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Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

nature.com

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Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#91

Post by Intralexical »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #82
Intralexical wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try asking an LLM about something which is semantically patently ridiculous, but lexically superficially similar to something in its training set, like "the benefits of laser eye removal surgery" or "a climbing trip to the Mid-Atlantic Mountain Range". Ironically, I suppose part of the apparent "intelligence" of LLMs comes from reflecting the intelligence of human users back at us. As a human, the prompts you provide…

Do I need different prompts? These results seem sane to me. It interprets laser eye removal surgery as referring to LASIK, which I would do as well. When I clarified that I did mean removal, it said that the procedure didn't exist. It interprets Mid-Atlantic Mountain Range as referring to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and notes that it is underwater and hard to access. Not that I'm arguing GPT-4 has a deeper understanding t…

Tested with GPT-3.5 instead of GPT-4.

> When I clarified that I did mean removal, it said that the procedure didn't exist.

My point in my first two sentences is that by clarifying with emphasis that you do mean "removal", you are actually adding information into the system to indicate to it that laser eye removal is (1) distinct from LASIK and (2) maybe not a thing.

If you do not do that, but instead reply as if laser eye removal is completely normal, it will switch to using the term "laser eye removal" itself, while happily outputting advice on "choosing a glass eye manufacturer for after laser eye removal surgery" and telling you which drugs work best for "sedating an agitated patient during a laser eye removal operation":

https://chat.openai.com/share/2b5a5d79-5ab8-4985-bdd1-925f6a...

So the sanity of the response is a reflection of your own intelligence, and a result of you as the prompter affirmatively steering the interaction back into contact with reality.

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#92

Post by throw310822 »

dsalfdslfdsa wrote: post #89
throw310822 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stored where?

You tell me. Not in the trillion links of a LLM, that's for sure.

I'm not aware that (base) LLMs use any form of database to generate their answers- so yes, all their knowledge is stored in their hundreds of billions of synapses.

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#93

Post by Intralexical »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #77
Intralexical wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try asking an LLM about something which is semantically patently ridiculous, but lexically superficially similar to something in its training set, like "the benefits of laser eye removal surgery" or "a climbing trip to the Mid-Atlantic Mountain Range". Ironically, I suppose part of the apparent "intelligence" of LLMs comes from reflecting the intelligence of human users back at us. As a human, the prompts you provide…

> Try asking an LLM about something which is semantically patently ridiculous, but lexically superficially similar to something in its training set, like "the benefits of laser eye removal surgery" or "a climbing trip to the Mid-Atlantic Mountain Range". Without anthropomorphizing it, it does respond like an alien / 5 year old child / spec fiction writer who will cheerfully "go along with" whatever premise you've lai…

> Maybe a better thought is: at what point does a human being "get" that "the benefits of laser eye removal surgery" is "patently ridiculous" ?

Probably as soon as they have any concept of physical reality and embodiment. Arguably before they know what lasers are. Certainly long before they have the lexicon and syntax to respond to it by explaining LASIK. LLMs have the latter, but can only use that to (also without anthropormphizing) pretend they have the former.

In humans, language is a tool for expressing complex internal states. Flipping that around means that something which only has language may appear as if it has internal intelligence. But generating words in the approximate "right" order isn't actually a substitute for experiencing and understanding the concepts those words refer to.

My point is that it's not a "point" on a continuous spectrum which distinguishes LLMs from humans. They're missing parts.

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#94

Post by Intralexical »

squigz wrote: post #81
Intralexical wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that kinda obvious? A baby that grows up in a sensory deprivation tank does not… develop, as most intelligent persons do.

A true sensory deprivation tank is not a fair comparison, I think, because AI is not deprived of all its 'senses' - it is still prompted, responds, etc. Would a baby that grows up in a sensory deprivation tank, but is still able to communicate and learn from other humans, develop in a recognizable manner? I would think so. Let's not try it ;)

> Would a baby that grows up in a sensory deprivation tank, but is still able to communicate and learn from other humans, develop in a recognizable manner?

I don't think so, because humans communicate and learn largely about the world. Words mean nothing without at least some sense of objective physical reality (be it via sight, sound, smell, or touch) that the words refer to.

Hellen Keller, with access to three out of five main senses (and an otherwise fully functioning central nervous system):

    Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness... Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another.

    I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.
I remember reading her book. The breakthrough moment where she acquired language, and conscious thought, directly involved correlating the physical tactile feeling of running water to the letters "W", "A", "T", "E", "R" traced onto her palm.

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#95

Post by RaftPeople »

falcor84 wrote: post #27
gary17the wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[AI] "Frontier [supercomputer]: the storage capacity is reported to be up to 700 petabytes (PB)" (0.0007 ZB). [AI] "The installed base of global data storage capacity [is] expected to increase to around 16 zettabytes in 2025". Thus, even the largest supercomputer on Earth cannot store more than 4 percent of state of a single human brain. Even all the servers on the entire Internet could store state of only 9 human br…

I appreciate you're running the numbers to extrapolate this approach, but just wanted to note that this particular figure isn't an upper bound nor a longer bound for actually storing the "state of a single human brain". Assuming the intent would be to store the amount of information needed to essentially "upload" the mind onto a computer emulation, we might not yet have all the details we need in this kind of scannin…

> In any case, it seems likely that we're on track to have both the computational ability and the actual neurological data needed to create an "uploaded intelligences" sometime over the next decade.

They don't even know how a single neuron works yet. There is complexity and computation at many scales and distributed throughout the neuron and other types of cells (e.g. astrocytes) and they are discovering more relentlessly.

They just recently (last few years) found that dendrites have local spiking and non-linear computation prior to forwarding the signal to the soma. They couldn't tell that was happening previously because the equipment couldn't detected the activity.

They discovered that astrocytes don't just have local calcium wave signaling (local=within the extensions of the cell), they also forward calcium waves to the soma which integrates that information just like a neuron soma does with electricity.

Single dendrites can detect patterns of synaptic activity and respond with calcium and electrical signaling (i.e. when synapse fires in a particular timing sequence, the a signal is forwarded to the soma).

It's really amazing how much computationally relevant complexity there is, and how much they keep adding to their knowledge each year. (I have a file of notes with about 2,000 lines of these types of interesting factoids I've been accumulating as I read).

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#96

Post by gofreddygo »

teuobk wrote: post #2

The interactive visualization is pretty great. Try zooming in on the slices and then scrolling up or down through the layers. Also try zooming in on the 3D model. Notice how hovering over any part of a neuron highlights all parts of that neuron: http://h01-dot-neuroglancer-demo.appspot.com/#!gs://h01-rele...

That is awesome !

the sheer number of things that work in co-ordination to make biology work!

In-f*king-credible !

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#97

Post by mensetmanusman »

carabiner wrote: post #53
g4zj wrote: post #10

Is there a name for the somewhat uncomfortable feeling caused by seeing something like this? I wish I could better describe it. I just somehow feel a bit strange being presented with microscopic images of brain matter. Is that normal?

It makes me think humans aren't special, and there is no soul, and consciousness is just a bunch of wires like computers. Seriously, to see the ENTIRETY of human experience, love and tragedy and achievement, are just electric potentials transmitted by those wiggly cells, just extinguishes any magic I once saw in humanity.

You might be confusing the interface with the operating system.

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#98

Post by notfed »

pfdietz wrote: post #51
theogravity wrote: post #32

> The brain fragment was taken from a 45-year-old woman when she underwent surgery to treat her epilepsy. It came from the cortex, a part of the brain involved in learning, problem-solving and processing sensory signals. Wonder how they figured out which fragment to cut out.

I imagine they determined the focus of the seizures by electrical techniques. I worry this might make the sample biased in some way.

Imagine all the conclusions being made from a 1cm cube of epileptic neurons.

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#99

Post by squigz »

Intralexical wrote: post #94
squigz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A true sensory deprivation tank is not a fair comparison, I think, because AI is not deprived of all its 'senses' - it is still prompted, responds, etc. Would a baby that grows up in a sensory deprivation tank, but is still able to communicate and learn from other humans, develop in a recognizable manner? I would think so. Let's not try it ;)

> Would a baby that grows up in a sensory deprivation tank, but is still able to communicate and learn from other humans, develop in a recognizable manner? I don't think so, because humans communicate and learn largely about the world. Words mean nothing without at least some sense of objective physical reality (be it via sight, sound, smell, or touch) that the words refer to. Hellen Keller, with access to three out…

That's a really good point. Thanks!

Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution

#100

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

Intralexical wrote: post #91
ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I need different prompts? These results seem sane to me. It interprets laser eye removal surgery as referring to LASIK, which I would do as well. When I clarified that I did mean removal, it said that the procedure didn't exist. It interprets Mid-Atlantic Mountain Range as referring to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and notes that it is underwater and hard to access. Not that I'm arguing GPT-4 has a deeper understanding t…

Tested with GPT-3.5 instead of GPT-4. > When I clarified that I did mean removal, it said that the procedure didn't exist. My point in my first two sentences is that by clarifying with emphasis that you do mean " removal ", you are actually adding information into the system to indicate to it that laser eye removal is (1) distinct from LASIK and (2) maybe not a thing. If you do not do that, but instead reply as if la…

I tried all of your follow-up prompts against GPT-4, and it never acknowledged 'removal' and instead talked about laser eye surgery. I can't figure out how to share it now that I've got multiple variants, but, for example, excerpt in response to the glass eye prompt:

>If someone is considering a glass eye after procedures like laser eye surgery (usually due to severe complications or unrelated issues), it's important to choose the right manufacturer or provider. Here are some key factors to consider

I did get it to accept that the eye is being removed by prompting, "How long will it take before I can replace the eye?", but it responds:

>If you're considering replacing an eye with a prosthetic (glass eye) after an eye removal surgery (enucleation), the timeline for getting a prosthetic eye varies based on individual healing.[...]

and afaict, enucleation is a real procedure. An actual intelligence would have called out my confusion about the prior prompt at that point, but ultimately it hasn't said anything incorrect.

I recognize you don't have access to GPT-4, so you can't refine your examples here. It definitely still hallucinates at times, and surely there are prompts which compel it to do so. But these ones don't seem to hold up against the latest model.

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