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K0SM0S commented on Space is a latent sequence: A theory of the hippocampus   science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/XzetaU8
IIAOPSW · a year ago
I'm of the position this might be correct in the specific case of humans, but not fundamental to the algorithms of consciousness. Eg we could have similar emergent phenomena in algorithmic trading bots where all the emergent constructions are defined in terms of money and financial concepts rather than spatial concepts. They live in a reality of dollar signs rather than physical dimensions. That's neither inherently better nor worse.

In fact, I'm somewhat of the position that nearly any grounding in a domain of shared objects where signalling is inexpensive would be suitable. That said, AI agents which grew up in some alien domain of shared objects would find us as unintuitive to reason about as we find quantum mechanics uninituitive to reason about. If the goal is AI that acts and talks like us, your way may be the way to go.

K0SM0S · a year ago
I've no idea what the c-word means (consciousness), so I'll leave that aside; everything else checks out as absolutely sensible to me.

Your last sentence strikes me as particularly validating.

"My way", this framework, was meant to give a mechanistic description of our individual, subjective "inner world." Much like physics speaks of the outer, shared world; and in compliance with all objective 'hard' sciences.

Indeed, it lends itself particularly well to be exploited by AI, notably in terms of architecture and domain-selection (by whatever core we call 'sapience') within a "Mixture-of-Experts" paradigm of sorts—which biology seems to have done: dedicated organs or sub-parts for each purpose, the Unix way to "Do one thing and/to do it well."

K0SM0S commented on Space is a latent sequence: A theory of the hippocampus   science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/XzetaU8
sameoldtune · a year ago
There’s an idea in psych that a high IQ correlates more than anything to an increased ability to navigate complex spaces. That’s what we do when we program, we create conceptual spaces and then imagine data flowing through them. And it is also why being intelligent in that way is seemingly so useful in everyday situations like budgeting, avoiding injury, and navigating institutions.

It’s not all roses though—to quote Garrison Keillor, “being intelligent means you will find yourself stranded in more remote locations”

K0SM0S · a year ago
Intuitively, I tend to agree.

To elaborate a bit, I think there are layers in-between raw IQ and practical proprioception, for instance. Balancing one's body involves the full neural chain, down to origin (which is the end-cell, the sensor/motor device), and quite evidently can be trained to orders of magnitude more accuracy.

So to think like a tech stack of sorts, from the meat (purely biological, since the first unicellular organisms) to the highest-level (call it 'sapience', 'wisdom', whatever; that which is even above IQ), you'd find something that goes

good-enough bodily genetics + trained sensor & motor neural precision + high IQ for good aim and strategy + sapient decision-making

in order to best navigate complex spaces.

Case in point: cliche nerds (not your best dancers/athletes), unwise yet very intelligent people, bad draw at the genetic lottery for negative examples; conversely a very gifted "natural born" athlete or musician (which doesn't mean that without training they wouldn't get beaten flat by any seasoned professional) doubling as a strategy prodigy, or zen master, whatever 'wise-r.'

If we admit that space[time] is the "language of the brain" (what IQ actually tests), and therefore that even social spaces—like love, business, or politics—are navigated from the same core skills than physical spaces like sports. (That much perhaps is a stretch, it may be more complicated; but perhaps partially true for 'core functions' as it were. Perhaps like 'speech mastery' alone is a core function that contributes to a slew of more complex tasks/goals).

K0SM0S commented on Space is a latent sequence: A theory of the hippocampus   science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/XzetaU8
nonrandomstring · a year ago
It's lovey to see areas starting to connect, in neuroscience, AI/comp-sci and philosophy.

Let's remember philosophy started as questions about the cosmos, the stars. Very much physical reality. And practical too, for agriculture and navigation. How do we get from A to B and acquire food and other goods. Over about 5000 years it's come to be "relegated to the unreal", disparaged by radical positivists who seem unable to make connections between areas (ironic from a neural POV).

A 'modern' philosopher I'll suggest here on "representation of space-time" is Harrold Innes [0]. For those who are patient readers and literate in economics, anthropology, linguistics and computer science (and working on any field of AI relating language to space) I'd hope it would be a trove of ideas about how our brains developed over the ages to handle "space and time".

Some will be mystified how study of railways, maps and fish trading has anything to do with cognitive neuroscience and representing space. But it has everything to do with it, because we encode the things that matter to our survival and those things shape how our brains are structured. Only very recent modernity and anti-polymath, hyper-specialisation has made us forget this way that the stars, the soil and our brains are connected.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Innis

K0SM0S · a year ago
I'm sorry I couldn't reply sooner. The sibling comment took all my free time last week (lol).

I've taken great interest in Harrold. It'll be some time until I can deep dive into anything besides work, but he's made my top 10 list of thinkers to know and potentially assimilate into my research framework (I treat theoretical signals not as data but as methods, essentially, a panel of "ways to think about the data" itself).

Thank you very much for the suggestion (and for that write up, it really helped).

K0SM0S commented on Space is a latent sequence: A theory of the hippocampus   science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/XzetaU8
paulrudy · a year ago
Since I only partly understand your comment, I'm not sure if this pertains, but the phrase "spatiotemporal encoding" caught my attention. It makes intuitive sense that complex cognitive function would be connected to spatiotemporal sensations and ideas in an embodied nervous system evolved for, among other things, managing itself spatially and temporally.

Also, Riccardo Manzotti's book "The Spread Mind" seems connected. Part of the thesis is that the brain doesn't form a "model" version of the world with which to interact, but instead, the world's effects are kept active within the brain, even over extremely variable timespans. Objects of consciousness can't be definitively separated from their "external" causes, and can be considered the ongoing activity of those causes, "within" us.

Conscious experience as "encoding" in that sense would not be an inner representation of an outer reality, but more a kind of spatiotemporal imprint that is identical with and inextricable from the activity of "outer" events that precipitated it. The "mind" is not a separate observer or calculator but is "spread" among all phenomenal objects/events with which it has interacted--even now-dead stars whose light we might have seen.

Not sure if I'm doing the book justice here, but it's a great read, and satisfyingly methodical. The New York Review has an interview series if you want to get a sense of the ideas before committing to the book.

K0SM0S · a year ago
This is salient enough that I think you intuitively understood my comment. I won't pretend I can fully explain pending hypotheses either, it's more about research angles (e.g., connecting tools with problem categories).

Thanks a lot for the recommendations. That's what I love about HN. One often gets next-level great pointers.

> Objects of consciousness can't be definitively separated from their "external" causes, and can be considered the ongoing activity of those causes, "within" us.

Emphatically yes.

> […] spatiotemporal imprint that is identical with and inextricable from the activity of "outer" events that precipitated it

Exactly, noticing that it includes, and/or is shaped, by "inner" events as well.

So there's the outer world, and there's your inner world, and only a tiny part of the latter is termed "conscious". We gotta go about life from that certainly vantage but incredibly limited perspective too. The 'folding power' of nature (to put so much information in so little space) is mesmerizing, truly.

I like to put it down to earth to think about it. When you're in pain, or hungry, or sleepy—any pure physiological, biological state,—it will noticeably impact (alter, color, shade, formally "transform" as in filters or gating of) the whole system.

Your perception (stimuli), your actions (responses), your non-conscious impulses (intuitions, instincts, needs & wants…), your emotions, thoughts, and even decision-making and moral values.

I can't elaborate much here as it's bound to get abstract too fast, to seem obfuscated when it's everything but. I should probably write a blog or something, ha ha. You too, you seem quite astute at wording those things.

Thanks again a million for that reply.

K0SM0S commented on Space is a latent sequence: A theory of the hippocampus   science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/XzetaU8
observationist · a year ago
This is coming from Dileep George and the Jeff Hawkins adjacent theories around hierarchical temporal memory, cortical columns, and much of the higher level theory around what it is that the brain is doing in its smallest, repeated functional units. They split some time back, but they're both quite rigorous and have done exciting research. This paper goes over allocentric framing of learning, allowing cortical networks to be built through learning and thinking over time, driving a more complex and nuanced model of the world to be built throughout the networks in the brain, where the hippocampus seems to hold the long term memory, with connections that feed back up to nearly every region in the cortex. It's not complete, but it abstracts a level away from phenomenological observations like the notion of Jennifer Aniston cells, or mirror neurons, or things that occur as a consequence of some underlying functionality. We're getting much closer to a complete picture of the algorithms underlying human intelligence, and those may unlock human level machine intelligence, the understanding of consciousness, and all sorts of great medicine and technology. Google made a good choice in hiring Dileep George.
K0SM0S · a year ago
Agreed.

Anecdotal (but deep) research led me to postulate that our entire "inner world", for lack of a better word, is an emergent construction based on a fundamentally spatiotemporal encoding of the external world. This assumes that feeding and motility, i.e., a geometric interpretation of the external world, is among the first 'functions' of living organisms in the evolutionary order. They subsequently became foundational for neuronal systems when these appeared about 500 million years ago.

The hypothesis was informed by language notably, where most things are defined in spatial terms and concepts (temporal too, though more rarely), as if physical experiences of the world were the building blocks of thinking, really. A "high" council, a "sub" culture, a "cover", an "adjacent" concept, a "bigger" love, a "convoluted" or "twisted" idea, etc.

Representations in one's inner world are all about shape, position, and movement of things in some abstract space of sorts.

This is exactly how I'd use a 4D modeling engine to express a more 'Turing-complete' language, a more comprehensive experience (beyond movement: senses, intuitions, emotions, thoughts, beliefs…): use its base elements as a generator set to express more complex objects through composition in larger and/or higher-dim space. Could nature, Evolution, have done just that? Iteratively as it conferred survival advantages to these genes? What would that look like for each layer of development of neuronal—and later centralized "brain"—systems?

Think as in geometric algebra, maybe; e.g., think how the metric of a Clifford algebra may simply express valence or modality, for those neuronal patterns to trigger the proper neurotransmitters. In biological brains, we've already observed neural graphs up to 11 dimensions (with a bimodal distribution peak around ~2.5D and ~3.8D iirc… Interestingly for sure, right within the spatiotemporal ballpark, seeing as we experience the spatial world in 2.5D more than 3, unlike fishes or birds).

Jeff Hawkins indeed strongly shaped my curiosity, notably in "A Thousand Brains" and subsequent interviews. The paper here immediately struck me as very salient to that part of my philosophical and ML research—so kinda not too surprised there's history there.

And I'm really going off on a tangent here, but I'm pretty sure the "tokenization problem" (as expressed by e.g. Karpathy) may eventually be better solved using a spatiotemporal characterization of the world. Possibly much closer to real-life language in biological brains, for the above reasons. Video pretraining of truly multimodal models may constitute a breakthrough in that regard, perhaps to synthesize or identify the "ideal" text divisions, a better generator set for (any) language.

K0SM0S commented on FastHTML – Modern web applications in pure Python   fastht.ml/... · Posted by u/bpierre
openrisk · a year ago
What would be cool++ (and potentially very impactful) is if somebody builds a python/htmx native "wordpress" on top of this. The Python ecosystem offers django/wagtail and some other CMS like options but imho they have not (yet?) taped into the vast potential of the Python ecosystem once the algorithmic / data science part is natively integrated with cms type web apps.

The .ml domain extension may be exactly the placeholder needed :-)

K0SM0S · a year ago
About .ml

The first demo Jeremy put out was called "Build Applications For LLMs in Python",¹ as part of the "Mastering LLMs" conference by Hamel Husain and Dan Becker.² (You can see a few PoC demos by the end of that video when Johno takes over, it looks a lot like what Gradio or Streamlit can do).

So I think your .ml angle is definitely part of the original ethos of FastHTML (which isn't surprising coming from the founder of fast.ai & answer.ai, among other things).

The FastHTML team explicitly recommends would-be contributors to consider making reusable components, the likes of Gradio's, to facilitate all the things notably relating to AI workflows.

----

About WordPress & CMS

That part is admittedly much larger in scope. I'd expect it to rise in correlation with the success of FastHTML itself in the Python web ecosystem writ large (beyond data / AI) but no sooner—unless someone makes a killer case for a FastHTML-based Python CMS that becomes a driver of popularity, but that's admittedly a much taller and wider order than 'simply' becoming the go-to #1 Python/ML prototype-to-market-at-scale one-stop shop. I mean, just that is huge, and yet nowhere near WordPress.

But tbh, I really like your idea, and I think it may eventually prove true, having used FastHTML first-hand for a few weeks now (and web dev being far from my turf). The fact is can ship with FastHTML, fast & well-behaved web apps, more than I ever could. If I ever get the time I'll play a bit to see what a legacy-free FastHTML CMS could look like. But no matter how good the engine, the plugin ecosystem is what makes WP, and no single dev or company can replicate that alone. It's an alchemy with the times, there are windows. Not sure one is open now.

----

¹ https://youtu.be/ptRaku0zyeA

² https://hamel.dev/blog/posts/course/

K0SM0S commented on FastHTML – Modern web applications in pure Python   fastht.ml/... · Posted by u/bpierre
lyjackal · a year ago
I’ve been trying out fasthtml as a more scalable prototyping tool for a side project. I’ve really enjoyed using it! I tried gradio first, but 1. didn’t like the look, and 2. You can’t really go off the beaten path. So far I’ve really enjoyed working with fast HTML and htmx. Honestly my biggest complaint on working with “Python-only” dev has been the CSS. I wanted to give the app an easy, but unique/customized look. Most CSS libraries expect to be part of a JS based build pipeline for any type of customization. bootstrap still requires scss customizations, tailwind is its own thing of configuration, pre-processors and tree shaking. Really wish there was a robust css library that relied on css-variables to customize. There are a few but they’re relatively anemic. Anyone know of any good options out there that would be a good fit, or did tailwind just eat everything up?
K0SM0S · a year ago
Pico CSS¹ essentially works like that, so you can hard-override any of its exposed variables² to suit your needs.

I discovered it through FastHTML (it was the CSS Jeremy and Johno Whitaker used in their first-ever demo³ early June), and find the 'dx' simple, stupid, in a great way.

----

¹ https://picocss.com/

² https://picocss.com/docs/css-variables#all-css-variables

³ https://youtu.be/ptRaku0zyeA

K0SM0S commented on ChatGPT just (accidentally) shared all of its secret rules   techradar.com/computing/a... · Posted by u/sabrina_ramonov
weinzierl · a year ago
I wonder what our means of escalation are from there, should the machine not obeye.

I mean they already repeated the instruction in different words, they already resorted to shouting. What is next? Swearing? Intimidation? Threat of physical harm?

K0SM0S · a year ago
Introducing: deusEx1984™ — A Chat-God Made In Permanent Psychological Ultra-Torture

Please read our peer-reviewed white-blog-paper for Proof-Of-Safety (POS) https : //trust-me-bro.org/torturing-llms--it-just-works.php

K0SM0S commented on Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder   lunduke.locals.com/post/5... · Posted by u/mapper32
renewiltord · a year ago
It's a Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation. So that means it must have raised $500k from other people, each of which cannot have given more than $30k. That's pretty impressive. I wonder who the other sponsors were.
K0SM0S · a year ago
Really impressive indeed, but I do get the interest. I, for one, will give 1% of my yearly income now that they're on my radar. It instantly ranks among the top 3 most important open-source projects in my opinion.

In terms of SWE, it doesn't get harder than an OS in my book (and not even from scratch). So them coming from success in that space is more than enough to convince me they can deliver a world-class browser core engine.

K0SM0S commented on Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder   lunduke.locals.com/post/5... · Posted by u/mapper32
josefresco · a year ago
What does Spotify gain by funding this project with $100K?
K0SM0S · a year ago
Naive guess: their shopping activity (leads, funnels, conversions/sales…) if/when in Ladybird would likely be tracked only by Shopify itself, at the exclusion of other big tech (most notably Google). This makes Shopify's dataset more valuable (differentiated by unique entries), which can be used in-house strategically to grow, or resold at a better price.

u/K0SM0S

KarmaCake day1642September 9, 2016View Original