Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

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AI chatbot - Artificial Intelligence digital concept

Are Chatbots Biased? The Research Results Are In

The results are obvious and dramatic. Inject the preferred training materials and the chatbot will “believe” whatever the post-trainer intended

People have noticed political biases in artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot systems like ChatGPT, but researcher David Rozado studied 24 large language model (LLM) chatbots to find out. Rozado’s (preprint) paper, “The Political Preferences of LLMs,” delivers open access findings from very recent research, and declares: When probed with questions/statements with political connotations, most conversational LLMs tend to generate responses that are diagnosed by most political test instruments as manifesting preferences for left-of-center viewpoints. The Chatbots’ Landslide of Opinion As reported in the New York Times, the paper restates that “most modern conversational LLMs when probed with questions with political connotations tend to generate answers that are … left-leaning viewpoints.” Using the verb “tend to” makes the conclusion appear tepid. The Read More ›

a-depiction-of-a-landscape-inspired-by-the-uncertainty-principle-with-shapes-that-appear-to-shift-and-blur-stockpack-adobe-stock
A depiction of a landscape inspired by the uncertainty principle, with shapes that appear to shift and blur.

What If We Lost the Power to Think Abstractly?

Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges depicts a character whose total recall prevents him from using abstractions, though he recognizes their existence
Physicist Werner Heisenberg saw in the dilemma of language — the specific vs. the general — an analogy to his famous Uncertainty Principle in physics. Read More ›
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Diverse cultures, international communication concept. Human silhouette with speech bubbles.

Origin of Language: Still a Mystery, Despite All We Know Now

We aren’t even sure which is the world’s oldest spoken language, though Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese have impressively long histories
We can research many questions about language but it’s not realistic to hope either that we can easily explain its origin or simply reduce it to software. Read More ›
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three dolphins close up portrait underwater while looking at you

Why Animals Don’t Really Have Anything Much to Say

Terrace attempted to teach infant chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky to form a sentence but conceded defeat. His apparent early successes were traced to human prompting. Read More ›
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free-range chickens on an organic farm in styria,austria

Chicken Whisperers? Humans Learn to Interpret Chicken-ese Quickly

Animal languages deal in emotions and sometimes in basic information but not in ideas. Humans can understand them to the extent that we can follow the emotions. Read More ›
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Mobile dictionary, translator  and e-learning.concept . Learning languages online.  Smartphone and books with language courses.

Do People Who Speak Different Languages Think Differently?

For centuries, linguists found that an intriguing, attractive idea but there is no clear evidence for it
McElvenny credits linguist Noam Chomsky (1928–) with revitalizing the idea that we all have the same sort of minds; language does not really change that. Read More ›
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Multiracial team of professional medical surgeons performs the surgical operation in a modern hospital. Doctors are working to save the patient. Medicine, health and neurosurgery.

Human Brain Tries Immediately to Compensate for Language Loss

Neurosurgeons recently had a unique opportunity to observe brains undergoing the loss of the speech area and compensating in real time
The observations showed that the brain needs specific lobes for normal processing but also — good news for rehab — that it compensates naturally. Read More ›
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Brain development during pregnancy of unborn baby. 3D rendered illustration.

Study: Babies Start Learning Their Home Language Before Birth

Neuroscience researchers found that newborns responded better to a folk tale in French than in Spanish or English — when French was their mothers’ native language
Before birth, the child is hearing the rhythm of speech rather than individual words, through the amniotic fluid; that may speed learning later. Read More ›
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canine astronaut, with his paw on button to activate rocket thrusters, in the cockpit of spacecraft, created with generative ai

Do Cool Floor Buttons Really Cause Dogs To Talk?

The latest fad in “Talk to the animals” appears to be a classic in confirmation bias
We’ve been through this before. If we are looking for someone to really talk to, that someone must still really be a human. Read More ›
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A green sprout sprouts from the microprocessor. A symbol of a new startup or business in the IT field of green technologies or biotechnologies. A living beginning in computers and artificial ai

“Emergence”: The College Level Version of “We Don’t Know How”

The word often permits the improbable to be considered probable for the purposes of sounding like science without providing any
No day that we can’t provide materialist explanations for everything can even be contemplated and that is where “emergence” stands bravely in the gap. Read More ›
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Infinite letters background, original 3d illustration.

Postmodernism’s Steady Deconstruction of Reality

How can we find truth when nothing is reliable?

Sometimes, you just have to try using college professors’ ideas in the real world. One such idea is “postmodernism.” Applied to communications, postmodernism teaches that whenever we read a written text, we should not try to discover what the writer intended. Instead of looking for an objective “meaning,” we should experience what the text means to us personally. The idea goes further, urging us to start by disbelieving the text and doubting our interpretations of it, too. People with the postmodern “deconstructionist” view say, “every text deconstructs” itself, and “every text has contradictions.” Deconstruction means “uncovering the question behind the answers already provided in the text.” Standing upon the ideas of the deconstructionist guru, Jacques Derrida, and his followers, one Read More ›

on the shores of truth
Aerial Australian Beach Landscape, Great Ocean Road

Awash in a Sea of Digital Information

In the age of infinite online text, maybe less is more

Some days after I close my laptop, I’d like to pick up a novel and read or work on a short story project, but then feel like I just need to empty my mind of all the snippets and clips of textual information I’ve consumed that day. News blurbs, thought pieces, emails, provocative tweets, more emails, more news blurbs… Frequently I’ll turn to a TV show or a social media binge in place of the novel. My brain can’t take any more text. It’s burnt out. It’s no secret contemporary Americans live in a sea of images and videos. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook all vie for human attention through images and color schemes designed to catch the distracted eye. Read More ›

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People taking classes at language school

Some Questions and Answers About Language From Recent Research

The hardest language, the best way to learn a language, and peering into the shadowy origin of language

Can there be such a thing as “the hardest language to learn”? At ZME Science, science writer Tibi Puiu dives into the question, starting with the assumption that the learner is an English speaker: After 70 years of experience teaching languages to American diplomats, the U.S. Foreign Service has grouped foreign languages into four categories of difficulty. The easiest language group requires 575-600 hours of study (23-24 weeks of classroom study) for students to achieve sufficient competence to be posted overseas, whereas the hardest group requires at least 2,200 hours of study (88 weeks of full-time classroom study) to achieve the same level of proficiency. In other words, some languages can be 3-4 times harder to master than others. Tibi Read More ›

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Thank You

How Human Language Is, and Isn’t, Like a Computer Program

A key difference is that a language cannot be downloaded into the brain, like a program. It must be painstakingly acquired

Giosuè Baggio, professor of psycholinguistics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, has mixed feeling about comparing the brain’s management of human language to computation. In some ways, it is a useful analogy: If we look at what the brain does while people perform a language task, we find some of the signatures of a computational system at work. If we record electric or magnetic fields produced by the brain, for example, we find signals that are only sensitive to the identity of the sound one is hearing — say, that it is a b, instead of a d — and not to the pitch, volume, or any other concrete and contingent features of the speech sound. At some Read More ›

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sign requesting no profanity.

Researchers: Profanity Has Some Elements of a Universal Language

They found that, in a number of languages, profanity omits certain sounds and stresses others

In a study, researchers found that, across different languages, swear words tended to lack soundssuch as l, r, and w: Shiri Lev-Ari and Ryan McKay from Royal Holloway, University of London conducted a pilot study with speakers of five unrelated languages (20 individuals per language) and asked them to list the most offensive words they knew in their language, excluding racial slurs. The initial study revealed that swear words were less likely to include approximants, which include sounds like l, r, w and y. The authors suggest that approximants may be less suitable than other sounds for giving offense and investigated this in two further studies. Springer, “The universal sound of swearing across languages” at Eurekalert (December 5, 2022) The Read More ›

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Illustration eines Eisbergs

Cormac McCarthy Tries To Make Sense of the Unconscious Mind

He offers shafts of light that make the “hard problem of (un)consciousness” feel less forbidding

In a classic piece at Nautilus, novelist Cormac McCarthy (b. 1933) — author of, among other novels, All the Pretty Horses (1992) and The Road (2007) — muses on the origin and nature of the unconscious mind. As we might expect from a novelist, it’s not his grand theory that is of much use at all. His grand theory is that “the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal,” which makes no sense. He adds, “All animals have an unconscious. If they didnt they would be plants.” How does he know that pond hydras, for example, have an “unconsciousness” but maple trees don’t? Well, he doesn’t. And yet, he also offers shafts of light that make the “Hard Problem Read More ›

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Concept of a program for a smartphone to translate from different languages

Neuroscientist Takes Aim at Yuval Noah Harari’s Claims re Humans

Behavioral neuroscientist Darshana Narayanan says that much of what Harari writes “sacrifices science for sensationalism” and is “riddled with errors”

Many readers have read our article last June on historian and transhumanist Yuval Noah Harari’s musings on what to do with the people that artificial intelligence is rendering “useless.” Now, first off, what Harari envisions is not happening. As business prof Jay Richards is fond of noting, AI enables more people to craft the jobs they want, with AI doing the traditional drudgery. Despite automation (or because of it),there are still plenty of Help Wanted signs out there. Call the argument Homo Deus vs. The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines, if you like. But at Current Affairs, behavioral neuroscientist Darshana Narayanan offers another critique. Apart from having a disturbing attitude to fellow Read More ›

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Multiracial friends having fun and laughing drinking coffee in coffeehouse, diverse young people talking joking sitting together at cafe table, multi ethnic millennials spending time in coffee shop

How Would an AI Chatbot Handle the Complexities of Oral Language?

University of Toronto linguist Joseph Wilson unpacks some of the differences between the way we speak and the way we write

Joseph Wilson, a linguist and journalist who has done considerable work with oral languages (languages not yet written down), offers some thoughts on claims that chatbots like Blake Lemoine’s LaMDA, really speak like human persons. He offers a sharp distinction between oral language and the written language that chatbots are trained on: But this excludes all unwritten forms of communication: sign language, oral histories, body language, tone of voice, and the broader cultural context in which people find themselves speaking. In other words, it leaves out much of the interesting stuff that makes nuanced communication between people possible. Joseph Wilson, “Why AI Will Never Fully Capture Human Language” at Sapiens (October 12, 2022) We really don’t know how old spoken Read More ›

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Concept of translation from different languages on an abstract world map

What Happens When You Feed a Translation Program Utter Nonsense?

Indiana University cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter had a lifelong acquaintance with and admiration for the Swedish language and with the help of Swedish friends, became conversant with it. That led him in turn to try an experiment on machine translation programs such as Google Translate and DeepL. At Inference Review, he tells us, “although — or perhaps because — these programs have improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years, I greatly enjoy discovering and poking fun at their many unpredictable weaknesses.” Thus the author of author of Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979) constructed a paragraph of pure nonsense in made-up Swedish, something like Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” which plays around similarly with English: All mimsy were the borogoves, And Read More ›

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Sanger Sequencing. 3D illustration of a method of DNA sequencing.

If DNA Is a Language, Who Is the Speaker?

Philosopher Steve Meyer talks about the significance of Francis Crick’s sequence hypothesis that shows that DNA is literally a language of life

In a talk at the Dallas Conference on Science and Faith (2021), philosopher Steve Meyer looked at the question of whether a multiverse, as in Multiverse of Madness (2022), or God, as in many traditions is the origin of our universe. That is, is our universe designed — as considerable evidence suggests — or is ours just one of a few lucky universes whose extra-lucky conditions allow for advanced life? Dr. Meyer is the author of The Return of the God Hypothesis (Harper One, 2021) which argues that the evidence from science favors God over a multiverse. (Sample here.) In this first of four transcripts of the talk, he talks about how and why it matters to ordinary people which Read More ›