Category: neural

Forever Uncanny

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Quanta has a fair round up of recent advances in deep learning. Most interesting is the recent performance on natural language understanding tests that are close to or exceed mean human performance. Inevitably, John Searle’s Chinese Room argument is brought up, though the author of the Quanta article suggests that inferring the Chinese translational rule book from the data itself is slightly different from the original thought experiment. In the Chinese Room there is a person who knows no Chinese but has a collection of translational reference books. She receives texts through a slot and dutifully looks up the translation of the text and passes out the result. “Is this intelligence?” is the question and it serves as a challenge to the Strong AI hypothesis. With statistical machine translation methods (and their alternative mechanistic implementation, deep learning), the rule books have been inferred by looking at translated texts (“parallel” texts as we say in the field). By looking at a large enough corpus of parallel texts, greater coverage of translated variants is achieved as well as some inference of pragmatic issues in translation and corner cases.

As a practical matter, it should be noted that modern, professional translators often use translation memory systems that contain idiomatic—or just challenging—phrases that they can reference when translating new texts. The understanding resides in the original translator’s head, we suppose, and in the correct application of the rule to the new text by checking for applicability according to, well, some other criteria that the translator brings to bear on the task.

In the General Language Understand Evaluation (GLUE) tests described in the Quanta article, the systems are inferring how to answer Wh-style queries (who, what, where, when, and how) as well as identify similar texts.… Read the rest

Bereitschaftspotential and the Rehabilitation of Free Will

Mark DavisLeave a comment

The question of whether we, as people, have free will or not is both abstract and occasionally deeply relevant. We certainly act as if we have something like libertarian free will, and we have built entire systems of justice around this idea, where people are responsible for choices they make that result in harms to others. But that may be somewhat illusory for several reasons. First, if we take a hard deterministic view of the universe as a clockwork-like collection of physical interactions, our wills are just a mindless outcome of a calculation of sorts, driven by a wetware calculator with a state completely determined by molecular history. Second, there has been, until very recently, some experimental evidence that our decision-making occurs before we achieve a conscious realization of the decision itself.

But this latter claim appears to be without merit, as reported in this Atlantic article. Instead, what was previously believed to be signals of brain activity that were related to choice (Bereitschaftspotential) may just be associated with general waves of neural activity. The new experimental evidence puts the timing of action in line with conscious awareness of the decision. More experimental work is needed—as always—but the tentative result suggests a more tightly coupled pairing of conscious awareness with decision making.

Indeed, the results of this newer experimental result gets closer to my suggested model of how modular systems combined with perceptual and environmental uncertainty can combine to produce what is effectively free will (or at least a functional model for a compatibilist position). Jettisoning the Chaitin-Kolmogorov complexity part of that argument and just focusing on the minimal requirements for decision making in the face of uncertainty, we know we need a thresholding apparatus that fires various responses given a multivariate statistical topology.… Read the rest