Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Ritual Report: NYC Less Wrong Solstice Celebration , published by jacob_cannell on the LessWrong.
This article presents an emerging architectural hypothesis of the brain as a biological implementation of a Universal Learning Machine. I present a rough but complete architectural view of how the brain works under the universal learning hypothesis. I also contrast this new viewpoint - which comes from computational neuroscience and machine learning - with the older evolved modularity hypothesis popular in evolutionary psychology and the heuristics and biases literature. These two conceptions of the brain lead to very different predictions for the likely route to AGI, the value of neuroscience, the expected differences between AGI and humans, and thus any consequent safety issues and dependent strategies.
Art generated by an artificial neural net
(The image above is from a recent mysterious post to r/machinelearning, probably from a Google project that generates art based on a visualization tool used to inspect the patterns learned by convolutional neural networks. I am especially fond of the wierd figures riding the cart in the lower left. )
Intro: Two viewpoints on the Mind
Universal Learning Machines
Historical Interlude
Dynamic Rewiring
Brain Architecture (the whole brain in one picture and a few pages of text)
The Basal Ganglia
Implications for AGI
Conclusion
Intro: Two Viewpoints on the Mind
Few discoveries are more irritating than those that expose the pedigree of ideas.
-- Lord Acton (probably)
Less Wrong is a site devoted to refining the art of human rationality, where rationality is based on an idealized conceptualization of how minds should or could work. Less Wrong and its founding sequences draws heavily on the heuristics and biases literature in cognitive psychology and related work in evolutionary psychology. More specifically the sequences build upon a specific cluster in the space of cognitive theories, which can be identified in particular with the highly influential "evolved modularity" perspective of Cosmides and Tooby.
From Wikipedia:
Evolutionary psychologists propose that the mind is made up of genetically influenced and domain-specific[3] mental algorithms or computational modules, designed to solve specific evolutionary problems of the past.[4]
From "Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions":[5]
An evolutionary perspective leads one to view the mind as a crowded zoo of evolved, domain-specific programs. Each is functionally specialized for solving a different adaptive problem that arose during hominid evolutionary history, such as face recognition, foraging, mate choice, heart rate regulation, sleep management, or predator vigilance, and each is activated by a different set of cues from the environment.
If you imagine these general theories or perspectives on the brain/mind as points in theory space, the evolved modularity cluster posits that much of the machinery of human mental algorithms is largely innate. General learning - if it exists at all - exists only in specific modules; in most modules learning is relegated to the role of adapting existing algorithms and acquiring data; the impact of the information environment is de-emphasized. In this view the brain is a complex messy cludge of evolved mechanisms.
There is another viewpoint cluster, more popular in computational neuroscience (especially today), that is almost the exact opposite of the evolved modularity hypothesis. I will rebrand this viewpoint the "universal learner" hypothesis, aka the "one learning algorithm" hypothesis (the rebranding is justified mainly by the inclusion of some newer theories and evidence for the basal ganglia as a 'CPU' which learns to control the cortex). The roots of the universal learning hypothesis can be traced back to Mountcastle's discovery of the simpl...
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