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New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm
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Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm
#52[dead]
Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm
#53The old neuroscience saying goes like this: "Human brain have billions of neurons and so it is too complex to understand, that's why neuroscience study simpler organisms. Flatworm's brain have 52 neurons. We have no idea how it works". Did finally something changed in this regard?
Many in the SciTech world who would shrink at even the thought of legitimizing Psychoanalysis should know that Freud only developed his psychological theory after trying and failing to create an entirely physical explanation for cognitive processes (Cf. "Project for a Scientific Psychology", Standard Edition I, pg.283). The entire field of Psychology would not exist if not for this failure, a failure which is also an…
First words aren't always interpreted as referring to the mother.
> The further one gets from that original source of comfort, the more complex means they employ to try and return, ceaselessly failing, always repeating the same thing over and over again. This is the origin of all language, all logic, and all of human society for Freud.
Dubious.
What of the people whose mother died during childbirth? It does not seem as though they are fundamentally different from everyone else.
I don't think Freud has anything to contribute to, much of anything, anymore.
Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many in the SciTech world who would shrink at even the thought of legitimizing Psychoanalysis should know that Freud only developed his psychological theory after trying and failing to create an entirely physical explanation for cognitive processes (Cf. "Project for a Scientific Psychology", Standard Edition I, pg.283). The entire field of Psychology would not exist if not for this failure, a failure which is also an…
First words aren't always interpreted as referring to the mother. > The further one gets from that original source of comfort, the more complex means they employ to try and return, ceaselessly failing, always repeating the same thing over and over again. This is the origin of all language, all logic, and all of human society for Freud. Dubious. What of the people whose mother died during childbirth? It does not seem…
There are people whose mothers died during childbirth, but babies literally can't take care of themselves, they need to be constantly attended to and the original moment of trauma is always the moment they are weaned. Surrogate mothers are extremely common, the fact that in the loss of the biological role the cultural form of the mother is still retained speaks even more strongly to Freud's point, that these co-ordinates that first arrange psychological life are so deeply embedded that we even unconsciously impose them even when they aren't necessary, and that we structure our societies around them.
>> The further one gets from that original source of comfort, the more complex means they employ to try and return, ceaselessly failing, always repeating the same thing over and over again. This is the origin of all language, all logic, and all of human society for Freud.
>Dubious.
This was just a quick summary of Freud's theory, I did not expect anyone to read thousands of pages of Freud but you are welcome to do so and then decide whether or not his work is "relevant". As I said, people in SciTech might not like him, but theres a very good chance that their therapists do. Freud remains one of the most cited authors in history.
Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm
#55Is there any reason to believe that biologically inspired architectures should yield better performance ? Brain are biological systems which have been trained through evolutionary processes. Neural Networks are algorithmic/linear algebra models trained through statistical methods One might argue that CNN are biologically inspired, but it's more likely that the reason they work is because they respects input symmetrie…
We know, for a fact, that biological brains work. Not only do they work, they work enormously well learning and adapting based on dramatically less available data, utilizing vastly less resources than anything we've conceived of in artificial computing. Biological architectures may not be the best possible, but empirical evidence demonstrates that they can result in intelligences ranging all the way up to sentience.
The question is if its appropriate to compare logical machines, which are built on things secondary, a-posteriori to the primary aspects of human cognition--that is to say logic--with the primary, biological, a-priori aspects of cognition which are in some sense inscrutable. I myself do not believe that we will never be able to comprehensively understand the way in which our minds work, only religion leaves mysteries up to God. But I think that using scientific empirical logic to understand how we are able to perform judgements such as those made with scientific empirical logic will never yield the proper result; judgement itself must be investigated. Something I don't think many researchers in the field of neural-networks are capable of doing.
Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I’m skeptical that biological systems will ever serve as a basis for ML nets in practice" First of all, ML engineers need to stop being so brainphiliacs, caring only about the 'neural networks' of the brain or brain-like systems. Lacrymaria olor has more intelligence, in terms of adapting to exploring/exploiting a given environment, than all our artificial neural networks combined and it has no neurons because it is…
If I had done synthetic biology my goal would have been to create cells that could reliably compute sine waves... by digitally computing taylor series polynomial approximations. Turns out engineering digital systems from cells is a remarkably challenging problem. Examples of "switches" in biology abound, my favorite simple one is the Mating Type of Yeast: yeast have two sex types, and swap a small region of DNA in-pl…
Not sure about polynomials, but how about "Genetic Regulatory Networks that count to 3" [1]. One of the interesting, counter-intuitive highlights from the paper: "Counting to 2 requires very different network design than counting to 3."
Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm
#57Imo, the next step in ML is unleashing the electron a bit. Right now we keep probabilistic electrons on leash in transistors, so they behave deterministically. This despotic method has taken us far, but without giving electrons some freedom back, we won't advance further.
I'm interested; could you expand on this please? How can we give electrons more 'freedom' and what would that result in?
Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
[1] linked above is an absolute powerhouse of a lecture by Michael Levin. Wow.
Thanks for calling it out, made me watch it. Absolutely fascinating. Incredible implications.
Beyond the much needed regenerative medical procedures, limb/organ reconstruction through "API" calls to the cells that 'know' how to build an arm, an eye, a spleen, and so on, it is the breakdown of the dichotomies taken for granted, human/machine, just physics/mind with an agent, and to speak instead of agential materials [1], which fosters a new type of endeavour, one which will be needed very soon if our CPUs start speaking to us.
[1] https://drmichaellevin.org/resources/#:~:text=Agential%20mat...
Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm
#59It makes a good headline, but reading over the paper ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00556-7.pdf ) it doesn’t seem biologically-inspired. It seems like they found a way to solve nonlinear equations in constant time via an approximation, then turned that into a neural net. More generally, I’m skeptical that biological systems will ever serve as a basis for ML nets in practice. But saying that out loud fee…
So I wasn't skeptical in the way you found it, but it did sound a heck lot to me like tradition numerical solution of PDEs...but with NNs in there somehow.
Re: New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm
#60It makes a good headline, but reading over the paper ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00556-7.pdf ) it doesn’t seem biologically-inspired. It seems like they found a way to solve nonlinear equations in constant time via an approximation, then turned that into a neural net. More generally, I’m skeptical that biological systems will ever serve as a basis for ML nets in practice. But saying that out loud fee…
"I’m skeptical that biological systems will ever serve as a basis for ML nets in practice" First of all, ML engineers need to stop being so brainphiliacs, caring only about the 'neural networks' of the brain or brain-like systems. Lacrymaria olor has more intelligence, in terms of adapting to exploring/exploiting a given environment, than all our artificial neural networks combined and it has no neurons because it is…
I am working on RL and robotics. I came across Levin in Lex's podcast. And then went on a binge of his other podcast appearences. I agree totally with you, I would very much like to build agents that adapt to different circumstances like "simple organisms". I am not familiar with biology, but I plan to build competence here to follow Levin's work to a point that I could potentially collabrate with biologists or learn from their work. Any suggestions (books etc) that would be salient towards this goal is much appreciated!