3 ms·

"But all almost miraculously running without a base oscillator for para-synchrony of compute" Would you elaborate on this a little for those of us who don't kn

by drsnow 5y ago

"But all almost miraculously running without a base oscillator for para-synchrony of compute" Would you elaborate on this a little for those of us who don't know what a base oscillator is or what it does for a para-synchronous compute?

robwwilliams 5y ago
Sure: almost all computation needs a method to time and synchronize operations. The synchronization in digital systems is driven by an oscillators/clocks/crystals. The precision of synchronization is never perfect—hence the new term “parasynchrony” or “good enough synchrony” to compute. Analog circuits also need a time frame (phase) for computation although it is not discretized. So where in the brain—a fancy mixed bag of salty cellular neurons and glia—is there anything analogous to an oscillator or clock? Answer: there isn’t! Para-synchrony is learned gradually by living and moving in a world. It is the root of the emergence of coordination of movements and eventually, of semantic sequence. The first years of life are about building “clock systems” into neural systems by tweaking synaptic weight and connection latencies to achieve coordinated movement (a hard compute) and accurate/useful perceptions (another hard compute). Movements, sensations, perceptions are all coupled closely and share DYNAMIC modulated meta-clock systems. We eventually control these meta-clock systems to some modest degree—and that modest degree allows us to steer attention recursively. Hofstadter makes this point in Gödel, Escher, Bach toward the end. Neuroscientists and developmental psychologists, and even philosophers (including Heidegger) take Time with a capital T, as a given. They are fixated on Representation. Even Piaget takes “Time” as a given. But time or synchrony as we experience it is very much a neural construct that takes years to build and fine-tune. Piaget got very close but in the end the question and the problem eluded him like a ghost. In “The Child and Reality”, he writes on page 15 (Rosin translation): “the action of looking, of following with the eyes, the action of bringing an object to the mouth, etc.—but they all lack coordination with each other.” Yet he forgets to ask why they lack coordination. The answer is that infants have very low and slow parasynchrony across their sensory-motor systems. More on this topic @robwilliamsiii
- sdwr 5y ago
  Wow! I read a paper a while back that suggested the brain cortex is modular, and each module is constantly+independently comparing sensory input to expectations (arxiv.org/pdf/1810.09084.pdf). From personal experience, when there's a lot of stimuli competing for my attention, most of it gets ignored or handled subconsciously. The flow of consciousness has fuzzy boundaries.

by drsnow 5y ago

robwwilliams 5y ago

Sure: almost all computation needs a method to time and synchronize operations. The synchronization in digital systems is driven by an oscillators/clocks/crystals. The precision of synchronization is never perfect—hence the new term “parasynchrony” or “good enough synchrony” to compute. Analog circuits also need a time frame (phase) for computation although it is not discretized. So where in the brain—a fancy mixed bag of salty cellular neurons and glia—is there anything analogous to an oscillator or clock? Answer: there isn’t! Para-synchrony is learned gradually by living and moving in a world. It is the root of the emergence of coordination of movements and eventually, of semantic sequence. The first years of life are about building “clock systems” into neural systems by tweaking synaptic weight and connection latencies to achieve coordinated movement (a hard compute) and accurate/useful perceptions (another hard compute). Movements, sensations, perceptions are all coupled closely and share DYNAMIC modulated meta-clock systems. We eventually control these meta-clock systems to some modest degree—and that modest degree allows us to steer attention recursively. Hofstadter makes this point in Gödel, Escher, Bach toward the end. Neuroscientists and developmental psychologists, and even philosophers (including Heidegger) take Time with a capital T, as a given. They are fixated on Representation. Even Piaget takes “Time” as a given. But time or synchrony as we experience it is very much a neural construct that takes years to build and fine-tune. Piaget got very close but in the end the question and the problem eluded him like a ghost. In “The Child and Reality”, he writes on page 15 (Rosin translation): “the action of looking, of following with the eyes, the action of bringing an object to the mouth, etc.—but they all lack coordination with each other.” Yet he forgets to ask why they lack coordination. The answer is that infants have very low and slow parasynchrony across their sensory-motor systems. More on this topic @robwilliamsiii

sdwr 5y ago
Wow! I read a paper a while back that suggested the brain cortex is modular, and each module is constantly+independently comparing sensory input to expectations (arxiv.org/pdf/1810.09084.pdf). From personal experience, when there's a lot of stimuli competing for my attention, most of it gets ignored or handled subconsciously. The flow of consciousness has fuzzy boundaries.