Noam Chomsky discusses whether Neuralink could expand human cognition. He argues brain-computer interfaces work like books: they extend capacity but can't transcend our native limits. Some scientific theories, like quantum mechanics, may be fundamentally unintelligible to us.
So I just spent a day at a company called Neuralink. And what they do is try to design what's called the brain machine brain computer interface. So they try to do thousands readings in the brain, being able to read what the neurons are firing and then stimulate back. So two way. Do you think their dream is to expand the capacity of the brain to attain information, Sort of increase the bandwidth at which we can search Google kind of thing. Do you think our cognitive capacity might be expanded? Our linguistic capacity, our ability to reason might be expanded by adding a machine into the picture?
Can be expanded in a certain sense, but a sense that was known thousands of years ago. A book expands your cognitive capacity. Okay, so this could expand it too.
But it's not a fundamental expansion. It's not totally new. Things could be understood.
Well, nothing that goes beyond our native cognitive capacities. Just like you can't turn the visual system into an insect system.
Well, I mean the, the thought is. The thought is perhaps you can't directly, but you can map. So good.
You. But we know that without this experiment, you could map what a bee sees and present it in a form so that we could follow it. In fact, every bee scientist does that.
But you don't think there's something greater than bees that we can map and then all of a sudden discover something, be able to understand a quantum world, quantum mechanics, be able to start to be able to make sense.
Students at MIT study and understand quantum.
Mechan, but they always reduce it to the infant, the physical. I mean, they don't really understand.
Oh, you know, there's things that may be another area where there's just a limit to understanding. We understand the theories, but the world that it describes doesn't make any sense. So, you know, the experiment, Schrodinger's cat, for example, can understand the theory, but as Schrodinger pointed out, it's an unintelligible world. One of the reasons why Einstein was always very skeptical about quantum theory, he described himself as a classical realist and one's intelligibility.
He has something in common with infants in that way.
