Tom Griffiths

It's that we've built models of the world around us that inform the way that we interpret the data that we experience.

And that's something where I think it's a little less mysterious where those priors come from, because they come from the world, but they also come from the world plus, again, whatever our more general inductive biases as learners.

I think the...

This is getting into 20th century cognitive science.

We made a leap from the 19th century, which is our logic and probability theory, to 21st century considerations about are people basing in the right ways and resource rationality and so on.

The missing chunk there is the 20th century, which is where people began to use these mathematical ideas as a tool for trying to understand human minds.

The first half of the 20th century, psychology was really focused on trying to

be a sort of rigorous scientific discipline, having gone from its foundations, which were really sort of introspective, where you would be asking people whether they saw something or heard something or what the impression of it was.

There was a sort of reaction against that, and behaviorist psychologists said, no, no, no, we can't see a thought or touch a feeling.

Let's focus on the things we can see or touch, which are

environments and the behaviors that they produce.

And so not allowed to really talk about those mental states as explanatory things in accounting for human behavior.

And then the advent of computers and the existence of mathematical frameworks for thinking about how to do things on computers and these extensions to logic and so on, which came out of that,

That provided a new set of theoretical tools that psychologists could use to come up with rigorous theories of how minds work.

You can talk about thoughts.

Maybe we haven't quite got to feelings yet, but thoughts.

If you have a precise mathematical device like logic for then coming up with hypotheses about what it is that thought does.

And the big successes of that enterprise were Alan Newell and Herbert Simon creating the Logic Theorist, which was a machine that could discover proofs for mathematical propositions and logic.

And Noam Chomsky showing that thinking about formal languages gave us a tool for then making sense of the natural languages that humans use.

And those ideas really sort of provided the foundation of science, but they also led to some interesting challenges.