Just to be clear, I was speculating in that section about filial imprinting in geese, not familial bonding in humans. I presume that those two things are different in lots of important ways. In fact, for all I know, they might have nothing whatsoever in common. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(UPDATE: I guess the Westermarck Effect might be implemented in a Section-13.3-like way, although not necessarily.)
If the learned representations change over time as the agent learns, the thought assessors have to keep up and do the same, otherwise their accuracy will slowly degrade over time.
Yeah, that seems possible (although I also consider it possible that it’s not a problem; by analogy, catastrophic forgetting is famously more of an issue for ANNs than for brains).
If the learned representations do in fact change a lot over time, I’m slightly skeptical that it would be possible to solve that problem directly, thanks to the lack of an independent ground truth. For example, I can imagine a system that says “If I’m >95% confident that this is MOMMY, then update such that I’m 100% confident that this is MOMMY.” Maybe that system would work to keep pointing at the real mommy, even as learned representations drift. But also, maybe that system would cause the Thought Assessor to gradually go off the rails and trigger off weird patterns in noise. Not sure. Did you have something like that in mind? Or something different?
An alternative might be that, if the specific filial-imprinting mechanism gradually stops working over time, it deactivates at some point and the (now-adolescent) goose switches to some other mechanism(s), like “desire to be with fellow geese that are extremely familiar to me” a la Section 13.4.
Reminder that I know very little about goose behavior and this is all casual speculation. :)
Ok, so this is definitely not a human thing, so probably a bit of a tangent. One of the topics that came up in a neuroscience class once was goose imprinting. There’s apparently been studies (see Eckhard Hess for the early ones) that show that the strength of the imprinting (measured by behavior following the close of the critical period) onto whatever target is related to how much running towards the target the baby geese do. The hand-wavey explanation was something like ‘probably this makes sense since if you have to run a lot to keep up with your mother-goose for safety, you’ll need a strong mother-goose-following behavioral tendency to keep you safe through early development’.
Thanks!
Just to be clear, I was speculating in that section about filial imprinting in geese, not familial bonding in humans. I presume that those two things are different in lots of important ways. In fact, for all I know, they might have nothing whatsoever in common. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(UPDATE: I guess the Westermarck Effect might be implemented in a Section-13.3-like way, although not necessarily.)
Yeah, that seems possible (although I also consider it possible that it’s not a problem; by analogy, catastrophic forgetting is famously more of an issue for ANNs than for brains).
If the learned representations do in fact change a lot over time, I’m slightly skeptical that it would be possible to solve that problem directly, thanks to the lack of an independent ground truth. For example, I can imagine a system that says “If I’m >95% confident that this is MOMMY, then update such that I’m 100% confident that this is MOMMY.” Maybe that system would work to keep pointing at the real mommy, even as learned representations drift. But also, maybe that system would cause the Thought Assessor to gradually go off the rails and trigger off weird patterns in noise. Not sure. Did you have something like that in mind? Or something different?
An alternative might be that, if the specific filial-imprinting mechanism gradually stops working over time, it deactivates at some point and the (now-adolescent) goose switches to some other mechanism(s), like “desire to be with fellow geese that are extremely familiar to me” a la Section 13.4.
Reminder that I know very little about goose behavior and this is all casual speculation. :)
Ok, so this is definitely not a human thing, so probably a bit of a tangent. One of the topics that came up in a neuroscience class once was goose imprinting. There’s apparently been studies (see Eckhard Hess for the early ones) that show that the strength of the imprinting (measured by behavior following the close of the critical period) onto whatever target is related to how much running towards the target the baby geese do. The hand-wavey explanation was something like ‘probably this makes sense since if you have to run a lot to keep up with your mother-goose for safety, you’ll need a strong mother-goose-following behavioral tendency to keep you safe through early development’.
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/12/imprinting