Last weekend I was flicking through some TWIML AI podcasts, something I haven’t done since the Covid-19 pandemic kicked and I got busy with other things. Spoiled for choice as ever, I opted to listen to Sam Charrington’s interview with Yoshua Bengio.
It doesn’t need me to tell you that Bengio is something of a legend, one of the world’s leading AI researchers; but what’s great about this interview is the succinctness with which Bengio brings together some of the major strands in contemporary thought about consciousness and the mind in a way that I have been trying and failing to do myself, or at least failing to do with any kind of clarity that I was able to communicate.
The strands I’m talking about are those characterised by the work of Geoffrey Hinton (deep learning), Daniel Kahneman (System 1 & System 2 thinking), and Judea Pearl (causal inference), .
I’m not going to give a potted summary of the work in question; the principles of deep learning as developed by Hinton and colleagues are well known enough now; Kahneman’s work with Andreas Tversky won him the Nobel prize in Economics and his book Thinking Fast & Slow was an international bestseller, and I wrote about Pearl’s work in this blog last year.
What’s so cool about the TWIML interview with Bengio is that after listening to it I was suddenly felt able to reconcile all these insights into different mental mechanisms into what at least seems like a coherent whole, bound together by Bengio’s insights about working memory and attention, which I already knew was something that he and others (Hinton too, I think) have been working on.
I sat right down and sketched out this diagram to explain it to myself, and I thought I’d share it hear and ask for comments:
My quick sketch of consiousness, pace Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Judea Pearl & Daniel Kahneman
Now doubt some of this confuses more than it simplifies, but once I’ve had more time to consider it and had some feedback I’ll see if I can improve it and maybe write something a little more detailed about what I’m trying to get it here, in case it isn’t actually as obvious as I’m intending it to be!Now doubt some of this confuses more than it simplifies, but once I’ve had more time to consider it and had some feedback I’ll see if I can improve it and maybe write something a little more detailed about what I’m trying to get it here, in case it isn’t actually as obvious as I’m intending it to be!