I’m often torn between the competing ideas that: Understanding the brain, with its repeating structures and distinct modules, will be relatively easy (i.e. within the short-term grasp of humanity) Understanding the brain, with its structures crafted through millions of years of random evolution, will be relatively hard (i.e. will not happen for multiple generations) For …
A Circuit-Level View of Evolutionary Interpretability Read More »
Intelligence is notoriously difficult to define, in part because of the variety of ways in which we see it manifested in the world. From humans, to mice, to ant colonies, to bacteria, to computational algorithms, we see intelligence all around us, but it’s difficult to put a finger on a single definition which covers all …
Merriam Webster: meaning \ˈmē-niŋ \ noun 1 a the thing one intends to convey especially by language b the thing that is conveyed especially by language 2 something meant or intended 3 significant quality 4 a the logical connotation of a word or phrase b the logical denotation or extension of a word or phrase …
A number of other posts so far have touched on what it is that brains do – and for the most part, it’s been summarized as “creating a model of the world”. By this, we’ve meant that certain patterns of neural activity can be understood as representing or standing for some observed pattern of material …
This post, and all posts published on this site, will be constructed using words. I imagine this seems reasonable enough (though there may be hope for some pictures as well!) – words are the foundation of communication across our world. But how well do we actually understand the nuance of this tool? In this post, …
Consciousness is, and may always be, a slightly thorny subject to discuss. For many people, no physical explanation is suitable, as it never seems to address questions along the lines of “but why does it feel like something to be me? I can think and see things and do things – we need to explain …