MULTIVERSES James Robinson

The launch of ChatGPT was a "Sputnik moment". In making tangible decades of progress it shot AI to the fore of public consciousness. This attention is accelerating AI development as dollars are poured into scaling models. 

 What is the next stage in this journey? And where is the destination?   

My guest this week, Nell Watson, offers a broad perspective on the possible trajectories. She sits in several IEEE groups looking at AI Ethics, safety & transparency, has founded AI companies, and is a consultant to Apple on philosophical matters.  Nell makes a compelling case that we can expect to see agentic AI being soon adopted widely. We might even see whole AI corporations. In the context of these possible developments, she reasons that concerns of AI  ethics and safety — so often siloed within different communities — should be understood as continuous.  

 Along the way we talk about the perils of hamburgers and the good things that could come from networking our minds.  

Links

* Nell's book: Taming The Machine: Ethically Harness The Power Of AI  [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Taming-Machine-Ethically-Harness-Power/dp/1398614327]
* Multiverses home [http://multiverses.xyz]

Physics helps get stuff done. Its application has put rockets in space, semiconductors in phones, and eclipses on calendars. 

For some philosophers, this is all physics offers. It is a mere instrument, albeit of great power, giving us control over tangible things. It is a set of gears and widgets (wavefunctions, strings, even electrons) to crank out predictions.  In contrast to instrumentalists, scientific realists argue that the success of theories shows that they map onto the structure of the world, symbols in equations carry the imprint of real entities.

This is an old debate in the philosophy of science. While we touch on some arguments for either position, this episode focuses on the phenomenology of physics researchers. What do physicists believe?  

Céline Henne is a philosopher at the University of Bologna. Alongside Hannah Tomczyk and Christopher Sperber she has fielded the most comprehensive survey of the attitudes of physicists towards the reality of the objects of their study. From looking at the answers to dozens of questions from several hundred physicists, they have distinguished several camps of belief. 

It's an elegantly designed survey, simply reading the questions forces a consideration of one's own position.   

* Take the survey at Multiverses.xyz [https://scientificrealism.multiverses.xyz/]to see if you are an instrumentalist or a realist (or a bit of both)
* Céline's homepage [https://www.celinehenne.com/]

It can be tempting to consider language and thought as inextricably linked. As such we might conclude that LLM's human-like capabilities for manipulating language indicate a corresponding level of thinking.   

However, neuroscience research suggests that thought and language can be teased apart, perhaps the latter is more akin to an input-output interface, or an area of triage for problem-solving. Language is a medium into which we can translate and transport concepts.

 Our guest this week is Anna Ivanova, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Georgia Institute of Technology. She's conducted experiments that demonstrate how subjects with severe aphasia (large-scale damage to the language area of their brains) remain able to reason socially. She's also studied how the brains of developers work when reading code. Again the language network is largely bypassed.  

Anna's work and other research in cognitive science suggest that the modularity of brains is central to their ability to handle diverse tasks. 

Brains are not monolithic neural nets like LLMs but contain networked specialized regions.  

* Anna's website: https://anna-ivanova.net/
* Multiverses home: multiverses.xyz

Words. (Huh? Yeah!) What are they good for? Absolutely everything.

At least this was the view of some philosophers early in the 20th century, that the world was bounded by language. ("The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" to use Wittgenstein's formulation over the Edwin Starr adaptation)

My guest this week is Nikhil Krishnan a philosopher at University of Cambridge and frequent contributor to the The New Yorker His book A Terribly Serious Adventure, traces the path of Ordinary Language Philosophy through the 20th century.

We discuss the logical positivists (the word/world limiters) and their high optimism that the intractable problems of philosophy could be dissolved by analysis. Their contention that the great questions of metaphysics were nonsense since they had no empirical or logical content.

That program failed, but its spirit of using data and aiming for progress lived on in the ordinary language philosophers who put practices with words under the microscope. Hoping to find in this data clues to the nuances of the world.

This enterprise left us with beautiful examples of the subtleties of language. But more importantly, it is a practice that continues today, of paying close attention to our everyday behaviors and holding our grand systems of philosophy accountable to these.

Listen to discover things you know, but didn't know you knew — like the difference between doing something by accident vs by mistake.

Do check out Nikhil's own podcast,  Minor Books, on iTunes [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-minor-books-podcast/id1725818257]  or Acast [https://shows.acast.com/minor-books] 

(00:00) Intro

(02:49) Start of conversation: Philosophical background and history

(04:47) The Evolution of Philosophy: From Ancient Texts to Modern Debates

(16:46) The Impact of Logical Positivism and the Quest for Scientific Philosophy

(38:35) J.L. Austin's Revolutionary Approach to Philosophy and Language

(48:43) The Power of Everyday Language vs the Abstractions of Philosophy

(49:11) Why is ordinary language so effective — Language Evolution?

(52:30) Philosophical Perspectives on Language's Utility

(53:28) The Intricacies of Language and Perception

(54:48) Scientific and Philosophical Language: A Comparative Analysis

(57:14) Legal Language and Its Precision

(01:07:33) LLMS: The Future of Language in Technology and AI

(01:10:33) Intentionality and the Philosophy of Actions

(01:18:27) Bridging Analytic and Continental Philosophy

(01:33:46) Final Thoughts on Philosophy and Its Practice)

Music may be magical. But it is also rooted in the material world. As such it can be the subject of empirical inquiry. 

How does what we are told of a performer influence our appreciation of the performance? Does sunshine change our listening habits? How do rhythms and melodies change as they are passed along, as in a game of Chinese whispers?

Our guest is Manuel Anglada Tort, a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has investigated all those topics. We discuss the fields of Empirical Aesthetics and cultural evolution experiments as applied to music. 

* Manuel's website with PDFs and links to papers [https://www.manuelangladatort.com/]
* Multiverses.xyz [https://%20multiverses.xyz/]



Chapters

(00:00) Intro

(03:35) Start of conversation: Music Psychology and Empirical Aesthetics

(07:54) Genomics and Musical Ability

(18:25) Weather's Influence on Music Preferences

(31:57) The Repeated Recording Illusion

(43:24) Empirical Aesthetics: Does Analysis Boost or Deflate Wonder?

(49:59) Music Evolution and Cultural Systems

(52:18) Simulating Music Evolution in the Lab

(1:01:27) The Role of Memory and Cognitive Biases in Music

(1:05:33) Comparing Language and Music Evolution

(1:20:37) The Impact of Physical and Cognitive Constraints on Music

(1:31:37) Audio Appendix

If all my beliefs are correct, could I still be prejudiced?

Philosophers have spent a lot of time thinking about knowledge. But their efforts have focussed on only certain questions. What makes it such that a person knows something? What styles of inquiry deliver knowledge?

Jessie Munton is a philosopher at the University of Cambridge. She is one of several people broadening the scope of epistemology to ask: what sort of things do we (and should we) inquire about and how should we arrange our beliefs once we have them?

Her lens on this is in terms of salience structures. These describe the features and beliefs that an individual is likely to pay attention to in a situation. They are networks that depend on the physical, social, and mental worlds. 

In a supermarket aisle, what is salient to me depends both on how products are arranged and my food preferences. Very central nodes in my salience structure (for example this podcast) might be awkwardly linked to many things (multigrain rice ... multiverses).

This is a rare and wonderful thing. Philosophy that is at once interesting and useful.

Links

* Jessie's home page: https://jessiemunton.wixsite.com/philosophy
* Jessie on X: https://twitter.com/alabalawhiskey
*  Multiverses home: https://multiverses.xyz

Chapters

(04:20) Welcome and Introduction to the Discussion

(04:53) Exploring the Essence of Epistemology

(06:31) Expanding the Boundaries of Traditional Epistemology

(10:50) Understanding vs. Knowledge: Diving Deeper into Epistemology

(12:42) The Role of Evidence and Justification in Beliefs

(23:59) Salience Structures: A New Perspective on Information Processing

(34:22) Applying Network Science to Understand Salience Structures

(43:41) Exploring Social Salience Structures and the Impact of Cities

(48:15) Exploring the Complexity of Attention and Salience

(48:30) The Challenge of Modeling Attention Mathematically

(48:57) Linking Attention to Real-world Outcomes

(50:01) Differentiating Causes of Attention and Their Impacts

(50:53) The Role of Individual and Social Responsibility in Shaping Attention

(52:19) Influence of Media and Technology on Salience Structures

(55:44) The Potential of Augmented Reality and Large Language Models

(00:47) The Personalization Dilemma of Search Engines and Social Media

(01:05:38) Exploring the Ethical and Practical Implications of Information Access

(01:22:53) Concluding Thoughts on Salience and Information Consumption