[ExI] Brain emulation, regions and AGI [WAS Re: Kelly's future]
Richard Loosemore
rpwl at lightlink.com
Mon May 30 20:35:14 UTC 2011
Kelly Anderson wrote:
> On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 7:18 AM, Richard Loosemore <rpwl at lightlink.com> wrote:
>> There is actually no true modularity, there are just regions with apparent
>> specializations, which are more or less definable or distinct, depending on
>> the case. The terms used are also not uniform: many are just "areas" (as
>> in Brodmann areas), but that implies cortex, whereas some significant chunks
>> or sub-cortical.
>
> Thanks. That helps me to understand some things better. My
> understanding is that there are some divisions that are pretty
> structural, such as the brain stem... but if I understand what you're
> saying it is that in the neocortex, there aren't such sub organs.
> Right?
Hmmmm.... [ponders long and hard]. There are areas that are so domain
specific, that some might call them sub-organs. The visual areas at the
back do a heck of a lot of processing that is the same in most
individuals. For example, there are separate dorsal and ventral
pathways, which seem to split the visual processing into two paths, one
of which computes vision-for-object-recognition, while the other
computes vision-for-action. (That is very approximate). And there is
an area of the left dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex (lDLPFC) that
sometimes appears to be extremely specific (but to a cluster of
different tasks.
But I myself would not call these modules. Partly that is because if
you look at the wiring at the level of columns and microcolumns, you see
very much the same patterns in those different places I just mentioned.
So, to my mind, what is happening is that the same basic style of
architecture is being used (a large array of repeating units - the
columns), but the types of "concepts" that accumulate in those repeating
units, during development, end up being specialized.
The way I interpret the specialization is as follows. There is incoming
traffic to the cortex from many sources, some of which certainly do do
some preprocessing. Now, those input wires arrive at the cortex at a
bunch of places -- there is not one part of the cortext that acts as the
gateway to the rest of the system, there are gateways scattered all
over. Also, there are some specific (probably hard-wired) superhighways
that connect different parts of the cortext to one another. Now, with
that combination of input ports and superhighways, the concepts that
tend to be learned by the sea of cortical columns tend to be specialized
for the same reason that the shops and businesses in a city tend to be
specialized and localized .... because the wholesale vegetable market is
located *here*, the cattle market *there* and the coffee houses *there*
(so all the stock brokers arise in the coffee houses!), .. and so on.
That picture I just gave means that all the columns have basically the
same functionality, and any apparent organs are just the result of
developmental pressures and some built in wiring.
>> My own, more general answer to the issue of AGI via brain emulation is that,
>> as you are suggesting, the modeling of the human mind/brain is likely to be
>> the first successful AGI, but this is unlikely to be whole brain emulation
>> in the sense of a low-level neuron-by-neuron copying.
>
> I agree 100%. In implementing this whole brain emulation, there may be
> areas where the best initial emulation is neuron by neuron emulation,
> but I hope that's just a small part of the emulation. And neuron by
> neuron emulation seems like a valuable first step in figuring out what
> the higher level functions are and how they work, I think.
Well, from my perspective as a cognitive scientist/AGI person, I am not
sure how valuable the low-level neuron stuff will be, in the end. For
example, I think we may have the functional model of a cortical column
in the next five years, as a result of purely psychological analysis.
That is, we could know pretty much what the columns are doing, without
having to ask the neuroscientists what the circuitry looks like. From
the point of view of AGI, that would make us able to build a human-like
AGI soon after, while the neuroscientists are still trying to figure out
where to store the pictures of the trillions of brain slices they are
collecting (never mind how to analyze those pictures).
Did you see my conversation with Eugen last week, when I mentioned a
picture of a neural area at one micron resolution (did you see the image
I dropped on my website, with one pixel per micron?). It is kind of fun
to imagine the neuroscientists using an image like that to arrive at a
sensible circuit diagram .... the pixels do not even show all of the
smaller cell bodies, never mind all of the smaller wires. And the
synapses are one or two orders of magnitude below that level of detail.
So that is my reason for skepticism about WBE. I am really puzzled
that more people out there do not stop to think about it, before they
jump on the WBE bandwagon.
Richard Loosemore
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