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The Human Brain Can Create Structures in Up to 11 Dimensions
- youdontknowtho 7y agoThis is going to be used by woo woo types for years. Did you know that our brains operate in 11 dimensions? Or, how can we get our brains to operate in all the dimensions it's capable of? Or, brains operate in 11 dimensions...and the soul makes up the other seven. Seven? That's a spiritual number. Etc... That guy who looks like David Spade with a brain tumor on Ancient Aliens will be all over this. The article is super interesting. I'm just enjoying imagining how someone will tie this to the great pyramid of Giza.
- ravenstine 7y agoIt will be the next "neuroplasticity".
- whymauri 7y agoBut neuroplasticity is actually a thing.
- inimino 7y agoBut so is this (presumably).
- ravenstine 7y agoYou're right, it is, but there's a lot of woo surrounding it and a lot of videos floating around with wild eyed people exaggerating the power of neuroplasticity.
- dumbfoundded 7y agolol, M-theory has 11 dimensions
- friendcrunch 7y agoCome on, it's more like the old Audi 5 ad, spoken with a Germanic accent, 4 cylinders is not enuf and 6 cylinders is too many… FIVE cylinders!
- stallmanite 7y agoI wonder what is the underlying urge behind the woo purveyors. There is more than a lifetime’s worth of weird trippy stuff that is 100% legit. There’s no need to muddy the waters; mystery abounds in the real world.
- ben_w 7y agoI was briefly interested in woo as a teenager — Wicca, telekinesis, shapeshifting, that sort of thing. One of the fascinating oddities I learned from that period is that several different founding mothers of Wicca — Valiente and Farrar come to mind — met people who thought the rituals they has created around and soon after WW2 were actually thousands of years old. I can’t put the connection into words, but it feels like this is related to “Joy in the Merely Real”: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x4dG4GhpZH2hgz59x/joy-in-the-merely-real https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x4dG4GhpZH2hgz59x/joy-in-the... Plus a dash of the way a beginner can totally misunderstand words of art and invent their own totally inaccurate understanding of what’s going on.
- tux1968 7y agoIt's hard to be an expert in Legit. You're instantly the sole authority on woo you invent.
- nabla9 7y agoI remember reading this article few years back. > A version of this story was first published in June 2017. It seems like they just reposed it and added "back in..." It would be more honest if they would just have "news from the past years section". Trying to sneak old articles as news in the front page is bad form.
- breck 7y agoDisclosure: I work on Tree Notation (https://treenotation.org https://treenotation.org). At the lab the other day we were discussing hyperparameter optimization in deep learning and visualizing N-dimensions spaces. Since all structures are Trees, which can be encoded in Tree Notation, we think there is a new type of visualization that can leverage that to easily visualize N-dimensional spaces. If you want to see a prototype (or contribute one!) when one is live, you can follow that issue here: https://github.com/treenotation/jtree/issues/35 https://github.com/treenotation/jtree/issues/35
- liability 7y agoFrom the number of times I've seen it mentioned, there seems to be very little that Tree Notation isn't in some way related to. But for the life of me I can't figure it out. From the examples it seems like a newline deliminated text format that uses spaces for indentation with indentation levels representing nested structure. Which seems fine enough but I feel like I'm missing some sort of philosophically profound implication of this format or something.
- breck 7y ago> From the number of times I've seen it mentioned, there seems to be very little that Tree Notation isn't in some way related to. But for the life of me I can't figure it out. Change the word "Tree Notation" to "binary Notation". What we discovered is that there is a remarkably simple notation that is all you need for representing abstractions and higher level languages. Just as Leibniz in the 1600's discovered that all you need is 0 and 1 to represent all information, we discovered that all you need is trees to represent all structures(and tree notation -- the most minimal way to encode trees), that has profound implications, just like binary. Think about all the things you use that depend on binary. All of the systems that depend on our modern will programming languages, Tree Notation will make all of those systems better in the decades ahead. People will say this is just "S-Expressions". Exactly! Except S-Expressions done correctly! When you try to reduce S-Expressions to perfection, you get Tree Notation. If you know S-Expressions and you still don't get that, this might help: https://medium.com/@breckyunits/removing-the-2s-from-trinary-notation-is-a-terrible-idea-848c2d7c6665 https://medium.com/@breckyunits/removing-the-2s-from-trinary...
- ianai 7y agoKey to understanding the thesis: “They found that groups of neurons connect into 'cliques', and that the number of neurons in a clique would lead to its size as a high-dimensional geometric object (a mathematical dimensional concept, not a space-time one).” Edit-more to the point; “"Networks are often analysed in terms of groups of nodes that are all-to-all connected, known as cliques. The number of neurons in a clique determines its size, or more formally, its dimension," the researchers explained in the 2017 paper.”
- Zenst 7y agoMay well turn out later on that AI is best modeled for speed and detail at 11 bit resolution - after all - evolution has done a lot of work that we equate as machine learning. Also interesting that 11 is also a prime number. But equally, may just be one of life's coincidences and the human drive to see patterns and understand exactly what is going on - a trait that still advances humanity today.
- jayd16 7y agoEvolution also determined a giraffe's lyrngeal nerve should detour down the neck and back.
- jacquesm 7y agoApparently the signal arrived too early so a delay loop was spliced in. Score one for ID.
- therein 7y agoWhen the giraffe class was first released it was too OP with its tall neck, allowing it to access food previously unreachable to many other classes while also being able to keep an eye on predators lurking at distance. Upon next evolutionary tick, it had to be nerfed.
- mockingbirdy 7y ago
- vankessel 7y agoTangential but I've always thought it may be possible for a human brain to experience higher spatial dimensions, it's just that all it ever experiences is 3. Imagine a video game is designed in 4 spatial dimensions and is fed directly into the brain through a neuralink type interface. The brain is pretty adaptable, would the recipient correctly experience those 4 dimensions?
- nothis 7y agoProbably not exactly what you’re talking about but you are aware of the indie game “Miegakure”?
- mirimir 7y agoI've seen more than three dimensions with LSD. At least, I've seen what looks a lot like those rotating hypercube images. Except more complicated, and looking somewhat like Mandelbrot sets.
- p1mrx 7y agoExtraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. With your mind in a suggestible state, it's much easier to convince yourself that you're seeing in 4D than is to actually see in 4D.
- vinceguidry 7y agoIt's pretty easy to work out what they actually saw from the words used to describe them. A hypercube rotation is a 4d object projected into 3 dimensions. Nothing extraordinary at all about that.
- swiley 7y agoPersonally the best abstraction I've seen for how the brain works is a "pointer and cell machine" similar to how people introduce s-expressions. It works well with how I find myself thinking about lists (like the alphabet) where I have to "cdr" down it to find any of the items.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 7y agoCould you elaborate? I'm not familiar with the terms you use and I don't understand the parallel you're drawing when I look them up.
- inimino 7y agoA cell holds some datum (like "Q" and all its associations) and a pointer is something that can reference another cell, for example ("Q", <rest of alphabet after Q>) includes a pointer to the rest of the alphabet after "Q". This (datum <ptr to the rest>) pair is exactly the LISP list, usually written as s-expressions.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mirimir 7y agoTangential question: What are good ways to visualize multidimensional data? Excel etc can chart 3D data, but even that is hard because stuff overlaps. And years ago, I had some Excel code that generated 3D views of 4D data. But with five or more dimensions, it's too tedious and unworkable. So I end up guessing a lot about what projections are useful. It's like that story about blind people trying to perceive an elephant. Anyway, just thought I'd ask.
- vankessel 7y agoUse non spatial dimensions as well, like color, size, and shape. You can also use clever projections like t-sne to reduce the number of dimensions while retaining some of the structure of the data (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJVL80Gg3lA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJVL80Gg3lA)
- mirimir 7y agoThanks, that's very useful.
- Der_Einzige 7y agoThere's an improvement to T-SNE called UMAP
- bitL 7y agoI've used them both recently and couldn't really tell which one is visually better; UMAP is supposed to be a bit faster though.
- inflatableDodo 7y agoI know someone with aphantasia who is an excellent mathematician, I asked him what he does instead of visualising and he says that he does mathematics with the kinesthetic feeling of arbitary imaginary limbs. This may possibly explain why he is one of the very few people I know who seems to experience no conceptual jump in difficulty when solving problems that have 4 or more dimensions when compared to solving those with 3 or less.
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y agoWow what a title to make me feel stupid, a handful of covariants is enough to confound me nevermind 11.
- buboard 7y agoI hate these titles, clickbait articles of that magnitude are just unacceptable to science.
- golemotron 7y agoIt's kind of spooky that M-Theory (a unified consistent version of string theory) has 11 dimensions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory Simulation much?
- dx7tnt 7y agoI thought this straight away. It made me think that the brain's structure has evolved in resonance with the fundamental dimensionality of the universe.
- bitL 7y ago11D tensor? Where would that get us with TensorFlow? To hierarchical attention?
- DoctorOetker 7y agoHahaha! Surely you must be trolling ;) spoiler alert: in math and physics, the dimension of a tensor is simply the dimension of your space, i.e. the number of basis vectors, and the number of indices is called the order (also degree or rank) while datamonkeys on MatrixBurp or TensorFart call the latter the "dimension" and the former ... the ... euh depth? So just like many here are objecting on the usage of "dimension" in the submitted article, (s)he is trolling the very same practice many ML people do with respect to mathematicians and physicists regarding the "dimension" of a tensor. so in math or physics terminology an 11-dimensional rank 2 tensor would take up just 11 ^ 2 = 121 values, while a 2-dimensional rank 11 tensor would take up 2 ^ 11 = 2048 values.
- wrnr 7y agoThere is a great video serie by infinite series[1] that goes into detail how the neural network of a brain processes information. The way I understand it is that the more abstract thoughts can are represented as higher dimensional structures of a directed graph. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akgU8nRNIp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akgU8nRNIp0
- michaco33 7y agoI dislike that we can't downvote.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago> Just to be clear - this isn't how you'd think of spatial dimensions (our Universe has three spatial dimensions plus one time dimension), instead it refers to how the researchers have looked at the neuron cliques to determine how connected they are. > "Networks are often analysed in terms of groups of nodes that are all-to-all connected, known as cliques. The number of neurons in a clique determines its size, or more formally, its dimension," the researchers explained in the 2017 paper. Can anyone give me a coherent summary of what this (both the quoted paragraphs and the entire article) is trying to say?
- ivan_ah 7y agoHere is a direct link to the paper from 2017: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2017.00048/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2017.0004... (paper has 102 citations according to google scholar see https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=11648945278530609413&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1164894527853060941... ) regarding "dimension" it's used in this sense of dimension of a simplex: > Following the conventions in algebraic topology, we refer to directed cliques of n neurons as directed simplices of dimension n-1 (which reflects their natural geometric representation as (n-1)-dimensional polyhedra) (see Figure S2; Section 4.1.3). Correspondingly, their sub-cliques are called sub-simplices. Figure S2 is in the Supplemental Material (and extra PDF 15 page of bonus materials) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2017.00048/full#supplementary-material https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2017.0004... Also related def'n on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex#Algebraic_topology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex#Algebraic_topology From what I understand of simplex of dim n-1 == clique of n neurons (in a directed graph) https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~daddel/linear_algebra_appl/Applications/GraphTheory/GraphTheory_9_17/node10.html https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~daddel/linear_algebra_appl/App...