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Why would modern thinkers wrestle with the problem of induction?

It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first. What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing. I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order. My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, czcams.com/video/J7Uh9phc1Ow/video.html

Harris William Thomas Mary Hall Brian

Well... I as a "correct", empathetic and competent individual didnt exactly see any benefits to this AI revolution. And yet now (as were being told) its uninevitable . Megalomanical idiots will be able to use AI to mimick empathy, and carefullness (especially if theyre rich), and its feeding it back into ourselves? Im not exactly sure why im not excited tbh. Give it some tasks, let it fulfill them and stop making it into a philosophical matter, as its a tool :) Its not AI per se that is the problem, it would be the over-reliance on digital systems for access and moreover, denial of acces for arbitrary reasons (imo)

It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first. What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing. I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order. My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461

Robinson Mary Lee Helen Harris Kimberly

The Book was Dense informative read, a bit speculative at times especially the chapter on Language. He seems to commit to ONE view of evolution of language (it is a Curiculum like Bird flight, we have instincts for conversation..and the general purpose learnign system Neocortex actually have regions , which were originally used for mentalizing, repurposed to aid that). There are various views on evolution of language and he just touches on those.

FWIW: it would be helpful to have a tiny bit more explicit discussion of the difference (as you two see it) between spikes and rate/population coding to frame the rest of the discussion. I’m still wondering if SNNs and spike dynamics cant be faithfully represented (idealised, abstracted) by rate (etc) coding ANNs in some fundamental in principle sense, in your views. Or, if the core dispute is just a about solving realism/resource/efficiency problems.

Learn me something. How do I decrease skepticism in my thinking. Thanks

My name is Rex JAMES JR Butterfield. It was only recently that God activated me to give a message to the entire world. This message involves the entire world at the exact moment that the world needs to hear to help save mankind from destroying itself. Please listen to me, I have all the proof you will need to verify my claims. I have stigmata, my name has been on the cross for 2,000 yrs as a sign as to who's up. You may not like or understand why God chose Rex. That's for to explain in person and my mission. I can dazzle your minds about human behavior and the universe and how everything interacts with everything. Please, I'm ready to come out because my message is so important and can unite the world as one instead of divide. Last week, I predicted a major shift in suffering and look at Bangladesh. And I feel more is to come. Please help me stop the war. And I know where Jesus is buried. And I'll inform you of things that only the church knows about the intimate mortal of Jesus Christ. Rex may be a man of the times but his message is UNIVERSAL. LITERALLY. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE THE RING THAT REX IS WEARING, It has two crosses indicating the second coming and arrows pointing every direction and he got it two yrs ago when his belief in God was nil. Help me now. I am in a Queens NYC homeless shelter. God bless, let's unite the world now 🙏❤️ I have very intimate knowledge about the real universe and I know what happens after death and what is everyones mission in life

Amazing😮 can we maybe do this experiment study w to ty other animals best baby chicks?

Great conversation. Thanks for sharing.

Book looks great will be digging in tonight

Now if you two could do this again for about 5 hours next time, 🙏🙏🙏💁‍♀️. Just… wow. I’m ordering the book, but just wanted to thank you both for this conversation. Some of it was a bit over my intellectual/academic pay grade, but it’s a topic I’ve been hungry for. (Really ANY attempt at reconciling aspects of Eco Psych and Neuroscience). My use-case for caring is that I’m one of the growing number of movement/skill coaches applying “Ecological Dynamics” (aka non-linear pedagogy, Constraints Led Approach, etc.). Plot twist: my athletes are all horses. It’s been a fascinating decade-long journey for me to work from the principles of context design, “constrain to afford” and for me, the biggest get influence was Eleanor Gibson, not as much JJ. I’m not a “Gibsonian”, just a practitioner with 100000% commitment to movement as emergent, and self-organization as my foundation. (I call it “body buy-in”, as in, the body parts can be instructed, manipulated, placed etc. and the coach can have us repeat/rehearse forever, but if it wasn’t the body’s own solution to a movement problem (task/environment constraints), it’s at best inefficient and at worst, dangerous. But I’m tossed out of the Gibsonian club for still using words like “unpredictable” 🤔. In AI world, I’m super enthused by the work of Ken Stanley, and use of exploration as a way to expose the “organism” to a large set of diverse experiences in movement problems, trusting their system to find the key invariants. In my world, with horse rehab, it is literally saving lives as horses are often euthanized when movement ability fails. Even horses diagnosed “neurological” or with severe arthritis can make astonishing progress when we design contexts that let self-organization do the heavy lifting of training. Ofc ecological dynamics is now being applied to human athletes at virtually all level of sport, including professional football, baseball, martial arts, cricket, basketball, etc. (I also used some of E.Gibson’s work to teach programming (in my former life); I created the Head First book series for O’Reilly that’s sold I think 3 million copies. Even my rough and crappy implementation of perceptual learning principles still led to surprising results!)

Maybe I skipped the section that clearly described prospective learning, but by 57 min mark, I just paused to go read part of the paper. My thoughts: First, this just sounds like branch prediction; Second, it's still bound by the curve fitting world of xNN's, which means it has no future path in AI. Third, brains might do something like this, but only in that we have a limit to the number of concepts we can keep active at one time (and not having the "correct" idea at the "right" time means taking the "wrong" action). It doesn't work for more complex problems, so likely isn't what our brains are doing.

Holy moly, I see the book on Amazon now. Coming out this December, and trimmed down to 300 pages?! Must be big pages with a small font!

Being narcoleptic with cataplexy would like to see more research done. I've had dreams that later happened in real life. I've memorized dreams during deja Vue. I'm 45 years old and this has been a part of my life since I was a child.

I loved this discussion. Thanks for posting it

recomiendo al autor que vuelva a leer su libro.

It's a great topic. Could be a bit more dynamic

Thank you for this. This book seems really important and extremely timely. There clearly are more and more people sharing Mazviita's concerns (her diagnosis, not necessarily her prescription). And you are in many ways the ideal interlocutor for these ideas. You are both getting very close to question the dogma of "no place for the subjective in science". This is an interesting angle of attack indeed. But the issue is less relativism, or perspectivalism (i.e., the postmodern notion the scientist has presuppositions, or a lens through which the world is interpreted). The problem is that the axiom in itself is ad hoc, only supported by tradition (Cartesianism), and logically questionable. A careful reading of the measurement problem of physics shows that it is the information, or measurement, not the apparatus, the determines the collapse of the wave function. It's not a matter of opinion. It's the measurement, information, or "knowledge" that affects the outcome. That observation alone is not sufficient evidence to topple the dogma, of course. But if you combine with the fact that we have run into a wall in neuroscience in aiming to explain subjectivity (e.g., perception) AFTER excluding it categorically from the domain of science, evidence starts to tilt in a Bayesian sense. And when we carefully start exploring putting the subjective / the observer back into the center, such as in first-person physics or in IIT, things start to progress again. Anyways, this is just a long-winded way of expressing that it is awesome to witness that even though this podcast seemingly started in embrace of computationalism / functionalism, you host these open and deep debates about whether this is indeed the correct direction to put all our efforts in.

Promo>SM 🌟

Fascinating episode!

Уважаемый господин Миддлбрукс! Здравствуйте! Меня зовут Сергей Зайцев. Недавно я наткнулся на ваше интервью с Gary Lupyan на BRAIN INSPIRED и пишу, чтобы выразить Вам свое восхищение. Может быть я не все понял из вашей беседы- я не специалист в нейробиологии и искусственном интеллекте. Но мне показалось, что Вам интересна тема происхождения языка, формирование понятийных единиц и речевое кодирование. Эту тему я самостоятельно изучал порядка десяти лет и был бы очень признателен возможности поговорить с Вами и, в какой-то мере, продолжить ваш разговор с Лупян. Для предварительного знакомства я предложил бы прочитать мою работу SOME ASPECTS OF THE PROTO-LINGUISTIC THEORY WITH THE EYES OF AN AMATEUR, размещенную на сайте журнала «Наука и Мир» (№ 2 (114), февраль), Том 1. Искренне ваш, Сергей Зайцев.

Wow, what an incredible talk! I can't believe this has so few comments; Alicia Juarrero's insights into complexity theory and the role of constraints are mind-blowing. Her ability to navigate the intricacies of complex systems, from brains to societies, is truly impressive. Juarrero's emphasis on the importance of constraints in understanding these systems is groundbreaking (although not necessarily "new" considering if delve into Aristotelian hylomorphism) . It's a refreshing perspective that challenges the traditional focus on linear causation, highlighting instead the dynamic interplay of constraints that shape the behavior and organization of complex phenomena. "Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence," seems like a must-read for anyone interested in delving deeper into the fascinating world of complex systems. I appreciate how she not only introduces these concepts but also provides a roadmap for navigating them, acknowledging that thinking across levels of organization can be challenging....some real examples not just hypothetical speculations. (eg what might get in Hegel) Love to see how these ideas integrate practically with work of Michael Levine and biomorphology.

I don't have a problem with AGI as we can certainly spend useful time discussing it, as this talk demonstrates. I would certainly call the coffee-making robot AGI. It doesn't matter so much if it doesn't do everything that a human can do. It is perhaps worth noting that when we discuss such a robot, we implicitly are discussing the set of all robots that we imagine could be made with such AGI technology.

Interesting talk! So where is this list with 13 items being discussed? In what paper?

I found this discussion to be very useful; 'Embodied Turning Test' is now in my vocabulary.

Ðude

Thanks!

Why bother with spikes: 1. It's the simplest language - only one word in it. It is as fundamental as a ping command in computer networks. 2. Cells are simplest living things, so they developed this language above chemical signaling for reason - to be able to talk p2p (peer to peer) instead of chemical paracrine broadcasting. 3. Multicellular organism can be viewed as a set of cells implementing some policy (in terms of RL) to survive for longer. Policy is a set of rules which every cell in this "community" has to follow for the benefit of their genes. So communication between individual cells drastically expands the variety of rules which may be included in this policy (and policy size and efficiency). Thus discarding spikes we ignore the reason the brain exists at all, lose connection to nature, and turn an epic fundamental study into some weird software engineering business.

Thanks!

As a podcaster myself, this was a greatly insightful convo

A beautiful mind 🤯

Although an unheralded theory, I believe it is still well known and offers the craved for solution to resolving the dichotomy between sensorimotor paradigms of consciousness and looked for representation of anti affordance crowd. In fact the acquisition of ventral and dorsal stream algorithms through component motor efference copy, as an elaboration to sensorimotor theory, attached below, has something to say about effectiveness of such approaches www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/mkozhevnlab/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/courses/literature/Multimedia%20learning,%20collaborative%20activities%20and%20team%20work%20involving%20visual-spatial%20imagery/Vakalopoulos.pdf

I find it extraordinary that John suggests that all embodied theory denies representation. In fact this work from way back in 2005 below resolves the dichotomy between sensorimotor theory and representation using the concept of a component motor efference copy through extra pyramidal pathways. The loop categorises perceptual information through feedback during developmental periods into dorsal and ventral streams such that the resultant algorithms are the basis of sensorimotor based cognition. It behooves John to address the mechanisms entailed in the paper before cursorily dismissing such theories. It also is the responsibility of Brain Inspired to raise these potential solutions given rejection of sensorimotor theory is a major platform for John pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16006052/

i learn a lot from krakauer. always great discussions.

keep up the good work!

I have long chewed upon a metaphor from philosopher of science Michel Serres: 'an organism is a sheaf of times'

daniel nicholson has a difficult-to-place accent

No brain ,no pain 😅

The Libet experiment findings were debunked in the past few years.. I think Kevin Mitchell would want to use these findings to fuel his argument

ILL BET YOU USE dews

Folder of time

At 37:36, when it is discussed how monkeys will play rock after they played paper and an opponent played scissor, the conclusion drawn that this is incompatible with model-free RL is wrong. A model-free method could easily switch to playing rock for many reasons. For example, if the action is thought to be as the best response to the last choice of the opponent, a model-free method will do exactly what is observed. There is no need for models, "imagination" and planning to achieve this behavior.

Bit of a long comment- TL;DR- part of what it means to be human is to continually resupply our brain cells with oxygen, water, and nutrition and to become functionally immortal by merging with AI would change all that…. Regarding the possibilities of merging humanity with a.i., at around 1:22:06 - I’m curious how the human brain metabolizes essentials (oxygen, water, and nutrients from our blood and how quickly brain death occurs when oxygen supplies are cut off) but also, how these needs for these essentials define our goals and our priorities as humans- and basically define everything that it means to be human- And how these would change if we ever could merge with AI. And all this to say- is it possible even on theory to replicate what the human brain does but not in a way in which it will die if it looses its supply of O2? But then it wouldn’t really be human anymore, would it? It’s almost like part of being human and carbon based life is to constantly to get oxygen and other materials as efficiently as we can until we reproduce. It’s not like Chat GPT has any fear of ‘death’ when the server is shut down, or any other kind of self-preservation instincts. I wonder what a functionally immortal being or race would do for pleasure or how values would change. Guess we’ll see! I’m 100% in favor of finding out. My thoughts are that we’re more than likely to meet our demise as a species at some point given the laws of thermodynamics and large probabilities and ash that- so this warrants exploring! -Related note (forgive me jumping topics here) but DNA carries with it a desire to replicate. Are there any good papers out there on an artificial DNA or a digital DNA that carries instructions to do something as well as to replicate itself so that it could evolve? Again- how it does this and what resources it consumes would define its purpose - and it may become our competition. (This is kinda scary). With theoretical immortality (from AI or from somehow merging with machines) comes a need to redefine our purpose. What would an immortal life form do for simple pleasures or ultimate meaning?

1:21:51 At the very end of this interview, there is a discussion on the future of humans and A.I. and Max brings up the point that humans may simply stop having biological children because they have so many flaws (like illnesses and mortality). 1). I think this can be expounded upon- just hearing this discussed in the context of this interview, a part of me finds this absurd - but this feeling of based on unfamiliarity rather than any well thought out notion of probability. To expound on this idea, I’d love to explore some examples of how human tastes and desires have evolved as we’ve animated to radical charges in the past that become commonplace. Everything- including our beliefs about the world and our values- are products of our brain and how it interprets data from our senses- so I find myself in full agreement that this is possible. The desire, however, to see our actual DNA replicated would somehow have to be accomplished (even symbolically) through the creation and/or adoption of artificial intelligence children. This is wild!

Oh my gosh I’m so jealous! I’ve been wanting to get @MaxSBennet on our podcast for a long time (don’t judge our CZcams- it’s brand new. We have an audience of 6000 on audio podcast players) Good for you guys!!

Immensely rich discussion. Thank you so much. Deffo gonna read Max’s book 🙏

This was a wonderful episode! As an engineering outsider myself, Max's research into this field is inspiring. Max is not trying to carve a way out of his field into neuroscience. He is trying to understand neuroscience in its own stock. Only when we democratize such information with the lens of someone who, as Max said, "doesn't want to prove himself right but is just trying to find what's right", can we truly make this information patch with other disciplines in science. This is a great cross-disciplinary talk, and exemplary of what other disciplines too must follow. Thank you for sharing this, Paul.