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?
Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution
101–110 of 205 posts
Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stored where?
You tell me. Not in the trillion links of a LLM, that's for sure.
The "knowledge" of an LLM is indeed stored in the connections between neurons. This is analogous to real neurons as well. Your neurons and the connections between them is the memory.
Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are missing the point. The calculation is intentionally underestimating the neurons, and even with that the brain ends up having more parameters than the current largest models by orders of magnitude. Yes the estimation is intentionally modelling the neurons simpler than they are likely to be. No, it is not “missing” anything.
The point is to make a ballpark estimate, or at least to estimate the order of magnitude. From the sibling comment: > Individual proteins are capable of basic computation which are then integrated into regulatory circuits, epigenetics, and cellular behavior. If this is true, then there may be many orders of magnitude unaccounted for. Imagine if our intelligent thought actually depends irreducibly on the complex inter…
> Imagine if our intelligent thought actually depends irreducibly on the complex interactions of proteins bumping into each other in solution. It would mean computers would never be able to play the same game.
AKA a quantum computer. Its not a "never", but how much computation you would need to throw at the problem.
Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution
#104Earlier 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…
My interpretation of this (beautiful) quote is there was a traceable moment in HK's life where she acquired "consciousness" or perhaps even self-awareness/metacognition/metaphysics? That once the synaptic connections necessary to bridge the abstract notion of language to the physical world led her down the path of acquiring the abilities that distinguish humans from other animals?
Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution
#105The 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...
Hmm, that website does not honour my keyboard layout. Not sure how they managed that.
Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Fair enough. OTOH, generating human-like text responses is a relatively small part of the human brain's skillset.
Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
My god. That is stunning. To think that’s one single millimeter of our brain and look at all those connections. Now I understand why crows can be so smart walnut sized brain be damned. What an amazing thing brains are. Possibly the most complex things in the universe. Is it complex enough to understand itself though? Is that logically even possible?
Crow/parrot brains are tiny but in terms of neuron count they are twice as dense as primate brains (including ours): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221... If someone did this experiment with a crow brain I imagine it would look “twice as complex” (whatever that might mean). 250 million years of evolution separates mammals from birds.
It's amusing to say that bird brains are on the next generation node size.
Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution
#108> 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.
Considering the success of this work, I doubt this is the last such cubic millimeter to be mapped. Or perhaps the next one at even higher resolution. No worries.
Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution
#109Another proof point that AGI is probably not possible. Growing actual bio brains is just way easier. Its never going to happen in silicon. Every machine will just have a cubic centimeter block of neuro meat embedded in it somewhere.
No reason for an AGI not to have a few cubes of goo slotted in here and there. But yeah, because of the training issue, they might be coprocessors or storage or something.
Re: Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution
#110> The 3D map covers a volume of about one cubic millimetre, one-millionth of a whole brain, and contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses — the connections between neurons. This is great and provides a hard data point for some napkin math on how big a neural network model would have to be to emulate the human brain. 150 million synapses / 57,000 neurons is an average of 2,632 synapses per neuron. The adu…
Yes and no on order of magnitude required for decent AI, there is still (that I know of) very little hard data on info density in the human brain. What there is points at entire sections that can sometimes be destroyed or actively removed while conserving "general intelligence".
Rather than "humbling" I think the result is very encouraging: It points at major imaging / modeling progress, and it gives hard numbers on a very efficient (power-wise, size overall) and inefficient (at cable management and probably redundancy and permanence, etc) intelligence implementation. The numbers are large but might be pretty solid.
Don't know about upload though...