Can Humans Think? – UCLA Livescu Initiative on Neuro, Narrrative, and AI

Inaugural talk by Matthew Jones and Chris Wiggins, authors of “How Data Happened”, titled Can Humans Think? Philosophy, Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, Humanities

Thinking is no longer confined to humans — if it ever was. More and more, thinking is laced with machines, networks of data and sensing, physical manipulations of brains and nervous systems and microbes. Large Language Models (LLMs) might not think, but we will certainly think with them in the future. The “brain in our gut” — our microbiome — is apparently involved in cognition, but how? Animal cognition is more than just instinct —but is it still less-than-human, or are we fooling ourselves? What does it really mean to think outside the box? Why is there a lamb on this poster?