Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community.

Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience

Gary Lupyan runs the Lupyan Lab at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he studies how language and cognition are related. In some ways, this is a continuation of the conversation I had last episode with Ellie Pavlick, in that we partly continue to discuss large language models. But Gary is more focused on how language, and naming things, categorizing things, changes our cognition related those things. How does naming something change our perception of it, and so on. He's interested in how concepts come about, how they map onto language. So we talk about some of his work and ideas related to those topics.

And we actually start the discussion with some of Gary's work related the variability of individual humans' phenomenal experience, and how that affects our individual cognition. For instance, some people are more visual thinkers, others are more verbal, and there seems to be an appreciable spectrum of differences that Gary is beginning to experimentally test.

• Lupyan Lab.
• Twitter: @glupyan.
• Related papers:
  • Hidden Differences in Phenomenal Experience.
  • Verbal interference paradigms: A systematic review investigating the role of language in cognition.
• Gary mentioned Richard Feynman's Ways of Thinking video.
• Gary and Andy Clark's Aeon article: Super-cooperators.

0:00 - Intro2:36 - Words and communication14:10 - Phenomenal variability26:24 - Co-operating minds38:11 - Large language models40:40 - Neuro-symbolic AI, scale44:43 - How LLMs have changed Gary's thoughts about language49:26 - Meaning, grounding, and language54:26 - Development of language58:53 - Symbols and emergence1:03:20 - Language evolution in the LLM era1:08:05 - Concepts1:11:17 - How special is language?1:18:08 - AGI