April 29, 2025
"It’s more fun to compute."
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
"When I consider what people generally want in calculating, I found that it …
Continue readingMarch 28, 2024
"Is one kind of neural circuit required to process visual information, another type to parse speech, and yet another to sequence movements? Or do circuits with different functions share common organizational principles?"
February 1, 2024
What is a neuron good for? What was Mother Nature thinking when she created it? We know that the neuron emerged from ancestral secretory cells[4] and evolved at least 5 times in history, and thus its origin cannot …
Continue readingSeptember 4, 2023
The role of the prompt engineer is one that didn’t exist until the emergence of generative AI. Their function is to engineer the best ways to query a generative system to obtain a desired output. For instance, they would query …
Continue readingAugust 29, 2023
Not too long ago I came across a compilation of ChatGPT’s mistakes at reasoning[3]. The fact that a language model of gargantuan dimensions as ChatGPT struggles at reasoning means that despite the overall AI-hype there is still much …
Continue readingJune 1, 2023
Let’s suppose that you’re given the task of separating images that contain -say, for instance- cats from those that don’t. This should be easy given that you know what a cat looks like. Let’s suppose that now you’re given the …
Continue readingMay 4, 2023
Even if you’re not an AI practitioner or researcher you probably heard the news about Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called godfather of AI, stepping down from his position at Google. The Deep Learning pioneer took such decision in order to be …
Continue readingApril 29, 2023
Artificial General Intelligence or AGI is probably the holy grail of artificial intelligence. The term refers to the capacity of systems to learn a diverse range of behaviours without forgetting what they have already learned, and being capable of learning …
Continue readingNovember 5, 2022
“Most observable patterns of nature arise from aggregation of numerous small-scale processes… Aggregation tends to smooth fluctuations.”
“Nature is both periodic and perpetual. One of the most basic laws of the universe …
Continue readingJune 13, 2022
“There is no greater sorrow than to be mindful of the happy time in misery.”
“The stream of Lethe issues from your kisses And powerful oblivion from your lips.”
February 4, 2022
I have reached a point where the various social dilemmas (problems of my social life) and intellectual dilemmas (problems of my professional life) could be solved by solving one and the same question. I thought, in my university years, that …
Continue readingJanuary 13, 2022
Let’s start with thought. That act of sequence generation, which it is most of the time considered the pinnacle of mental endeavours and abstract reasoning. Thinking relies on a generative and voluntary process of pattern formation. Unlike perception, which is …
Continue readingApril 4, 2020
I own an Amazon Echo, which gives me access to the voice assistant Alexa to use some of Amazon services. I usually use Alexa to know about the day’s weather or the news, as well as to play music from …
Continue readingDecember 14, 2019
What sound does a tree falling in a forest make if no one is around to hear it? Answer: none, because sound is a phenomenon that requires a subject to perceive it. A lonely falling tree doesn’t emit sound, but …
Continue readingNovember 19, 2019
I have recently come across comments from people working on machine and statistical learning referring to supervised learning as the way in which we learned concepts at an early age. These people often cite examples such as “when you were …
Continue readingOctober 18, 2019
It’s been already a few years since I play around in my head with the following situation. I imagine myself as being just “switched on” (or initialized like a computer or any other electrical device) at the exact moment in …
Continue readingAugust 3, 2018
I am currently working in a project that involves some sort of text mining and natural language processing (NLP). For this I need to disambiguate words and -if possible- relate them to their concept, that is, to their abstract pure …
Continue readingJune 8, 2018
"Having a thought does not mean having an internal representation that is a cleaned up version of the sentence any more than perceiving a red square involves having a red square in the head."
"But what then am …
Continue readingDecember 11, 2017
More and more I become convinced that the brain is a big language machine, and most of its function can be seen as the works of a system learning and articulating language. Moreover, I am convinced that the babbling and …
Continue readingJanuary 15, 2017
Let me start by asking a controversial question: Can machines think? The question takes us back to Alan Turing’s seminal paper Computing machinery and intelligence, where he outlines the so-called imitation game which later would be known as the Turing …
Continue readingJanuary 14, 2017
Hi, this is the very first blog post in the Thoughtist. The main motivation for the existence of this blog is to write about philosophy of natural and artificial intelligence; in particular, to discuss the main ideas behind Thoughtism.
Thoughtism …
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