A quick sketch of consciousness
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:
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!
