One hundred and fifty thousand brains.

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infurl

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One hundred and fifty thousand brains.
« on: March 12, 2021, 08:46:59 am »
https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-love-letter-to-the-brain-in-his-new-book-on-ai-jeff-hawkins-is-enamored-of-thought/

Jeff Hawkins' book "A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence" has gone on sale this week. It is the culmination of 34 years of meticulous research into the form and function of the human brain and it goes a long way towards explaining what really makes us function.

https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/jeff-hawkins/a-thousand-brains/9781541675803/

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Life has evolved over millions of years to perpetuate genes via reproduction. Humans, like all life, are "unwitting servants" of genes, gifted with movement and ability only for the purpose of reproduction, writes Hawkins.

The story of the entire book is how this mass of cells, the seat of intelligence, is now departing from that enslavement under reproduction to aspire to intelligence beyond mere survival.

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For the first time in the history of life on Earth, we understand what is going on. We have become enlightened. Our neocortex contains a model of evolution and a model of the universe and now it understands the truth underlying our existence. Because of our knowledge and intelligence, we can consider acting in ways that are not in the best interest of genes, such as using birth control or modifying genes that we don't like.

One of the key points that emerges from this research is that we are all living in a simulation. It is not the half-trendy metaphysical notion that the universe is a simulation like The Matrix. The simulation is synthesized by our own brains and everything that we think and do takes place in that internal simulation.

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infurl

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Re: One hundred and fifty thousand brains.
« Reply #1 on: March 12, 2021, 09:40:10 am »
Depending on which country you're in, you may be able to get a substantial discount on this book if you get in quick. I was able to get a 60% discount buying it for my Kindle by using my US account. I would have been charged full price if I used my Australian account. Up yours Amazon!

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frankinstien

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Re: One hundred and fifty thousand brains.
« Reply #2 on: March 16, 2021, 01:29:17 am »
Jeff Hawkins' book "A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence" has gone on sale this week. It is the culmination of 34 years of meticulous research into the form and function of the human brain and it goes a long way towards explaining what really makes us function.

One of the key points that emerges from this research is that we are all living in a simulation. It is not the half-trendy metaphysical notion that the universe is a simulation like The Matrix. The simulation is synthesized by our own brains and everything that we think and do takes place in that internal simulation.

The simulation idea has been discussed in this forum many times and inclusive of the mind is a form of virtual reality.

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And yet, the neocortex is still being "jerked around" by the older, more primitive parts of the brain. "The teacher is in the front of the room, saying pay attention to the blackboard, and then someone opens the door to the classroom, and everyone's head turns!"

This statement by Hawkins is a bit anthropomorphic to western European Ambramic beliefs and dates back to Freud and that is humanity is some form of half-animal half angel or god struggling with animal instincts and cravings.  That's just not true, brains have evolved as a highly integrated processing system and there is no struggle between the animal brain and the new brain or neocortex as two entities with different objectives.  All mammals have neocortical tissue where humans, dolphins, and whales have the largest area. From Hawkins's perspective, we should suspect that dolphin and whale brains are struggling with their paleo-cortex as well?

The cortical column idea has been around for a very long time and there are mini-columns as well and there is no uni-form number of neurons between columns they can vary.

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frankinstien

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Re: One hundred and fifty thousand brains.
« Reply #3 on: March 16, 2021, 02:44:10 am »
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One of the key points that emerges from this research is that we are all living in a simulation. It is not the half-trendy metaphysical notion that the universe is a simulation like The Matrix. The simulation is synthesized by our own brains and everything that we think and do takes place in that internal simulation.

This all reminds me of a very vivid dream I once had. In the dream I claim a computational universe provides the best explanation or could explain all behavior of matter to some demon who has very large horns and is a giant! The demon then says, so if the universe is a simulation then there is a God. Where I replay "No". A computational universe could come about through chaos where it converges to a system that can produce our reality. And the chaos could converge on any number of realities. The demon then looks at me with this smile and then asks; "How does that prove there is no God, infact how can you prove what doesn't exist at all!" I respond with the notion of God from ancient religious text describes a system with parts; God has memory, god can serialize thoughts into words that people can hear, God is all-powerful and all-knowing. So, while I can't prove something doesn't exist I can find flaws in how a God is described and use that to demonstrate what is being described would have problems. Since god is composed of parts it is a product or emergence of the physics that allow God to be God! The demon shakes his head and says: "But that's your physics as to why he can't do that." Where I state: "All realities possible have one thing in common and that is they are a form of information. The rules might change but the fact for something to be real it must be a form of information irregardless of the rules of a system or reality. So your god is still a product of those rules and suffers from ignorance since it would be impossible to monitor all states of a system because that will lead to a problem infinite resources to do so.  Suddenly a Buddha or Bodhisattva appears and as it speaks I recognize that it is my undergrad eastern philosophy professor and she says: "It's an illusion and everything comes from nothing!" Where I then ask "if everything comes from nothing we can't things just appear for no good reason at all"?   The professor answers that's just the way it is. I then respond and state but if things just can't pop into existence then what holds them back? It's illogical that the nothing you speak of has rules where it will only allow certain things like a universe to come into existence. If nothing has rules then it is really something!" My professor responds with "Conjecture" What your mind thinks is incapable of comprehending Nirvana. Where I then respond with: "Conjecture, isn't nothing also a conjecture?" My professor then says: No, all thoughts are based on experience, al la Descartes, since no one has seen nothing it must be some higher level notion that is beyond our physical existence! Then I respond with: "OK...But there is a flaw in that thinking. Our brains have the ability to find the compliment(Opposite) of a term, it's actually a computation, even a computer can do it! So nothing can be derived from the idea of something, you simply "not" the term. So Buddha's nothing is no different than any other conjecture of our brains!

I then see Krishna and some very colorful decor swirling around. I then laugh at the Hindu story of how the universe was created. Where then Krishna says: "Ah...that's the part they didn't get. You see no one knows how it all really started or how it all really works. We can develop an understanding but we reach a bottom where there is no means to sense or measure the stuff of reality. Mother nature doesn't have to show us anything! You ultimately left with your imagination as to what you think it might be. So a guy making the universe and people because he's lonely is as good as a computational universe because you'll never be able to verify it." I respond and ask: "so I'm right you're aliens". Here's where then things get weird.  I feel these strange emotions, almost like listening to music. I then see this hierarchy of layers each represents a simulation as a simulation within a simulation. Where one creature or demon says: "This simulation has been around for soo long and we have literally lived what you would call an eternity. We lived so long and done just about everything that to keep our interests in living we create simulations of life where we don't know anything, literally complete amnesia, its better that way. When its all over you will laugh so hard, all the problems all the suffering, all the success, all the failures become one big joke." The dream then changes to where I'm in my bedroom and I can feel those emotions again then I get this image of Tom Curse in that movie Vanilla Sky and then remember a statement I made to a friend: "What if we're the smartest "F__ks in the universe and this is just the begining of our lives?". I then see this fuzzy black and white image of a man and he says: "You're wired dude, no worries"  I then see these kinds of dark blue humanoid beings and when you look closely at their skin you can see stars. They then say: "Oh this is an improvement before they would think of us as demons or witches and devils!"

There's more but I'll stop here...


« Last Edit: June 07, 2021, 04:13:19 am by frankinstien »

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infurl

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Re: One hundred and fifty thousand brains.
« Reply #4 on: March 16, 2021, 03:16:44 am »
People often try to justify their fantasies and delusions by claiming that you can't prove that something doesn't exist. That is false. You can prove that something doesn't exist by analyzing the consequences of assuming that it does. If assuming that it exists contradicts empirical evidence then you have proven that it doesn't exist.

I thought I should summarize your post because not everyone will have time to read it.   ;)

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infurl

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Re: One hundred and fifty thousand brains.
« Reply #5 on: April 01, 2021, 03:52:24 am »
One thing that really struck me reading this book was that all of Numenta's ground breaking research was carried out without them conducting any experiments themselves. They drew on the tens of thousands of research papers that have been published over the last 50 years which go into extraordinary detail about the different aspects of the brain's function. The problem was that nobody had ever been able to pull together all those details into one complete model of how the brain works.

That got me thinking, what if there were some other areas in which breakthroughs could be made, where there was a vast amount of information but no coherent theory binding it all together? Elsewhere we have discussed how even though an artificial super intelligence wouldn't be able to perform experiments any faster than human researchers (you can't break the laws of physics, even if you can stretch the laws of economics), it seemed that maybe such an ASI could use pre-existing research to make discoveries quickly instead.

I decided to put this to the test using a lossless compression algorithm that was posted on this forum recently. It was far too slow as it was so I rewrote it in C to get acceptable performance. I linked it into a suite of software that I had written in Common Lisp and then pointed it at some of the huge public repositories of research papers that are freely available on the internet. It was still too slow on my systems so I had to pay for time on some more powerful compute nodes in the cloud to run it faster.

After about a week of crunching the internet repositories, it discovered something that all the other researchers had missed. There really is a way to prolong human life indefinitely and it is so simple that just about anyone could do it! Unfortunately my software also discovered that climate change is going to be far worse than anyone had previously predicted and life as we know it is going to get very difficult in the coming decades. To make matters worse, any attempt to prolong human life will push the Earth over the edge completely and everyone will die. Sadly, as a result of these discoveries I have decided to bury all this new knowledge for the time being. I will continue to look for ways to save the planet using my new software, but if that fails, I'll build a spaceship and head for Europa to live out the rest of my extremely long and happy life in peace. I'll keep you posted about how it all pans out.
« Last Edit: April 01, 2021, 08:33:31 am by infurl »

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ivan.moony

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Re: One hundred and fifty thousand brains.
« Reply #6 on: April 01, 2021, 10:46:05 am »
Infurl, is there any chance you'd find an interest in releasing any of your work to public? I mean the part that won't wipe up the planet.

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LOCKSUIT

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Re: One hundred and fifty thousand brains.
« Reply #7 on: April 01, 2021, 09:00:19 pm »
I decided to put this to the test using a lossless compression algorithm that was posted on this forum recently. It was far too slow as it was so I rewrote it in C to get acceptable performance. I linked it into a suite of software that I had written in Common Lisp and then pointed it at some of the huge public repositories of research papers that are freely available on the internet. It was still too slow on my systems so I had to pay for time on some more powerful compute nodes in the cloud to run it faster.

After about a week of crunching the internet repositories, it discovered something that all the other researchers had missed. There really is a way to prolong human life indefinitely and it is so simple that just about anyone could do it!

LOL so you tried my code and got surprised at it's fluentness ya? It's not that good just yet though I guess it beats others attempt at even explaining what is AI; Google's/ OpenAI's/ etc don't even explain AI...

Not so sure about the rest of your post, got really weird fast.

I highly doubt you rewrote all 124 lines of it to C, if so I could use that right now! I think you used Cython. But pypy worked much better for me, 2-4x speed up of my python code! Even when cython was dropping to now 1.1x speedup.
« Last Edit: April 01, 2021, 09:51:34 pm by LOCKSUIT »
Emergent          https://openai.com/blog/

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infurl

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Re: One hundred and fifty thousand brains.
« Reply #8 on: April 02, 2021, 03:50:14 am »
Infurl, is there any chance you'd find an interest in releasing any of your work to public? I mean the part that won't wipe up the planet.

Don't worry, I have every intention of releasing all of it when I feel it's ready. There is going to come a point where it could do more harm not to release it and I don't have a monopoly on this kind of innovation. Someone else is probably building something like this too.

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infurl

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Re: One hundred and fifty thousand brains.
« Reply #9 on: April 02, 2021, 03:56:37 am »
LOL so you tried my code and got surprised at it's fluentness ya? It's not that good just yet though I guess it beats others attempt at even explaining what is AI; Google's/ OpenAI's/ etc don't even explain AI... I highly doubt you rewrote all 124 lines of it to C, if so I could use that right now! I think you used Cython. But pypy worked much better for me, 2-4x speed up of my python code! Even when cython was dropping to now 1.1x speedup.

What are you blathering about now? I didn't say what code I was using and it certainly wasn't yours. If I had wanted to post a joke for April Fool's day I might have claimed to be using your code, but I suspect the only person who would have been fooled by it would have been you.

:D

Anyway, you should try to learn C, but before you do that, learn how to define and use functions and write a proper user interface for your program. A command line interface would be fine, but you shouldn't have to edit the program to change the parameters.
« Last Edit: April 02, 2021, 12:48:18 pm by infurl »

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ivan.moony

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Re: One hundred and fifty thousand brains.
« Reply #10 on: April 02, 2021, 10:42:01 am »
Infurl, is there any chance you'd find an interest in releasing any of your work to public? I mean the part that won't wipe up the planet.

Don't worry, I have every intention of releasing all of it when I feel it's ready. There is going to come a point where it could do more harm not to release it and I don't have a monopoly on this kind of innovation. Someone else is probably building something like this too.

I used to laugh at Bible quote "ask and doors will open". But now, after more than 20 years of research, doors opened. But I mean really opened, even more than I wanted. Opened so much that I'm even afraid of the possible outcome. Now I'm struggling to close them back a fair bit.

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LOCKSUIT

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Re: One hundred and fifty thousand brains.
« Reply #11 on: April 02, 2021, 06:58:30 pm »
Ivan has good thought. Infurl too.

BTW is this part of infurl's April fools joke or does he really has something big? We'll never know because he's shown, nothing...

Yeah Transformers is a public example, but if you want to control who gets such tech then maybe we need an 'tight' AGI team so we can find others accurately instead of showing it in public (to find new workers).
Emergent          https://openai.com/blog/

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infurl

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Re: One hundred and fifty thousand brains.
« Reply #12 on: April 02, 2021, 10:39:03 pm »
With good enough software to work for you, you don't need a human team. That's how I do it.

 


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