[HN Gopher] Mammals dream about the world they are about to expe...
___________________________________________________________________
Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before
they are born
Author : birriel
Score : 549 points
Date : 2021-07-26 23:28 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.yale.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.yale.edu)
| g3e0 wrote:
| Reminds me of the theory that dreaming (and music) evolved to
| "practice" hypothetical situations and emotions before they
| happen -
| https://whatismusic.info/blog/AUnifiedTheoryOfMusicAndDreami...
|
| It's easy for me to believe that this could have initially
| evolved to give babies slightly more preparation for the outside
| world (and therefore a slightly higher chance of survival), and
| that we just happen to retain the ability throughout adulthood.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Makes sense. Baby wildebeests has to learn to walk in minutes
| after birth. Hungry Lions are literally waiting for their lunch
| to be born.
| l33tman wrote:
| To put this into context, retinal waves (essentially self-
| propagating excitations along the retina) pre-birth have been
| known to exist and help neural organization for what must be
| 20-30 years. What's new in this paper is that they additionally
| confirmed that the direction of the propagating waves coincided
| with the mouse's typical optical flow pattern, essentially
| helping priming motion-detection neurons in addition to the well-
| known edge-detection neurons early.
|
| I wouldn't compare this to dreaming really, it's a very different
| process where top-down connections hallucinate sensations. This
| is a completely bottom-up process, it's more or less like a test-
| bench connected to the optic nerve generating moving edges pre-
| birth.
| andai wrote:
| The video of retinal activity [0] looks quite similar to what I
| often see when I am falling asleep.
|
| [0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qarq_UPAS1M
| momirlan wrote:
| You a ?
| _pmf_ wrote:
| "Science"
| imbnwa wrote:
| Plato grinning ear-to-ear somewhere right now
|
| Freud also predicted this in that he postulated that
| hallucination was more primordial than actual sense-experience
| noisy_boy wrote:
| At a more "pop" level, Avatar fans with a told-you-it-is-
| totally-possible expression.
| malkia wrote:
| That's nature's loading screen! Awesome discovery....
| Geee wrote:
| Is it possible that there's some kind of neural transfer from the
| mother's brain during pregnancy? I've been wondering if there is
| or if it's all genetic. Evolutionary it would be very interesting
| if consciousness wasn't genetic, but transferred during
| pregnancy.
| chromanoid wrote:
| Epigenetics are one way.
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6127768/
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| Parent organisms do influence the way their children develop,
| at what extent is a different question (I understand it is
| fractal spaghetti all the way down).
|
| It seems planaria worms can do something like that [0].
|
| [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5051648/
| yellowapple wrote:
| I'd be pretty curious about the mechanism for such transfer.
| The umbilical cord doesn't contain nerves AFAIK (and even if it
| did, the whole point of placental reproduction is to isolate
| the embryo/fetus from the mother, so probably no nervous
| connection there, either), so that'd preclude a direct
| connection between their nervous systems. Maybe hormones or
| some other chemical means?
| axiom92 wrote:
| Similar:
| https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(21)00064-7
|
| Dreams help the brain in generalizing the world. From the
| article:
|
| "That is, dreams are a biological mechanism for increasing
| generalizability via the creation of corrupted sensory inputs
| from stochastic activity across the hierarchy of neural
| structures."
| shannifin wrote:
| > A new Yale study suggests that, in a sense, mammals dream about
| the world they are about to experience before they are even born.
|
| "In a sense" ... A bit of a click-baity title for what amounts to
| suggesting that brain wiring is primed for sensing the world,
| which is not news.
|
| The study itself looks to be more about _how_ the brain primes
| itself (visual systems specifically). It may or may not have
| anything to do with dreaming.
| system2 wrote:
| People do not read without click-bait anymore.
| [deleted]
| nabla9 wrote:
| "Retinal waves prime visual motion detection by simulating future
| optic flow", Science 23 Jul 2021: Vol. 373, Issue 6553, eabd0830
|
| DOI: 10.1126/science.abd0830
|
| https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6553/eabd0830
| snack-boye wrote:
| Imagine if this is the dream, as we get older and stuff seems to
| make less sense is actually getting closer to birth.
| momirlan wrote:
| That's dementia
| joshxyz wrote:
| What if this life we're living is one of those dreams?
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| So mammals are NOT Tabula Rasa at all.
|
| Some people today need to learn this.
| lupire wrote:
| Unit-testing the software before deployment.
| darepublic wrote:
| Yes and just like software it doesn't matter the test results
| were still going live
| vmception wrote:
| To the host it can matter
| guerrilla wrote:
| I think you missed the point: they're going to be born and
| have to deal with reality in any case. There would be no
| possible consequence of a failed unit test.
| vmception wrote:
| Not if the host aborts
| guerrilla wrote:
| The woman has no idea if the baby is passing "unit tests"
| or not, and so no abortion can depend on hypothetical
| "unit tests." Quit with this made-up nonsense.
| taneq wrote:
| That's way less of a foregone conclusion than you seem to
| think.
| fungiblecog wrote:
| I'm sure there is brain activity that prepares the baby for
| birth, but calling it a "dream" is just clickbait
| echelon wrote:
| The headline is kind of beautiful, even if wrong. In a
| /r/BrandNewSentence kind of way, but also subtle commentary
| about cognition and our place in the consciousness landscape.
|
| "Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience
| before they are born"
|
| Wow, those are some evocative feels in those words.
|
| I immediately thought about Google's "DeepDream" and how
| reversed back propagation gives us a projection of the network.
| Growing brains similarly fire before they're trained on real
| world perceptual inputs. Maybe these have shapes that evolved
| to be world-like and give babies an advantage in the fitness
| landscape.
|
| My next thought: what if what we're collectively doing now --
| all of our neural connectomes growing, dying, forming new
| connections, evolving understandings. Society, basically -- is
| the same shape of an AGI before birth? Maybe alien worlds tend
| towards this path too. A bad analogy, sure, but maybe it's the
| shape of the universe's consciousness being bootstrapped,
| before it awakens. Not getting into metaphysical garbage --
| just thinking about what's to come.
| dogorman wrote:
| I guess the suggestion that fetuses might dream probably seems
| outlandish if, for some reason, you were already committed to
| the idea that fetuses are "not alive."
| antattack wrote:
| Are you thinking about zygote rather than fetus perhaps?
| taneq wrote:
| I find it highly implausible that many people believe fetusus
| are "not alive". You might be referring to the widely held
| position that an early-term fetus isn't sufficiently
| developed to be considered a full-fledged human, and that any
| rights it might have don't outweigh those of the mother who
| is carrying it?
| dogorman wrote:
| I've found that "fetuses aren't alive" is a common talking
| point espoused by people who aren't comfortable sitting in
| a moral gray area and want an simple excuse to resolve
| their cognitive dissonance. It's common enough that I can't
| help but wonder if that is the reason people are so
| resistant to the idea that fetuses might dream. It seems
| remarkably similar to _" farm animals can't feel pain"_. A
| transparent fib people tell themselves to feel better about
| their positions. Incidentally, I eat meat and I am pro-
| choice.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| I think you've confused the talking points.
|
| I've heard the saying that fetuses aren't _conscious_ ,
| but I've never heard anyone, however fringe, say fetuses
| aren't _alive_.
| dogorman wrote:
| Maybe so, though this too seems like a strange belief,
| and touches on the reason I find surprise at such things
| odd: it's been known for years that fetuses at late
| stages have cycles of REM sleep and _apparent_
| wakefulness.
| cma wrote:
| Isn't that part of rationale for roe v wade 3rd trimester
| rule already?
|
| I've never heard someone say farm animals can't feel
| pain.
| dogorman wrote:
| I suppose you'll also claim you've never met a
| "vegetarian" who thinks "fish don't count."
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| They are all a stage of human life. I love the fact that they
| start learning languages before exiting the womb... Life is
| awesome!
| xkeysc0re wrote:
| The researchers call it "dream-like" and it is, in the sense
| that, like a dream, the neurons are stimulated and activated as
| though sensory input was occurring despite there being no
| actual stimuli.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Foetus can have, and will have, direct experience of the
| world before birth. In the last months of pregnancy they
| definitely can hear what is happening outside. Will also
| react to strong noises or gentle pressure.
|
| Seeing differences at daylight or obscurity while in the womb
| does not seem impossible. Anybody that has closed the fist
| over a strong flashlight knows that the flesh is not totally
| opaque.
|
| Is this dreaming? Maybe, maybe not. Other explanations are
| possible.
| deburo wrote:
| Huh, how weird. How are those stimulis generated? Through the
| mother's eyes or brain activity?
| [deleted]
| jobigoud wrote:
| "Dream-like" implies they are genetated directly in the
| fetus brain without external stimuli.
| throwamon wrote:
| Nitpick: _stimuli_ is already the plural of _stimulus_.
| imvetri wrote:
| hmm. when the brain is floating in the stomach, it already had
| built how the world would be.
|
| Initial sense - Floating, so floated and floater exists.
| something exist, let me figure it out. oh sometimes I sense
| vibration, some are slow and repetitive, some are musical, oh
| then learns about vibration and source of vibration. then
| predicts what could be the source of vibration.
| Amin699 wrote:
| Mice, of course, differ from humans in their ability to quickly
| navigate their environment soon after birth. However, human
| babies are also able to immediately detect objects and identify
| motion, such as a finger moving across their field of vision,
| suggesting that their visual system was also primed before birth.
| archibaldJ wrote:
| Once upon a time, I woke up from a dream and was greeted by
| friendly beings. They looked at me in wonder, and were surprised
| I'm awake. The lights in the room were very cozy. Soon I went
| back to sleep, and there I was, veritably back in this world
| again. Now I do not know whether I had taken LSD and visited a
| different world, or I had temporarily woken up from this dream,
| and now making sense of the waking up as "a LSD experience".
| __ryan__ wrote:
| Alternatively, you were dreaming the whole time. I have _many_
| dreams where I "woke up". I'm totally convinced it's real in
| the dream-- even though I also have telekinesis and can fly.
| dorkwood wrote:
| I've had dreams where I'm lying in my bed, trying to fall
| asleep. I wouldn't have known I was even dreaming if I didn't
| stop to check.
|
| For those wondering how to check if you're dreaming: pinch
| your nose closed with your fingers. If you can inhale through
| closed nostrils, you're dreaming.
| euske wrote:
| I always wondered how our brain is pre-wired to recognize 3D
| objects right after a birth, but this article is saying that eyes
| are giving fake image-like input to our brain so that it can
| perform "pre-training"? Does this imply that our brain is truly a
| blank slate if these initial seeds aren't given?
| Davidzheng wrote:
| sorry but I don't think there is any sense in which the infant
| brain is a blank slate. Definitely not for vital functions (as
| seen by the "instinctual" abilities noted elsewhere in this
| thread, not in language/cognition, and IMO not even
| culturally/morally.
| fossuser wrote:
| I don't think brains are pre-wired to recognize 3D objects.
|
| There was an example case of a blind man with cataracts getting
| it fixed at around 50 years old. People were curious if he
| would be able to know if a sphere was round just by looking at
| it without touching it.
|
| IIRC - not only could he _not_ do that, but he couldn 't
| visually interpret shadows (saw them as black splotches -
| didn't recognize depth), and was confused why objects got
| smaller as they were moving away.
|
| I think the human visual system trains on a lot of visual input
| data, but it typically happens at the baby stage where you
| can't really interact.
| echelon wrote:
| Fascinating anecdote, and I'd love to see the report on this.
| I wonder what else they learned from such an interesting case
| study.
|
| But I doubt it's 100% "no pre-wiring". What about gravity and
| musculature? Surely brains must know or train on these in
| some way before birth.
|
| And what about fight or flight reflexes and presupposing
| monsters in the shadows? My understanding is that these had a
| primitive evolutionary basis and that we came hardwired to
| respond to certain stimuli.
| lostmsu wrote:
| What about musculature? Human babies mostly just violently
| shake all hands and legs right after birth.
| jolmg wrote:
| Gravity is probably also learned at the same time we
| learn how to use our muscles from how we must compensate
| for it when moving, also from seeing how things have a
| tendency to approach the ground unless something gets in
| the way, and from the sound things make when they hit the
| floor.
|
| I don't think there's much opportunity to experience
| gravity before birth in order to train it, and I can't
| think of anything the brain would need to know about
| gravity beyond how we experience it with our senses.
|
| > And what about fight or flight reflexes and
| presupposing monsters in the shadows? My understanding is
| that these had a primitive evolutionary basis and that we
| came hardwired to respond to certain stimuli.
|
| Maybe pre-wired behaviors can depend on non-pre-wired
| stimuli, like a function that's conditioned on an
| undefined function and evaluates to false on exception.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah - I just meant specifically 3D visual modeling. I
| think some fears are known to be innate among apes - fear
| of the dark, snakes, and falling. Also paying attention to
| faces?
|
| The cataracts thing was an article I saw on HN a few years
| ago, but don't remember the title.
| jolmg wrote:
| > don't remember the title.
|
| Found this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17687533
|
| which leads to:
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/people-cured-
| blindne...
|
| which leads to:
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/05/10/to-see-and-
| not...
|
| > TO SEE AND NOT SEE By Oliver Sacks May 2, 1993
|
| > A NEUROLOGIST'S NOTEBOOK about Virgil (pseud.), who
| lost his eyesight as a child, and regained it at age 50.
| Tells how he could not adjust to the sighted world, and
| eventually had to be hospitalized.
|
| Unfortunately, it needs a New Yorker account to view.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yep - that looks like the stuff I was remembering, nice
| find.
| gojomo wrote:
| Abre los ojos.
| Infernal wrote:
| One of my favorite movies.
| khr wrote:
| This article didn't link to the research article directly. Here
| it is for those interested:
|
| https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6553/eabd0830/
| gradschoolfail wrote:
| TIL sheep dream about nonelectric androids
| mindfulplay wrote:
| Really fascinating. Does this mean the world "view" is encoded
| into the DNA somehow and that then gets transformed into neural
| activity? How could a few billion pairs of acids encode such a
| world?
|
| What's even more fascinating is that emotions, behaviors,
| imagination and dreams must all be encoded and not learnt with
| just a billion-odd pairs / bits.
|
| Meanwhile, it takes a few megabytes for us humans to encode a
| decent Hello World program in a modern programming environment.
| smegger001 wrote:
| complex emergent behaviors from simple rule systems is quiet
| common.
|
| conways game of life is derived from 4 simple rules yet shows
| complex behavior including the ability to operate a universal
| turring machine.
|
| a few hundred megs of instructions seems quiet reasonably able
| to generate a highly complex system
| anthk wrote:
| You can play Tetris on GNU sed. You can play Zork on a
| PostScript interpreter by simulating the ZMachine on PS.
| yreg wrote:
| The dreaming doesn't simulate a complex world. As I understand
| it, it might be something like a simple blob moving around in
| 2D space.
| l33tman wrote:
| It's just expanding circular waves of activity on the retina.
| Don't read too much into the articles clickbait headline :)
| [deleted]
| yellow_lead wrote:
| The full title is pretty funny.
|
| > Eyes wide shut: How newborn mammals dream the world they're
| entering
|
| Reference to the Kubrick film I assume.
| gojomo wrote:
| Something about this reminds me of the 'Winning Ticket
| Hypothesis' in artifical neural networks: that some 'random'
| initializations prime a network far better for later faster
| learning. From https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03635 - the abstract:
|
| _Neural network pruning techniques can reduce the parameter
| counts of trained networks by over 90%, decreasing storage
| requirements and improving computational performance of inference
| without compromising accuracy. However, contemporary experience
| is that the sparse architectures produced by pruning are
| difficult to train from the start, which would similarly improve
| training performance._
|
| _We find that a standard pruning technique naturally uncovers
| subnetworks whose initializations made them capable of training
| effectively. Based on these results, we articulate the "lottery
| ticket hypothesis:" dense, randomly-initialized, feed-forward
| networks contain subnetworks ("winning tickets") that - when
| trained in isolation - reach test accuracy comparable to the
| original network in a similar number of iterations. The winning
| tickets we find have won the initialization lottery: their
| connections have initial weights that make training particularly
| effective._
|
| _We present an algorithm to identify winning tickets and a
| series of experiments that support the lottery ticket hypothesis
| and the importance of these fortuitous initializations. We
| consistently find winning tickets that are less than 10-20% of
| the size of several fully-connected and convolutional feed-
| forward architectures for MNIST and CIFAR10. Above this size, the
| winning tickets that we find learn faster than the original
| network and reach higher test accuracy._
|
| Are these innate patterns of activity priming mammalian brains in
| a similar way?
| voldacar wrote:
| "Neural networks" aren't very similar to brains, so I would
| doubt it
| kbenson wrote:
| So, that sounds like a good reason to iterate over a bunch of
| random initializations and train them up to find those awesome
| resulting networks that are smaller but have the same accuracy
| (if I'm understanding that correctly and it's actually possible
| to isolate or take advantage of those subnetworks for a final
| smaller size).
|
| Or... has anyone tries training a network for determining the
| initialization state of another network? And now I'm wondering
| if those good starting initialization values only work well for
| a specific task or if they seem to span all or a subset of
| tasks, and maybe there's some inherent quality in how the
| values relate that we can tease out...
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > Are these innate patterns of activity priming mammalian
| brains in a similar way?
|
| A newborn foal can stand within 55 minutes of being born and
| can walk or run within 90 minutes. That is crazy fast training
| speed. Is it training initialization or is it a form of
| transfer learning?
|
| Most human babies take 9-18 months to walk, and this is
| commonly attributed to the fact that human babies have immature
| brains that cannot mature due to birth canal constraints, which
| is constrained by pelvis size which is constrained by the need
| to walk upright.
|
| I have wondered about how true this is. Maybe our brains are
| just so much more powerful, or capable of much deeper
| understanding, that we require a much lower initial learning
| rate.
|
| The lottery ticket could explain why some children learn to
| walk at 6 months, while others are closer to 24 months, with no
| different in intelligence or motor skills in later life.
|
| Edit: As some people below have correctly pointed out, human
| babies could not walk within an hour for physiological reasons,
| but nor do they exhibit the basic motor skills, spatial
| reasoning or image processing required for walking. Many human
| babies even struggle to feed for the first 24-48 hours or
| longer.
|
| Meanwhile baboon babies can hold onto their mother from birth
| while the mother climbs trees.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| > Is it training initialization or is it a form of transfer
| learning?
|
| I doubt it's randomly initialized. The brain has centers for
| motion which might be honed in at birth for these animals.
|
| Let's not ignore genetics, which pre-populate weights and
| subnetworks in the form of motion-control centers in the
| brain. Once you consider the gene-brain interaction over the
| course of evolution as part of your training, the huge data
| required for modern ML starts to make more sense.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > I have wondered about how true this is.
|
| It isn't. Human babies prioritize differently. We learn to
| understand language and to communicate before we learn to
| walk.
|
| (In fact, for many babies learning to walk is a conscious
| process. We learn to learn before we learn to walk.)
| soheil wrote:
| > A newborn foal can stand within 55 minutes of being born
| and can walk or run within 90 minutes. That is crazy fast
| training speed. Is it training initialization or is it a form
| of transfer learning?
|
| Probably neither. How does the human baby "learn" to breath
| almost immediately after birth? I suspect the answer here is
| also the same.
| jacinda wrote:
| > this is commonly attributed to the fact that human babies
| have immature brains that cannot mature due to birth canal
| constraints, which is constrained by pelvis size which is
| constrained by the need to walk upright
|
| Interestingly, the EGG hypothesis postulates that the
| constraining factor is not pelvis size, but rather that
| neonates consume so much energy that we give birth just
| before a women's metabolic limits would otherwise be overrun
| (leading to both maternal and infant death). Based on this,
| the increased energy demands of our larger brains mean that
| we have to sacrifice neonatal motor skills or drastically
| improve the metabolic efficiency of adult women.
|
| https://www.pnas.org/content/109/38/15212
|
| > In humans, maximum sustained metabolic rate is thought to
| be 2.0-2.5x basal metabolic rate (BMR).
|
| > By 9 mo, metabolic demands of the fetus threaten to push
| maternal energy requirements beyond 2.1x BMR. Extending
| gestation by even one month would likely require metabolic
| investment beyond the mother's capacity. Instead, the mother
| delivers and the neonate's growth rate slows relative to its
| fetal growth rate, keeping both the offspring's and the
| mother's energy requirements in check.
| watwut wrote:
| > constraining factor is not pelvis size
|
| I kind of doubt that, because if baby is after term, the
| risk is supposed to be childbirth itself being too
| dangerous. And they induce birth if the baby is too big
| too.
|
| Large baby is considered a risk on itself.
| eru wrote:
| Yes. And for even larger babies, c-sections are common.
| MoreenDichele wrote:
| That's obvious bullshit because then any woman giving birth
| to twins would die. Use your fucking brain please.
| l33t2328 wrote:
| > consume so much energy that we give birth just before a
| women's metabolic limits would otherwise be overrun
|
| Since babies traditionally breast feed and thus survive
| solely on the mother's energy after birth, this explanation
| doesn't seem to hold water.
| minitoar wrote:
| The truncated gestation is sort of taking that into
| account, at least according to this paper
| https://www.pnas.org/content/109/38/15212
| slickrick216 wrote:
| Breast feeding is quite hard on women and many women
| struggle to sustain the child on the breast alone.
| There's a history of communal feeding which adds new
| energy into the equation and also mixed feeding once the
| child is old enough. I would say it's probably a
| continuation at the peak metabolic rate described in the
| parent post.
| eidelweissflow wrote:
| Most women I know who struggled with breastfeeding were
| due to inability to have the baby correctly latched. Once
| the baby is latched, women shouldn't have a problem with
| supply. Mother spends at most 500 calories extra when
| breastfeeding which most of the time comes from the
| weight that's gained during pregnancy. I myself was able
| to exclusively breastfeed for 6 months after which we
| started introducing solids.
| Nition wrote:
| > Instead, the mother delivers and the neonate's growth
| rate slows relative to its fetal growth rate.
|
| Worth noting how massive the growth rate is I think: Even
| _after_ birth, the baby gains weight faster than it ever
| will again in its life. In absolute terms! In relative
| terms it 's even more insane.
|
| A 12-year-old boy going through puberty will go from 90lb
| to 100lb over a year, an increase of 10lb or ~10%.
|
| The average baby boy will be born at 7.5lb and weigh 20lb
| at one year old, an increase of 12.5lb or ~270%. Nearly
| triple the size!
| agent008t wrote:
| Putting on 6kg in a year is not that fast, people do
| sometimes gain weight faster than that in adulthood.
| [deleted]
| Nition wrote:
| I'm going by average weight gain from normal growth. But
| let's look at height instead then.
|
| Average height at age 12: 59". At age 13: 62". 3" of
| growth.
|
| At birth: 19". At one year: 29". 11" of growth.
|
| Try matching _that_ just by eating more.
|
| (obviously, yes, it's easier for a small thing to grow
| than a large thing. But it's still crazy fast. Imagine
| being 50% taller in a year)
| agent008t wrote:
| You talked about weight gain, in absolute terms. A novice
| powerlifter can easily put on both more absolute weight
| and absolute strength in a year than a newborn.
| shard wrote:
| The image of a baby trying to outlift the weights that a
| novice weightlifter is lifting is now ingrained in my
| mind.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| That's not growth, just fat accumulation which is a much
| simpler process.
| agent008t wrote:
| And a child puts on 100% bone and muscle?
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| No, but I'm not sure what point you're trying to make?
| agent008t wrote:
| I was just pointing out that a baby does not gain weight
| faster than it ever will again in its life, in absolute
| terms. That's all. Not sure why I got the downvotes and
| no-true-scotsman arguments in return.
| tk75x wrote:
| Plus fat and some water, yes. And furthermore, to go from
| a 10 pound baby to a 100 pound adult, I will make the
| claim that a baby has to gain 900% body mass.
| Naracion wrote:
| How are you defining growth? Are you defining it by
| volume? Ie assuming the body mass density remains the
| same, how much does the weight increase (which means the
| body is volumetrically growing)?
|
| If not--I am very lightweight right now, and I'm trying
| to put on body mass by eating more and exercising. While
| my volume will increase, my main growth is in density. My
| growth is not in fat, but actual muscle mass. Is this
| growth? If so, I have gone from 125lb to 140lb in ~2
| months, which in absolute terms is obviously more than
| the baby (my goal is 160lb by the end of the year).
|
| A few years ago, I went from ~130lb to 165 lb in three
| months--blame the free food at FAANG cafes during an
| internship. But this might be closer to what you were
| saying earlier--putting on fat.
|
| Edit. I guess in the original statement saying that a
| person will never gain weight at this rate again there
| should be the explicit assumption that we're talking
| about natural growth, not growth due to external factors
| (ie more eating--intentional or not). In that case, that
| statement would be true.
| agent008t wrote:
| I wouldn't say that growth through eating is unnatural
| though.
| Naracion wrote:
| I guess what I might have implied by "natural" is growth
| from growing older as opposed to growth from nutrition.
|
| But in that sense, of course a baby will have more growth
| than an adult--isn't it reverse exponential?
| ljf wrote:
| But putting on 100% or even 200% of weight in a year is
| not normal or even possible for most adults without
| crippling their health. All babies do this.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| I believe the GP was contesting the "In absolute terms!"
| part of the comment.
| techrat wrote:
| Diminishing returns as the numbers of scale increase.
|
| The growth might seem impressive when you do percentages
| of a very small number, but it's still a very small
| number overall.
| Nition wrote:
| It's not though, that's my point. Even in absolute terms,
| weight gain from growth in the first year is _still_ more
| than any other time in the average person 's life.
| eru wrote:
| > Interestingly, the EGG hypothesis postulates that the
| constraining factor is not pelvis size, but rather that
| neonates consume so much energy that we give birth just
| before a women's metabolic limits would otherwise be
| overrun (leading to both maternal and infant death). Based
| on this, the increased energy demands of our larger brains
| mean that we have to sacrifice neonatal motor skills or
| drastically improve the metabolic efficiency of adult
| women.
|
| This seems weird. Fully breastfed babies require even more
| calories from the mother. (They are bigger than unborn
| babies, and they lose more heat.)
| mandelken wrote:
| Perhaps it's more than just calories or energy intake,
| but as well doing the breathing, immuno responses,
| digesting, filtering blood etc. for both mother and baby?
| eru wrote:
| Maybe. But now we are just speculating.
| TheGeminon wrote:
| > Instead, the mother delivers and the neonate's growth
| rate slows relative to its fetal growth rate, keeping
| both the offspring's and the mother's energy requirements
| in check.
|
| Growth rate slows after birth, so that would account for
| some of that. Mother's also would not need to carry
| around the weight of the baby, and would be more able to
| provide for the child.
| a0-prw wrote:
| Women in Africa (in traditional societies), carried their
| babies on their backs while they worked the fields,
| carried water, etc.
| akomtu wrote:
| I guess it's firmware of some kind. Newborns already know how
| to breathe, how to control the heart rate and tons of other
| low level things. Legs movement is a small feature in
| comparison.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Newborns don't even know the legs belong to them.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Interesting. Could this also partly explain child geniuses?
| In general they are worlds ahead early in life. But they
| aren't significantly better then the non child genius peers
| later in life.
| taneq wrote:
| > Most human babies take 9-18 months to walk, and this is
| commonly attributed to the fact that human babies have
| immature brains that cannot mature due to birth canal
| constraints
|
| I strongly doubt that human babies are physiologically
| capable of walking before 6-9 months regardless of their
| level of brain development. The entire baby is born many
| months "early" compared with other mammals due to the
| limitations of the human pelvis.
| phire wrote:
| Babies can't even roll-over until 4-6 months
| amock wrote:
| Newborns have some ability to roll over that is lost and
| then regained, so it's not that they are physically
| incapable of rolling over.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I think the problem is they lose a lot of weight early on
| (can roll over) and then begin to fatten up quickly. The
| calorie intake relative to body size is immense and for a
| few months a baby just doesn't have the muscle strength
| to support its newfound fat composition (loss of ability
| to roll) in addition to their heads growing rapidly early
| on and not having the neck muscles developed yet.
| briefcomment wrote:
| This person's baby walked at 8 months [1]
|
| [1] https://www.scarymommy.com/complete-shock-early-
| walking-baby...
| taneq wrote:
| Hence me giving a range of 6-9 months. My niece was
| walking not long after 9 months, it's rare but not
| unheard of. A newborn baby simply wouldn't have the
| physical strength or rigidity, though.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Earliest I've seen was 9/10 months, that kid looked so
| strange to me, they could barely hold their head up as
| they tottered around like a drunk. I wonder if the
| parents promoted early walking?
| octopoc wrote:
| People do that successfully, the problem is that if
| babies skip the crawling phase then it may cause learning
| disabilities among other things. Which is fascinating in
| the context of this conversation. The order in which
| things are learned can be very critical!
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Yes, successful crawlers might walk later, kids that
| learn to bum-shuffle (propel forwards whilst sitting on
| their bottoms) might not crawl much.
|
| Our eldest wasn't interested in crawling really and went
| _almost_ straight to walking but not until about 14
| months IIRC (it was > 10 years back).
|
| We did baby sign (a sort of simplified BSL; would
| recommend) and some people suggested it would retard
| speech - same child modified a sign before 12 months and
| so could tell us he needed a poo/wee and we'd sit him on
| the potty to do it all before he was able to talk - saved
| me changing a lot of stinky nappies! Longitudinally, our
| kids used baby sign and did/are doing well at school and
| have all been ahead with language skills (but that's not
| accounting for confounding variables).
|
| It's curious to see infant developmental stages becoming
| more and more to be compared to AI/robot development.
| pankajdoharey wrote:
| Intel is an Old baby who walks with crutches. Intel
| delivered the 10nm Processor just 2 months back after a
| decade of failure. Their 7nm is still broken and so is
| there 5 and 3nm in research. And they hope to catch up to
| the competition by 2025 is a funny joke. Intel isnt a
| reliable delivery partner which is why Apple moved away to
| its own processors.
| beerandt wrote:
| >Most human babies take 9-18 months to walk, and this is
| commonly attributed to the fact that human babies have
| immature brains that cannot mature due to birth canal
| constraints, which is constrained by pelvis size which is
| constrained by the need to walk upright.
|
| You have this a bit backwards- yes brain size at birth is
| limited by pelvis size, but this means that humans are born
| prematurely compared to other mammals. The entire body is
| basically premature and underdeveloped, not just the
| head/brain. If anything the brain is relatively over-
| developed, as it's size is the constraining factor in
| gestation length.
|
| If I remember correctly, 18-24 months is the estimated
| gestation time humans would have if not restricted by pelvis
| size (which ironically is itself a result of walking
| upright), and this fits better with the idea of being able to
| walk closer to birth.
|
| There's a chapter in "Born to Run" that ties human physiology
| and endurance and evolution and brain development together in
| a way that's so elegant, it almost has to be true. It covers
| the steps that lead to the need for a bigger brain and
| walking upright as a means for persistence hunting. Highly
| recommended reading, especially that chapter.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > A newborn foal can stand within 55 minutes of being born
| and can walk or run within 90 minutes. That is crazy fast
| training speed. Is it training initialization or is it a form
| of transfer learning?
|
| Or maybe having 4 legs (as a foal) gives more natural balance
| than a human or maybe even a cat or dog.
|
| In the same way technically you only need one leg to walk
| (hop) around but that's much more difficult than having two.
| KronisLV wrote:
| That's a fair point!
|
| However, another commenter brought up the fact that human
| muscles are somewhat underdeveloped after birth. It might
| make sense that having 4 legs is easier both in regards to
| balance, as well as because the load per leg decreases to
| make standing on them easier.
|
| That is probably not the only reason, but probably a
| contributing factor.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Most human babies take 9-18 months to walk, and this is
| commonly attributed to the fact that human babies have
| immature brains
|
| Have you ever seen a new-born baby's legs?
|
| They aren't even remotely strong enough to walk, no matter
| what the brain tells them. It takes those months to develop
| leg muscles. New-borns don't have them.
|
| It's absolutely not restricted by the brain size.
| GreeningRun wrote:
| If I follow your reasoning on the leg muscles, how to deal
| with the grasping reflex? That's all the weight on just
| some arm muscles...
| narag wrote:
| _It 's absolutely not restricted by the brain size._
|
| The brain size needs a huge head, so in a sense it is.
|
| All the factors are interwined. The growth of the brain
| seems to have been a very fast evolution, The pelvis had no
| time to adapt, so giving birth early was the final
| solution.
|
| With that in mind, I don't find _fair_ to shame the pelvis,
| or the brain. The weakest link is the legs, but it 's not
| their _fault_ either since they had no time to mature.
|
| Give one of those cocky foals a head of proportional weight
| and allow them to use only two limbs and see who's
| stumbling now!
|
| Edit: newborns can't even balance their heads on their
| necks, they're extremely fragile.
| outworlder wrote:
| True. But the movements on all limbs are quite
| uncoordinated at first. It's also not restricted to muscle
| strength.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Well, the legs may be less developed since they're not
| useful because ... the brain size is not big enough?
|
| Anyway, hard to conclude, just think your logic is missing
| a little.
| throw_nbvc1234 wrote:
| Except that children can walk with assistance (and crawl)
| before they're strong enough to walk on their own.
| underwater wrote:
| Interestingly they can also effectively communicate well
| before they can vocalise words. A baby can sign reliably
| at 7-9 months but typically won't be able to speak until
| 12 months.
| adamauckland wrote:
| 'Walking by one, talking by two'
| [deleted]
| chrisseaton wrote:
| But if you hold a child up before their legs are strong
| enough they will walk.
| freemint wrote:
| Or maybe it's not the brain is to small, but that the
| brain is still growing and therefore subject to enough
| noise to make actions now impossible for the sake of the
| future.
| danielheath wrote:
| I've seen a 2mo with the leg strength required. If you
| balanced them they would hold themselves up, no problem.
|
| The balance comes much later than the strength.
| gambiting wrote:
| I have a 10 week old baby right now, he can absolutely
| stand on his legs if you hold him steady - but yeah, he
| has absolutely zero clue what to do from there :P Also
| he's got a kick that you really need to watch out for,
| strong little dude.
| jacobolus wrote:
| The balance can also be trained relatively quickly, but
| newborns typically get very little practice.
|
| If you start occasionally holding your baby up by the
| thighs when they are 4-5 months old (their back/abdomen
| muscles at that point are typically plenty strong), after
| about a month they will have the balance to hold their
| torso upright when sitting on an adult's shoulders, for
| at least a while. By age 8-9 months they will be very
| stable and good at balancing for long stretches of time.
| (I recommend any new parent try this, not only for the
| baby's sake but because carrying a baby on shoulders is
| dramatically less tiring for an adult than carrying a
| baby in arms, and less hassle than a stroller or baby
| carrier.)
|
| People generally hold their babies from the top (e.g.
| with hands in armpits), in a way that they are passively
| stable. If you want to train someone's balance, you want
| to force them to actively stabilize themselves from a
| default-unstable position at least a bit every day.
| Babies have very short torsos and small heads compared to
| older kids, with the effect that their torsos have a much
| smaller moment of inertia about the waist: it takes
| several times more muscle strength for a 3-year-old to
| lift their torso up.
| mortehu wrote:
| Based on my experience with our first child, these might
| be placebo exercises, and the babies might have met those
| goals on their own. Assuming you haven't done a
| randomized trial.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Based on which experience? My experience with now 2 young
| kids and their playground buddies is that whichever
| skills they regularly practice improve very dramatically
| compared to skills they don't practice. The differences
| are not at all subtle.
|
| If you get a few 3-year-olds and e.g. get one to practice
| kicking a ball for 10 minutes per day, another to
| practice riding a 2-wheeled scooter, another to practice
| hanging from monkey bars, and another to practice
| swimming, after a few months there will be a wide gulf
| between their abilities at those skills.
| davchana wrote:
| > If you start occasionally holding your baby up by the
| thighs when they are 4-5 months...
|
| Do you mean baby sits on my shoulder with his legs around
| my neck, I am holding on to his thighs, and he can hold
| on to my head with arms? We both face forward in same
| direction.
| jacobolus wrote:
| No, I mean you hold your baby by the thighs, facing you,
| and let him balance his torso upright by flexing his
| abdominal/back muscles. At first, the baby will not have
| the coordination to stay upright very well, but actively
| stabilizing himself will train that balance. Because you
| are holding the thighs, the baby only has to stabilize
| one joint (the waist).
|
| Then after a month or two of practice (a few minutes per
| day, nothing too serious here) you put your baby on your
| shoulders, holding his ankles, and he will be able to
| hold his torso up with his abdominal muscles for at least
| a few minutes at a time. Practice this for a few more
| weeks and you will be able to walk around town with the
| baby on your shoulders.
| davchana wrote:
| Oh I get that. Kind of what my parents did that always
| pick up baby from waist(if he is sitting down) & holding
| him only at thighs/waist. I see some people pick up by
| from their underarms.
| gojomo wrote:
| Maybe given the length & complexity of a full human life, a
| bunch of brain factors actually work to _slow specialization
| down_ to prevent early overfitting.
| jovdg wrote:
| > Edit: As some people below have correctly pointed out,
| human babies could not walk within an hour for physiological
| reasons, but nor do they exhibit the basic motor skills,
| spatial reasoning or image processing required for walking.
| Many human babies even struggle to feed for the first 24-48
| hours or longer.
|
| https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=newbor.
| ..
|
| > Stepping reflex > > This reflex is also called the walking
| or dance reflex because a baby appears to take steps or dance
| when held upright with his or her feet touching a solid
| surface. This reflex lasts about 2 months.
|
| Maybe not enough to qualify as "exhibit the basic motor
| skills"
| retrac wrote:
| > That is crazy fast training speed.
|
| Is it? If we ignore compute requirements, how long would a
| good algorithm take to learn something like balancing a
| quadrupedal robot, based on real-time feedback to its
| outputs? It is a simpler problem, but drone flight software
| based on learning, can re-learn how to fly a quadcopter after
| something like losing a propeller and a sudden shift in
| weight distribution, in a few seconds.
|
| A robot could be built that learns how to adapt to something
| like a limb being lost or added or half its weight shifted to
| the other end. It could probably learn an approximate optimal
| to move under those conditions in just seconds, as well.
| Though, I suspect that foal might actually be nearly as
| adaptable. Adult horses, or humans... not so much. We have
| many overlapping models of how to move, probably. I would
| take only seconds to adapt to half my weight being added on
| my shoulders, in the same ballpark as our best robotic
| systems. But if my left leg grew four inches it would take me
| a lot longer than the robot to learn and internalize the best
| way to move again. I could barely keep up with that when it
| was just a few inches a year when I was a kid.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > Is it? If we ignore compute requirements, how long would
| a good algorithm take to learn something like balancing a
| quadrupedal robot
|
| Seems easy but why don't we have self driving cars by now?
|
| Walking it not just a mechanical task. Your quadcopter is
| not learning to interpret raw electrical signals from an
| IMS and raw electrical signals from a CMOS sensor. The
| training is also probably done in a simulator, where if it
| breaks, it is reset and training continues.
|
| A horse is learning to interpret inner ear signals and
| signals from the optical nerve AND the using those to build
| a spatial map of the environment. Only then it is actually
| trying to walk.
|
| A 2 hour old baby horse can not only run on not-flat
| terrain but is spatially and environmentally aware. It has
| taken years for Boston Dynamics to develop a platform that
| is equivalent to a pack horse and even then probably can't
| respond independently to never-seen-before threats or
| challenges.
| smegger001 wrote:
| Because the average first time driver is primed with
| approximately 15 years of training data from observation
| of not just driving deriving a complex physics model,
| object detection and identification system, spacial
| reasoning, natural language comprehensions, theory of
| mind able to predict behavior of other drivers based on
| subtle cues, and teen drivers are still awful at it as a
| rule with much higher accident rate.
|
| Trying to build a neural net or set of neural nets that
| can do all of those jobs is a daunting task and no one
| has the time to train the artificial neural network for
| 15 years. that's why we don't have safe self driving
| cares yet.
|
| as for the horse, well 50 millions of years of evolution
| on constantly refined genetic algorithm is hard to beat
| and that was on top of the evolution of the eohippus as a
| starting point
| retrac wrote:
| We do have self-driving cars we just don't have any we
| think are good enough, well-tested, and adaptable to
| mixed-use driving and our various regulatory and safety
| and cultural needs. You can't get regulatory approval for
| a car that learns to drive by guided trial and error in
| the wild -- which is the most direct way of training such
| a thing. Feedback on what you shouldn't drive over also
| isn't as immediate and unambiguous, compared to whether
| gravity will topple it over.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > If we ignore compute requirements, how long would a good
| algorithm take to learn something like balancing a
| quadrupedal robot, based on real-time feedback to its
| outputs? It is a simpler problem, but drone flight software
| based on learning, can re-learn how to fly a quadcopter
| after something like losing a propeller and a sudden shift
| in weight distribution, in a few seconds.
|
| Firstly, the drone software is not re-learning anything;
| when a baby walks unaided for the first time and you place
| a rattle in their hands, do you really refer to that as
| "re-learning walking"?
|
| Secondly, forget about computational requirements and just
| look at how many iterations have to be run to reach
| success; mammals (and humans specifically) can "learn" to
| recognise an entire class of something just from one or two
| images of that something. Learning something else doesn't
| "forget" the old thing. A NN trained to recognise faces in
| images can't, to me knowledge, be trained to _also_ balance
| a bi-pedal robot, or ride a bicycle.
|
| IOW, what I see currently is that NNs are very one-
| dimensional - the net that becomes optimised for one task
| becomes unoptimised for that task if you subsequently add
| new tasks.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| > that we require a much lower initial learning rate.
|
| The way I understand it is that is not so much required as
| not selected for. We could certainly be able to walk at one
| day old if evolutionary pressure made it necessary, but it
| prioritized other aspects in our cognitive development to
| survive so we don't. It's not as if we say "oh, horses can
| walk early and therefore are incapable of rational thought"
| we evaluate them on their own merits.
| hanoz wrote:
| _> Most human babies take 9-18 months to walk, and this is
| commonly attributed to the fact that human babies have
| immature brains..._
|
| Isn't it just a matter of priorities? Many birds spend a
| similar proportion of their life unable to fly, but they're
| safe in a nest. If you're a foal on the savanna, you need to
| get up.
| a0-prw wrote:
| Yes, I agree. Horses are exclusively prey animals in a
| natural setting. A newborn human would have had it's armed
| "pack" to protect it from predators.
| afavour wrote:
| Perhaps only partially related to what you're saying but
| human babies _are_ born with some innate reflexes:
|
| https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=newbor.
| ..
|
| Perhaps the most relevant to this discussion is the
| "stepping" reflex. It isn't really stepping but if placed in
| a standing-like position babies will often raise one foot,
| put it down, then the other. The most interesting part to me
| is that this reflex stops by two months. Makes me wonder if
| it's an evolutionary leftover from our days as monkeys or
| something like that. It's all so fascinating.
| tigershark wrote:
| They can even swim safely underwater thanks to a reflex.
| the_af wrote:
| Also the grasping reflex: if you place your finger in the
| palm of a newborn's hand, she will grasp it. It works
| almost without fail with any newborn baby. After a few
| months it completely disappears: grasping is no longer a
| reflex but a voluntary act, and as often as not she won't
| be inclined to do it.
|
| I read that both failure to demonstrate these reflexes
| while newborn, as well as continued existence past a few
| months old, are signs that something might not be entirely
| right with the baby.
| patentatt wrote:
| And it's usually an incredibly strong grip! Seems like it
| could definitely be used to grab onto a monkey mother's
| back, never thought about that!
| l33tman wrote:
| These primal reflex arcs are suppressed by pyramidal
| circuits from the brain as they mature, essentially
| overriding them. This is one set of neurological tests of
| damage to the higher spinal cord/brain in adults; those
| reflexes can re-appear due to again limited inhibition.
| teawrecks wrote:
| In the context of real life we draw a distinction between thus
| neonatal dreamlike state and post birth "reality". But in the
| context of a neural net, I don't think such a distinction is
| necessary. They both sound like they're training the network.
| Still interesting to consider the parallels though.
| emtel wrote:
| It's not just mammals. I've always been astounded that spiders
| know how to spin webs. Their mothers don't teach them how!
| gota wrote:
| Or this, which is mind-blowing:
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dragonfly-
| undertak...
|
| Insects that have large migration patterns - all of the
| individuals die before coming back to the initial spot; only
| their descendants continue the cycle. How?!
| chromanoid wrote:
| Maybe epigenetics? I mean blank slate theory is off the
| table anyway...
|
| In addition think about how bees can tell harvest locations
| to each other by dancing:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance This dance is
| probably also something those bees know before being born.
| stared wrote:
| I think it is less relevant to Winning Ticket Hypothesis (in my
| opinion, the most important paper on deep learning theory in
| the last 5 years), but about architectures that work to some
| extend with random weights.
|
| See "Weight Agnostic Neural Networks"
| (https://weightagnostic.github.io/):
|
| > Inspired by precocial species in biology, we set out to
| search for neural net architectures that can already (sort of)
| perform various tasks even when they use random weight values.
| dexen wrote:
| Reminds me the old anecdote, In the days when
| Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat
| hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I
| am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-
| Toe." "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
| "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to
| play." Minsky shut his eyes. "Why do you close your
| eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher. "So the room will be
| empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
| gota wrote:
| I guess I can see some parallel the way you describe it, but it
| is not that tight of an analogy IMO. Correct me if I'm wrong
| but the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis mainly means that, for many
| of our tasks, we start with needlessly huge networks, and thus
| a good portion of the learning process is just the network
| learning to "cope with the noise" from the extraneous
| connections
|
| Hence why the lottery ticket network (being a smaller version
| of the same _initial_ network) can achieve similar accuracy
| (but not 'better') in much shorter time - because you took
| away all the confounding stuff. That kind of 'counterfactual'
| doesn't really translate to a biological domain, right?
|
| Also - the baby brain is not really a 'pruned', smaller version
| of the adult brain, right? Neither is the fetus brain compared
| to the baby brain (which is more to the point of the article).
| So the analogy breaks down there too
|
| I guess what the article describes is a bit like "pre-training"
| a full network with 'synthetic' experiences that quickly tune
| it for later. In that sense, I think its like these "dreams"
| are a 'distilled dataset' [1]. The question then is: how is
| this dataset being passed on from mother/father to child?
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.10959
|
| Abstract:
|
| > _Model distillation aims to distill the knowledge of a
| complex model into a simpler one. In this paper, we consider an
| alternative formulation called dataset distillation: we keep
| the model fixed and instead attempt to distill the knowledge
| from a large training dataset into a small one. The idea is to
| synthesize a small number of data points that do not need to
| come from the correct data distribution, but will, when given
| to the learning algorithm as training data, approximate the
| model trained on the original data. For example, we show that
| it is possible to compress 60,000 MNIST training images into
| just 10 synthetic distilled images (one per class) and achieve
| close to original performance with only a few gradient descent
| steps, given a fixed network initialization. We evaluate our
| method in various initialization settings and with different
| learning objectives. Experiments on multiple datasets show the
| advantage of our approach compared to alternative methods._
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| > Also - the baby brain is not really a 'pruned', smaller
| version of the adult brain, right
|
| I think it is the other way around -- adult brain is a
| physically pruned version of baby brain. We start with lots
| of connections from everywhere to wherever and then lose a
| lot of them as we learn, while strengthening useful ones.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| How hard would it be to find random networks that don't need to
| be trained at all?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Depends on the size of the network I would guess. A Boltzmann
| brain would apparently take about 10^10^50 years to form from
| quantum fluctuation in a vacuum. Our hypothetical neural
| network would be less complicated than that, assuming we're
| not aiming for general AI, so I think we can safely take that
| as an upper bound...
| CaptainNegative wrote:
| With a uniform initialization, presumably you'd never need
| much more than 2^(network bit complexity) number of samples
| to come across an ideally-initialized network with decent
| probability, so that's 2^10^24 for anything that fits in a
| yottabyte.
| freemint wrote:
| In the absence of dynamics and uniform random mutation,
| yes. But Both don't hold in the universe.
| belgian_guy wrote:
| Surprisingly, it's quite doable in practice. See e.g.
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.13299.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Do they do this in the dark and is it correlated with light
| input.. so is the eye/brain responding to stimulus even though
| the eyes aren't open yet?
| rudyfink wrote:
| I recall once hearing a talk that discussed, what I recall as,
| "test patterns" being run across the visual cortex prior to
| birth. Essentially, waves / patterns of stimulation would go
| across the optic structure that would be used to, again as I
| recall it, "calibrate" the visual system.
|
| I dug a bit and was able to find this paper
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15289028/ , which seems to
| track my memory. It has a number of forward and backward
| citations if you are interested. Perhaps someone with far more
| than my vague recollection of a talk will step in though!
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Are these the same patterns one can see by applying pressure
| on the inner corners of the eyes? Massaging my tear ducts
| makes me see strange black/white/gray/color patterns that
| change over time.
| jherm7 wrote:
| Poor giraffes dreaming they can walk right when they're born only
| to come tumbling down. Ah, gravity, thou art a heartless bitch.
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| Reminds me of recent Reinforcement Learning work on learning from
| internal world model "dreams".
|
| https://worldmodels.github.io/
| z3t4 wrote:
| Likely the fetus get spatial sense at some stage before birth...
| Tycho wrote:
| Maybe telepathy/ESP is real, it's just that we lose it soon after
| birth, or in early childhood, like eidetic memory. Or perhaps
| some people retain it longer - or some animals, hence all the
| mythical beasts.
| chromanoid wrote:
| Yeah, this is much more probable than a mechanism to replay
| genetically/biochemically encoded activation patterns that help
| survival after birth.
| Tycho wrote:
| Why the sarcasm?
| chromanoid wrote:
| Because it is an obviously improbable reasoning. Ever heard
| of Occam's razor?
| throwawaybchr wrote:
| These kinds of claims are near impossible to prove with certainty
| so it all seems very self gratifying
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > Crair said. "It's like dreaming about what you are going to see
| before you even open your eyes."
|
| Given that we don't know what dreaming is, that analogy adds
| unnecessary confusion to interpreting the phenomenon described in
| TFA.
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