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Thank you for engaging! Are you saying it isn’t enough to have a model? That it must be accurate in all ways to be an adequate explanatory model? Describing t

Thank you for engaging! Are you saying it isn’t enough to have a model? That it must be accurate in all ways to be an adequate explanatory model? Describing the spin of an atom as spin is explanatory—but only incompletely. It still has value. In this case, the article described how astrocytes and neurons interact in some way that can produce properties of transformers. Correct? Why, in your opinion, is this a fruitless end? We won’t find a memory system or CPU either, but we may find accumulators and registers, and we are damn likely to find convolutions. Why not attempt to explicate a mechanism for transformer-based computation in the brain? Maybe they are wrong. But to call this pseudoscience…

mjburgess 4y ago
Well, again, I didnt call this paper pseudoscience. The "culture of papers" around this is pseudoscience. It's aim is to misapply computational descriptions to things in order to build PR credibility for their own projects -- everyone from Stanford, MIT, etc. does this, and it's awful. Attributing spin to particles is explanatory. You can, for example, perform the stern-gerlash experiment. The problem is something like this, take the formula f(a, b, c; A, B, C) = a^A.b^B.c^C That formulae describes gravity (a=m,b=M,c=r; units of GN), electrostatics (a=q,...), pendulums, oceans, thermodynamics... etc. The formulae is a pure syntax on to which we can impose a wide variety of radically different semantic. Knowing that formulae can be used with a system is meaningless. It can be used to describe an aspect of almost any system. The explanation part comes from the semantics of that formulae. What computational descriptions do is simply show that some formulae can be used. A priori, we basically already know that even, eg., that formulae above "describes the brain". That doesnt mean the brain is anything like gravity, thermo, etc. The false equivocation here is this: since the syntax of transformer models applies to the brain, their semantics as used on digital computers shows the brain is like a digital computer. This is a false equivocation, and extremely unlikely. If people want to make the above claim they need to perform an experiment which shows that the brain is operating like a digital computer, that a formulae applies to both is unsurprising. We should expect some aspect of the airflow in a room to be describale with the syntax of a transformer.

mjburgess 4y ago

Well, again, I didnt call this paper pseudoscience. The "culture of papers" around this is pseudoscience. It's aim is to misapply computational descriptions to things in order to build PR credibility for their own projects -- everyone from Stanford, MIT, etc. does this, and it's awful. Attributing spin to particles is explanatory. You can, for example, perform the stern-gerlash experiment. The problem is something like this, take the formula f(a, b, c; A, B, C) = a^A.b^B.c^C That formulae describes gravity (a=m,b=M,c=r; units of GN), electrostatics (a=q,...), pendulums, oceans, thermodynamics... etc. The formulae is a pure syntax on to which we can impose a wide variety of radically different semantic. Knowing that formulae can be used with a system is meaningless. It can be used to describe an aspect of almost any system. The explanation part comes from the semantics of that formulae. What computational descriptions do is simply show that some formulae can be used. A priori, we basically already know that even, eg., that formulae above "describes the brain". That doesnt mean the brain is anything like gravity, thermo, etc. The false equivocation here is this: since the syntax of transformer models applies to the brain, their semantics as used on digital computers shows the brain is like a digital computer. This is a false equivocation, and extremely unlikely. If people want to make the above claim they need to perform an experiment which shows that the brain is operating like a digital computer, that a formulae applies to both is unsurprising. We should expect some aspect of the airflow in a room to be describale with the syntax of a transformer.