Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

Post by Lyapunov_Lover » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 1:47 AM UTC

throwawaygo wrote: post #258

Lyapunov_Lover wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't, actually. There are high-res versions of important events. The locus coeruleus-noradrenaline system act in concerto with the amygdala to induce protein synthesis in the hippocampus to produce vivid episodic memories. It gets rewritten every time it's accessed, but it doesn't become abstracted away like the memory of mundane events. Semantic memory is what we call our repertoire of facts and gists and othe…

Any representation of reality should not be confused with reality. The map is not the terrain. The menu is not the meal. -post-modern philosopherzzz It’s true varying resolutions are stored and retrieved but all are a reduction of the inputs to some useful representation.

Post by inter_netuser » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 2:14 AM UTC

dcposch wrote: post #259

freediver wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a contradiction as I meant "achieving" in the context of creating it (through software). The fact it happened to us is undeniable (from our perspective), but the how/why of it is still one of the many mysteries of the universe - one we will likely never solve.

FWIW this is the same argument once made against human flight. In the late 19th century, there were a lot of debates in the form > Clearly flight is possible, birds do it > Sure but how/why is one of the many mysteries of the universe, one we will likely never solve. "Man won't fly for a million years – to build a flying machine would require the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanics for 1-1…

Post by inter_netuser » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 2:15 AM UTC

jamiek88 wrote: post #245

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's semantics at this point but we did not create ourselves, it was a complex process that took billions of years to create each one of us. Something being conceivable isn't the same as it being practically possible. I can imagine what you propose, but the same goes for traveling to distant stars or a time machine for going to the future. All perfectly possible in theory.

Yeah but interstellar and time travel haven’t been done, or at least we haven’t observed such. Flight had. Intelligence has.

Post by jameshart » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 2:38 AM UTC

freediver wrote: post #254

extheat wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious why you think that. Do you think it’s a fundamental problem with the discrete nature of traditional computers? Or a problem with scale and computational limits? If it’s the latter, if a hypothetical computer has unlimited time and memory capacity, why do you think AGI would remain impossible?

Machines are good at computation, which is not equal to reasoning, but rather a subset of reasoning. And not only they are good at computation, but they are exceptionally good at it - I have no illusion of trying to compete with a machine doing square roots or playing chess. And increasingly harder problems are being expressed as computation problems, with more or less success - most famously probably self-driving. B…

Post by a_square_peg » Wed, Apr 13, 2022, 2:54 AM UTC

axg11 wrote: post #35

Compression is a component of general intelligence. A few years ago I was very sceptical of machine learning ever leading to general intelligence. I've since changed my mind. There are a lot of parallels to this work and the concept of "embeddings" in machine learning. Intelligence requires the ability to generalize. A prerequisite for generalization is the ability to take something high-dimensional and reduce it to…