9 ms·
With few exceptions, the AI research community completely overlooks the "rest of the body" when it comes to thinking about intelligent systems and focuses too m
by AndrewKemendo 6y ago
With few exceptions, the AI research community completely overlooks the "rest of the body" when it comes to thinking about intelligent systems and focuses too much on the brain.
The amount of computing going on in the peripheral nervous system is staggering - and when you look at HOW and WHERE this computing works with effectors and sensors you realize how much of intelligence is reliant on those systems being there.
Brains are interesting - but they actually don't do all that much when it comes to the majority of how people interact with the real world, and frankly you don't need that much (physical mass of) brain to be intelligent.
- patmorgan23 6y agoThis. Mind vs body is a false dicotomy. Your mind is fully integrated through out your body. Physical and mental health are so heavily intertwined.
- avaldeso 6y ago[Citation needed]
- ErikVandeWater 6y agoI think the second sentence is opinion, not something that could be objectively tested. Last sentence is mostly true. Sick people are much less happy than when they are healthy.
- tiborsaas 6y agoYou can cite your body. Before you get offended, really, just examine it as a system, and try to explain how can you have a conscious experience without any sensory input. Even with a lame comparison to computers, the machines also need a lot of stuff to put a CPU to work.
- SkyPuncher 6y ago> You can cite your body. At best, this is an anecdote.
- avaldeso 6y ago> You can cite your body. Anecdotal evidence. Also, if the mind is fully integrated with the body, how you explain seemingly inconsistent states that seems to work just fine. Eg., people with ALS or quadriplegic or severely injured or mutilated. If the mind can perfectly works without a perfectly abled body, where's this mind body connection? Also, where's such connection in a comatose brain with a completely funcional body? Maybe I misunderstood what this mind body connection is supposed to be.
- AndrewKemendo 6y agoShow me these people who aren't significantly augmented to replace their bodily functions eg Hawking. I'm not sure how you consider that working "just fine."
- quesera 6y ago> try to explain how can you have a conscious experience without any sensory input. John Lilly, sensory deprivation tanks? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly
- tiborsaas 6y agoSensory deprivation is interesting, but you already have a conscious experience when you enter the tank. It even reinforces that your mind is tied to your body.
- carapace 6y agoCheck out Levin's lab's work: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" - NeurIPS 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 In short, the biomolecular machinery that neurons use to think is present in all cells.
- Teever 6y agoThis may be the case but a quad amputee is still able to form and recall memories as well as tell jokes and sing songs.
- ksaj 6y agoI don't understand the meaning of this response. You seem to be suggesting that all memories are in the limbs. I don't think that's what was being suggested here. Trying to stay within what I think you are saying, don't forget that if you amputate some insect's legs, they will keep flicking around for a while, even though there is no connection to the brain. Surely the insect doesn't suddenly forget how to move it's now missing leg. But the leg does seem to have its own capacity to remember how to jump or whatever even without the brain. Until it runs out of energy, of course.
- Teever 6y agoInsect legs don't have the capacity to remember how to jump. They retain the ability to move for a brief period of time. You're ascribing a higher meaning to the limited spasms of a dismembered limb.
- ravi-delia 6y agoAnd yet I can go a-chopping anywhere but the brain without cognitive deficit, but even a little scraping of the cortex has a notable effect. The brain is fed and maintained by the body, and as such is vulnerable to the body's failures, but such a connection doesn't exactly break down the difference between mind and body.
- loveistheanswer 6y ago>And yet I can go a-chopping anywhere but the brain without cognitive deficit, but even a little scraping of the cortex has a notable effect. Is this not obviously false? Cut out someones heart, lungs, stomach, liver, kidneys, etc. and they will surely have a "cognitive deficit" in the form of death. (Assuming no transplant is used)
- ravi-delia 6y agoA-chopping anywhere but the brain without nontrivial cognitive deficit would have perhaps been better, but a little less pithy. The next sentence admits as much.
- AndrewKemendo 6y agoThis is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. You are framing this in terms of "cognitive deficit" which is specifically a (poorly defined) function of a generally high level capability test focused on brain function evaluation. Intelligence is not simply the theoretical capability to do higher reasoning in a structured test in my opinion - it's the functional capability to actually prove you can do higher reasoning through demonstration. You can't just go "a-chopping" anywhere any have the same functional capabilities. If I chop off your thumb, you are significantly functionally less intelligence in a practical test: if my intelligence test requires you to zip up your pants as a step, you would do much more poorly without your thumbs than someone with 40 fewer IQ points. Think differently - if you can't prove you're more intelligent by actually DOING something then you aren't more intelligent.
- ravi-delia 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jtsiskin 6y agoMost AI tasks that I think of - image labeling, NLP - the majority of that happens in the brain? Do we process language in our peripheral nervous system?
- _Microft 6y agoEdge-enhancement happens at the retina already by clever combinations of inputs from different photoreceptor cells for example.
- ravi-delia 6y agoBut it's also pretty obviously just a convolution, so not exactly a big unknown. It's super neat, and it makes sense that it would be in the eye, but at the end of the day the interesting processing is done in the brain.
- AndrewKemendo 6y agoOf course it does - physical phenomena must have a biological transducer to interact with [1] The structure of these transducers is critically important as they gate/filter the interaction types with the physical world that ultimately are the bounds on what humans can reason about. They are doing transformations and "pre-processing" if you like to compress real world signal into something that can be interpreted by the other systems in the body. [1] https://www.umms.org/ummc/health-services/hearing-balance/patient-information/how-ear-works https://www.umms.org/ummc/health-services/hearing-balance/pa...
- jtsiskin 6y agoBy language I mean words, the symbols that NLP operates on. Raw audio -> words is a much simpler problem than words -> understanding/response.
- 01100011 6y agoSure but think about what happened. 50+ years ago, researchers figured out some aspects of a neuron, simulated a network of grossly simplified neurons, and found out they could do useful things. Much of modern NN stuff is just following that trajectory. I don't think many people seriously believe that artificial neurons are in any way comparable to a real neuron, much less believe that an ANN is comparable to what goes on in the human body. Maybe in some very limited cases like the visual cortex, but even then I think most people would admit that it's a poor model valid only to a 1st approximation. That said, there is still merit in pushing the current approach further while other researchers continue to try to understand how biology implements intelligence and consciousness.
- AndrewKemendo 6y agoI don't know a single luminary in AI who seriously considers the whole of body approach to their work. Pretty much everyone talks/reasons specifically only about the brain and never how they work holisitcally sensors and effectors. For example, in computer vision, all of the biggest work assume the starting point of a 2D (RGB+Grey) matrix as the starting point. They never make any assumption about how that image is generated. Only really in the LIDAR world is the sensor considered, and even then everyone is trying to jam LIDAR return into a 2D matrix.
- IdiocyInAction 6y agoHow do you suggest that AI research should incorporate that? Most modern AI research isn't even brain-inspired anymore; the origins of ANNs are brain-inspired, but most SOTA approaches don't really seem to be.
- AndrewKemendo 6y agoStart from first principles in the physical world. Do more work on what kind of processing we can do at the edge of the sensor and work our way up from there. For example, build a system that learns to have reflexes. That is, has processing close to or near a sensor and can work collaboratively with other sensors to learn (not explicitly programmed) to take action based on input without a central processing system. I would argue that if you can build a complex enough physical reflex learning system, then you have enough of the building blocks for a human level system.
- Darvon 6y agoArtificial Life community does this research. Simulating worm brains and modelling ants, etc.