HST (0:00 - 0:00)

Record.

BCS (0:02 - 0:04)

It says recording here.

HST (0:04 - 0:16)

Yep, and it just, I clicked it as you spoke or just before or
something like that. How are you doing? Well, I said this last time
and you disagreed with me, but you look okay.

BCS (0:16 - 0:35)

Yes, so I actually think I am okay this time. Good, good, good. I'm a
little compromised in various ways, which I'm going to tell you about.

HST (0:36 - 0:37)

Sure, well.

BCS (0:40 - 0:44)

One of them being that I haven't done my homework for a reason I want
to try to explain, actually.

HST (0:46 - 1:50)

Well, I mean, it was short notice, but I figure we do this, well, I
don't know, it's like going, this is a comparison I use too often in
too many ways. It's like we used to do with the kids, which was that
we would go to the West Coast of Scotland for the Maybank holiday
weekend every year. And without paying any attention to what the
weather forecast was, because you needed to book in advance to get a
cheap place and so on.

And sometimes that meant famously, and family history is a good thing,
eating our sandwiches in a phone booth on the ferry pier between Skye
and Rase, because it was raining too hard. Didn't want to sit in the
car to have our picnic. But sometimes it meant swimming off white sand
beaches in Ariseg in 20 degree weather, and it looked and felt like
the Caribbean.

So you win some and you lose some. And if this is not as well prepared
as you'd like, then we'll talk anyway.

BCS (1:51 - 2:57)

We'll talk anyway. And I have a question about substance. So here's
the problem.

I have to get the final draft of the Reflections book to the press by
July 8th, which deadline I'm not going to make. But I need to make it
enough that my good standing with the press remains such that I can
get an extension. And I think given the uncertainty about my lifespan,
to say nothing of maybe just efficiency overall, I just need to do
that.

So this morning, I kind of thought, look, am I going to spend the
morning reading old versions of God Approximately, which I would like
to do? And I slapped myself on the other wrist. Is that a well founded
instructional?

HST (2:57 - 2:59)

Probably not. But anyway.

BCS (3:01 - 3:08)

And have been working on that.

HST (3:08 - 3:13)

That's that. I mean, you you're the only person who can correctly set
your priorities.

BCS (3:14 - 3:19)

Right. So I think I have to do that. Now, July 8th is not very far
away.

HST (3:20 - 3:20)

No, it's not.

BCS (3:21 - 3:34)

So that might mean delaying our project by a rather short amount of
time. But realism, the aforementioned realism means it'll probably
mean deferring it for longer than that.

HST (3:34 - 3:42)

But understood. But we can we can reduce, at the very least, reduce
the frequency. But I may try to keep it ticking over one way or
another.

BCS (3:42 - 3:46)

Yeah, sure, sure. Well, so here's a question, if I can just plunge
in. Maybe there are other.

HST (3:46 - 3:46)

Of course.

BCS (3:47 - 4:15)

Yeah, go. So I was struck when I wrote the postscript note to our last
meeting. By how I was framing everything.

In terms of. Well, actually, I don't even remember the last note. Hang
on a second.

Maybe I should take a look at it.

HST (4:16 - 4:16)

I should too.

BCS (4:17 - 4:18)

Was it email? Probably.

HST (4:18 - 4:27)

I believe. Well, I'm sorry. If it was an email, then I don't have it.

But that doesn't mean that it's not worth looking at. All right.

BCS (4:28 - 4:39)

So I'm desperately waiting.

HST (4:45 - 4:50)

I gather from Jim that some progress has been made on the map project.

BCS (4:52 - 4:53)

On which project?

HST (4:54 - 4:57)

The Save Brian's Mac project.

BCS (4:58 - 5:02)

Oh, yes. But not enough to have the Mac saved.

HST (5:05 - 5:11)

Well, he was hopeful of his next meeting with you, but maybe it didn't
happen that way.

BCS (5:15 - 5:16)

So when did I?

HST (5:16 - 5:23)

Okay, here we are. Call this week. No, that was quick thought.

It says here.

BCS (5:23 - 5:24)

Oh, that's it. Okay.

HST (5:25 - 5:25)

Right.

BCS (5:26 - 5:53)

All right. So yeah, I've got it. Right.

So as in the first paragraph, I say, call these the historical and
metaphysical approaches.

HST (5:54 - 5:54)

Right.

BCS (5:55 - 6:09)

And what I have not done is read any. So what you think you have or
what you know that you have is something like version 11. Is that
right?

HST (6:09 - 6:18)

That's correct. 2009 version 11, which I would say in terms of this
dichotomy is entirely the historical approach.

BCS (6:19 - 6:19)

Okay.

HST (6:19 - 6:37)

And I think that's consistent with the note at the top, which says, in
previous versions of this, I tried to produce a metaphysics, which
would underpin what I'm talking about, but didn't get far enough to
make it worth reproducing or something like that.

BCS (6:38 - 6:41)

And I did say in previous versions of this.

HST (6:41 - 8:23)

I believe so. Let me just get the fact of the matter in front of me,
which it nearly is. In fact, wait a minute.

I'm just looking at the wrong place. This one. Yes, it is.

A number of manuscripts have been circulated under this title over the
last 15 years. Right. This one lacks any sketch of a worldview
exhibiting the characteristics described.

I presume that means described below as it were. Somewhat in response
to the first version, which tried to provide such a view without
explanation of what was interesting or mattered about it. If it seems
worthwhile, I may someday incorporate all the various versions into a
single long, it says short, monograph.

BCS (8:27 - 8:28)

Stereograph.

HST (8:29 - 8:31)

Yes, something like that.

BCS (8:34 - 10:57)

Right. Okay. Well, that's very helpful actually to me.

Bob, thank you for finding that. Yes, I think that longer monograph,
the yet to be produced longer monograph is what I feel as if we're
aiming at. And I don't actually know whether I made any attempt to say
that these lead to the same view.

I have actually thought about that. Okay. So, let me actually recite
from memory four or five sentences and tell me if they ring a bell.

Have you ever read them? Goes something like this. Start at the
beginning.

That is, start at what those who'd like to start at the beginning
start with. Bosons, fermions, quarks, assemblages pressed into atoms
and molecules and DNA and so on and so forth. And then the second
paragraph saying, of course, something like that's not a beginning.

Many will argue, whatever. And then something like, but actually it
doesn't matter where we start. We'll end up in the same place.

So, in the media there would be something like other people would say
start with stories or something like that. Anyway.

HST (10:58 - 12:12)

I see what you're saying. Okay. I mean, I think it's important that
you, well, it changes where you go next to have something like the
storyline, because otherwise it's all just about where you cut the
physics.

And that I think is not enough. That's just what I think of as, I had
a version of this conversation last week with my regular Quaker
interlocutor. There are these two questions, which I believe, which I
tend to attribute to Kant, but I may get wrong.

Why is there something rather than nothing? And how would I live my
life? And if you talk to Dominicans, for instance, they will happily
talk about one or the other, but usually find it challenging to see
what the relationship is between likely answers to the first and
likely answers to the second.

That's another way of saying what it is you're trying to bring
together, I think. Right.

BCS (12:12 - 13:08)

I think so. Yeah, I think so. And I think what I put in the note after
the historical approach is sort of a story about how our understanding
of Rameans and Bosons, as it were, has been pressed into service as a
grounds for normativity and maybe objectivity and so on and so forth.

I don't think successfully, but there is...

HST (13:08 - 13:13)

That's really the first large paragraph in the email.

BCS (13:14 - 13:19)

Right. Which I've now buried under lots of windows.

HST (13:20 - 13:32)

Well, the pure mechanism of classical science, then rationality with
reference to Friggen logic, then normativity, and the current paradigm
of deriving it from the evolutionary field, etc. Right.

BCS (13:42 - 15:20)

Yeah. So then the argument would go something like this, that the only
tenable version of the metaphysical approach, well, sorry, the only
tenable version of both approaches ends up being indistinguishable
from the tenable version of the other. And one crucial factor in that,
I believe, is that both stories have to do justice to our being here.

HST (15:22 - 15:31)

Yeah. I mean, I've been thinking... You know the phrase, the thing,
which I think is very bizarrely labeled, the anthropic principle.

BCS (15:31 - 15:32)

Right.

HST (15:32 - 15:42)

Which attempts to dissolve the first of the Kantian questions by
saying, because if there weren't something, we wouldn't be here to ask
the question, get over it.

BCS (15:45 - 16:03)

Yes, but I think that the anthropic principle is misapplied radically
because they try to understand what the world needs to be like in
order to support life or inquiry or something like that.

HST (16:05 - 16:31)

Yeah. I mean, yeah, certainly. Yeah.

What little I remember of the time I heard somebody talk about this at
length was Planck's constant is what it is. And the fact that if you
varied it by not very much in either direction, nothing would work
isn't something that needs explanation because it evidently is the
case.

BCS (16:31 - 16:31)

Right.

HST (16:32 - 16:52)

And if it weren't the case, I mean, yes, exactly. It is at least of
minor theoretical interest to establish what the bounding box is
within which we would still be here to ask that question. But having
done that, there's nothing more to be said.

BCS (16:53 - 16:53)

Right.

HST (16:55 - 17:06)

But I think you're... So, I mean, I don't think that changes the
availability of both projects, essentially.

BCS (17:06 - 17:53)

I think that's right. And I actually think, you know, this is... Well,
I'm going to have to agree to the long rather than short.

I'm assuming if I go down this pathway, but I actually think the
fact... Well, as I put it, which is transparent to nobody, the
ontological warrant for the epistemic fact that we use differential
equations to express physical laws is actually... I mean, I don't know
if I said this in the objects book, but anyway, underlies the Dysus of
the world, which I think is fundamental to consciousness and self and
various things like that.

HST (17:56 - 18:08)

But because of the uncertain... No, not the uncertainty because, I
mean, is this... What I remember from the objects book, which I've
already apologized for is very little, is about the importance of
slop.

BCS (18:09 - 18:11)

Yeah, no, that's a different thing.

HST (18:11 - 18:14)

That is a different thing. Okay. Nevermind then.

Rasson.

BCS (18:20 - 18:25)

What's the... Rasson regardless?

HST (18:26 - 18:26)

Yeah.

BCS (18:27 - 19:54)

I'm not sure I should accept the regardless just now, but yeah, the
Dysus stuff is, I think, important to self. And something else that's
interesting, this is going to sound a little bit like a non-sequitur,
but I think it's not for obvious reasons. The fact that LLMs are based
on language is, I think, possibly consequential, but possibly not the
reason for their success.

Because I think the power of them stems from the fact that the
relationality that they encode is so stupefyingly huge that all the
content of the state of the network is bizarrely non-conceptual in the
sense of that.

HST (19:58 - 20:16)

Absolutely. I mean, they got somewhere by not being
representational. Well, not being representational.

Sorry, but not being explicitly representational. That no amount of
additional funding to Doug Lennon and company would ever have gotten
to.

BCS (20:17 - 20:25)

Right, right. Exactly. How to say that well is not trivial, but I
completely agree.

HST (20:26 - 20:44)

Yeah, I mean, it would be useful in the indefinitely unforeseeable
future to have a conversation involving Fernando Pereira about this,
because... Have you ever met Fernando? Not clearly.

BCS (20:44 - 20:51)

Oh, yeah. I knew him. God knows if he was a student, but anyway, 100
years ago.

HST (20:51 - 22:51)

No, he was our student, because I did his PhD oral. Oh, I see. No, but
I think he was in California at the time of the oral, so it's
possible.

It doesn't matter. Anyway, he was here six months ago for a guest talk
during our 60th anniversary celebrations. And the talk was
interesting, but not great and not recorded.

But lunch beforehand, which was just me and him and one other person,
was hugely more valuable, because he was expanding to an audience that
could hear of the two of us on his anger about the fact, about the
impact of his own company's work, indirectly in terms of open AI, but
in chat GPT and so on. Because he's recently changed within Google,
being responsible for the natural language work to being responsible
for the sort of theory practice interface within Google. And he's very
angry about the way in which people are treating the natural language
problem as having now been solved and or being soluble only by the
technologies of LLMs. But what he did for us in that conversation, and
I wish I had recorded it, was give me a much clearer sense of the
scale of the base model. And also the scale of the priming that it
gets in order to make it a question answer.

BCS (22:51 - 22:52)

Yeah. What's that called?

HST (22:53 - 22:56)

The prompt. It's not the prompt, but it's something.

BCS (22:56 - 22:57)

Prompt engineering.

HST (22:58 - 23:05)

Yeah. The prompt engineering is, there are three aspects of this, I
think. There is the base model.

BCS (23:06 - 23:13)

Right. Which is something like 100 billion gigabytes or something.

HST (23:13 - 23:46)

Yeah. Well, it's certainly that many dimensions. And I don't know,
there's this whole business about projecting to lower dimensionalities
for years that I don't understand.

But there's the base model. There is the make this a question
answerer, make a question answerer from this base model. And there's,
what do we add to the conjunction of those two from your question?

BCS (23:48 - 23:54)

And is the third of those what's called prompt engineering? I think
so.

HST (23:55 - 23:59)

But I could be wrong. It doesn't matter.

BCS (24:00 - 24:01)

Anyway. Yeah. Anyway.

HST (24:04 - 24:26)

Even though the interesting part in a way is in a sense from the
performance point of view is not the base model, but it's the thing
you make a question answerer out of it with.

BCS (24:27 - 24:28)

Right. Right.

HST (24:29 - 25:19)

Because that's what the people who don't have any money scrimp on,
skimp on. Right. And why you then get things which lie and fabulate
and contradict themselves and in general, or start imitating Witty
Tiki Ray rather than a human being or whatever it might be.

Because actually, there's another kind of farm rather than the GPU
farm that you need to build something like as successful as it is as
chat GPT, which is a huge farm of ordinary human beings asking
questions and feeding back to the engineers the wrong answers and
saying, you've got to stop this kind of answer.

BCS (25:19 - 25:23)

Right. Yeah. That's a lot of trivial.

HST (25:24 - 25:29)

And that's an open-ended and in principle, impossible task.

BCS (25:29 - 25:31)

Right. Interesting.

HST (25:32 - 25:34)

Anyway, that was all.

BCS (25:34 - 25:45)

A total footnote. You could have expressed your thought at the
beginning of your what you just said that that's what people who
scrimp skimp on.

HST (25:46 - 26:13)

Yes. Something like that. Anyway.

But so I think from your perspective, it's really GPT-3 that you're
interested in, which is the base model. It's now GPT-4 and they won't
tell you anything about that. The only thing we have any information
about is GPT-3.

Right. Well, that's the only thing I've seen published information
about from Google anyway. Right.

BCS (26:16 - 26:17)

Yes. I mean, I think that's...

HST (26:18 - 26:19)

Open AI. Sorry. Yeah.

BCS (26:19 - 26:26)

From open AI. Yeah. I think that's what I was just talking about.

I mean, it doesn't prove that I'm not interested in the other ones.

HST (26:28 - 26:59)

But I mean, it's there, for instance, that we come back to the thing
that you said, which I think is why I think Dijkstra is certainly in
there is not only do they not know that there's a world that not only
does that 100 million gigabytes, whatever it is, 100 million
gigabytes, what it doesn't have is any obligation to the world about
which...

BCS (27:00 - 27:01)

Right.

HST (27:01 - 28:33)

That is some kind of representation. Right. Yeah.

But that responsibility can be decomposed in any particular instance
to being only about a certain small part of the world, which amounts,
I guess, in many cases, to some kind of story about reference and
Dijkstra's. And it does... I am tempted to bring Jonathan back into
this again, Jonathan Rees, because of his...

What he's been spending the last two or three years on is trying to
articulate a story about reference, which is simply defined in terms
of propositions that include this are vulnerable to changes in
that. That is, they include this referring expression are vulnerable
to changes in that bit of the world as a way of talking about what
does that referring expression refer to? Well...

Because he's a radical empiricist, basically, he wants...

BCS (28:33 - 28:33)

Right.

HST (28:33 - 28:35)

Anyway, sorry, that is taking us away now.

BCS (28:35 - 29:59)

No, not entirely, because there was a title of a talk I was thinking
of putting together, something like the nonverbal meaning of words. If
we talk about, not only about Sussman, but let's say, and what he
meant by empirical or something, but just we talk about... Well, the
things we're talking about, the three parts, the base model, the delta
that turns it into a question answering machine, and the prompt
engineering that turns a particular prompt into a particular prompt,
basically, particular question into a particular