BCS  (0:05 - 1:30)

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 prompt, say. And we
talk for half an hour about that, and we end up using the word prompt
for that which the third part of our tripartite distinction has turned
a question into.

That's right.

HST (1:31 - 1:33)

Yeah. So far, so good.

BCS (1:35 - 2:35)

What prompt means in our discourse at that moment is not something
that necessarily could be propositionally expressed, even though I
just used words to communicate it with you about it. But there's no
reason to suspect the kinds of understanding that I can evoke with
things like early Pereira or something should actually have, well, the
form of articulation that we assume propositions have. So, I don't
think, and, you know, take poetry as a kind of limit example.

HST (2:36 - 2:36)

Yeah.

BCS (2:36 - 3:10)

I don't think there's any reason to suspect that the understanding
process is ever, I mean, I think something needs to be said about
articulation in the original sense of being hinged. But I guess poetry
is unhinged.

HST (3:13 - 5:36)

So, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who was a
prodigious intellect, ... wrote a book and gave a lecture, a series of
lectures, a series of lectures, possibly even Gifford lectures, about
the necessity of poetic discourse in the face of the divine, the
infinite, whatever, what he had spent his life
promulgating, you could almost view it, at
the end of his time in that role, a sort of _apologia pro vita
sua_.  [Regarding] the creed, which attempts to be
wholly explicit about something, which he in the end feels it's
impossible to be even usefully explicit, much less wholly
explicit.

And of course, you know, illustrated by lots of good, impenetrable,
more or less penetrable poetry.  You never know where you're going to
find somebody trying to share the same thought.

BCS (5:39 - 5:53)

Well, I mean, this conversation we're having is a good example of what
does poetry mean, right? We've already bent it like a, yeah, like a
string on an electric guitar.

HST (5:55 - 6:56)

But that's what language is good for. This is
Robin Cooper's
point that it's fundamental to the success of language, that what you
understand by what I say is not what I meant by it. I'm exaggerating
only slightly, right?

He used to give a critique of the so-called conduit metaphor, saying
that it's not just unhelpful, it's incoherent.

You can't take whatever my mental structures are and inject them into
somebody else's brain by any means and get any useful results.

BCS (6:57 - 7:16)

It's actually interesting because you could write a short story on,
maybe science fiction, I don't know, um, on what would evolution have
looked like if our spinal cords came to the surface.

HST (7:17 - 7:47)

Right. Well, and I think that there are many people who think that,
that once we, once we have a 38 pin socket at the base of our spinal
cord, um, that turning a vat produced body into me is just a matter of
cabling the one up into the other.

BCS (7:47 - 7:49)

Right. With, with high bandwidth.

HST (7:49 - 7:56)

With high bandwidth and whatever the neural equivalent, neural
equivalent of rsync is.

BCS (7:56 - 8:34)

Right. But it's interesting because one of the things that I think
that deep learning folks have realized is that populating levels with
arbitrary numbers of neurons or fake neurons or whatever, isn't always
helpful. The reduction in number of neurons on a given level is often
necessary in order to force the abstraction, basically.

BCS (8:42 - 8:51)

I'm not sure I've heard it before, but that's certainly what I take: @?
The fact that these things collapse, if they have too many
neurons.

HST (8:51 - 9:09)

You can always throw more data in, but you can't just throw more
layers or nodes in the layers without some more architecture.

BCS (9:10 - 9:16)

That's right. Because it actually, it's not that it won't get any
better. It'll actually get worse.

HST (9:17 - 9:24)

I think I would say, because it will never converge.

BCS (9:25 - 9:27)

Never converge. That's what I meant to say. Yeah.

HST (9:27 - 9:41)

There's not enough pressure on the channel, 
To make it effective in the coding required.

BCS (9:41 - 9:42)

Right.

BCS (9:48 - 10:23)

So let's go back to the question is @? whether the metaphysical
story, which might be actually just a more successful version of
the anthropic principle. I don't know.

So anyway, I'm not going to use it [the anthropic principal] anymore.

HST (10:24 - 10:33)

I introduced it only because it's a shorthand for a line of thought.

BCS (10:33 - 10:37)

Yeah ... which has gone astray, I think.

...

BCS (10:46 - 13:52)

The metaphysical question. I'm starting over. I have said that we are
in, of, and about the world.

And the in and of are pretty serious facts. And it's funny writing
about reflection, even though I'm not writing about reflection. But
I'm kind of writing about, well, I'm writing about what I'm writing
about the fundamental notion of computing as revealed by looking at
reflection.

And the reason reflection is such a salutary example is that, you
know, I take computation to be a dialectic of meaning and mechanism (to
refer to the other book that I want to write). It both represents and
does. And, but crucially, it represents and does. @delete one?@

And it needs to represent its representation, it needs to represent
its doing, and it needs to be able to do what it represents itself as
doing and whatever. It exemplifies, and it's both part
of its properties, it exemplifies the properties that can represent,
which forces a certain kind of discipline on it. And that fact
about reflection reflection @? is, is related to [pause?@] I mean, I feel now as
if I'm instantiating this idea that the layers need fewer neurons,
because I'm losing neurons at a rate that's forcing everything into
being the same thing.

But that fact about us being here and representing being here, and
what the constraints on that are, is a pretty serious fact about how
we think, I think. And I think the ontological facts that the use of
differential equations in physics represents, which are never given a
name, but that's what I think they, the deixis sort of is, is just one
of the things that is pushed on us. That's a funny use of the word
push, but it's one of the things we're, we're not normatively
accountable to, we just are bluntly accountable to.

HST (13:52 - 13:55)

Yeah, we're obliged by, we're obliged @?, much better circumstance.

BCS (13:56 - 13:57)

Thank you, yeah, we're obliged.

HST (14:01 - 15:32)

[edit this heavily @?]

So that, I think that, that claim that you just uttered, I don't
understand. And I think elucidating it, and maybe the elucidation is
in the objects book if I went back and found it, but it's not, but,
but I think it's necessary if you want to, I mean, the problem is at
the, at the purely sort of tactical level, whether the, whether it's
necessary to take 10 or 15 pages to reformulate each of the two
stories in order to demonstrate that they converge. Right.

Or, you know, it's, I haven't, it feels to me like that's not perhaps
what you would like to do, but it's the only structure that I've been
able to think of given what we've been saying so far. But, but maybe
there's another I mean, yeah. Because there, the problem is that there
are critical steps in each of those, which, which you understand, and
which you may or may not have articulated in one place or another, is,
you know, right.

Well, already, but they haven't been pulled together in a way.

BCS (15:32 - 15:41)

No, I think that's absolutely right. And I think my tendency would be
to recapitulate both of them in one to 2000 pages.

HST (15:42 - 15:47)

Yes, well, that would serve nobody's interest.

BCS (15:48 - 17:54)

And one thing also that's interesting about the deixis story is that
it is obvious to a very small number of people, all of whom I believe
are computer scientists. And that's just an interesting
intellectual history sort of fact. And very smart people, like my
friend [whose name escapes me right now, young Rosa Tao ?@], father's a
philosopher of science.

She's got two PhDs, one in philosophy, one in neuroscience now. And
she's on the faculty at Stanford. And, and I like her too much.

She and I have had this explicit conversation about why it's obvious
that the structure of indexicals in language, and the structure of
magnetism, and the way physics is expressed in terms of properties,
not objects, and that the regularities are differential, which is why
the differential equations are used, are the same fact. And it just
strikes her as inane and absolutely not.

They have nothing to do with each other.

HST (17:56 - 17:59)

It's certainly not inane, but it's not immediately effable @sp? to me either.

BCS (18:00 - 18:20)

Well, not only is it not immediately effable, but I feel as if I tried
to express it in the objects book, I've tried to express it in
numerous places since, and none of my expressions of it have actually
made any headway with the people to whom it's not obvious, which is
interesting.

HST (18:20 - 18:34)

Can you name anybody who has successfully, maybe already before you
even mentioned it, grasped this?

BCS (18:35 - 18:47)

Well, Jun is one, but as I said to Jill, Jun probably understands my
work as it were better than anybody, but nobody can understand him.

[cut all this@?]
  BCS (18:58 - 19:09)

  So it's a puzzle to me, to what extent he should be named as, you
  know...

  HST (19:09 - 19:14)

  Whether he'll appear for the defense in court.

  BCS (19:15 - 19:21)

  Right. He failed his PhD oral at Duke in philosophy.

  HST (19:22 - 19:25)

  Yeah, I'm sure that could be said of many good people.

  BCS (19:28 - 19:34)

  Anyway, yeah, whether he should be custodian of the oeuvre, at any
  rate.

HST (19:36 - 19:51)

That has got to be a goal, it seems to me, to try to break through
that logjam, but maybe, maybe too hard for this life. You were just
going to revert to Fernando.

BCS (19:52 - 20:16)

Yes, I think he, I don't know if I just made this up, but I think he's
somebody who thought, oh yeah, of course, that's obvious. And
actually, someone who definitely thinks it's obvious [is Pengy guy]