[ExI] Brain emulation, regions and AGI [WAS Re: Kelly's future]

[Richard Loosemore]

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