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.
Jörn, Niko and I continue the discussion of mental representation from last episode with Michael Rescorla, then we discuss their review paper, Peeling The...
Show notes: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour Artificial Cognitive Systems on Twitter. Artificial Cognitive Systems research group. The paper we discuss: Generative...
Brian and I discuss a range of topics related to his latest book, The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values. The alignment problem...