[0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-estimate-boos...
There are also studies that show “data” in the brain isn’t stored read-only and the process of accessing that memory involves remapping the neurons (which is how fake memories are possible) - so my take is if you access a memory or datum sequentially start to finish each time the brain knows this is to be stored verbatim for as-is retrieval but if you access snapshots of it or actively seek to and replay a certain part while trying to relate that memory to a process or a new task, the brain rewires the neural pathways accusingly. Which implies that there us an unconscious part that takes place globally plus an active, modifying process where how we use a stored memory affects how it is stored and indexed (so data isn’t accessed by simple fields but rather by complex properties or getters, in programming parlance).
I guess the key difference from how machine learning works (and I believe an integral part of AGI, if it is even possible) is that inference is constant, even when you’re only “looking up” data and you don’t know the right answer (i.e. not training stage). The brain recognizes how the new query differs from queries it has been trained on and can modify its own records to take into account the new data. For example, let’s say you’re trying to classify animals into groups and you’ve “been trained” on a dataset that doesn’t include monotremes or marsupials. The first time you come across a platypus in the wild (with its mammaries but no nipples, warm-blooded but lays eggs, and a single duct for waste and reproduction) you wouldn’t just mistakenly classify it as a bird or mammal - you would actively trigger a (delayed/background) reclassification of all your existing inferences to account for this new phenomenon, even though you don’t know what the answer to the platypus classification question is.
Somtimes it's almost like creating a specialist shard to take over the task. Driving is hard at first, with very high task overload, lots to pay attention to. With practice, it becomes a little automated part of yourself takes care of those tasks while your main general intelligence can do whatever it likes, even as the "driver" deals with seriously difficult tasks.
such that
> you nevertheless can recover enough information to be useful in the future.
I disagree (in case you meant to imply it) that compression implies generalization.
Aside from having to eventually experience the death of all stars and light and the decay of most of the universe's baryonic matter and then face an eternity of darkness with nothing to touch, it's yet another reason I don't think immortality (as opposed to just a very long lifespan) is actually desirable.
And when losing memories you would first just discard some details, like you lose now anyway, but you would start compressing centuries into rough ideas of what happened, it's just the details that would lack a bit.
I don't see it being a problem at all. And if really something happens with the Universe, sure I can die then, but why would I want to die before?
I want to know what happens, what gets discovered, what happens with humanity, how far do we reach in terms of understanding of what is going on in this place. Why are we here. Imagine dying and not even knowing why you were here.
...but that's exactly what OP said, no?
I remember attending an ML presentation where the speaker shared a quote I can't find anymore (speaking of memory and generalization :)), which said something like: "To learn is to forget"
If we memorized everything perfectly, we would not learn anything: instead of remembering the concept of a "chair", you would remember thousands of separate instances of things you've seen that have a certain combination of colors and shapes etc
It's the fact that we forget certain details (small differences between all these chairs) that makes us learn what a "chair" is.
Likewise, if you remembered every single word in a book, you would not understand its meaning; understanding its meaning = being able to "summarize" (compress) this long list of words into something more essential: storyline, characters, feelings, etc.
(https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-...)
Lossy compression = Intelligence
That's where the Hutter Prize falls down, it's based on lossless compression, which is nothing like how the brain works.
Not precisely. We don’t know if verbatim capacity is limited (and it doesn’t seem to be) but the brain operates in a space-efficient manner all the same. So there isn’t necessarily a causative relationship between “memory capacity” and “means of storage”.
> Likewise, if you remembered every single word in a book, you would not understand its meaning
I understand your meaning but I want to clarify for the sake of the discussion that unlike with ML, the human brain can both memorize verbatim and understand the meaning because there is no mechanism for memorizing something but not processing it (i.e. purely storage). The first pass(es) are stripped to their essentials but subsequent passes provide the ability to memorize the same input.
I am but a simple physicist and I can already tell you it is.
On the other extreme, are packers. They have optimized for packing facts in bulk, with little regard for how they fit together. If you give this type of person a set of instructions that require a wider knowledge of how things fit, they will get lost, frustrated, and/or need support. If you anticipate this, and spend a bit extra time to show how to handle all of the possible contingencies, (and give them a document of this) they're good, and will be quite happy with your support.
I think that mappers take more time figuring out the model, compressing the facts to save space, and increase applicability in general.
Or is it always running at the same pace regardless of if it’s empty or not?
I guess the Brian doesn’t really work like that…. But I’m curious :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain#Metabolism
> The energy consumption of the brain does not vary greatly over time
But having so much of the past being so accessible is tough. There are lots of memories I'd rather not have, that are vivid and easily called up. And still, I think it's only a fraction of what her memory seems to be like.
Same! They thought I was a genius in primary school but I ended up a loser adult with a dead end job. Turns out I just liked technology and was good at remembering facts and names for things.
While the upper bound is technically "infinity", there is a tradeoff between the amount of concepts stored and the fundamental amount of information storable per concept, similar to how other tradeoff principles like the uncertainty principle, etc work.
We don’t know if the animal brain works the same way, but I suspect it is mostly compression algorithms designed to predict things, and doesn’t store much data at all.
Geometry is good for training in this way—and often very helpful for physics proofs too!
this 'compression' is what 'understanding' something really entails; at first... but then there's more.
when knowledge becomes understood it enables perception (e.g. we perceive meaning in words once we learn to read).
when we get really good at this understanding-perception we may start to 'manipulate' the abstractions we 'perceive'. an example would be to 'understand a cube' and then being able to rotate it around so to predict what would happen without really needing the cube. but this is an overly simplistic example