am no expert in brain development, still have read about evolution. I like aspects of the way you mentioned this, but seems that putting cortex separately from fish brain isn't quite right. As you mentioned, the cortex is simply a part of the fish brain that evolved much (much, much) larger than a fish's. Maybe:
Fish Brain = brain stem + small cortex (+ other parts of brain)
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(evolved into)
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V
Human Brain = brain stem + gigantic cortex (+ other parts of brain)
Sorry, know this is splitting hairs, but just thought it a useful distinction to make.
That's not quite right - a fish does not have a cortex.
The pallium of a fish and mammal are structured differently. A fish's (& bird's) pallium has a clustered (aka "nuclear") organization, while a mammal's has a mostly layered organization which is what is referred to as the cortex.
There is also more to a brain than just brainstem + pallium. In a vertebrate it's brainstem (aka hindbrain) + midbrain + forebrain, with the pallium being part of the forebrain.
Interesting, but for me at least, this new research did not seem to promote the dispelled hypothesis about the reptile brain. Because the reptile brain hypothesis says a primitive reptile-brain evolved first (lower brain), then a separate part of the brain (upper brain) evolved later that was responsible for complex thought.
Actually, the upper and lower brains evolved together and most animals have both, including reptiles.
Didn't read it thoroughly, but your [2] reference seems to be saying this too.
And actually, the fact that the brain is actually two "developmental" systems combined into one seems like big news to me. We might not know its other uses, but probably for cognitive science and even AI research this might be super useful. In AI, maybe two models should be developed and trained in conjunction that talk to each other, each with different functions and roles, because brains work better this way.
And from what I read, evolution did this type of combined evolution somewhat often. The parts of the ear evolved from different "Gill slits" from when we were fish, meaning the ear isn't evolved from one group of cells in the embryo, but from multiple groups of cells that evolved into one organ system, the ear. Yeah, the middle ear evolved from a different "gill slit" from the outer and inner ear.
"The brain does it" is not in itself a reason to do the same in AI.
Sometimes, what the brain does is genuinely a good solution to a given task - one that's good regardless of whether your neural network is of artificial or biological variety. But sometimes, what the brain does is an evolutionary kludge, or a hack that works around one of the "being made of flesh" issues - of which there are a great many.
We have known examples of both - and a few known features that might go either way.
The brain does have some known useful features that we are yet to plunder - usually because we know they're there somewhere but not how they work. We don't know how the brain stabilizes online learning, for example. Or what low k-complexity priors and data augmentation processes does it use to enable its sample efficiency.
But a two-system split? Useless by itself. Splitting a network in two is easy - but if we don't know what that split does, what it buys us, what useful bias does it impart? We're just adding complexity. See: the investigation into HRMs, and how the "hierarchical" part proved to be a lot less meaningful than anticipated.
That's the thing: we ripped the entire idea of learning connectionist networks straight out of the brain - but our implementation of that idea is very different.
The asynchronous nature of BNNs? The brain does that because its neurons are slow and synchronization is unnatural. The predictive Hebbian learning hybrid that the brain uses? Loses to backprop if you have what it takes to implement backprop.
There are a lot of mediocre or unapplicable ideas in the brain for every good one. Figuring out how the brain does the things it does is hard enough - but making use of that is even harder. It's why ANNs and BNNs diverge so much in form even as they converge in function.
Eh, think you might not have read my comment well enough, because actually I partially agree with you in that two models may not be the best way to train an LLM. Yeah, I did say "In AI, maybe two models should be developed and trained in conjunction," meaning this is just some random idea based on the two system idea that might be useful.
Was just implying we don't know all the useful ideas (not just in tech but in medicine, genetics, evolutionary bioligy, mathematics...) that might be developed because we now know that the brain is two separate systems.
It's all good though.
> maybe two models should be developed and trained in conjunction that talk to each other, each with different functions and roles, because brains work better this way.
I mean, is that not essentially what a Mixture of Experts model is?
Like the thought:) But actually have read that the hypothesis that the hindbrain (or lower brain) had evolved directly from our lizard ancestors while the upper brain (which does more complex types of thought) evolved later turned out to be wrong. Like the study has shown, they evolved at the same time, and many animals had both. It's just in humans, the upper brain evolved much larger in proportion to the lower brain.
As an American, would say more than half our country actually agrees with you. Trumps approval rating has fallen to 39% while 58% disapprove. Yeah, a lot of us in the US are in just as much amazement as the rest of the world at the crazy and petty actions he takes.
So we’re just bidding our time, waiting until the midterm elections to weaken the right, and then afterwards, we’ll just be counting the days until he’s out of office. Hopefully he’ll be replaced with someone who is at least halfway competent - it amazes us how almost everything the touches gets completely screwed up
And i as an average European just want to say - we feel with you and all the others that are suffering through this. I don't know either what I could or would do if my own government went this route. I hope your institutions and the people's resilience will overcome this dark chapter of American history and build a better foundation on top.
>I hope your institutions and the people's resilience will overcome this dark chapter of American history and build a better foundation on top.
I hope we can scrape it all back to the bedrock foundations of our country before we rebuild anything. I don't want any foundation built on top of this festering layer of bullshit. I'm afraid we will still have foundation problems in the future if we don't examine the reasons why it failed this time and set the rebuilt country up with one less failure mode.
Let's do this once. As they say where I'm from "There's only two ways to do anything - do it right or do it over."
Thanks, it’s been a real trial, but we can feel the momentum shifting - when Trump is truly let loose, he’s his own worst enemy. And agreed, hope our institutions hold up too:)
> Trumps approval rating has fallen to 39% while 58% disapprove.
> Hopefully he’ll be replaced with someone who is at least halfway competent
That's the point. You've vote for this guy TWICE. So probably when we talk about 58% disapprove, those 58% disapprove him not because of what he's doing, but because he's doing it to little and to incompetently.
It is scary that you want to replace him with another Trump, but "at least halfway competent". Oh boy!
?
Don’t think I was implying I wanted to replace him with another far-right candidate, just someone who is competent in general.
But do agree that we did all voted for him twice, so saying that maybe this is actually what it means to be an American could hold some truth. Still, don’t think so, he’s clearly one of, or the most divisive person in modern American history. It seems like most people here either love him or hate him with every fiber of their being.
Literally every campaign promise he's went back on. So, "Saying that maybe this is actually what it means to be an American could hold some truth" I don't really think is accurate lol
I know a lot of folks who voted for the man, almost all of them would love for a competent alternative. Unfortunately, in the last election, neither were competent, so a lot of it was a coin toss.
Ah this is true too (seeing as I didn’t vote for him, it doesn’t bother me that he’s done the opposite of his campaign promises).
But as for competent alternatives during last election, would think a young, vibrant, thoughtful Kamala Harris would have done a better job - Still, if I’m being honest, I was not a big fan of hers even though I would have voted for her (was out of state during the last election and voting got too complicated). So, I can understand if this turned off voters.
… although, if you were referring to Biden, then yeah, truly neither were competent choices.
> Don’t think I was implying I wanted to replace him with another far-right candidate, just someone who is competent in general.
Maybe you are not. But what about other 58%? In the end, you have elected him twice, and it's not like the guy was pretending to be the other person. Trump did exactly what everyone have expected him to do, if only incompetently and ineffectively.
more than half is pretty unlikely. about a third is. the rest dont care or actively support trump
the election results speak for themselves. Trump got more votes than he did in 2016 - americans by and large saw his shitshow and decided they wanted more
Am no expert at French history, but this feels like cherry-picking to me of what happened to France.
From what I read, one of the biggest reasons (besides the defeat at Waterloo) for the downfall of France to Britain was that in the 1700’s, France had wild speculation in the colonies in the Americas, specifically, in the Mississippi Company. When the bubble started collapsing, the Prime Minister at the time (John Law), put a lot of the French treasury into trying to support that bubble, but it collapsed anyway. Now the French government was relatively cash poor, which eventually led to losing a lot of its colonies to Britain, a great deal of unrest in France and the French Revolution.
And I am no history expert, so am unsure of this myself, but in my humble opinion, the idea that monarchy is why France lost its place in the world doesn’t seem like a major factor.
Actually, not sure how to take it, because it can be viewed the opposite way than trying to escape blame for crimes, that it’s a parody of something AI did that everyone is making a big deal about.
Not sure what the poster of the mastodon’s tweet was??
Hi there. Actually, Leqembi is a 1st gen Alzheimer’s drugs and targets amyloid plaques. But, like other responses, amyloids doesn’t seem to be hugely responsible for Alzheimers, which is why targeting things like tau proteins is being explored.
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