A neuroscientist warns – God is not to blame. But neither do you | iRADIO

Few people are more called to talk about the brain and thinking than Haim Sompolinsky, who will be awarded The Brain Prize, the highest award for neuroscientists, in Copenhagen. Together with two other colleagues, they will share almost one and a half million dollars for this prestigious award.

Jan Fingerland: Neuroscientist warns – God is not to blame. But neither do you

He answers the question of what he will do with this money in two ways. Be joking that his wife had already spent the amount. After all, they have five children and twenty-two grandchildren. Or more seriously – that he himself does not decide about it anyway, because free will does not exist, our actions can, neurologically speaking, always be explained retroactively as “inevitable”.

Thinking in a circle

At the same time, Sompolinsky knows more about the human brain and thinking than almost anyone on Earth. Already in the 1980s, he participated in laying the foundations for research that is now being used in the creation of artificial intelligence systems.

Haim Sompolinski, originally a physicist, was interested in how the brain actually works at a basic level, how it is possible that as a result it can recall memories, create, calculate, learn a new language or predict what will happen next.

He discovered that brain cells do not have a strict hierarchy. The neural network has a rather circular architecture, the excitations are constantly going round and round, even during sleep. With the help of this circular movement, the brain network creates a lot of different test patterns, which it constantly changes and modifies thanks to the input of stimuli from the outside.

And last but not least, he says that the brain has enormous dynamics, it contains an immense amount of exciting and depressing stimuli that constantly cancel each other out. Thanks to this, the brain network is able to react very quickly and flexibly to any small change, because the neurons are always close to the threshold of their activity. All of this is important when building artificial intelligence systems.

Does artificial intelligence think?

According to Sompolinski, there are two basic views on her abilities. Either that it is a “stochastic parrot”, namely that it just offers the most likely combinations of words without “understanding” them. Or, on the contrary, that machines are slowly approaching human intelligence and getting closer to gaining their own consciousness.

Sompolinsky places himself somewhere in the middle. Artificial intelligence today can do more than just process large amounts of data and in some ways simulate the human brain. As a scientist, however, he cannot answer the question of what thinking is, he can only compare the empirical output.

He notes that, for example, in the field of language, artificial intelligence today achieves excellent results without knowing the principles of grammar. But at the same time, she is unable to answer the question, what is the fourth word of a text.

In other words, computers and humans make very different mistakes, and this shows a fundamental difference in their outputs. However, the progress in the field of AI is said to be so enormous that it is difficult to predict long-term development, in ten years artificial intelligence may already be “humanized”.

Don’t strain yourself

Israeli journalists noticed their domestic scientific superstar only when she started receiving foreign prizes, not just Copenhagen’s The Brain Prize. It’s not just about what he or his wife will do with a high financial reward or what they can say about the future of artificial intelligence. Mate is another matter.

Professor Sompolinsky is a pious man, the orthodox son of a rabbi, but he is also a top scientist. He even denies the existence of the supernatural, the afterlife, or miracles. It is said to be contrary to what an intelligent person would arrive at. We can only encounter God as a natural order.

So why is he a devout Jew? According to him, everyone manifests their desire for the realization of universal values ​​differently, he as a religious Jew, someone as a secular, other people are members of numerous other cultures. He is simply following his tradition.

Haim Sompolinski may enjoy shocking his listeners, but there is something comforting about his words. We are part of some order, God is not responsible for everything, but neither are we ourselves as individuals. So we don’t have to constantly burden ourselves with responsibilities. The question is what the AI ​​will think about it when it actually thinks.

The author is a commentator on Czech Radio

Jan Fingerland

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