Noam Chomsky: Neuralink and the Expansion of Cognitive Capacity
00:00:00.000 | - So I just spent a day at a company called Neuralink
00:00:05.000 | and what they do is try to design
00:00:09.480 | what's called the brain machine, brain computer interface.
00:00:12.700 | So they try to do thousands readings in the brain,
00:00:16.420 | be able to read what the neurons are firing
00:00:18.720 | and then stimulate back, so two way.
00:00:21.660 | Do you think their dream is to expand the capacity
00:00:25.900 | of the brain to attain information?
00:00:29.780 | Sort of increase the bandwidth
00:00:31.340 | at which we can search Google kind of thing.
00:00:35.620 | Do you think our cognitive capacity might be expanded,
00:00:39.420 | our linguistic capacity, our ability to reason
00:00:42.520 | might be expanded by adding a machine into the picture?
00:00:46.340 | - Can be expanded in a certain sense,
00:00:48.780 | but a sense that was known thousands of years ago.
00:00:53.020 | A book expands your cognitive capacity.
00:00:56.860 | Okay, so this could expand it too.
00:00:59.220 | - But it's not a fundamental expansion.
00:01:01.100 | It's not totally new things could be understood.
00:01:04.140 | - Well, nothing that goes beyond
00:01:06.220 | their native cognitive capacities.
00:01:09.660 | Just like you can't turn the visual system
00:01:11.820 | into an insect system.
00:01:13.820 | - Well, I mean the thought is perhaps
00:01:18.820 | you can't directly, but you can map.
00:01:21.580 | - You could, but we know that without this experiment.
00:01:25.560 | You could map what a bee sees and present it in a form
00:01:29.880 | so that we could follow it.
00:01:31.120 | In fact, every bee scientist does that.
00:01:33.120 | - But you don't think there's something greater than bees
00:01:37.560 | that we can map and then all of a sudden discover something,
00:01:42.840 | be able to understand a quantum world, quantum mechanics,
00:01:46.960 | be able to start to be able to make sense.
00:01:49.160 | - Students at MIT study and understand quantum mechanics.
00:01:54.840 | But they always reduce it to the infant, the physical.
00:01:58.280 | I mean, they don't really understand.
00:02:00.080 | - Oh, you don't, there's things.
00:02:01.400 | That may be another area where there's just a limit
00:02:04.520 | to understanding.
00:02:05.880 | We understand the theories, but the world that it describes
00:02:09.880 | doesn't make any sense.
00:02:11.600 | So, you know, the experiment, Schrödinger's cat,
00:02:14.640 | for example, can understand the theory,
00:02:16.880 | but as Schrödinger pointed out,
00:02:18.920 | it's an unintelligible world.
00:02:22.440 | One of the reasons why Einstein was always very skeptical
00:02:26.400 | about quantum theory, he described himself
00:02:30.360 | as a classical realist, in one's intelligibility.
00:02:35.360 | - He has something in common with infants in that way.
00:02:39.140 | (chuckles)
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