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Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient?
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- HeyItsMatt 4y agoSpeak for yourself.
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoI'm curious for the other folks reading this post and interacting with this thread- do you believe that the logical pathway for expanding human intelligence is with A) Brain-Computer interfaces, B) Through AGI, C) Playing with our genes (e.g. designer babies), D) Something else (and I'd love to hear thoughts)
- mlyle 4y agoThe question is ill-posed. What exactly is "human intelligence"? Are you asking me for a normative judgment (e.g. which one is morally correct?) or some kind of positive one (e.g. which one will improve outcome measure X most?) Why are you assuming that it's just one? These choices don't seem mutually exclusive.
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoHuman intelligence = the standard intelligence we exhibit today as humans vs. machine intelligence from something like ML Not asking for a normative judgement or a positive one, I asked about what you thought would be the logical progression (under the assumption that humanity would like to continue to evolve and become more prosperous and becoming more intelligent or building more intelligent tools seems and obvious way to help enable that) Could be more than one, was just trying to give some large buckets, that's why I added D and asked for people to add their thoughts.
- mlyle 4y ago> Human intelligence = the standard intelligence we exhibit today as humans vs. machine intelligence from something like ML Yah, but what is that? Are you talking about an IQ score? Ability to do the tasks that ML is not currently good at isn't a great measure (a few years ago, Go or creating high quality paintings would have qualified). E.g. one example of "D" is "rigorously studying and improving human education". But there's infinite clarification on what the problem you're trying to solve before we agree what improvement is: * Mean, median, or peak outcomes? * Performance on a given curriculum, or on a given abstract class of problems? Does creativity count? Is an education system that improves various kinds of quantitative metrics by 20% but results in a 5% less creative and flexible population a "win" or not? Pretty much all the same arguments apply no matter which approach you consider. > Not asking for a normative judgement or a positive one, Well, normative considerations are important. If experimenting with brain-computer interfaces for quick advancement harms humans, is it a "good path"? How do we compare these paths? Quickness, magnitude of results, "best" resulting society, least harms, some kind of cost measure?
- sinenomine 4y agoWhy should this discussion play out again and again in this exact form is beyond me. It's always the same troupe of beaten up arguments trying to pass while being expressed in academia-flavored rhetorics, is it the canon critical thinking essay tone they teach in the US? Insofar as the grandparent post contained some useful inquiry this should amount to uncharitable derail. So often this blows up when anything related to IQ is brought up, a profound generational trauma of american intellectualism gets a small scene to replay its discourse in suffocating detail. Maybe this is as close to the root cause as we can publicly get? Our insane tendency to avoid productive discussion and stifle true creative activity, all in favor of hollow wordplay (quasi-statistical if the situation requires, not less hollow). Our education - a glorified daycare with rote-learning for line-workers, of which we somehow expect intelligence gains if only we could spend more time instilling it (going against all solid evidence to the contrary, because the doctrine of never having enough education has to be preached). There is a word for this, and it is a neologism: https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words
- causi 4y agoC is the most practical in the short term, because we don't have to understand the brain all that well to find out how to tell an embryo to make it bigger and denser. It will involve a lot of failures.
- colechristensen 4y agoIf you didn't suffer from the presence of a moral code, gene editing babies for intelligence is something you could do today, or if not, with a month or two of preparations and waiting for suppliers. I would bet that it is possible to expand actual consciousness into connected hardware (silicon or engineered nervous tissue), and have that hardware expand a metric you would call intelligence. The most reasonable thing in a third direction would be improving brain development through specific training in childhood and training as an adult. A lot of intelligence comes down to how the brain organizes itself in response to inputs, and a scientific discipline to optimize this could make a lot of progress. Not that work isn't being done along these lines but I think there is a lot of room to grow here.
- nonameiguess 4y agoIf you eliminate the "G" in AGI to include any mechanical, electrical, or otherwise automated non-human computational processes we can use to augment our own brain's limitations, i.e. calculators, slide rulers, all the way up to Wikipedia, then AI is clearly the answer so far. Even just books and language, augmenting human intelligence by parallelizing thinking across many humans and not losing knowledge upon death, are huge wins. But for the far future, all of the above seems like a good answer. At least one "something else" is the possibility of nutritional, electrical, or biochemical interventions that can increase brain function without needing to change our genes. Caffeine and beta blockers seem like the best things we've got so far, along with not being in a state of persistent starvation, but there are presumably ways we can do better.
- cjbgkagh 4y agoC) you don’t even have to know which genes boost intelligence to know that kids from smart parents are more likely to be intelligent. Akademgorodok was a concentration of very smart Russian scientists and turned into an (accidental?) eugenics program producing a new generation of smart kids. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever met were born there. But once IQ boosting genes are known they can be selected for by sequencing embryos, I.e. pick the smartest 2 embryos from a candidate pool of 100. An average couple with average variance could still produce 130 IQ kids.
- narag 4y agoI won't be the one to disagree on the effectivity of that approach, but not sure what would be the goal. To ellaborate: aren't there unintended consequences of very high intelligence?
- tsimionescu 4y agoIQ is much more a measure of prosperity/conformity than anything else, past 90-100.
- mlyle 4y agoThis isn't really true. The heritability of IQ is pretty high. We know this from twin studies. Beyond this, adopted siblings, have a very low correlation coefficient of IQ by adulthood, but genetic siblings have a very high one.
- mlyle 4y agoI'll go and play along with my own definitions, even though I think the question is hard to answer because we may not agree what it means at all. Improving the development and deployment of existing human intelligence is the strongest logical pathway for expanding human intelligence. 1. Most humans don't develop to anywhere near their full potential. 2. It's unclear whether even the "best" humans are anywhere near actual limitations. 3. Most humans spend large amounts of time doing drudge, unrewarding work below their full developed potential that could be better accomplished in other ways. Things like efforts to expand AI potentially chip away at 3.
- kshacker 4y ago> 3. Most humans spend large amounts of time doing drudge, unrewarding work below their full developed potential Imagine all humans working at their full potential. Would we have fewer people because we do not need that much potential? Would this have caused world wars decades, centuries, or millennia earlier? What will be the cost of making all humans work at their full potential? Maybe a hard problem to solve.
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- WJW 4y agoI kinda depends if they can agree on what needs to be done I suppose, just like in the real world. But TBH it sounds like it would quickly devolve into NIH, a bit like a team with too many seniors.
- mlyle 4y agoImagine monarchs and elites in the 1200s picturing what would happen if the commoners were educated and able to pursue intellectual pursuits en masse. They'd have similar arguments. And I mean, they wouldn't be wrong: we're wasteful; we duplicate effort; things are scattershot and disorganized. But we live in an amazing world of progress, creative expression, and wealth, too. Imagine taking another small step in the direction towards developing and exploiting human talent and allowing for self-actualization.
- narag 4y agoThe main obstacle to a happy life for most of Humanity is not lack of intelligence but irrational or selfish impulses. That would be my D. Make a more liveable world and no, we won't get there with more emotions/drama. More like live and let live. B won't expand human intelligence. C is paved with unintended consequences. Wait until it's not playing. So, IMHO, mostly A.
- kbelder 4y agoI think in the medium term, probably genetics, because that's partly a trial-and-error approach. I feel like brain-computer interfaces, and other technology that relies on actually _understanding_ details of how the brain works, are quite a ways off. But... in the short term, I think we could still make massive gains purely by improving education and child-rearing. If our schools and families actually raised and educated kids _properly_ (whatever 'properly' is), we'd see huge improvements in average IQ. Real improvements that may be culturally infeasible, and also could be very damaging if they are done wrong.
- pjscott 4y agoHow? There's a long history of failure at raising people's IQs by environmental changes, and it doesn't seem to be for lack of trying.
- scotty79 4y agoYou can however lower IQ with environmental changes very effectively. Getting rid of parasites improves educational outcomes of children. Possibly their IQ as well. Who knows how much smarter would we be if flus, colds and other duseases didn't ravage bodies of our children.
- 8note 4y agoMy understanding is that removing lead from a variety of infrastructure has done wonders for people's intelligence, as has enabling better family planning. Which failures are you talking about?
- pjscott 4y agoI consider those to be in the category of not lowering people's IQ. Making someone dumber is fairly easy: just drop them on their heads as a child, malnourish them, and expose them to lead and lots of parasites. And make sure they don't get enough iodine. But in rich countries we've already fixed those things, and there doesn't seem to be much else we can do.
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- Paedor 4y agoI'm doing a comp-bio PhD right now, and the more I learn about the process of playing with genes, the further I think we are from expanding intelligence with them. In the current state of the field, we simply don't know how cells work (in enough detail). We can't predict what cells do when genes are mutated, we definitely can't manufacture new genes that slot into the cell's existing machinery, and, for a lot of the proteins related to neurons in particular, we don't even know what they do. If there is a breakthrough, it'll take luck at this point, and probably be something stupid, like realizing we can double production of some cell type without hurting the child *too* much. We're really not close to engineering anything, which might be a requirement for producing more intelligence without some very clumsy side effects. Given the level of trial and error required for a lucky breakthrough, and the human cost of that error, we might just give up on this until the singularity anyways. That said, there's so much undiscovered now that there could be a perfect mechanism that just isn't known yet. And, indirectly, by just making sure people don't have allergies or a pre-disposition to heart disease... we might increase intelligence just by making people healthier.
- mlyle 4y agoHeritability of intelligence is high, and there's a few genes already existing in the human population that are well correlated with intelligence. You could just try turning a few known knobs and see what happens. The efficacy is probably moderate-- maybe 7 IQ points or so with the currently known genes. But a change of mean IQ by 7 is actually a pretty substantial advantage-- it's half a standard deviation, and predicts about $4k more income per year. Yes, it's unethical and there's probably substantial human cost. Or, there's even a shortcut of just testing for people with high IQs that also possess the best known genotypes (i.e. test both genotype and phenotype) and forcing them to breed.
- hedgedoops2 4y agoEducation Basic Income and Basic Capital (so you can use education)
- bee_rider 4y agoI would say probably A. Computers complement humans well, they are good at the things we suck at, and bad at the things we're good at. Lots of progress in computers nowadays is made by hanging problem-specific accelerators off the side of conventional CPUs, so either we can be "creativity accelerators" hanging off the computers, or they can be "computational accelerators" hanging off us. It should also improve human-to-human communication speed. The whole trick of humans is that we can put our heads together and work as a super-brain. As a side-effect, the normal-humans have distill their work-product into 'ideas' that fit into the heads of other normal humans. It seems unlikely that we'll ever genetically engineer the whole human race, so continuing to produce normal-human-compatible ideas seems like a big win. If we have genetically engineered super-humans going around, they might have some ideas that are just too big to fit in our normal brains. Breaking compatibility like that seems risky, don't want people out there whose word we just fundamentally have to take on some things.
- eternityforest 4y agoSomething else. All the other ones will happen to the best of our ability, but only for specific groups, and people(Or at least people like me) could wond up seeing them as almost cults, for a long while until it is totally proven safe and beneficial. The rest of us, at least for now without major cultural change, will just do more and more of our "thinking" outside our heads. Unless you can prove, via decades long studies, that your enhancements are totally safe and side effect free, with not even some headaches or 1 in 10000 complications, I'll just... use google. Even if you did have the studies I'd still want to personally meet enhanced people and see for myself if it altered their personality or caused some random aches and pains, or had some other regrettable thing they didn't bother to do a study for. Even after all that, there could still be social discrimination. If cyborgs were disliked my most people, I'll probably leave it to the people who are passionate about enhanced intelligence. Sure, maybe I could get a better job. Maybe I would even be able to understand 3D space well enough to do things like driving and not occasionally walking directly into door jambs. But by the time you have the enhancements cars will be self driving and computers will be able to do even more of the math I'd want to do. I don't think I have any close friends who want a Neuralink. CAD programs are essentially already a primitive form of neural prosthesis. We can work with shapes we couldn't work with mentally, and workflows outside of the traditional "Imagine, understand, write it down" are possible. Even if ALL the problems are solved, it probably will only be useful to people working in specific cutting edge sectors, and for committed philosophers(Professional or amateur) who belong to a school that is not against enhancements in the first place.
- hypertele-Xii 4y agoAbolishment of artificial scarcity moats to culture and technology, i.e. patents and copyright. Essentially, allowing access to a greater corpus of training data as a human right.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoI think baby steps: just do an IQ test with and without access to Google or Alexa, see where we are now with brain augmentation. There's a paper in that.
- witherk 4y agoModern humans in the developed world have access to insane quantities of calories. Too bad that evolution is still scared of us starving to death so we store the calories as fat. I think over evolutionary time, our brains could do some unbelievable things using all those calories.
- yrgulation 4y agoThis sounds as if people in the less developed world are somehow mentally challenged. What an odd comment tbh.
- fsckboy 4y agoI think you're reading it wrong: GP is saying if the brain could use as many calories as were available, then people with access to fewer calories would be at a handicap; but such is not the case.
- yrgulation 4y agoI stand corrected.
- seiferteric 4y agoNot how I read it. Thought they were saying that our brains could evolve to use more calories since they are abundant now, instead of storing the calories as fat as our bodies currently do. Basically what if you could make your brain 50% more powerful at the expense of needing more calories, it would seem like a pretty good trade off today since many of us eat more calories than we need anyway.
- yrgulation 4y agoA good point. Incidentally i need to eat like a whale despite sitting on a chair all day long. Brainpower is a hungry business but i dont get it my body needs to store some of that food as fat. I eat all day long! Perhaps we are feeding it the wrong stuff and what we are used to eating is no longer suitable for how we use our bodies in the modern day? But what about the super developed countries of east asia where people appear to be skinny? Is there something wrong with our diet in the european and american world?
- seydor 4y agoBCI. We still interact with keyboards, which is a very cumbersome and roundabout way to talk to each other and to the machine. BCI will connect our intelligence in unprecedented ways, and hopefully will allow 'uploading' so that there's continuity even after death. Genetics is not the right way to go about it - carbon and protein chemistry was a very slow 'minecraft' way to build intelligence , and each of our senses and motors can be replaced with much much simpler electronic devices. I don't know what AGI means in this context. Surely a BCI can upload itself to a brain-simulator and live there. No need for 'artificial' persons, although it is in principle possible (why not after all).
- thatguy0900 4y agoJust think, some day instead of choosing between religions you'll get to decide between the alphabet afterlife or the meta heaven. Hopefully you don't commit some cardinal sin in life and get yourself shadowbanned first before you die.
- feet 4y agoFrankly, that is quite improbable. Unless you can work over time to replace the brain piecewise so it integrates with non biological parts, transfer of consciousness is not happening
- giraffe_lady 4y agoOne will eventually come to believe that the other's afterlife is a crime against the dignity of the soul, and attempt to destroy it. In this way we will fulfill the prophecy we created ourselves by waging war in heaven.
- retrac 4y ago> Surely a BCI can upload itself to a brain-simulator and live there. I'm not sure. I have a strong suspicion that we can make a useful brain-computer interface, without any idea how the brain really works. And I kind of expect that's how it will go. I think this because, in a technical sense, we already have brain-computer interfaces. Cochlear implants. They are used to restore hearing. The auditory nerve and cochlea are, anatomically speaking, actually part of the brain. A long, extremely thin wire probe is inserted into the cochlea and auditory nerve. The probe has electrical contacts which are driven by the cochlear implant speech processor. The probes themselves are interesting in their own right; early ones only had a few electrical contacts, while modern ones have dozens or hundreds of electrodes spaced out along the length, each of which can be individually controlled, providing an almost infinite variety of possible inputs which the brain can distinguish. So here's the wild bit. We have only a vague idea how auditory signals are encoded by the cochlea and sent down the auditory nerve. This was even more true when cochlear implants were first devised, in the 1970s. It turns out that doesn't matter. If you start applying varying voltages at different electrodes along the probe, that correspond with activation of various frequency bands at varying intensities, in the vaguest mimicry of auditory nerve signalling, the brain pretty quickly figures it out. A person who previously had natural hearing and lost it can learn to understand speech this way sometimes in a matter of days. People who were born profoundly deaf and were not implanted in infancy often regret the decision to be implanted and usually do not learn to decode sound in a useful way. Children who are implanted in infancy usually do. As an aside, the accounts given by people who have had this generally unpleasant experience, suddenly given an extra sense but with no neural structures developed life-long to process it, are both fascinating and harrowing.
- daoist_shaman 4y agoBecause it's had millions of years to converge on a near-optimal solution for the environment that it's in. In fact, this is true for all organs within all extant species. Nature is far more advanced than technology, and I don't believe that we'll ever quite be able to one-up her. Most efforts to do that have seriously harmed us. We think we know everything, but this dangerous hubris can destroy all planetary life in the blink of an eye.
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- cm2012 4y agoI'll take the other side of that bet. We've one upped nature on hundreds of things, eventually we will be able to improve on nature in every respect.
- ff317 4y agoI'll take the third side of that bet: we've already so fundamentally altered "nature" to our whims, often in very destructive and short-sighted ways, that we're well past the point of trying to pretend like we're preserving any "natural" state of affairs ( https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/ !). The best we can hope for at this point, barring a severe and abrupt population decline, is to continue engineering our way out of this mess as best we can, with the long-term interests of humans at the forefront.
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- uoaei 4y agoTrust Nature's engineers -- they've been at it for billions of years!
- mrguyorama 4y agoExcept nature's engineers are also working in the bounds and constraints of their system, and occasionally end up building things such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve#Evidence_of_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve#Evid...
- nitwit005 4y ago> For example, a professional tennis player can follow the trajectory of a tennis ball after it is served at a speed as high as 160 miles per hour, move to the optimal spot on the court, position his or her arm, and swing the racket to return the ball in the opponent’s court, all within a few hundred milliseconds. I suspect if you made a perfectly invisible ball, you'd find people would manage to hit it back quite often. There's a lot of signal from the opponent's body motion.
- nh23423fefe 4y agoI disagree, and think it would nearly never be hit. Servers use false movement to disguise the serve.
- nitwit005 4y agoThey do, but within limits. You can't make any random movement and hit the ball somewhere useful. The existence of feints is why I knew people were using the body motions as a strong signal in the first place.
- okwubodu 4y agoThis is most obvious in soccer and basketball where you’ll see two similarly skilled players almost get stuck in place trying to predict the other’s next move.
- mulvya 4y agoWell, Ronaldo could hit a soccer ball after lights are cut. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoScYO2osb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoScYO2osb0
- nh23423fefe 4y agoclose but not really. the lights were on at the kick. he couldn't make contact with an invisible ball
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- saeranv 4y ago> Another salient property of the brain ... is that the connection strengths between neurons can be modified in response to activity and experience—a process that is widely believed by neuroscientists to be the basis for learning and memory. Repetitive training enables the neuronal circuits to become better configured for the tasks being performed, resulting in greatly improved speed and precision. This seems like a clear description of a bayesian process. The new connections are a posterior updated from the likelihood informed from input sensory data. But the fact that they don't describe it as such makes me wonder if there's other reasonable ways to model this learning behaviour. I am familiar with Karl Friston's work (as a layperson) of animal behaviour and learning as a form of bayesian update via variational inference. Does anyone know if his ideas, or the general idea of learning as a bayesian process well accepted in the neuroscience industry?
- EricMausler 4y agoNeurons that fire together, wire together
- eli_gottlieb 4y agoThe general idea of a Bayesian brain is fairly well-accepted. Not everyone agrees that oh, this must be the way the brain works, but there are definitely experiments demonstrating set-ups in which you can get a good approximation of a Bayesian posterior distribution out of subjects. The question is how the brain might do Bayesian inference in a very broad class of generative models (not just affine-Gaussian!), and what else it might be doing inference in service to.
- saeranv 4y ago> This latter property is particularly useful for enhancing the precision of information processing. For example, information represented by an individual neuron may be noisy (say, with a precision of 1 in 100). By taking the average of input from 100 neurons carrying the same information, the common downstream partner neuron can represent the information with much higher precision (about 1 in 1,000 in this case). What does precision mean here, mathematically? Precision as in precision/recall doesn't seem to work, as precision in that context means TP / (TP + FP), and going from 1/100 to 1/1000 would mean worse precision. Does it mean something like floating point precision, where increasing bits can increase information represented, i.e. 2 bits represent max of 11=3, 3 bits represent maximum of 111=7 and so on? I can't quite this to work...
- eli_gottlieb 4y agoThey mean signal-to-noise ratio. Let's say you want to estimate some quantity, so you put a Gaussian prior over it. You then have a bunch of different sensors subject to white (Gaussian) noise, and some link-function connecting the latent value to the mean of the sensor reading with fixed precision. Gaussian with Gaussian is a conjugate prior-likelihood pair, so you can calculate the posterior parameters in closed form. Your posterior mean is going to be a precision-weighted average of your sample mean and your prior mean, while your posterior precision (signal-to-noise) is going to be proportional to the number of sensors you used.
- saeranv 4y agoThank you, that's a very clever explaination. Even though I can't grok the mathematics off the top of my head (I would have to look up the conjugate gaussian-gaussian formula and work this out) I think converting this to a posterior probability calculation is much more intuitive, then the article's explaination. So, my crude understanding is that therefore the signal and noise is the mean and variance of the Gaussian, respectively. The posterior uncertainty in this is case is thus a function of a weighted average of the sample data, weighted by the priors, normalized by the data, which results in a higher signal-to-noise ratio, or lower uncertainty.
- xtiansimon 4y agoWhy does the human brain think itself so efficient? Bias. Haha. Couldn’t help it…