#93 Prof. MURRAY SHANAHAN - Consciousness, Embodiment, Language Models

episode

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) not yet transcribed

▲ 0

Transcript

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet Upvotes decide what gets transcribed next — 0 so far. Sign in to upvote

More from Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

VAEs Are Energy-Based Models? [Dr. Jeff Beck] 46 min · 25 Jan 2026

Abstraction & Idealization: AI's Plato Problem [Mazviita Chirimuuta] 53 min · 23 Jan 2026

Why Every Brain Metaphor in History Has Been Wrong [SPECIAL EDITION] 42 min · 23 Jan 2026

Adversarial Examples and Data Modelling - Andrew Ilyas (MIT) 1h 28m · 22 Aug 2024

All episodes from Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) →

Report any issue

Source

Recorded24 Dec 2022

Publisheranchor.fm ↗

Handlerec:2107379

Show notes

Support us! https://www.patreon.com/mlst Professor Murray Shanahan is a renowned researcher on sophisticated cognition and its implications for artificial intelligence. His 2016 article ‘Conscious Exotica’ explores the Space of Possible Minds, a concept first proposed by philosopher Aaron Sloman in 1984, which includes all the different forms of minds from those of other animals to those of artificial intelligence. Shanahan rejects the idea of an impenetrable realm of subjective experience and argues that the majority of the space of possible minds may be occupied by non-natural variants, such as the ‘conscious exotica’ of which he speaks. In his paper ‘Talking About Large Language Models’, Shanahan discusses the capabilities and limitations of large language models (LLMs). He argues that prompt engineering is a key element for advanced AI systems, as it involves exploiting prompt prefixes to adjust LLMs to various tasks. However, Shanahan cautions against ascribing human-like characteristics to these systems, as they are fundamentally different and lack a shared comprehension with humans. Even though LLMs can be integrated into embodied systems, it does not mean that they possess human-like language abilities. Ultimately, Shanahan concludes that although LLMs are formidable and versatile, we must be wary of over-simplifying their capacities and limitations. YT version: https://youtu.be/BqkWpP3uMMU Full references on the YT description. [00:00:00] Introduction [00:08:51] Consciousness and Consciousness Exotica [00:34:59] Slightly Consciousness LLMs [00:38:05] Embodiment [00:51:32] Symbol Grounding [00:54:13] Emergence [00:57:09] Reasoning [01:03:16] Intentional Stance [01:07:06] Digression on Chomsky show and Andrew Lampinen [01:10:31] Prompt Engineering Find Murray online: https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mpsha/ https://twitter.com/mpshanahan?lang=en https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=00bnGpAAAAAJ&hl=en MLST Discord: https://discord.gg/aNPkGUQtc5

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.