In this first part of our conversation, Paul and I discuss his approach to understanding how the brain (and intelligence) works. Namely, he believes we are fundamentally action and movement oriented - all of our behavior and cognition is based on controlling ourselves and our environment through feedback control mechanisms, and basically all neural activity should be understood through that lens. This contrasts with the view that we serially perceive the environment, make internal representations of what we perceive, do some cognition on those representations, and transform that cognition into decisions about how to move. From that premise, Paul also believes the best (and perhaps only) way to understand our current brains is by tracing out the evolutionary steps that took us from our single celled first organisms all the way to us - a process he calls phylogenetic refinement.
Support the Podcast Show notes: Raia and I discuss her work at DeepMind figuring out how to build robots using deep reinforcement learning to...
Mentioned in the show Follow Blake on twitter: @tyrell_turing Blake’s Learning in Neural Circuits (LiNC) Laboratory. He’s a Fellow with the Learning in Machines...
Support the show on Patreon for almost nothing. I speak with Tom Griffiths about his “resource-rational framework”, inspired by Herb Simon's bounded rationality and...