What I meant was that the connectionist alternative didnāt really take off until GPUs were used, making massive parallelism possible.
Thanks for the clarification! I guess you already noticed how research centers in cognitive science seem to have a failure mode over a specific value question: Do we seek excellence at the risk of overfitting funding agency criterion, or do we seek fidelity to our interdisciplinary mission at the risk of compromising growth?
I certainly agree that, before the GPUs, the connectionist approach had a very small share of the excellence tokens. But it was already instrumental in providing a common conceptual framework beyond cognitivism. As an example, even the first PCs were enough to run toy examples of double dissociation using networks structured by sensory type rather than by cognitive operation. From a neuropsychological point of view, that was already a key result. And for the neuroscientist in me, toy models like Kohonen maps were already key to make sense of why we need so many short inhibitory neurons in grid-like cortical structures.
Going back to Yevick, in her 1975 paper she often refers to holographic logic as āone-shotā logic, meaning that the whole identification process takes place in one operation, the illumination of the hologram (i.e. the holographic memory store) by the reference beam. The whole memory āsurfaceā is searched in one unitary operation.
Like a refresh rate? That would fit the evidence for a 3-7 Hz refresh rate of our cartesian theater, or the way LLMs go through prompt/āanswer cycles. Do you see other potential uses for this concept?
Weāve got to understand how the memory is structured so that that is possible.
In a paper I wrote awhile back I cite the late Walter Freeman as arguing that āconsciousness arises as discontinuous whole-hemisphere states succeeding one another at a āframe rateā of 6 Hz to 10 Hzā (p. 2). Iām willing to speculate that thatās your āone-shotā refresh rate. BTW, Freeman didnāt believe in a Cartesian theater and neither do it; the imagery of the stage āup thereā and the seating area āback hereā is not at all helpful. Weāre not talking about some specific location or space in the brain; weāre talking about a process.
Well, of course, āthe distributed way.ā But what is that? Prompt engineering is about maneuvering your way through the LLM; youāre attempting to manipulate the structure inherent in those weights to produce a specific result you want.
That 1978 comment of Yevickās that I quote in that blog post I mentioned somewhere up there, was in response to an article by John Haugeland evaluating cognitivism. He wondered whether or not there was an alternative and suggested holography as a possibility. He didnāt make a very plausible case and few of the commentators took is as a serious alternative.
People were looking for alternatives. But it took awhile for connectionism to build up a record of interesting results, on the one hand, for cognitivism to begin seeming stale on the other hand. Itās the combination of the two that brought about significant intellectual change. Or thatās my speculation.
Iām willing to speculate that [6 Hz to 10 Hz ]thatās your āone-shotā refresh rate.
Itās possible. I donāt think there was relevant human data in Walter Freeman time, so Iām willing to speculate thatās indeed the frame rate in mouse. But I didnāt check the literature he had access to, so just a wild guess.
the imagery of the stage āup thereā and the seating area āback hereā is not at all helpful
I agree thereās no seating area. I still find the concept of a cartesian theater useful. For exemple, it allows knowing where to plant electrodes if you want to access the visual cartesian theater for rehabilitation purposes. I guess youād agree that can be helpful. š
Weāre not talking about some specific location or space in the brain; weāre talking about a process.
I have friends who believe that, but they canāt explain why the brain needs that much ordering in the sensory areas. Whatās your own take?
But what is [the distributed way]that?
You know backprop algorithm? Thatās a mathematical model for the distributed way. It was recently shown that it produces networks that explains (statistically speaking) most the properties of the BOLD cortical response in our visial systems. So, whatever the biological cortices actually do, it turns equivalent for the Ā« distributed memory Ā» aspect.
Or thatās my speculation.
I wonder if thatās too flattering for connectionism, which mostly stalled until the early breakthrough in computer vision suddenly attract every labs. BTW
Is accessing the visual cartesian theater physically different from accessing the visual cortex? Granted, thereās a lot of visual cortex, and different regions seem to have different functions. Is the visual cartesian theater some specific region of visual cortex?
Iām not sure what your question about ordering in sensory areas is about.
As for backprop, that gets the distribution done, but thatās only part of the problem. In LLMs, for example, it seems that syntactic information is handled in the first few layers of the model. Given the way texts are structured, it makes sense that sentence-level information should be segregated from information about collections of sentences. Thatās the kind of structure Iām talking about. Sure, backprop is responsible for those layers, but itās responsible for all the other layers as well. Why do we seem to have different kinds of information in different layers at all? Thatās what interests me.
Actually, it just makes sense to me that that is the case. Given that it is, what is located where? As for why things are segregated by location, that does need an answer, doesnāt it. Is that what you were asking?
Is accessing the visual cartesian theater physically different from accessing the visual cortex? Granted, thereās a lot of visual cortex, and different regions seem to have different functions. Is the visual cartesian theater some specific region of visual cortex?
In my view: yes, no. To put some flesh on the bone, my working hypothesis is: whatās conscious is gamma activity within an isocortex connected to the claustrum (because thatās the information which will get selected for the next conscious frame/ācan be considered as in working memory)
Iām not sure what your question about ordering in sensory areas is about.
You said: what matters is temporal dynamics. I said: why so many maps if what matters is timing?
Why do we seem to have different kinds of information in different layers at all? Thatās what interests me.
The closer to the input, the more sensory. The closer to the output, the more motor. The closer to the restrictions, the easier to interpret activity as latent space. Is there any regularity that you feel hard to interpret this way?
Finally, hereās an idea Iāve been playing around with for a long time:
Thanks, Iāll go read. Donāt hesitate to add other links that can help understand your vision.
You mean this: āWeāre not talking about some specific location or space in the brain; weāre talking about a process.ā
You mean thereās some key difference in meaning between your original formulation and my reformulation? Care to elaborate and formulate some specific prediction?
As an example, I once gave a try at interpreting data from olfactory system for a friend who were wondering if we could find sign of an chaotic attractor. If you ever toy with Lorenz model, one key feature is: you either see the attractor by plotting x vs vs z, or you can see it by plotting one of these variable only vs itself at t+delta vs itself at t+2*delta (for many deltas). In other words, that gives a precise feature you can look for (I didnāt find any, and nowadays it seems accepted that odors are location specific, like every other sense). Do you have a better idea or itās more or less what youād have tried?
Iāve lost the thread entirely. Where have I ever said or implied that odors are not location specific or that anything else is not location specific. And how specific are you about location? Are we talking about centimeters (or more), millimeters, individual cortical columns?
Whatās so obscure about the idea that consciousness is a process that can take place pretty much anywhere, though maybe its confined to interaction within the cortex and between subcortical areas, Iāve not given that one much thought. BTW, I take my conception of consciousness from William Powers, who didnāt speculation about its location in the brain.
Nothing at all. Iām big fan of these kind of ideas and Iād love to present yours to some friends, but Iām afraid theyāll get dismissive if I canāt translate your thoughts into their usual frame of reference. But I get you didnāt work this aspect specifically, thereās many fields in cognitive sciences.
About how much specificity, itās up to interpretation. A (1k by 1k by frame by cell type by density) tensor representing the cortical columns within the granular cortices is indeed a promising interpretation, although itād probably be short of an extrapyramidal tensor (and maybe an agranular one).
Well, when Walter Freeman was working on the olfactory cortex of rodents he was using a surface mounted 8x8 matrix of electrodes. I assume that measured in millimeters. In his 1999 paper Consciousness, Intentionality, and Causality (paragraphs 36 ā 43) a hemisphere-wide global operator (42):
I propose that the globally coherent activity, which is an order parameter, may be an objective correlate of awareness through preafference, comprising expectation and attention, which are based in prior proprioceptive and exteroceptive feedback of the sensory consequences of previous actions, after they have undergone limbic integration to form Gestalts, and in the goals that are emergent in the limbic system. In this view, awareness is basically akin to the intervening state variable in a homeostatic mechanism, which is both a physical quantity, a dynamic operator, and the carrier of influence from the past into the future that supports the relation between a desired set point and an existing state.
Later (43):
What is most remarkable about this operator is that it appears to be antithetical to initiating action. It provides a pervasive neuronal bias that does not induce phase transitions, but defers them by quenching local fluctuations (Prigogine, 1980). It alters the attractor landscapes of the lower order interactive masses of neurons that it enslaves. In the dynamicist view, intervention by states of awareness in the process of consciousness organizes the attractor landscape of the motor systems, prior to the instant of its next phase transition, the moment of choosing in the limbo of indecision, when the global dynamic brain activity pattern is increasing its complexity and fine-tuning the guidance of overt action. This state of uncertainty and unreadiness to act may last a fraction of a second, a minute, a week, or a lifetime. Then when a contemplated act occurs, awareness follows the onset of the act and does not precede it.
He goes on from there. Iām not sure whether he came back to that idea before he died in 2016. I havenāt found it, didnāt do an exhaustive search, but I did look.
A few comments before later. š
Thanks for the clarification! I guess you already noticed how research centers in cognitive science seem to have a failure mode over a specific value question: Do we seek excellence at the risk of overfitting funding agency criterion, or do we seek fidelity to our interdisciplinary mission at the risk of compromising growth?
I certainly agree that, before the GPUs, the connectionist approach had a very small share of the excellence tokens. But it was already instrumental in providing a common conceptual framework beyond cognitivism. As an example, even the first PCs were enough to run toy examples of double dissociation using networks structured by sensory type rather than by cognitive operation. From a neuropsychological point of view, that was already a key result. And for the neuroscientist in me, toy models like Kohonen maps were already key to make sense of why we need so many short inhibitory neurons in grid-like cortical structures.
Like a refresh rate? That would fit the evidence for a 3-7 Hz refresh rate of our cartesian theater, or the way LLMs go through prompt/āanswer cycles. Do you see other potential uses for this concept?
Whatās wrong with Ā« the distributed way Ā»?
In a paper I wrote awhile back I cite the late Walter Freeman as arguing that āconsciousness arises as discontinuous whole-hemisphere states succeeding one another at a āframe rateā of 6 Hz to 10 Hzā (p. 2). Iām willing to speculate that thatās your āone-shotā refresh rate. BTW, Freeman didnāt believe in a Cartesian theater and neither do it; the imagery of the stage āup thereā and the seating area āback hereā is not at all helpful. Weāre not talking about some specific location or space in the brain; weāre talking about a process.
Well, of course, āthe distributed way.ā But what is that? Prompt engineering is about maneuvering your way through the LLM; youāre attempting to manipulate the structure inherent in those weights to produce a specific result you want.
That 1978 comment of Yevickās that I quote in that blog post I mentioned somewhere up there, was in response to an article by John Haugeland evaluating cognitivism. He wondered whether or not there was an alternative and suggested holography as a possibility. He didnāt make a very plausible case and few of the commentators took is as a serious alternative.
People were looking for alternatives. But it took awhile for connectionism to build up a record of interesting results, on the one hand, for cognitivism to begin seeming stale on the other hand. Itās the combination of the two that brought about significant intellectual change. Or thatās my speculation.
Itās possible. I donāt think there was relevant human data in Walter Freeman time, so Iām willing to speculate thatās indeed the frame rate in mouse. But I didnāt check the literature he had access to, so just a wild guess.
I agree thereās no seating area. I still find the concept of a cartesian theater useful. For exemple, it allows knowing where to plant electrodes if you want to access the visual cartesian theater for rehabilitation purposes. I guess youād agree that can be helpful. š
I have friends who believe that, but they canāt explain why the brain needs that much ordering in the sensory areas. Whatās your own take?
You know backprop algorithm? Thatās a mathematical model for the distributed way. It was recently shown that it produces networks that explains (statistically speaking) most the properties of the BOLD cortical response in our visial systems. So, whatever the biological cortices actually do, it turns equivalent for the Ā« distributed memory Ā» aspect.
I wonder if thatās too flattering for connectionism, which mostly stalled until the early breakthrough in computer vision suddenly attract every labs. BTW
Is accessing the visual cartesian theater physically different from accessing the visual cortex? Granted, thereās a lot of visual cortex, and different regions seem to have different functions. Is the visual cartesian theater some specific region of visual cortex?
Iām not sure what your question about ordering in sensory areas is about.
As for backprop, that gets the distribution done, but thatās only part of the problem. In LLMs, for example, it seems that syntactic information is handled in the first few layers of the model. Given the way texts are structured, it makes sense that sentence-level information should be segregated from information about collections of sentences. Thatās the kind of structure Iām talking about. Sure, backprop is responsible for those layers, but itās responsible for all the other layers as well. Why do we seem to have different kinds of information in different layers at all? Thatās what interests me.
Actually, it just makes sense to me that that is the case. Given that it is, what is located where? As for why things are segregated by location, that does need an answer, doesnāt it. Is that what you were asking?
Finally, hereās an idea Iāve been playing around with for a long time: Neural Recognizers: Some [old] notes based on a TV tube metaphor [perceptual contact with the world].
In my view: yes, no. To put some flesh on the bone, my working hypothesis is: whatās conscious is gamma activity within an isocortex connected to the claustrum (because thatās the information which will get selected for the next conscious frame/ācan be considered as in working memory)
You said: what matters is temporal dynamics. I said: why so many maps if what matters is timing?
The closer to the input, the more sensory. The closer to the output, the more motor. The closer to the restrictions, the easier to interpret activity as latent space. Is there any regularity that you feel hard to interpret this way?
Thanks, Iāll go read. Donāt hesitate to add other links that can help understand your vision.
āYou said: what matters is temporal dynamicsā
You mean this: āWeāre not talking about some specific location or space in the brain; weāre talking about a process.ā
If so, all I meant was a process that can take place pretty much anywhere. Consciousness can pretty much āfloatā to wherever its needed.
Since you asked for more, why not this: Direct Brain-to-Brain Thought Transfer: A High Tech Fantasy that Wonāt Work.
You mean thereās some key difference in meaning between your original formulation and my reformulation? Care to elaborate and formulate some specific prediction?
As an example, I once gave a try at interpreting data from olfactory system for a friend who were wondering if we could find sign of an chaotic attractor. If you ever toy with Lorenz model, one key feature is: you either see the attractor by plotting x vs vs z, or you can see it by plotting one of these variable only vs itself at t+delta vs itself at t+2*delta (for many deltas). In other words, that gives a precise feature you can look for (I didnāt find any, and nowadays it seems accepted that odors are location specific, like every other sense). Do you have a better idea or itās more or less what youād have tried?
Iāve lost the thread entirely. Where have I ever said or implied that odors are not location specific or that anything else is not location specific. And how specific are you about location? Are we talking about centimeters (or more), millimeters, individual cortical columns?
Whatās so obscure about the idea that consciousness is a process that can take place pretty much anywhere, though maybe its confined to interaction within the cortex and between subcortical areas, Iāve not given that one much thought. BTW, I take my conception of consciousness from William Powers, who didnāt speculation about its location in the brain.
Nothing at all. Iām big fan of these kind of ideas and Iād love to present yours to some friends, but Iām afraid theyāll get dismissive if I canāt translate your thoughts into their usual frame of reference. But I get you didnāt work this aspect specifically, thereās many fields in cognitive sciences.
About how much specificity, itās up to interpretation. A (1k by 1k by frame by cell type by density) tensor representing the cortical columns within the granular cortices is indeed a promising interpretation, although itād probably be short of an extrapyramidal tensor (and maybe an agranular one).
Well, when Walter Freeman was working on the olfactory cortex of rodents he was using a surface mounted 8x8 matrix of electrodes. I assume that measured in millimeters. In his 1999 paper Consciousness, Intentionality, and Causality (paragraphs 36 ā 43) a hemisphere-wide global operator (42):
Later (43):
He goes on from there. Iām not sure whether he came back to that idea before he died in 2016. I havenāt found it, didnāt do an exhaustive search, but I did look.