AIAP: Human Cognition and the Nature of Intelligence with Joshua Greene

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Show Notes

"How do we combine concepts to form thoughts? How can the same thought be represented in terms of words versus things that you can see or hear in your mind's eyes and ears? How does your brain distinguish what it's thinking about from what it actually believes? If I tell you a made up story, yesterday I played basketball with LeBron James, maybe you'd believe me, and then I say, oh I was just kidding, didn't really happen. You still have the idea in your head, but in one case you're representing it as something true, in another case you're representing it as something false, or maybe you're representing it as something that might be true and you're not sure. For most animals, the ideas that get into its head come in through perception, and the default is just that they are beliefs. But humans have the ability to entertain all kinds of ideas without believing them. You can believe that they're false or you could just be agnostic, and that's essential not just for idle speculation, but it's essential for planning. You have to be able to imagine possibilities that aren't yet actual. So these are all things we're trying to understand. And then I think the project of understanding how humans do it is really quite parallel to the project of trying to build artificial general intelligence." -Joshua Greene

Josh Greene is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard, who focuses on moral judgment and decision making. His recent work focuses on cognition, and his broader interests include philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. He is the author of Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Bewtween Us and Them. Joshua Greene's current research focuses on further understanding key aspects of both individual and collective intelligence. Deepening our knowledge of these subjects allows us to understand the key features which constitute human general intelligence, and how human cognition aggregates and plays out through group choice and social decision making. By better understanding the one general intelligence we know of, namely humans, we can gain insights into the kinds of features that are essential to general intelligence and thereby better understand what it means to create beneficial AGI. This particular episode was recorded at the Beneficial AGI 2019 conference in Puerto Rico. We hope that you will join in the conversations by following us or subscribing to our podcasts on Youtube, SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast site/application. You can find all the AI Alignment Podcasts here.

If you're interested in exploring the interdisciplinary nature of AI alignment, we suggest you take a look here at a preliminary landscape which begins to map this space.

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