Seeing red

[The Grand Nudger]

That's what I'm saying.  You could see chaos in say the QM activity in an electronic logic gate, but that chaos is limited in such a way that it is irrelevant-- a gate is just a gate.

We engineer as much as we can out, but there are always edge cases, failure conditions, and unseen events.  "Chaos" isn't something that we -or- computers don't already have to deal with.   It's not irrelevant, even to a gate.  If something goes wrong, something goes wrong, and things go wrong alot.

Are you saying that logic gates are analog?

Yes we make analog logic gates, logic gates can be made out of -anything-.  We've been using analog computing devices for 150 years.......

Okay, this is the point around which we'll form an argument, I guess.

There is no room for argument.  There is such a thing as a random number generator, an actual component...an assembly of gates that will just spit random shit out forever.  That's chaos in computationally accessible little bytes. It exists.  If you think you need chaos for a non-existent ghost to be, then computers can accomplish that already. You don't even need the computer. You and I could argue the ghost all night and all day and that won't change. If the brain is special (and that's all that was, special pleading), it isn't for that reason. As for the ghost who lives in chaos... I've built -alot- of rngs, not a single one of them has ever given me the impression that there was anything residing in them.

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In it's most exotic form, a comp mind could be made out of nothing -but- random number generators wired to each other, a evolved heuristic for staying alive, truly referent to nothing, truly about nothing. Just a temporarily successful series of steps. I hope there's more to us, if for no other reason than that trying to understand the operation of such a system would be futile...it wouldn't work for any reason in particular with regards to itself.

[bennyboy]

These are not logic gates, which you've established as the foundation for all comp mind, no?

[The Grand Nudger]

What isn't a logic gate, a random number gen? That schematic above is a plan for building one type of single digit random number generator out of logic gates.  

Or are you asking whether or not an rng mind is a logic gate? The answer in that case is yes as well, many gates. I doubt it's efficacy greatly, but as a possibility it can't be ruled out. It could work, but for how long and in what context...meh.

[bennyboy]

What isn't a logic gate, a random number gen? That schematic above is a plan for building one type of single digit random number generator out of logic gates.  

Or are you asking whether or not an rng mind is a logic gate?  The answer in that case is yes as well, many gates.  I doubt it's efficacy greatly, but as a possibility it can't be ruled out.  It could work, but for how long and in what context...meh.

I'm curious what you consider a "logic" gate?  Do transistors count?

[emjay]

And the question being what effect would that have on the system? It's an interesting question... what would it take to 'break' the neural network?

I wouldn't use the term broken.  Interference might break a digital system (it might not anyway), but the brain is what it is, and I wouldn't say that rare events would generally mean a "breaking."  I can imagine (and this is just speculation) that you could see epileptics as systems that are sensitive to constructive interference (i.e. harmonics), and that things like spiritual experiences might be, as well.

Yeah, not necessarily break but just drastically alter its functioning. I wonder now too if epileptic fits might be that sort of wave effect, and if so it's not a good thing. As for spiritual experiences, have you had any? Or what you'd liken to them? Ie in meditation. I haven't had any experiences that I would deem spiritual so I can't relate to it. But expert practitioners of meditation can 'quiet' the mind and experience all sorts of weird stuff. The point of meditation is to let thoughts and sensations float through your mind without being engaged as it were... so you're aware of them but you don't feed them. And that would fit in with what I've been saying about contexts, in that contexts are 'refreshed' by engaging with them, so perhaps what's going on in advanced meditation is that contexts are being allowed to weaken and deactivate... resulting in the equivalent of an empty mind And then there'd be the question of this feeling of connectedness that people report; a kind of at-one-with-the-universe/no-self feeling. But I have no ideas yet on that

Anyway, the point of all that was to hopefully understand what could go wrong if a butterfly effect, snowball thingy happened So I was thinking, since the neurons rely on maintaining very specific potential differences and concentration gradients relative to the extra-cellular fluid then I think it would be fair to say that the content of the extracellular fluid must be regulated just as much as it is inside neurons. And for that the blood-brain barrier springs to mind, because it requires active transport of nutrients that it allows through the barrier (which is not everything... not toxins in the bloodstream for instance) via special transport molecules/cells, whatever they may be. So the question is if you've got an edge case where say all neurons are either in the resting state or in the fully excited state, what would be the situation in the extracellular fluid?

That would be like having every start in the galaxy line up, I suppose.  

As for your question to both of us, about pulling neurons 1-by-1, I really don't know I'm sorry. I think a neural network will always find a way to represent whatever it can, depending on its connectivity, but with decreasing neurons and thus indirectly decreasing connectivity, the scope of the representations would reduce. But how to translate that into stable or variable I don't know... I think it would always be pretty stable whatever size it was but I don't really know what you mean.

I suppose my question is whether adding more members adds a statistical balancing force that will never be disrupted (like the QM particles in my table never "spiking" and causing it to light on fire or something), or whether the increased complexity adds to the chance of a rogue wave-type situation where SOMETIMES remarkable things will happen as a gazillion discrete events just happen to line up.

Okay I've just been reading about it, and I'll just put this out there. The cerebral cortex - that is the thin outer layer of grey matter that covers the cerebrum in all its characteristic folds... gyrus and sulci... which allows gives it more surface area - is made up of six layers of neurons with bidirectional connectivity as I've explained. Different parts of it handle different functions... visual processing... learning... motor processing etc, and have different concentrations of certain types of neurons in the different layers, but what's common to most of it is these six layers. And what's interesting, and what I didn't know until now, is that they're arranged in columns as per this image:

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...and that the difference between a human brain and any other mammalian brain is not the number of layers, but the number of columns. So the human brain has drastically more columns than any other animal brain, but the form of those columns is roughly the same in all mammals. So to the question of what would happen if you remove neurons one at a time, I'd say it depends where you remove them from, so if it was removing columns at a time in the cerebral cortex, I think the effect would be to reduce the representational space, and thus the complexity of the associations and the information processing that was possible.

It's fascinating and I really want to start understanding this structure intimately. The question is, am I willing to spend 75 quid on a book called Cerebral Cortex: Architecture, Connections, and the Dual Origin Concept? It's so tempting because my problem at the moment is I understand the principles and network dynamics of a generic network of that type and arrangement but I don't know much about the structure of specific brain areas. Maybe it's about time I did?  

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm curious what you consider a "logic" gate?  Do transistors count?

Transistors are used to build them.  If you are using a transistor to accomplish computational work, yes, it's a logic gate. A slide rule is a logic gate. That something is a logic gate depends upon it's ability to model functions and it's use to that end.

Logic gates are primarily implemented using diodes or transistors acting as electronic switches, but can also be constructed using vacuum tubes, electromagnetic relays (relay logic), fluidic logic, pneumatic logic, optics, molecules, or even mechanical elements. With amplification, logic gates can be cascaded in the same way that Boolean functions can be composed, allowing the construction of a physical model of all of Boolean logic, and therefore, all of the algorithms and  that can be described with Boolean logic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_gate

@emjay...

Maybe it's about time I did?

Given your interest, yah, probably. Bit like a programmer deciding to learn about hardware and it's manufacture. Your model will -have- to conform to the kind of system the hardware can support, or else it couldn't be representative of a human mind even if it was a comp mind. Presumably, if comp is mind...it can be accomplished many ways, but the different manners in which it's accomplished, separate hardware, would lead to noticeable different types of systems with different ranges of ability and different limitations. It's possible, for example, that you can model an NN or circuit that our bodies just can't build..or that even if they did, due to our anatomy, they wouldn't/couldn't work.

[emjay]

@emjay...

Maybe it's about time I did?

Given your interest, yah, probably.  Bit like a programmer deciding to learn about hardware and it's manufacture.  Your model will -have- to conform to the kind of system the hardware can support, or else it couldn't be representative of a human mind even if it was a comp mind.  Presumably, if comp is mind...it can be accomplished many ways, but the different manners in which it's accomplished, separate hardware, would lead to noticeable different types of systems with different ranges of ability and different limitations.  It's possible, for example, that you can model an NN or circuit that our bodies just can't build..or that even if they did, due to our anatomy, they wouldn't/couldn't work.

Okey dokes then, 75 quid about to get spent I do pick these things up little by little as I go along, like I'm doing right now with these columns, so I do know something about the brain and areas of interest as they crop up or could relate to my theories, but I've never really been interested in it from the top down... so my knowledge of the large scale anatomy of the brain is very limited. So my approach has essentially been to model these things like you say without much reference to the actual hardware, and thus work on a theory of mind that uses a generic cortical-style network, and just assume that it could handle it. But some of the things I approach from the bottom-up... like trying to theorise how emotion would be associated with the representations... might meet with better success by looking from the top-down. So hopefully this book will be very enlightening and I'll be able to see if I'm on the right track.

Btw I bought the book that goes with the nand2tetris course, and downloaded the software from it's website, but there's no coursera course on it in the near future (as the website recommends) so I might just have to rely on the book. But just letting you know I've got it, and that'll be yet another project to be working on along with all of this. But there's so much on at the moment, don't be surprised if I only do it in dribs and drabs, but I will get there

[The Grand Nudger]

It's gonna hook you like crack rock...especially if you get a more whimsical hdl.  There are more amusing ones than the one included in that package - steampunk skins for gates, animation...that sort of thing.....so much fun.  It might help you to see how your NNs do work, to see the place, to see the interactions.  To see how it would have to be manufactured in order to function as you've envisioned it. How you solve something mechanically.  I'm guessing it would be a hell of alot of work, though.....the last time I did something big I think I dropped a few hundred hours on modeling a custom 8bit computer (I wanted to learn the specifics of kogge stone alu architecture so I built one in hdl).

...but, you and I can share our own schems from a dropbox now, and because of the popularity of that course there are lots of archives for circuits in that format.

[emjay]

It's gonna hook you like crack rock...especially if you get a more whimsical hdl.  There are more amusing ones than the one included in that package - steampunk skins for gates, animation...that sort of thing.....so much fun.  It might help you to see how your NNs do work, to see the place, to see the interactions.  To see how it would have to be manufactured in order to function as you've envisioned it.  How you solve something mechanically.   I'm guessing it would be a hell of alot of work, though.....the last time I did something big I think I dropped a few hundred hours on modeling a custom 8bit computer (I wanted to learn the specifics of kogge stone alu architecture so I built one in hdl).

...but, you and I can share our own schems from a dropbox now, and because of the popularity of that course there are lots of archives for circuits in that format.

I hope so and I think it will because I think you and me are quite similar... both reductionists... and both with a need to understand things at a fundamental level... not just taking them on faith. That's why I never trust things like Freudian psychology etc because it's too vague and symbolic and I can't relate it to any real processes. I mean, I know he was a neuroscientist and therefore that some of it was based on observations about the brain (association for instance) but IMO most of it was a load of bollocks... literally cos that's all he talked about

Yeah, I do think it will be good for me... by seeing it work in front of my very eyes it will give me confidence, just as the NN theories do... and it would be great to fully understand how computers work right down to the chips. We did do one unit in computer hardware at college - ALU's, CPU's, truth tables, two's complement etc - but it was a long time ago... but still I did enjoy it so I think I'm gonna love learning Assembler etc but not just that but what it actually translates into higher up the chain... how binary and machine code manifests at higher levels... I'm guessing you probably dream in binary right? I'd like to too...

It'll be nice sharing schems with you, once I've made some. and I'm quite looking forward to seeing your random number generator in action cos that looks pretty cool I've always wanted to understand electronics and this looks like the perfect way to do it - ie virtually, in software, rather than with real chips and circuitboards... cheaper that way and more scope I'd guess - and I also enjoy logic puzzles and this I'm sure will be kind of like that, but I'll be learning something, and hopefully a lot, in the process

[bennyboy]

Yeah, not necessarily break but just drastically alter its functioning. I wonder now too if epileptic fits might be that sort of wave effect, and if so it's not a good thing. As for spiritual experiences, have you had any? Or what you'd liken to them? Ie in meditation. I haven't had any experiences that I would deem spiritual so I can't relate to it. But expert practitioners of meditation can 'quiet' the mind and experience all sorts of weird stuff.

Yes, I've had several major events in my life under a variety of conditions: a couple times in meditation, a couple times when fasting and reading the Bible, a couple times under the effects of LSD, at least one time caused by strobing lights, and a couple times while getting deep into philosophy and physics-- especially when i deeply pondered things like QM, entanglement, etc. I've had 3 or 4 real lucid dreams and a cople out of body experiments, as well.

I would call them "spiritual" in the sense that I know they are the kind of experience that spirtual-minded people often talk to. But not in the sense that I believe they are a product of any spiritual activity.

...and that the difference between a human brain and any other mammalian brain is not the number of layers, but the number of columns. So the human brain has drastically more columns than any other animal brain, but the form of those columns is roughly the same in all mammals. So to the question of what would happen if you remove neurons one at a time, I'd say it depends where you remove them from, so if it was removing columns at a time in the cerebral cortex, I think the effect would be to reduce the representational space, and thus the complexity of the associations and the information processing that was possible.

When you talk about representation "space," I believe you mean simply capacity, and are not making references to qualia, to homunculi, to stages or screens or anything like that, right?

It's fascinating and I really want to start understanding this structure intimately. The question is, am I willing to spend 75 quid on a book called Cerebral Cortex: Architecture, Connections, and the Dual Origin Concept? It's so tempting because my problem at the moment is I understand the principles and network dynamics of a generic network of that type and arrangement but I don't know much about the structure of specific brain areas. Maybe it's about time I did?  

I don't think you need to spend money every time you want to learn. Googling "cerebral architecture" yielded what seem to be plenty of interesting results.