343 | Tom Griffiths on The Laws of Thought
2/9/20261 hr 19 min
For all that human beings spend a lot of their time thinking, it's far from obvious what that process actually entails. Part of it amounts to classical logical reasoning. But an even bigger part involves reasoning with probability and uncertainty. And some of it is governed by unavoidable limitations on time and accuracy. Psychologist and computer scientist Tom Griffiths suggests that we have thought about it enough to feel that we have come to understand some general principles, which he explains in his new book The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of Mind.
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Sean Carroll· Host0:51
Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I've always thought that one of the interesting aspects of modern approaches to AI, large language models, other connectionist things, is that very often, or at least in their natural state, uh, an LLM is not good at arithmetic. [chuckles] It's not good at adding numbers together. Y- you can augment the program so that they're very good. You can give basically an LLM access to a calculator. It's exactly like human beings. They're not very good at arithmetic in some sense, but if you have a calculator, they can do it. But in their natural state, LLMs make