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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