Comment by calepayson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by calepayson | Hacker News Reader

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> Fantastic speculation here, explains a lot, and has testable hypotheses.

Calvin is the man.

> For example, there should be a relationship between rate of learning and the physical subcolumns - we should be able to identify when a single column starts up / is fully trained / is overused

This sounds super interesting. Could you break down what you're thinking here?

> Marvin Minsky was spot on about the general idea 50 years ago, seeing the brain as a collection of 1000s of atomic operators (society of mind?)

I'm very much an amateur in this field and was under the impression that Minsky was trying to break it up, but was trying to specify each of those operations. What I find so enticing about Neural Darwinism is the lack of specification needed. Ideally, once you get the underlying process right, there's a cascade of emergent properties.

Using the example of a murmuration of starlings I picture Minsky trying to describe phase transitions between every possible murmuration state. On the other hand I see Neural Darwinism as an attempt to describe the behavior of a single starling which can then be scaled to thousands.

Let me know if that's super wrong. I've only read second hand descriptions of Minsky's ideas, so feel free to send some homework my way.

> I've only read second hand descriptions of Minsky's ideas, so feel free to send some homework my way.

Here you go: https://breckyunits.com/marvin-minsky.html

I think you are right in that Minsky was missing some important details in the branches of the tree, particularly around cortical columns, but he was old when Hawkins and Numenta released their stuff.

In terms of the root idea of the mind being a huge number of concurrent agents, I think he was close to the bullseye and it very much aligns with what you wrote.

Awesome post, thanks. I ordered society of mind.

Reminds me of when I took "The Philosophy of Cognitive Science" in college. The entire class was on AI. When I asked the professor why, she explained: "You don't understand something unless you can build it".

It's cool to learn that quote might have been because she's a fan of Minsky.

> In terms of the root idea of the mind being a huge number of concurrent agents, I think he was close to the bullseye and it very much aligns with what you wrote.

I think you're right here and I'd like to add a bit. One common mistake people make when thinking of evolution, is where in the hierarchy it takes place. In other words, they misidentify the agents by an order of magnitude.

For example, in biology I commonly see it taught that the individual is the subject of natural selection (or worse, the population).

Really, it's the gene. The beauty of evolution is that it can take an agent as simple as the gene and shape it into the litany of complex forms and functions we see all around us.

If evolution is at play in the brain, I suspect that Minsky's agents are the individual firing patterns. Like genes, the base of the hierarchy, the fundamental unit. Also like genes, they slowly build increasingly complex behaviors from the ground up. Starting before birth and continuing for most of our lives.

Right, the Selfish Gene is one of the best books I ever read.

There's also a paper I recently came across (https://warpcast.com/breck/0xea2e1a35) which talks about how causation is a two way street: low level nodes cause things in higher level nodes, but higher level nodes in turn cause things in lower level nodes.

In other words, just because genes have really been the drivers and our bodies just the vehicles, doesn't mean that's not cyclical (sometimes it could cycle to be the higher level ideas driving the evolution in lower level agents).

> I suspect that Minsky's agents are the individual firing patterns.

I like this idea. The biggest open question in my mind in regards to Minsky still is exactly on this: what physically is an agent? How many are there? My margin of error here is wild -- like 10 orders of magnitude.

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