[HN Gopher] Space is a latent sequence: A theory of the hippocampus
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Space is a latent sequence: A theory of the hippocampus
Author : XzetaU8
Score : 54 points
Date : 2024-08-01 18:28 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| smokel wrote:
| Space is a latent sequence _to humans_. I wonder what it is to
| God, or some other external observer.
| protonfish wrote:
| The paper is specifically about how space is represented in the
| human brain. Data representing space can be encoded in many
| different, but functionally equivalent, ways. Showing how it
| could be encoded by neurons in the hippocampus is valuable to
| understand our brain, but philosophically not significant.
| ithkuil wrote:
| How can understanding how the world works not be
| philosophically significant?
|
| How did we come to the point where we relegated philosophy to
| be the study of only the things not connected with reality?
|
| I'm fine with thinking about philosophy as a field that also
| explores ideas that are not connected with reality, but it's
| not only about those things.
| meroes wrote:
| They got sick of philosophers asking tough questions
| probably.
| 0xTJ wrote:
| Philosophy isn't relevant here, this is talking about science
| and theorizing about the function of real structures in our
| brains.
| exe34 wrote:
| So like Narnia looking out of the cupboard?
| fredgrott wrote:
| If you read Wolfram's work you see him talking about this several
| times...
| observationist wrote:
| This is coming from Dileep George and the Jeff Hawkins adjacent
| theories around hierarchical temporal memory, cortical columns,
| and much of the higher level theory around what it is that the
| brain is doing in its smallest, repeated functional units. They
| split some time back, but they're both quite rigorous and have
| done exciting research. This paper goes over allocentric framing
| of learning, allowing cortical networks to be built through
| learning and thinking over time, driving a more complex and
| nuanced model of the world to be built throughout the networks in
| the brain, where the hippocampus seems to hold the long term
| memory, with connections that feed back up to nearly every region
| in the cortex. It's not complete, but it abstracts a level away
| from phenomenological observations like the notion of Jennifer
| Aniston cells, or mirror neurons, or things that occur as a
| consequence of some underlying functionality. We're getting much
| closer to a complete picture of the algorithms underlying human
| intelligence, and those may unlock human level machine
| intelligence, the understanding of consciousness, and all sorts
| of great medicine and technology. Google made a good choice in
| hiring Dileep George.
| K0SM0S wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| Anecdotal (but deep) research led me to postulate that our
| entire "inner world", for lack of a better word, is an emergent
| construction based on a fundamentally _spatiotemporal encoding_
| of the external world. This assumes that feeding and motility,
| i.e., a geometric interpretation of the external world, is
| among the first 'functions' of living organisms in the
| evolutionary order. They subsequently became foundational for
| neuronal systems when these appeared about 500 million years
| ago.
|
| The hypothesis was informed by language notably, where most
| things are defined in spatial terms and concepts (temporal too,
| though more rarely), as if physical experiences of the world
| were the building blocks of thinking, really. A _" high"_
| council, a _" sub"_ culture, a _" cover",_ an _" adjacent"_
| concept, a _" bigger"_ love, a "convoluted" or "twisted" idea,
| etc.
|
| Representations in one's inner world are all about shape,
| position, and movement of things in some abstract space of
| sorts.
|
| This is exactly how I'd use a 4D modeling engine to express a
| more 'Turing-complete' language, a more comprehensive
| experience (beyond movement: senses, intuitions, emotions,
| thoughts, beliefs...): use its base elements as a generator set
| to express more complex objects through composition in larger
| and/or higher-dim space. Could nature, Evolution, have done
| just that? Iteratively as it conferred survival advantages to
| these genes? What would that look like for each layer of
| development of neuronal--and later centralized "brain"--
| systems?
|
| Think as in geometric algebra, maybe; e.g., think how the
| metric of a Clifford algebra may simply express valence or
| modality, for those neuronal patterns to trigger the proper
| neurotransmitters. In biological brains, we've already observed
| neural graphs up to 11 dimensions (with a bimodal distribution
| peak around ~2.5D and ~3.8D iirc... Interestingly for sure,
| right within the spatiotemporal ballpark, seeing as we
| experience the spatial world in 2.5D more than 3, unlike fishes
| or birds).
|
| Jeff Hawkins indeed strongly shaped my curiosity, notably in "A
| Thousand Brains" and subsequent interviews. The paper here
| immediately struck me as very salient to that part of my
| philosophical and ML research--so kinda not too surprised
| there's history there.
|
| And I'm really going off on a tangent here, but I'm pretty sure
| the "tokenization problem" (as expressed by e.g. Karpathy) may
| eventually be better solved using a spatiotemporal
| characterization of the world. Possibly much closer to real-
| life language in biological brains, for the above reasons.
| Video pretraining of truly multimodal models may constitute a
| breakthrough in that regard, perhaps to synthesize or identify
| the "ideal" text divisions, a better generator set for (any)
| language.
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