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Money. Death of intellectual integrity. Nihilistic decadence. Read Nietzsche

"high abstraction, low complexity" e.g. non-wellfounded sets: astrocyte_syncytium = ( infomorphism, astrocyte _syncytium ) where infomorphism = affordance -> memory where affordance from Gibson is possibility Death modelled by running out of possibilities, i.e. possibilities go to zero. Repeatedly substituting the RHS of the equation for "astrocyte _syncytium" on the RHS produces a finite stream which ends when you run out of possibilities (affordance). The most basic possibility involving the self would be breath. (Having no possibility for breath leads to death.) The first possibility involves "hunger for air", which comes after connexin43 and other connexins flood the system during parturition. Given the difficult if not impossible instrumentation, the probable, initial situation is: parturition -> connexins -> astrocyte syncytium -> self with memory and therefore consciousness of "hunger for air" ("Infomorphism" comes from a category called "Chu space". See Barwise and Seligman "Information flow: the logic of distributed systems')

beautiful presentation!

Wow. This really motivates me to understand CT further.

This is pivotal

congrats on the presentation and work! very exciting stuff

thats such a facinating approach, ty for explaining it in such an understandable way :D

Ternary networks, or “3-way interactions which cannot be reduced to pairwise sub-interactions”, are self-dual 😌💭 Excellent work, Carlos!

After 100 years it really seems like the only REAL advancement in our understanding of the human brain is that we can say "we have no idea how the human brain works" in ever more complicated ways.

Great lecture.

You know that if some quantity grows "fast" it doesn't mean that it grows exponentially? There is an actual mathematical meaning to this term. These graphs look more linear or at most quadratic. This is only two minutes in, which is quite disappointing for a talk about "Category Theory for Neuroscience". I will give it a couple more minutes hoping that it improves.

This distorted sphere, does this come from measured data? Is that distorted sphere similar for all brains? Is there a noticeable uncertainty? Is it proven, that there is no way for this mathematically vaguely defined distorted sphere to be isomorphic to a flipped version of itself? It's not the same. It's isomorphic. And this color space maybe can be isomorphic to another ordering of the color spectrum.

Isn't being isomorphic the same as being the same up to names. That means, things have the same structure. But then in the "practical example" the same is the same you? I don't really like this isomorphic =: same abstraction. Because it's not about equality.

Cause (thesis) is dual to effect (anti-thesis) -- Hegel. Integrating information is a syntropic process -- teleological. Concepts are dual to percepts -- the mind duality of Immanuel Kant. "Always two there are" -- Yoda.

Yeah nah, this mathematical theory is missing something imo. Can't put my finger on it, tho. Maybe it has something to do with the axioms. Idk. Very interesting tho.

I am not convinced. Really shallow theory...

Also, it's very out there but what if consciousness is inevitably existence experience itself resulting in all conscious experiences being that of existence itself and then existence breaks this up into a linear subjective timeline (i.e. 'we', 'us', existence itself experiences itself and goes through various lives).

Sometimes I wonder if what really exists is conscious experience in its own right and as discussed in this video, these conscious experiences are integrated creating the illusion of the self. Note, not an illusion of consciousness but conscious experiences exist and they create the self, with that being the illusion.

Consciousness is an incredible thing. One thing that's so mysterious is that it does not appear to be a part of objective reality and yet our own experience of it proves that it exists. If you say that your consciousness does not exist then you are not experiencing yourself reading this right now - disagreeing with that statement requires consciousness (and we get back to 'I think therefore I am'). I suppose either this is part of objective reality (our conscious experience) but in a way that we do not understand or we need to expand linguistics and concepts of 'existence'.

good grief. If you are really saying ,switching on things in a certain way ,gives you the colour red ? Well lets switch on a similar set of switches in a computer and let it experience the colour red. Better still , lets print out the code , the moment the computer experiences red, so we can claim the code on the paper is experiencing red.

This technocratic approach tells us exactly nothing about consciousness. Consciousness is an emergent property of every autopoietic (i.e. self-sustaining/self-recreating = living) system and precisely emerges from the reduction of complexity (i.e., perception, representation) between the infinitely complex environment to the relatively few perceptions, i.e. to the model-building, that is necessary for autopoietic self-preservation and survival. These perceptions or models also include system-internal (i.e., within-the-body) processes, thus forming a self-representation contained in the representation of the environment. This is the definition of consciousness. One of the simplest organisms that has consciousness (i.e. a model of itself inside a model of its environment, thus a perception of itself) is a single living cell.

That's not how neuron work, and you can't us "logic" to combine information that's analog in essence, you are so confuse about the brain ! This is just a curious tentative projection of digital computing onto a neural network, you can't go backward like that with analog information. Look for Hebb rule if you want to understand neurons ! Not reducible to what you present. Essentially, one thing that is not reproduced in your model, beside not being analog, is “any two cells or systems of cells that are repeatedly active at the same time will tend to become 'associated,' so that activity in one facilitates activity in the other”. Real neurons have a potential excitation (sensitivity) different for each incoming dendrites and this potential is modified following Hebb's rule ! If an input dendrite is active when an output is generated, the dendrite sensitivity is increased, and conversely decreased when they are not active at the same time. Your model does not represent learning, just a finished unchanging network. Sadly unproductive mathematically because the 'objects' are not represented correctly, sorry. Moreover, you have not demonstrated how you use it to get any results.

Somebody intent at DEFINING consciousness for a start ????? I have not seen ONE definition that makes sense yet ? You don't have a "solid starting point" as you say, if you don't give a comprehensive definition, as is done in mathematics ! Start over ! It doesn't make any sense like this ! BTW, it seems to me that IIT just another (fancy) name for cognition !

A descripton of X can never be X ... IIT is useless

This guy talks so fast I thought my video was at 1.5x speed

Zero interest. Come back when you can actually make a prediction that can be tested.

Interesting presentation, but actually yonedas lemmas still doesn't solve the problem with qualia

Information should not be use as axiom. There is definition of informatrion from prof. Marian Mazur and this definition is generalized by phd Jozef Kossecki in general quality theory of information. All of them is described in math properly.

But what's it gonna cost me?

Are you familiar with the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein? Heidegger was interested in the meaning of being and Wittgenstein was interested in the philosophy of language. They operated very independently of one another but interestingly converged on ideas very similar to what you mentioned here with the Yoneda Lemma. Wittgenstein argued that a private language would be impossible to learn. And your argument on color perception is a more precisely stated version Wittgenstein's private language argument. I want to go even further than you here. The universe is inherently meaningful because of its networked nature. Meaning is the relationship between a node and the network it is embedded in. And this holds true for all levels of nature. Being is the internal structure of a node (its existence) plus the relationship it has with the network it's embedded in. For this reason, meaning and being are intertwined with one another. I refer to this geometry as 'Situatedness.' Information is the signaling of Situatedness. Learning and knowledge are the storage and remembering of Situatedness. Meaning makes information possible, which in turn makes life possible, which in turn makes intelligence possible, which in turn makes consciousness possible. In other words, meaning makes information possible, not the other way around.

I love this. Had never heard of this test.

I believe we do know that some animals are aware of Self, and self-awareness is a trait that is attributed to consciousness. The way we determine is to take chalk and put a mark on the animals head or elsewhere on their body, then show them a mirror and if they reach for the chalk mark on their own body, then we know that they are self-aware. Elephants, monkeys, and many other animals have passed this test, but not all and not most; however, this is buy one method and other methods might reveal more accurate results. For instance, this test cant work for fish, as chalk would wash off. Also, this test could be passed by repetition and a learned pattern recognition rather than self-awareness. However, elephants for one pass this test the first time, before any pattern knowledge is instilled in them.

If the colour absorption spectrum was symmetrical the result would be the opposite. I do not see how one would need category theory to come to this conclusion and would be very happy if someone could shed some light on this. it is quite obvious even with simple logic following. Going further with asymmetrical colour absorption spectrum, the result still would be different if we do not "assume" individuals who might have inverted spectrum still have the same colour absorption/perception with the ones who do not have inverted. If inverted spectrum people also have different absorption, we still can not differentiate them. Another note is that this makes it possible for everyone to have different vision since we might have continuously different colour spaces with a corresponding absorption spectrum such that the distances between the colours are always the same for everyone.

What's stopping someone from creating some strange meaningless dynamical system with a huge number of interacting nodes, that has a large phi, but is not representing anything about the world or interacting with any external stimuli?

If we start from phenomenology and structuralize it well, let’s say color experience can be embedded in (R, G, B) space and discovered con cells representing RGB, then can we say we solved the hard problem of color consciousness? I don’t think so, but I don’t know why.

I call BS on this. These methodologies might have some value in some field someday but I don't think it will bring our understanding one step nearer to what consciousness is. You have one axis for degree of consciousness and one for content, but no clear concept of what consciousness itself is. If you have no clear idea of what you are looking for, how will you know if you find it?

I suspect IIT is something like a necessary but not sufficient condition for consciousness. But I do think it gets to something important about the cause-effect structure that IIT attempts to get at that is important. One other weakness or at least misconception about IIT is that because it’s mathematical, its structure is set in place. That’s not the case. There are number of ways to measure a variety of quantities that are something like Phi in IIT (the measure of integrated information) for example mutual information. All of those measures you probably will find to be high in conscious systems and low in (most) unconscious systems. The framework they have is by no means set in stone. I know they actually changed the distance measure to Wasserstein from KL.

Great lecture, but I’m not sure the conclusion is correct. It shows that the color space of vision is isomorphic between people. That doesn’t mean the actual qualia is the same. It’s a basic confusion of map and territory. Personally, I’m largely skeptical of most attempts to apply really abstract math to most practical problems, partially because it just offloads the work into how you structure your category and partially because the conclusions are generally very nebulous. Some of my favorite books are by Robert Rosen, who pioneered relational biology (basically applying category theory to theoretical biology). Utterly fascinating work, and yet I have no idea if there is any substantive use for it. It’s entirely possible I just don’t see deeply enough into the problems.

Sorry, I can't spot time in this equation. Any further improved versions available?

Sophistry is always underpinned by the illusion of pure math.

This was a very interesting and informative video, thank you! I was just wondering, were arbitrarily assuming that the mechanisms(the 4 neurons in the model state) behaved as “AND” gates when you explained the cause repertoire of mechanism X_1?

Super interesting, thank you! 🙏🏻

IIT really is supreme at developing these ideas most fully. A recent paper isolated how the qualia space of space is generated by an integrated set of grids. Qualia analysis and it’s geometric construction is the extreme Wild West of science and very much the future, especially in the area of A.I. Overall, I think it’s very important to recognize the hierarchal nature of our qualia experience. Color experience first and foremost happens in a quale capable of a sense of space, for instance. No color without space. (Lots of rules like this I reckon.) Also, if information is the key then it explains why “color” is a dimension (or dimensions) while a particular color (like pink) is not. This is because, if color is a dimension which contains the potentiality to be different states (shapes) then SOME color will be realized as long as it’s POSSIBLE that some color can be realized! And the shape that that dimension transforms to (in the context of the whole quale) specifies the color that is actually being experienced, but with the important point that when this happens all the other color experiences that COULD have happened but didn’t are attendant to (and even constitute to a degree) the color actually experienced. Blue MEANS, not red, not green etc. within the context of an existent possibility space of color geometry, which itself is a geometrically isolatable sub-modality within the context of a larger whole quale that is geometrically realized as single hyper-complex n-dimensional polytope.

The inverted spectrum thought experiment (as it's normally presented) is pure idiocy. Essentially it says that laws of physics are arbitrary. For color perception to be different there must be an underlying cause, a physical alteration either in the eye or in the brain, the way it is with color blindness (daltonism). An abnormal perception, if it doesn't interfere with any aspect of life, would be undetectable. However, it would then also be of no consequence, as if it didn't exist at all. More over, it's quite possible that everyone perceives color SLIGHTLY differently (rather than inverted), and it's also of no consequence whatsoever. However, I fail to see why mapping NORMAL color perception in any way contradicts any ABERRANT perception and the colloquial use of color (which is a very rough division of the visible into 6-8 colors at the most). If we had 10s or 100s of colors, a biologically determined mapping would clash with the naming conventions and perceptions in the aberrant individual, but with a rough division into red-green-blue-yellow-purple? Unlikely.

now i know how to quantify certain types of information when given a certain type of model... wheres the connection to conciousness?

Thank you!

Excellent presentation and communication skills, was very easy to follow.

This was an amazing introduction to both category theory and the neuroscience of visual perception.

You are confused. Because you think brain exists. Brain doesnt exists. "Brain" is just an idea in consciousness.

You cannot have inverted spectrum, because qualia are meaning, they are not random, is like saying that you can have wings instead of legs and not noticing. Of course you notice. See my papers about consciousness, like "Meaning and Context: A Brief Introduction", author: Cosmin Visan.