’s published papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=2grAjZsAAAAJ
• Ai medical panel on TOE: https://youtu.be/abzXzPBW4_s
• Jacob Barandes and Manolis Kellis on TOE: https://youtu.be/MTD8xkbiGis
• Will Hahn on TOE: https://youtu.be/3fkg0uTA3qU
• Noam Chomsky on TOE: https://youtu.be/DQuiso493ro
• Greg Kondrak on TOE: https://youtu.be/FFW14zSYiFY
• Andres Emilsson on TOE: https://youtu.be/BBP8WZpYp0Y
• Harnessing the Universal Geometry of Embeddings (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12540
• Yang-Hui He on TOE: https://youtu.be/spIquD_mBFk
• Iain McGilchrist on TOE: https://youtu.be/Q9sBKCd2HD0
• Curt interviews ChatGPT: https://youtu.be/mSfChbMRJwY
• Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (book): https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674251555
• Karl Friston on TOE: https://youtu.be/uk4NZorRjCo
• Michael Levin and Anna Ciaunica on TOE: https://youtu.be/2aLhkm6QUgA
• The Biology of LLMs (paper): https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html
• Jacob Barandes on TOE: https://youtu.be/YaS1usLeXQM
• Emily Adlam on TOE: https://youtu.be/6I2OhmVWLMs
• Julian Barbour on TOE: https://youtu.be/bprxrGaf0Os
• Tim Palmer on TOE: https://youtu.be/vlklA6jsS8A
• Neil Turok on TOE: https://youtu.be/ZUp9x44N3uE
• Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/jayaraasi/
• On the Origin of Time (book): https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593128443
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