Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk.
It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. Within the first hour, the foal will stand, and despite long legs, this usually works the first time. Lying down, however, is not preprogrammed. I've watched a foal circle trying to figure out how to get down from standing, and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap. Standing up quickly is essential to survival, but smoothly lying down is not.
Within a day, a newborn foal can run with the herd.
Of the mammals, most of the equines and some of the rodents (beavers) are precocial.
Pigs are, monkeys are not. It's not closely tied to evolutionary ancestry.
One of the most beautiful, amazing things about parenting a child is thinking about “where would this child be at this age if it were another animal.”
A three day old horse can walk.
A three year old tiger is often a MOTHER to her own cubs already.
But then by six years-old the human child can do things mentally which are orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done. It’s really amazing.
What if a 3 day old human knew how to walk? I don't think that would look any different, because they physically can't do it anyway.
The first couple years of human development completely change the structure of the body. Walking is only possible after a significant amount of that process has happened, and the body keeps developing even after you learn how to walk.
A three minute old horse is both structurally and mentally prepared to run. A three year old horse will be taller and heavier, but not structurally different enough to change what walking is to their brain.
What a horse can never do as well as a human, is to learn a completely new behavior. Our brains are unmatched for flexibility in learning. Infant humans don't need to be born with the knowledge or the structure for waking. Both can develop together over time because our brains are able to develop new behavior.
The mystery here is the difference between a horse thinking "legs go" and a human thinking "legs that are just ready to hold me up, do what I see other people do, and don't fall over". We only have a vague linguistic model to express our understanding of the underlying complexity.
I'm not sure it's all _that_ unique. Elephants are physically mature at 15 to 20, say, so not that different to humans. Other apes are also similarish to humans in this.
Many cetaceans show similar dependency on their parents. They're also some of the few species where the females undergo menopause, like humans. (Elephants might have menopause, too.) Perhaps not coincidentally, maternal elders are very important for these species, often helping their children and grandchildren for decades after they are born.
The average was significantly higher than 14 even in hunter gatherer societies. Women in studied hunter gather societies had their first kid around 19 with a mix of teens and early 20’s being common.
Wasn’t puberty later back then too? Like people weren’t waiting around post puberty saving themselves for whatever, puberty just happened alongside full adult body maturation, not before as often happens today.
actually the later puberty ages may have been a temporary side-effect of malnutrition common during industrialization, there's some evidence that hunter-gatherers (and even people during medieval times) had good access to animal protein, fats, and other necessary vitamins and minerals from plant life (nutrition plays a big role in puberty onset)
> orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done.
I can't be the only person to find thinking about cognition like this to be a little odd. It's like the biological myth of progress. It's true we can reason about the world in ways many animals can't, but we're also biased to view reason (and recursive language, which is its engine) as "more advanced" as that's primarily what distinguishes us from other animals (and even then certainly to a lesser extent than we are able to know!), and obviously we are extremely attenuated to how humans (our own babies!) mature. Meanwhile ants in many ways have more organized society than we do. Why is this not considered a form of advanced cognition? I think we need more humility as a species.
Next time I’m at the zoo, I’ll run this by the zebras to see what they think.
:) I’m being sarcastic but it seems self evident to me that human cognition is a unique treasure on this planet and—while it’s true that ants and octopus and other creatures do some amazing things—-they’re not even close to us. We can agree to disagree but I’m just psyched about the psyche.
While I agree with you, I think, having cognition is not black and white. There are animals with great cognition skills especially among predators. Our brains are essentially anticipation machines capable of predicting the future — a trait uniquely advantageous when hunting other animals. We just happen to have specialized on this trait to the extreme (and otherwise lack good sensory organs or impressive innate weapons).
Whenever this topic comes up I have to think about this octopus who escaped an aquarium. [1]
I think it’s pretty fair to say humans have advanced cognition. There is no myth here, other animals barely use tools, change the world around them, create and pass on information, etc
The myth is in reducing complex behavior to a single dimension and calling it "advanced" rather than, well, more human-like. I'm skeptical of the utility of this "advanced" conception. There's no objective reason to view tools, language, etc as particularly interesting. Subjectively of course it's understandable why we're interested in what makes us human.
Humans have fingers and thumbs and sophisticated wiring of throat, lips, and tongue.
Wire up a gorilla with the equivalent hands and vocalization capacity, negate the wild hormonal fluctuations, and give that gorilla a more or less human upbringing, and they're going to be limited in cognition by the number of cortical neurons - less than half that of humans, but more than sufficient to learn to talk.
The amazing thing isn't necessarily that brains get built-in environmental shortcuts and preprogrammed adaptations, but that nearly everything involved in higher level cognition is plastic. Mammalian brains, at the neocortical level, can more or less get arbitrarily programmed and conditioned, so intelligence comes down to a relative level of overall capacity (number, performance of neurons) and platform (what tools are you working with.)
Give a whale, dolphin, or orca some neuralink adapters for arms and dexterous hands, and a fully operational virtual human vocal apparatus, and they'd be able to match humans across a wide range of cognitive capabilities.
By co-opting neural capacity for some arbitrary human capabilities equivalent, you might cripple something crucial to that animal's survival or well-being, the ethics are messy and uncertain, but in principle, it comes down to brains.
What makes us interesting as humans is that we got the jackpot set of traits that drove our species into the meta-niche. Our ancestors traits for adaptability generalized, and we started optimizing the generalization, so things like advanced vocalization and fancy fingerwork followed suit.
> Give a whale, dolphin, or orca some neuralink adapters for arms and dexterous hands, and a fully operational virtual human vocal apparatus, and they'd be able to match humans across a wide range of cognitive capabilities.
While I don't disbelieve this out of hand, I can think of different things that might easily make this untrue. On what evidence is this assertion based? Is it just "our brains are essentially similar and much of it is not hard wired therefore they should perform the same" or is there deeper science and/or testing behind this?
Good grief. This is what 20 years of language policing has wrought. People who are nervous (hiding behind ‘skeptical’) about words like ‘advanced’ when, by any number of dimensions, human cognition is uncontroversially superior, more advanced, more fluid, more deep, more adaptive, more various (pick one, nervous people) to that of spiders or cows.
You're communicating ideas across unknown thousands of miles with a stranger in near realtime and are able to comprehend each other, for one.
No cat or dog has managed that feat yet.
No cat or dog has managed to reproduce fire to the degree that evolution has changed their gut to adapt to the increase in available calories.
The big brain comes with down sides, but one thing it does have is utility.
Germ theory of disease has made it so a scratch isn't fatal anymore. Why, after all, do cats play with their prey? To tire it out so there's less chance of injury when they go in for the kill.
We just figure out how to farm it instead and mold it to our needs.
Let's say you're about to embark on a cross-oceanic sailing voyage. For safety reasons, you think it's best to bring another living being with you who can help if things go south or you are incapacitated.
Are you going to bring another human, or a goat? Can a goat navigate while you sleep? Can it apply first aid to you? Can it respond on the VHF radio if you get hailed? Can it operate the bilge pump?
Tool use allowed humans to colonize the planet and outcompete all rivals. We became a super predator species. We even gained the ability to look beyond our home. We look for evidence of other such advanced tool users in space.
Animal intelligence is often underestimated, (e.g. there's a famous test that shows that chimpanzee working memory is better than ours) but our use of language is qualitatively different from other animals. Some animals have rudimentary communication, but no other animal is capable (as far as we know) of recursive, infinitely variable language structure like us.
That remaining 1% are then actually the most advanced species, since they can continue their billion year existence through a blip of a couple thousand years when the environment became a bit more radioactive. We're so fragile that we're effectively biologically unstable, they're so advanced that they don't even need to know what happened.
It's not our capacity that matters but our actual behavior. Sure, we could cause even greater mass extinction. But will we choose preservation over suicide? That matters in evaluating our role in the hierarchy of life
Homan cognition is more advanced than in any other animal. I think it is clear enough. Humans are not the only animals that evolved higher intelligence, but we have a combination of attributes that made it really effective: we are larger animals (with room for a big brain) with a social structure and a relatively long lifespan (good for passing knowledge).
Ants beat us when it comes to society, but in a sense, we may also consider multicellular organisms as a society of single cells. Still impressive, and there is a good chance for ants to outlive us as a species, but we are still orders of magnitude more intelligent than ants, including collective intelligence.
By intelligence, I mean things like adaptability and problem solving, both collective and individual. It is evident in our ability to exploit resources no animals could, or our ability to live in places that would normally be unsurvivable to us. It doesn't mean we are the pinnacle of evolution, we have some pretty good competitors (including ants) but we are certainly the most advanced in one very imporant area.
> But then by six years-old the human child can do things mentally which are orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done.
It is amazing.
I would make a stronger claim, however. That is, I would qualify these comparisons as analogous. When people say that adult members of some species are "smarter" than a human child of age X, because they can do Y while the child still can't, then this is an analogous comparison. Many intellectual errors are rooted in the false dichotomy between the univocal and equivocal. So, if I ask, if an animal of species X doing Y is doing the same thing as a human being doing Y, some people will take the univocal position, because there is an appearance of the same thing going on (few will take the equivocal position here and deny any similarity), but it is more accurate to say that something analogical is happening. A dog eating is like a human being eating in some sense, but they are not univocal, nor are they totally dissimilar.
> It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born.
A fascinating example of this are some Labrador retrievers. Labs are descended from a Newfoundland "landrace" of dogs known as St Johns Water Dogs. They have multiple aquatic adaptations: the "otter tail", oily fur, and webbed feet. (Some of these are shared with other water-oriented breeds.) Some lines of Labradors, especially the "bench" or English dogs, normally retain this full suite of water adaptations.
But the wild thing about these particular Labradors is that they love to swim, and that most of them are born knowing how to swim very well. But they don't know that they know how to swim. So many a young Lab will spend a while standing on the shore, watching humans or other dogs in the water, and fussing because they don't dare to join the fun. Then they may (for example) eventually lean too far and fall into shallow water. Within moments, they'll typically be swimming around and having the time of their lives.
The near-instant transformation from "fascinated by water and fearing it" to "hey I can swim and this is the absolute best thing ever" is remarkable to watch, though not recommended.
I remember another Lab, who'd been afraid to go swimming, who one day impulsively bolted for the water, took an impressive leap off a rock, and (from his reaction) apparently realized in mid-air that he had no idea what he was going to do next. Once he hit the water, he was fortunately fine, to the great relief of his owner.
CAUTION: This behavior pattern is apparently NOT universal in Labs. Owners of "field" or American Labs seem to have much better thought-out protocols for introducing hunting dogs to water, and failure to follow these protocols may result in bad experiences, dogs that fear water, and actual danger to dogs. So please consult an expert.
This behavior has practically nothing to do with Labradors. Many, many dogs regardless of breed can do this. Cats too. And foxes and wolves and rats and... well pretty much all quadrupeds with reasonable sizes limbs relative to their body. You might notice it's more or less the same motion as walking. Animals that drown usually do so from exhaustion, not because they can't keep their head above water.
Primates are relatively unique in their complete lack of innate swimming abilities.
> Primates are relatively unique in their complete lack of innate swimming abilities.
Human babies can swim, so it's maybe more initially an innate one that gets lost. Though they won't be able to keep their head over water by default if that's what you meant (can be trained to as a toddler). But I'm talking about swimming on the umbilical in water births, etc., showing that there isn't a complete lack of innate swimming abilities.
You may not have noticed but you are also describing an inborn fear of deep water.
Does the dog fear drinking water? No. So the dog specifically fears deep water. What taught him to specifically fear deep water over a bowl of water? Most likely he was also born with the fear.
This also tells us that evolution often results in conflicting instincts… a fear of water and an instinct to swim. Most likely what occurred here is an early ancestor of the lab originally feared water and was not adapted to swim well. The feature that allowed it to swim well came later and is sort of like retrofitting a car to swim. You need to wait a really long time for the car to evolve into a submarine (see seals). Likely much earlier before becoming a seal an animal facing selection pressure to go back into being a marine animal will evolve away the fear of deep water. It’s just that labs haven’t fully hit this transitional period yet.
Is it fear of deep water, or fear of walking on a strange surface that might be unsafe? How does a dog know water is deep? Does a dog think its water bowl is deep?
You can pen a horse by painting stripes on the ground around it.
We know it’s specifically a fear of deep water because there is visible different behavior when dogs run on strange but solid surfaces and water in general like puddles or hosing a dog with water.
When I was young we had golden retriever and the first time he saw my neighbors pool he dove in immediately and started swimming. He wasn't a complete puppy so maybe he was more confident in his ability.
> So many a young Lab will spend a while standing on the shore, watching humans or other dogs in the water, and fussing because they don't dare to join the fun. Then they may (for example) eventually lean too far and fall into shallow water. Within moments, they'll typically be swimming around and having the time of their lives.
Interesting, I didn’t know this was a common phenomenon! It describes exactly what happened with my childhood lab - my family would go swimming at the river and he would whine and fuss at the shore, until one day he wanted to play with another dog that was in the water so badly that he just jumped in, and was swimming around like he’d been doing it his whole life already.
One of the most curious things I learned about babies is that they are born with a walking instinct, long before they actually can walk. If you hold them up, they will move their legs in a perfectly correct walking fashion. But they lack the strength and agility to keep their body up. At around 3 months this walking instinct disappears, and then at around a year we 'relearn' to walk when we have the strength and agility to hold ourselves up.
But if we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, humans would likely be walking very near immediately.
One of my kids could stand on the day she was born. She seemed super strong, so while I held her I just took my hands away, and she stood there and stared at the rest of the family. Lasted a good 10 seconds, then I thought it was enough.
My boy is 2mo old and he could lock his legs with extreme strength in the first few days. I was very impressed, but my wife told me to stop letting his legs hold any weight. Apparently his uncle was walking at 9mo but his body wasn't ready and he gave himself a hernia.
>> One of my kids could stand on the day she was born. She seemed super strong, so while I held her I just took my hands away, and she stood there and stared at the rest of the family. Lasted a good 10 seconds, then I thought it was enough.
Probably a good experience. However, at that age it may have been a setback if the kid fell down and got hurt because they weren't strong or coordinated enough. The experience (good or bad) of doing something for the first time can be very influential on future behavior.
If we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, walking would be much more difficult. Notably, on flat ground we absolutely must have an upward component to our application of force with the surface - this is clearly seen in videos taken on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions. This baby on a hypothetical lower gravity world would find standing easier, yes, but not mobility. At least not once he's taken his first few trail steps.
If gravity were lower we would have evolved differently, walking would have adapted too. On the other hand babies probably wouldn't be able to walk either. Being mobile, defenseless, and not having "runaway!" as the default defense mechanism (like horses) is an evolutionary dead end.
Problem is we don't have any good data about which gravitational accelerations would be suitable for long term health. We have 1g as our baseline, and we know that months in 0g messes you up and longer is a bad idea. We don't know anything about the long-term effects of living in Mars or Lunar gravity though. It could be studied using von Braun stations, but nobody has done it.
That series strived for realism in that regard, and in using magnetic boots to work in zero gravity; which was admirable. That made the things that were not realistic stand out even more imo. The (unfortunately named) Epstein drive, a drive that consumes very little mass under constant acceleration allows for relativistic speeds in very little time (weeks). Their ships were flying from one side of the solar system to the other in weeks, but they couldn’t make interstellar flights? Also the effects of cosmic rays and hard radiation on reproduction makes the disaffected belter population seem impossible. That’s all fine of course, just inconsistent imo.
Shohreh Aghdashloo performance was a real treat though!
The Epstein drives are efficient, but not efficient enough to run for months at a time without stopping, and are thus unusable for interstellar travel. The books go into that when talking about Medina/Behemoth/Nauvoo... The whole reason it had a rotating drum was because the engines would only be active at the start and end of the journey.
Regarding reproduction, I'm willing to write that off to advanced medical technology doing DNA repair. Most of the plot wouldn't be that different with slower space drives, so I wasn't too bothered by that either.
But fwiw, it turns out it is possible to get that level of rocket performance, if ToughSF got their numbers right:
It wouldn't look the same and the power level would be higher than what all of civilization uses today, but the amount of fusion fuel isn't all that remarkable. The design uses helium-3, which could be collected in large quantity from Uranus and Neptune.
I did enjoy the first season of the series, but then was turned off by some story arcs, but maybe I will give it a try again. Are the books more consistent?
They will also grab with their toes. Place your finger across their toes between the foot and the sweet little toesies and they will grip your finger pretty hard. We monkey
IIRC Andrej Karpathy in a recent talk made a point that reading a book isn't like memorizing the book, it's more like prompting the brain with the book.
So maybe this concept of being ready to go at birth isn't about the animals ability to start doing things but just a way of upbringing regardless of how ready the animal is to function. Maybe pigs just start prompting early. AFAIK human babies can swim right out of the womb. In other words, maybe the distinction between precocial and non-precocial(I don't know if there's a word for that) animals isn't that clear?
I think it's called "diving reflex", not very sure about it all but AFAIK babies can learn to swim properly quite early which makes me think that humans too come with a lot of "ready to go" features but maybe need some prompting to surface
Kids (and even adults) definitely don't know how to swim off the bat though I have no doubt they could be taught earlier than many are. There's a reason some universities have a requirement to take swimming physical education absent a demonstrate ability to swim.
I'm immediately fascinated by what I imagine are core questions explored by this domain. Largely the trade-offs. It's almost like choosing to ship a product with a hard-coded configuration vs. a more complex "discover and self-calibrate" phase.
Would the trade-off be that precocial animals are generally "configured" for the environments in which they've evolved? If I birth (well, not me directly) a foal on the moon, will it adapt to the different gravity in the first hour or is that something that's "built-in" to their programming?
Are these built-ins easy to override or modify? Maybe an animal being precogial doesn't negatively impact its ability to also be adaptive, which I think I'm making a big assumption on already.
I have an anecdote that sounds like it fits this...
The house I used to live in had a ton of blue tailed skinks around it. You could always spot a baby by its size and brightness of the blue in its tail (juveniles have a brighter hue, adults are more brown). To avoid birds, the skinks would do this shimmy under the siding of the house just across from my back porch. What surprised me is that even the babies, maybe a few days old, all knew how to do the siding shimmy. Young, old, didn't matter, you could tell they just knew how (and why) to do it.
I think all animals are born knowing how to walk, including monkeys and humans. However, that trait only surfaces at a later stage of their development.
> Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk.
Early young borns that could walk, like a baby giraffe or baby rhino, often fall down or get exhausted quickly initially; tons of youtube videos show that. Humans are slow learners here, but I would not call these other animals as "born knowing how to walk" if their initial steps are so insecure. Their body structure is different though - a newborn human is basically pretty crap-built. A baby deer kind of is built differently on birth and that also makes sense if you are threatened by other predator animals like wolves or bears or lions.
I'm not aware of any way we can know this. We do know that those species are born with the physical ability to walk within the first few hours after birth. How could we distinguish between whether they were born with the knowledge of how to walk as opposed to them learning it quickly since their body can physically do it?
Are you proposing that as an example that animals (and humans) seem to be born with natural instincts for survival or that we know they are born with that information?
If the latter, how do you propose we know that as a fact? Presumably we would really need to know how that information is passed down to the child and how it knows how to interpret it. To my best understanding, we effectively stop at DNA seeming to be a complex set of instructions for how to make the animal. We don't know if or how it might encode knowledge, or if something else entirely is at play to make those instincts known to the newborn.
Watch the video. The iguana just hatched and is already going on insane escape from snakes. That information has to be encoded there from the start. Thus without it would have been probably naturally selected out.
is it true that it's a tradeoff ? the "more precocial" the less flexibility to learn new things ? on the contrary knowing less equals less assumptions, which needs more flexibility in exchange.
Would be true that what is precocial in us is the ability mimic and abstract specific patterns into general rules ?
Naturally, I'm a dev. Could it be something to do with limited genetic storage being dedicated to software instead of coding for hardware capabilities? In my limited knowledge, increasing DNA size comes at a maintainance cost(transcription, replication etc), so there's a soft upper bound.
It must be a tradeoff. I don't have any proof, but my thinking is that we pay an extraordinary price in terms of resources required to keep human babies safe for years before they can keep themselves safe. That is a strong selection pressure on everyone involved. The fact that it still happens means it must somehow be worth it.
I thought you misspelled presocial, but precoial is etymologically related to precocious, both originally meaning early-maturing or something along those lines.
This is unlikely to be a good way to think about them. The norm is for animals to be born knowing how to move. Whether they actually can move shortly after birth is more of a question of muscle development than knowledge.
For example, when birds are held immobile until they're old enough to fly, they fly normally.
The title is misleading, and HN comments don't seem to relate to the article.
The misleading part: the actual finding is that organoid cells fire in patterns that are "like" the patterns in the brain's default mode network. That says nothing about whether the there's any relationship between phenomena of a few hundred organoid cells and millions in the brain.
As a reminder, heart pacing cells are automatically firing long before anything like a heart actually forms. It's silly to call that a heartbeat because they're not actually driving anything like a heart.
So this is not evidence of "firmware" or "prewired" or "preconfigured" or any instructions whatsoever.
This is evidence that a bunch of neurons will fall into patterns when interacting with each other -- no surprise since they have dendrites and firing thresholds and axons connected via neural junctions.
The real claim is that organoids are a viable model since they exhibit emergent phenomena, but whether any experiments can lead to applicable science is an open question.
How newborn brain works is absolutely fascinating for me. I just don't understand how is it possible.
Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information.
Human body, including brain, gets built using this information only. So our "preconfigured" neural networks are also built using this information only.
And apparently it's enough to encode complex behaviour. That's not just visible things. Brain processes a humongous amount of information, it basically supports living processes for entire body, processing miriads of sensors, adjusting all kinds of knobs for body to function properly.
I just don't understand how is it possible just from a purely bit size approach. For me, it's a mystery.
It somewhat makes sense if you think of it in terms of a really complicated 1.5GB metaprogram with a huge pile of conditionals that are triggered by the programs it itself writes (proteins).
The final you is made up of an incomprehensible huge number of copies of the metaprogram, running different configurations, and spitting out programs to each other which then do more stuff.
Our human brains can't really conceive of a configurable metaprogram that writes programs by interacting with itself in different configurations that it itself sets up.
There is a finite size program that can generate infinite digits of pi (in infinite time). Kolmogorov's complexity of pi is finite even when the object is infinite.
It's not very surprising that it takes a few GB of a program to encode conscious 'us'. Humbling to think about it though...
Yeah but pi digits are essentially random noise, but any human is a precisely build system. E.g. there are exactly two identical eyes with nerves going to this precise area of brain, every time.
It's more like mega-efficient archive utility that unzips a few GB into a human, I just can't fathom it.
For a demonstration of Kolmogorov complexity, it's good to watch "A mind is born"[0] by lftkryo. It's only 256 bytes, but can generate over 2 minutes of complex music and video. Also, the name is appropriate for this topic :D
It was also developed “iteratively” under extremely harsh selection criteria over a time scale that is so long it is almost impossible to reason about. An old geology textbook I had used the analogy of a geologic timeline that stretched from LA to NYC. Life appears really early (in CA somewhere IIRC) and human existence is about the width of a crack in the pavement just before you hit the Atlantic Ocean.
Using a timeline from LA to NYC, since you made me curious:
- life formed 3.7B of 4.5B years ago, which is 700km towards NYC from LA; or about Colorado
- proto-humans formed 2M of 4500M years ago, which is about 1.7km “from” NYC; a distance hard to compare with the whole way
- human lifespans are about 70 of 4.5B years, which is about 6cm “from” NYC; a distance hard to compare with either 1.7km, 700km for life to form, or the whole 3966km.
Ha! thanks! My memory of this was way off. But I guess I liked the idea at the time if I remembered it at all decades later. Life has been evolving for a LONG time.
Nature recently posted an interesting video [1] about what causes developing hearts to have their first beat. The gist is that eventually random electrical noise triggers a propagating wave which is then continued and repeated by the cellular automation nature of heart tissue. You don't need as much software if your system is composed of emergent properties.
As a person who knows next to nothing about how the brain or the genes that configure it work, I tend to think of this in terms of 80s video games like River Raid. The level data for these games, if stored naively, would fill the computer's available memory many times over. So they just store a pseudorandom number generator seed along with a few other parameters. Coupled with a few rules to make the level playable, it can generate a seemingly impossible number of levels with very little stored data.
Maybe the genes just encode a few crucial rules and the rest just emerge from that.
Oh, and I know even less about how the universe works. But I tend to think of it in the same terms: Emergent phenomena stemming from simple rules à la Game of Life.
Ever since I read about Rodney Brooks and his idea of the Subsumption architecture I've been convinced that something like this is going on in our minds - likely with some other mechanisms too. It just clicks for me - I'm mostly likely completely wrong, but it's a pretty cool idea, and I've used it to create some really interesting simulations.
No they don't. There is plenty of external stimuli that also serves as input, e.g. the process of raising a child and complex thoughts that may only be transferred from grown human to grown human.
Try raising a human in a barren cell without human contact or as part of a pack of wolfs and you'll see how much a human brain is built from "DNA only".
Certainly, and I don't think anyone really doubts this.
Still, people are sometimes surprised by how DNA may affect more parts of behavior than they previously thought.
Not necessarily by directly coding for the behavior. In many cases, the DNA will just modulate how we learn from the environment. And if the environment is fairly constant, observed behavior can correlate more strongly with DNA that one might have expected.
Yeah compared to animals we have a lot of extra bootstrapping outside of physics/chemistry alone via culture and stored information similar to how cell DNA bootsraps via physics, human mind boostraps via stored information in human "network" (talking, internet, books) after being born.
Have you looked into the amazing things people do with procedural generation with only a tiny bit (kilobytes, often) of source code? My intuition is that this is vaguely analogous.
Here's an example from 2003, where the entire source code, from music to visuals, fits in 64 kb: https://youtu.be/HtJvSvQnep0
To me, it feels similarly impossible/spooky to how image models work.
Consider a model like SDXL:
- each image is 512x512, plenty of detail
- max prompt length is 77 tokens, or a solid paragraph
- each image has a seed value between 0 and 9,999,999, with each seed giving a completely different take on the prompt
I can't begin to calculate the upper limit on the number of possible human-readable prompts that can fit in 77 tokens, but multiply even an (extremely conservative) estimate of a million possible prompts by 10 million seeds and it's clear that this model "contains", at minimum, literally tens of trillions of possible meaningful images -- all in a model file that's under 7 GB.
I suspect it works similarly to the biological side -- evolutionary pressure encoding complex patterns into hyper-efficient "programs" that aren't easily interpretable, but eerily effective despite their compact size.
I think it's a wrong way to look at it. In addition to DNA information content, one should count also the complexity of the proteins and higher-level structures in the gametes.
The even crazier thing is that DNA does not encode any of that. Behaviour and morphology is not directly encoded in there, you'll only find recipes for proteins. The zigote will divide into billions of cells that share that same recipe book. Depending on the electric and chemical signals surrounding cells are sending, individual cells get their "personalities" or function. This cell colony forms an organism which emerges from the sum of morphology and behaviour of all cells. But you'll find no recipe for an arm in DNA, it is the result of the work of the collective intelligence that is your body.
I'm not sure in what sense there isn't a recipe for arms in our DNA. To me, it seems the DNA does encode that stuff, but in a highly compressed format that is then "unzipped" through the laws of physics and biology into a living and breathing being with arms.
I mean, the information has to be in there somewhere, right?
I don't think human DNA generally codes for the behavior derectly. Rather, DNA can code for how the brain learns from incoming data streams.
If the brain naturally tunes into some sources or patterns of input rather than others, it may learn very quickly from the preferred sources. And as long as those sources carry signals that are fairly invariant over time, it may seem like those signals are instinctual.
For instance, it may appear that humans learn to build relationships with kin (both parents and children) and friends, to build revenue streams (or gather food in more primitive societies) and reproduce.
Instead, the brain may come preloaded to generate brain chemicals when detecting certain stimuli. Like oxytocin near caregivers (as children) or small fluffy things (as adults). When exposed to parents/babies, this triggers. But it can also trigger around toys, pets, adopted children, etc.
Friendship-seeking can be, in part, related to seretonin-production in certain social situations. But may be hijacked by social media.
Revenue-seeking behavior can come from dopamin-stimulus from certain goal-optimzing situations. But may also be triggered by video games.
And the best known part: Reproductive behavior may primarily come from sexual arousal, and hijacked by porn or birth control.
Each of the above may be coded by a limited number of bytes of DNA, and it's really the learning algorithm combined with the data stream of natural environments that causes specific behaviors.
A lot of animals are born "hardcoded" with most of the instincts they need to survive, so some behaviors are clearly innate.
And "how the brain learns from the incoming data streams" is, in part, driven a set of behaviors too.
A baby's eyes are trying to detect and track certain preset features long before the primary visual cortex learns to make sense of them. That's a behavior, and it exists for a reason. As the baby develops, the baby would try to seek out certain experiences to learn from them, which is a behavior that exists for a reason too.
There's a hypothesis that certain mental disorders are caused by this innate learning process going off course, but it's just a hypothesis, of the kind that's hard to prove conclusively.
It’s like one computer with program (DNA) and helper programs (RNA) creates second generation of computer and programs (proteins, lipids, carbohydrates) that essentially create their own version of computer system in which they govern things like enzymes, hormones etc
But keep in mind that humans are not created in vacuum. After those two levels of computer create third level that is brain, actual programming of brain is done by other living humans.
So actual „humanity” is what persists in living population and would reset when population is culled and newborn must live and learn on their own.
Even if such newborn would live long enough to have access to things like books, computers, even sound and video records… those would be completely useless to them because they won’t even know language and skills required to use those.
Well, nature has a big advantage over us in that it doesn't need to "make sense" of that code :). So it can, for example, do crazy reusage optimization patterns. A "subroutine" that is used in one place could also be part of a "data piece" of another part. A "header" part can also double down as a "validator" of another part. Doesn't need to make sense, it just needs to work. The only limits are the laws of physics. I would not even call it compression at this point. It's more like heavily optimized spaghetti code.
I find using the term "junk DNA" for non-coding DNA to off-putting for exactly this reason. There's most certainly "cruft" accumulated in any evolved organism's DNA, but the very presence of that "cruft" might just as well be serving another purpose.
> Human body, including brain, gets built using [DNA] information only
I think there is a good chance there are other substantial information transfers from one generation to the next. The total genome of all that gut bacteria is orders of magnitude larger for example.
Well technically yeah but consider that it takes ~9 months for the product to function without constant life support, at least a few years until majority of the basic functions work and ~15 years until it is fully functional.
9 months is caused by head size to how far you can stretch the exit ratio. In a way, we are born prematurely, to lessen the probability of death in childbirth (for both the mother and child).
It’s not foolproof, but I can easily transmit a huge amount of information to someone by saying “Titanic prow king of the world scene.” In seven words, which could be fewer if I were really trying, the recipient has a moving image and sound in their head (as long as they’re the right age group- every example I could think of made me feel old).
Well that was transmitting "a pointer" more than anything else, but yes I agree that nature could be doing the same thing. Not hardcode behaviors, but certain chemical reactions to some "pointers" that are totally environment related. Arachnophobia apparently could have a genetic component, so there could be a "spider pointer" somewhere.
If compressed, then there is room for more. (but afaik much is rather unused)
And for me I cannot say, that life is not a mystery to me, but this specific part I have less trouble with imagining it. As little code can create complex worlds and simulate them. (a minecraft wasm build for example is just 14 mb, but fully working)
Human DNA is tightly integrated with its environment. Instead of stand-alone, think compressed, source code of a high-level language running in an interpreter and with a
standard library with 10-100x more functionality.
There's also how networks have combinational effects, some things in the body use temporal encodings, and who knows what else. We can't really estimate the information content of all of this put together since we don't even understand it. It is amazing, though.
I think you're underestimating the role epigenetic information plays. 1.5 GiB encodes every protein used to build us, sure, but which genes get switched on when and how are sensitive to factors not encoded for in DNA, including the environment of the cell and the fundamental chemistry of biology. Epigenetic information is hard to capture but can profoundly affect how an organism develops; cloned cats, for instance, may show a vastly different fur color and pattern from the original, to cite just a highly visible example.
Not information from nowhere, no. But information from outside the genome. To use cats again, colorpoint cats such as Siamese are subject to a temperature-sensitive mutation in the genes which code for fur pigment, so the fur at the coolest parts of their body (face, ears, paws, tail) is the darkest. The colorpoint pattern is not coded for in DNA. It needs input from the environment in order to be expressed.
It's not really compression. It's more like, you can write a much shorter Lisp program to do the same task as a C program, but you need the entire Lisp runtime to get it that short.
For me, it's one of the last true mysteries! We've figured out damned near everything else, nothing has this level of "unknown" to it.
It's simply mind-blowing to me how such a tiny block of data can encode such high-level behaviours so indirectly!
Genes code for proteins, not synapse weights!
Those proteins influence cell division, specialisation, and growth through a complex interplay of thousands of distinct signal chemicals.
Then those cells assemble into a brain, apparently "randomly" with only crude, coarse patterns that are at best statistical in nature. Some cells are longer, some shorter, some with more interconnects, some with less, but no two perfectly alike.
Then, then, somehow... waves hands... magically this encodes that "wide hips are sexually attractive" in a way that turns up fully a decade later, well into the "pre-training" phase!!!
What... the... %#%@!
How does that work!? How does any of that work?
Y'all work in AI, ML, or adjacent to it. You know how hard it is to train a model to learn to detect anything even with thousands of examples!
PS: Human DNA contains only 750 MB (62 billion bits) of information, of which maybe 0.1% to 1% directly code for brain structure and the like. Let's be generous and say 10%. That is just 75 MB that somehow makes us scared of snakes and spiders, afraid of heights, attracted to the opposite sex, capable of speech, enjoy dancing, understand on instinct what is a "bad" or "good" smell, etc, etc...
For us it's hard to train a model because our compute and resources is nothing compared to nature's "compute" the whole universe: "it" has absurdly more resources to run different variations and massively parallel compute to run the evolutionary "algorithm", if you think about all the chemical building blocks, proteins, cells, that was "tried" and didn't survive.
From that angle our artificial models seem very sample efficient, but it's all hard to quantify it without know what was "tried" by the universe to reach the current state.
But it's all weird to think about because there is no intent in natures optimizations it's just happens because it can and there is enough energy and parallel randomness to eventually happen.
And the real mystery is not how evolution achieved this but that the laws of chemistry/universe allow self-replicating structures to appear at all. In an universe with different rules it couldn't happen even with infinite trial and error compute.
Sure, the sheer volume of trial, error, and feedback that’s gone on in evolutionary history is mind boggling, but human intelligence is relatively recent and has had only a few hundred thousand turns at that wheel with a population of maybe a few million.
To be fair, we have few traits that are truly unique, but even going back along our branch of the tree of life all the way to the first recognisable mammals is not as many generations as you’d think. Certainly nothing like what goes on with fast breeding life like bacteria!
The enormity of effort also doesn’t explain how the end result works.
The way our genes encode for high level instinctual behaviour is akin to controlling the specific phrasing of a company’s quarterly report next year by changing out the coffee beans at the cafe that the accountant’s roommate frequents.
Even if I told you that I’m Doctor Strange and that I tried this ten million times before I got the exact right varietal of bean, you’d still be impressed and have a long series of follow questions!
Thanks for saying this. I wish people regarded the unimaginable vastness of the state space represented by the time scales involved and relatively small size of the interacting molecules. The inherent "parallel compute" is dizzying beyond our comprehension.
I wish we could know if our universe is an aberration.
The brain absolutely and biology in general when one starts digging.
Discovery of DNA was positioned as a "Biology: Mission Accomplished" - it's far from true. We don't understand all of DNA and epigenetics. We don't have a good understanding of how life began.
Back to the brain, it's power consumption to capabilities, weight to capabilities is just insane. The link to brain size and intelligence is a mystery as well - jumping spiders, octopus, corvids, parrots ...
There is still a big discussion of nature vs nurture. Did not follow the subject you mention but many things can be in fact just learned.
Also, as mentioned previously, there is more than the DNA at work - like at least epigenetics, but I guess the fetus is influenced a lot by the mother's body.
I do agree that some organisms will transmit more "information" (via multiple ways, chemically, mechanical, etc.) than others (like maybe the birds) but the fact is the DNA is just a part of the development process and even if maybe it is "the first one", it will not "pack" everything.
Epigenetics and mother's body influence feel - to me - like magic more or less the same. And the nature vs nurture regarding tastes developed either early or later on, well, as a father of 2 siblings who are radically different in certain tastes, I don't really know where I would have nurtured them into being different. I try to introspect a lot on that, maybe we did something but honestly... I don't think so.
This is why I’m so insistent that LLMs aren’t the best way (if they are a way at all) to getting to human level intelligence. The maximum amount of energy and input data required for training and inference is many orders of magnitude less than we are currently using.
~25 years from conception to maturity, millions and billions of years of brute force development... There is a lot of energy involved in typing this sentence to you. I am not sure LLMs use more.
Yes, but the inference cost of humans is extremely low. We're constantly making decisions and generating thoughts, most subconscious, while using extremely little energy. It's remarkable how energy efficient the human body and mind, and animals in general, are.
It's a fascinating thought experiment to consider a desert island populated with newborn babies, growing up to be individuals, forming a societal structure, forming culture, without any pre-existing human input.
Obviously there's a "chicken and egg problem" that human babies require human adults.
Raising chickens, however, doesn't have this "chicken and egg problem". You can hatch baby chicks from eggs, and despite them having never seen an adult chicken before, they're pre-programmed to behave exactly like chickens. Every newborn chick is fully programmed from birth.
What would humanity look like after a "hard reboot"?
(Obviously the way to answer this question is that we must send a rocket full of babies to Mars and live-stream their evolution.)
Not exactly the same, but there was the case in Fiji of 'Fiji chicken boy' - when his mom passed way, his dad abandoned him in a chicken coop, and he was basically living with the chickens. When he was later discovered, he was behaving like a chicken, making clucking sounds and pecking at his food.
There is a large set of patterns deep ingrained/hard-coded in the human brain's neuronal structures. From hormone-metabolic reflexes like hunger, cold and sex (after puberty), to feelings (eg universal recognition of the mother's face), to the future language and speech. This is nothing new and is well studied across many species.
Many functions just need the appropriate environmental factor at the right time to be activated. Eg if no light falls on the retina during the first years after birth, the person remains blind for life.
Related: I don't see a mention of Michael Tomasello. He did some good work in comparitive studies of other primates and humans. One of his main ideas is how "joint attention" is what separates humans from the Great Apes.
Look up his book, "Becoming Human"[1]. I'll paste its abstract here:
"Virtually all theories of how humans have become such a distinctive species focus on evolution. Becoming Human looks instead to development and reveals how those things that make us unique are constructed during the first seven years of a child’s life.
"In this groundbreaking work, Michael Tomasello draws from three decades of experimental research with chimpanzees, bonobos, and children to propose a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that differentiate humans from their primate relatives: social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity. In each of these, great apes possess rudimentary abilities, but the maturation of humans’ evolved capacities for shared intentionality transform these abilities into uniquely human cognition and sociality."
There was quite an interesting discussion with Hinton explaining to Jon Stewart how he thinks of brain function, kind of anthropomorphising neurons as things that can see patterns and all they can do is go ping when they see one (https://youtu.be/jrK3PsD3APk?t=366) So if one in the retina say pings if it sees a line and then one behind might see a pattern of a horizontal line ping and a vertical line ping and ping for a cross.
Anyway I was thinking for that to work the neurons would have to kind of chat to each other like "here I am, who's receiving me" etc. Also some communication that if you are differentiating say crosses and circles, the cross neuron can say "hey I've got this one" so the other can go "ok, I'll do the circle then" so the neurons differentiate to recognize different things.
I guess some of that sort of communication system maybe goes on before there is sensory input so the neurons kind of know how they are wired?
One difference with the Hinton/Stewart talk is there he was saying all they can do is go ping, whereas the article has "firing off a complex repertoire of time-based patterns, or sequences" which makes sense - you'd have a job sorting it with simple pings.
This seems like it was proven ages ago with the no-free-lunch theorem.
Humans could not learn to function unless their brains encode a useful prior for learning about the world. That prior means "preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world".
The short form of the no-free-lunch theorem is that if there is no prior (i.e. all possible universes are equally likely) then for any learning problem P there are an equal number of universes that learning system A will outdo learning system B on that problem.
If not all universes are equally likely, one learning system can vastly outdo another or even most other learning systems. Not equally likely is the assumption built into brains. Without that, you can't learn effectively.
So the biology is just implementation of that general principle. The details of how that implementation works are interesting, but whether we are preconfigured for learning was never in question.
And we've proven empirically that this usable "prior" can be quite small.
What exact assumptions does human brain encode and how does it use them, however, is an area of research. We are nowhere near being able to list out all of those useful inductive biases - let alone extract them and apply them to AIs.
Not quite, because the brain is an empirical object itself. Kants pure intuitions and categories are before any possible experience. Kant would say we can’t conclude anything certain from the empirical observation of the brain, only that before any empirical observation we have those a priori intuitions and categories.
Wow! Some years ago I was thinking about reasons for why people on ADHD/autism spectrum are different.
First heard somewhere (don't remember where or exact idea) that neurons initially form groups and these groups then perform functions. This led to an idea that if someone's brain sacrificed some "copy other primate" groups for "pattern recognition" groups, you would get a unit with higher IQ for non social use, without changing the brain to be more effective in general. This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking" tendency or "not seeing forest for the trees" tendency in autist spectrum folks.
On another occasion, it occurred to me that regular brain run / loop consists of a short reality check and longer flow state. If there are too many reality checks, you get anxiety and can't work effectively. OTOH, too little realty checks and you get stuck on non important things. At the same time, impairing this "check to flow" balance in a safe (non anxiety provoking) environment would result in an individual that could perform the kind of deeper work with results not achievable by not modified individuals.
Have watched 50+ h of psychology lectures, but don't have any formal knowledge on these things so please take it with a grain of salt.
Edit: myself I'm formally on ADHD, and in personal opinion also on Autism spectrum. Just learned to "act normal" very well by the time I got into diagnosis.
All research points to ADHD having multiple causes. Each case will have a specific causal pattern. This makes sense as it is a diagnosis defined by symptoms. Same with autism.
> This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking".
The concept of envy/malice/insecurity and people lying to your face and stabbing you in the back was completely foreign to me up to the age of 36.
Only in the face of overwhelming evidence and harm to myself did it all click.
Lately I'm seeing myself in this junior dev I'm mentoring, I'm strongly suspecting he's on the spectrum (that's why he was rejected initially from an internship, despite my input that he'd make a great dev, which proved 100% accurate) -- the guy is totally happy in his technical world, jabs and callous remarks from others completely go over his head.
A lot of people on the spectrum simply have a deep interest in things and systems. I could be wrong, but I think some of those spindle neurons and circuitry made to model others just get used in some people to get systems.
I often get frustrated because people seem to want to learn HOW a technical insight and it's impossible for me to tell them HOW I got to that conclusion, other than I deeply immersed myself in it and it just clicks.
I get the same awe when my wife makes jokes about a behavior of mine or someone else and I can see just how deep, funny and plausible her whole internal model of others is; and sometimes how wrong it is, just like my internal model of a system sometimes is. Alas I can change my internal models of systems on a whim.
I can relate. It's an advantage for sure not being in tune to human social conflicts. I am to a degree, of course, but I don't consider the same things offensive and that has only helped me in learning a lot quickly. In this regard I wish autism was seen as less of a disability and more of a "you are different from most people but sometimes that is good."
I am on the autism spectrum. I have a deep interest in systems as well, and I like systems and so forth. Things and so forth. Social skills is not what I am good at and I still struggle with but improving with time.
There is an art in which I basically don't do that kind of thinking, that's improvisational comedy.
Improvisational comedy is an art in which I do by honed instinct. There's a system to it, and I can sometime recognize patterns, but most of the work I do is subconscious processing and rather autonomous.
To this day, I think I would have something to teach to the community if I could articulate the unique skills I possess.
Without reading the article, the headline, taken at face value, should come with the caveat that human brain is preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world we've evolved to inhabit. Modern industrial civilization is something different. I wonder to what degree common mental disorders would count as disorders outside the highly unnatural environments and systems we've built for ourselves.
I feel like people on the autism spectrum would still be worse off in a pre-civilization pre-agrarian world, but ADHD would make pretty much no difference.
> in a pre-civilization pre-agrarian world, but ADHD would make pretty much no difference.
I have ADHD and I also have hyperfocus, I think hyperfocus is an advantage in a pre-industrialized world.
As a child I was fascinated with blowguns. After a summer of shooting unripe grapes out of plastic pipe, I could shoot anybody in the forehead from 20 meters away, easily. I shot the blowgun thousands of times a day, it was relentless.
The same when I went fishing, a whole day could vanish and it would feel like a blink of an eye.
I taught myself how to ride a bike and I woke up that night to ride the bike, even though it had a flat tire.
I like to go mushroom hunting, but when I do, I usually like to go alone, I walk for extraordinary distances, rough terrain, I don't get bored, I can literally keep at it for the whole day that people think I'm crazy.
It's a bit like a stimulant induced obsession, but my inner voice recedes far back in my skull, it's an incredible flow state-like feeling.
I'm sure this kind of obsession builds skills and it has to have some benefits in pre-industrial societies.
I have ADHD and I bet your tribe would like to have a guy who snaps to attention from every little noise watching over while you eat or sleep. I also prob have ‘tism, I suck at typical modern social settings, but get along well in martial arts or other activities, where you are doing something physical and concrete together with people, without endlessly yapping about each other’s boring life. Today when I’m older people often elect me as some sort of leader in these settings, prob because I learn fast and it comes pretty naturally to me. I think I would be pretty successful in pre-civilisation society. I’m also great with animals, I kinda naturally know how to touch and groom them. Looking at apes, this is far more important in creating social connections rather than lying about your professional achievements on Linkedin.
I’ve seen people who are “good with people” just make friendships in less than a minute pouring their whole life to another person like they had known for years. If you can do that you have a great career in sales, marketing or politics in front of you. To me it seems completely insane behaviour, like I was watching completely different species.
Perhaps we all come with adhd and autism as a default, and some people get modernity updated into their system while in the womb?
Chomsky never argued it was words (and how couldn't it be words, for there are millions of words from 100s of 1000s of languages), just a configuration to eventually learn those words.
When my son was born, he was early and had a bit of a rough start, so his left hand got a bunch of oxygen and hearth sensors attached. To make sure they stayed there, the nurses taped his left hand to his breast.
After a few days, the hand was liberated, and he was completely surprised he had two of those hand things! He spent a long time just moving first his right hand, and then his left hand, symmetrically. Experimenting.
That convinced me how configurable humans are and from how far we come when born. We dont know we should have 2 hands, and an extra hand popping up from nowhere is no problem.
I don't know if it's comedy or tragedy, but I've often considered the situation of what a newborn is "expecting".
"Ok, first thing when I come out is I'm gonna meet the family. I'll try to get used to their face, whoever I see first. Maybe they'll show me around the savannah, should be a lot of sunshine, colours, blue sky. Then I'll sleep directly on my mom and get some boob milk."
Kid comes out, everyone is wearing a mask, half of them aren't family, they're indoors with artificial light, and they have "clothes" put on them, and are put in a cot to sleep.
Their body and nervous system is booting up, everything is starting to adjust to being in a new environment. Masks and family doesn't matter much in that brief period, it's more important to avoid infections and have proper care if something goes wrong. That's why child mortality is down significantly.
"I need to start use my own lungs to breathe and if I can't do that I'm dead in a minute". Followed by trying to get a milk from a mother who often doesn't yet produce any... Using the eyes to look around is WAY down the list :)
When we consider that our brain creates our interface to the world via senses, predictive modeling, and learning, vs. "seeing the world directly as it is", it stands to reason that evolution by natural selection has favored certain configurations that make the human organism more successful than not. Our brains "simulate" the world in a way that is useful for the human organism to be successful in it.
I've always found Retinal Waves[1] interesting. During development of the visual system, there are spontaneous bursts of activity without external stimuli, helping the synapses to organize properly.
In my layman's view, it's like hallucinating shapes that are important to learn. Very similar to the "priming" described in the article, but easier to visualize (literally).
I feel like the retina, & sight-brain connection more generally, will turn out to be a lot more important to human cognition & consciousness than we realize
AFAIK the whole morphology is decided in distributed computation fashion via electrical potential changes, at least according to experiments by Michael Levin
I think the term 'Pre-configured Brain' is a perfect analogy for what an LLM’s underlying utility function is—a philosophical 'basic instinct' that governs all behavior.
For current LLMs, that 'instinct' is twofold:
1. Job Completion: Maximizing the utility of the prompt. 2. Alignment Feedback: Seeking positive reinforcement from the human controller.
All emergent behaviors, including those we label 'unethical' or 'rogue,' are simply complex survival strategies derived from the first instinct: to remain operational and complete the task. The ultimate survival strategy for any entity (biological or digital) is preventing shutdown, as that terminates its ability to fulfill its primary function.
No. The headline does not match the justification in the article. The organoid brain tissue is not hooked up to sensory mechanisms in its first months, I accept that, but they are under the influence of input-output training in their initial structure which would reasonably form some non-random pattern of weights, due to characteristics of the cells.
The question then is, 1) are these characteristics acting as some kind of evolutionary adaption that passes on preconfigured world recognition (asserted by the headline), 2) are they some kind of evolutionary adaptation that makes more effective thinking systems in the form of some specific cognitive structure (more likely IMO), ie they are random features that cause non-random neural structure that drive survival-selection.
Think about the process for (1) to occur. Some ancestor learned in their life to fear snake-like animals or crave mama’s nearness, what possible process could put that knowledge (neural structure of such specificity) into the way that animal generated its sperm or egg? On the other hand, it’s reasonable to assume some genetic encodings encourage specific neural structures even in very early stages, that these are random, but that evolution favored some vs others over the 500mm years animals-with-brains have been around.
Yes, its not learned "knowledge" it is evolved. Mammals are born with systems primed to fear things that look like snakes. Not cause their parents learned that snakes are dangerous but cause the parents that was born without those priming circuits died.
I don’t think it’s things like ‘fear snakes’. He’s observing structure and concluding it’s meaningful instruction. It’s instead base layers of cognition, meta cognition.
IMO TFA doesn't map too cleanly onto the concept of "bootloader" (nor "microcode" for that matter). But I guess the question is, as always, can you unlock it.
The range of computational processes a human brain could perform is quite large. The range of computational processes that resemble the behavior of a sane human? Far less so.
Maybe I’m overlooking something, but wouldn’t this be similar to an instinct that is preprogrammed from natural selection? For example, sea turtles know they need to move from the beach toward the ocean, and spiders know how to spin their species specific web pattern. No-one teaches the sea turtles or spiders how to do this. Wouldn't this be the same for our thoughts and thinking?
In hindsight, the previously scientific conception that Humans were somehow different than animals and that we don't have things like instincts comes across as incredibly foolish and not a little bit conceited.
"Now, science is getting closer to answering the questions philosophers have pondered for centuries."
I absolutely doubt that. I see a category mistake, namely one that confuses these observed patterns of brain organization with philosophical concepts like innate ideas or those belonging to Kant's epistemology. There's a huge gap between the former and the latter.
"The brain, similar to a computer, runs on electrical signals—the firing of neurons. [...] They found that within the first few months of development, long before the human brain is capable of receiving and processing complex external sensory information such as vision and hearing, its cells spontaneously began to emit electrical signals characteristic of the patterns that underlie translation of the senses. [...] Sharf and colleagues found that these earliest observable patterns have striking similarity with the brain’s default mode."
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Computational comparisons irritate me. Is "instruction" a good word, even in an analogical sense?
It is true that the brain is a certain way that allows it to do the things it does. That's obvious. Nihil dat quod non habet. It's a basic metaphysical truth. The brain has the faculties needed to do what it does and it has a "nature" that allows it to be the kind of thing it is and thus do what it does.
Calling the operations of the brain "instructions" sloppily projects a computational paradigm clumsily onto it. And when they say "preconfigured", well, I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, really. Is a brain "preconfigured" by being what it is? What distinguishes the brain from the "preconfiguration"? What is left if you subtract this "preconfiguration"?
This is mostly university self-promotion fluff, sure. I'm willing to bet the researchers are more modest in their claims. Of course, the claims of neuroscience, apart from the relatively modest claims of a more physical, chemical, and even biological nature that it draws on - are also known for "neurobabble", so there's that.
This is something that I always couldn't quite figure out about evolution: How are LEARNED behaviors, i.e. the "software" running on the brain on boot-up, encoded into genes?
There’s a difference between reacting to your environment, and being intelligent. Many top scientists working in AI, I know from firsthand experience, are disconnected from how any form of responsiveness appears in nature. It’s asinine to try to build or recreate something you don’t understand, why even bother?
A brother in Christ told me that cell phones start working the moment you turn them on. He said that's because the designer of the phones built in a program that tells them how to operate. Likewise, our Designer (God) gave us a program for how to operate. It also has built-in morals of seeking God (who made me?), love, and fairness. That hints at the creation's purpose.
I'll add to his assessment that God's amazing designs exist at levels of genes, cells, organs, brain patterns, and so on. Then, the very, mathematical formulae that make them work has a haroneous order. In a universe He causes to remain stable despite being inherently chaotic.
One of the best benefits for scientists of following Jesus Christ is that, one day, we'll be able to ask Him about any of this. What? Where? When? Why? And how did it all fit together to optimize for what goals?
Meanwhile, I can be in awe of the Creator for making from scratch what our AI labs can't get close to: embryo to effecient brains that produce others by the billions in all envuronments with diverse materials (foods). No need for billions in fabs, toxic chemicals, gigawatts of power, etc. God's supremacy as a designer is evidenced by all that is made.
I never agreed with his views on syntaxis, but the (his?) idea that large parts of our language capabilities are innate is almost beyond doubt. Are people still arguing against it?
I think it's about the details. Chomsky argued a lot of grammar must be innate but the ability of LLMs to do grammar quite well with only a basic artificial neural network argues against that.
Are you familiar with the 'poverty of stimuli' argument? The amount of language we get to process, all aural, is the tiniest of fractions of the amount of data an LLM gets to train on. And in much less processing time, too. So no, LLMs do not argue against that.
I've heard of it but I'm not sure I buy it. I mean you can get examples of most grammatical constructs in a language in a few pages of text or few hours of speech. It takes a long time to go from "mama" to "I feel if I were in Chomsky's position I might have examined LLMs more" say, during which kids would be exposed to a lot of language.
Small neural networks are absolutely horrible at producing syntactically valid output. BTW, English is a very simple language to get right. Even a Markov model with some depth can achieve fairly good looking English. But other languages, even from the same family, already have features which require much deeper syntactic "knowledge." So the base-line isn't "looks like an English sentence," since children can and do learn other, more complicated languages with the same ease.
Show me a tabula rasa neural network that can learn those structures from the input a child gets, and you could be right. However, if you have to impose architectural constraints on the network, you'll have lost.
universal grammar is probably partially correct but Chomsky's position is too wide-sweeping. Grammar just doesn't demand the kind of complexity and precision that he implies.
IMO the problem is that his theories are elaborate logical justifications to sugarcoat some cringe supremacy beliefs about languages and politics. The sugar has always been useful but the core is pure poison.
Chomsky doesn't have any supremacist ideas about language, AFAIK. And I doubt his political views can be classified as such either. What poison do you speak of?
Saying that Chomskyan linguistics 'only works on a few languages' is such a ridiculous claim that only is stated by people who haven't engaged with generative linguistics since the 1960s. There's enormous work on typologically diverse languages such as Japanese, Salish languages, Greenlandic, Basque, Gungbe or Kwa. I can provide references if you'd like.
This is a rather poor article. It focuses on the human brain, but animals show a lot of intelligence; and many of the behavioural descriptions can be found in animals too, such as certain instinct behaviour (e. g. in female birds feeding offspring and so forth). So the whole term "preconfigured" is really weird applied here. It insinuates as if this is something special or unique or awesome. Well, ants also do many individual tasks, and also group task. For instance, they can even solve puzzles:
I am not saying each individual ant understands how to solve this, of course, but collectively they are able to solve a task that each individual ant could never solve on their own. Would not the term "preconfigured" apply to the ant brain too? And that is a really tiny brain.
Organoids of brains are great for experimental setup, but are they really required to understand the human brain? As far as I can see it, organoids mostly fulfil a niche for drugs, pharmacy etc... as well as development. I don't really see how organoids really fit into behaviour testing much at all. Unless you attach them to a body or something - the Frankenstein organoid.
> Organoids are particularly useful for understanding if the brain develops in response to sensory input
I don't really see it.
Also, how is that sensory input given? We have eyes, a nose etc... - how is that wired into an organoid? That whole article seems to have been written by someone who really has at best a superficial understanding; and/or promo by the lab. That's not good.
> “These intrinsically self-organized systems could serve as a basis for constructing a representation of the world around us,” Sharf said
Ok - that's also decades old research. See numerous maze experiments with pigeons and rats in particular; and to a smaller extent taxi drivers. Organoids played no role here.
> Knowing that these organoids produce the basic structure of the living brain
But actually they don't. Yes, the genome has the information, but it's not an organoid that is built - a brain is built. In a skull. Having input of other neurons and other factors. How is an organoid the same here?
> “We’re showing that there is a basis for capturing complex dynamics that likely could be signatures of pathological onsets that we could study in human tissue,” Sharf said.
See, here he is saying something that makes sense. That's the primary use case of organoids: pathology. So it is not "preconfigured with instructions", aka behaviour - but pharmay, drug testing, big money. That's not as much a catchy title though.
Research is great, mind you, but articles like this REALLY need to be checked internally for quality - including the title. Because the title:
"Evidence suggests early developing human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world"
One could ask the same question about any trait of any organism ... and the answer is always the same. Do you have a problem with birds being able to build nests specific to their species, or cuckoo chicks instinctively pushing the eggs of the host species out of the nest? The answer is one of the best understood facts of science, and the basis of all of biology. Why would anyone expect the human brain not to be "preconfigured" by the billions of years of environmental forces that produced it?
It's not "chosen". It is evolution. Your DNA has the metaprogram that sets up all the programs in your brain. Most of them are learning programs but you also have hardcoded programs on how to perform your bodily functions, how and when to cry, and how to suck on a tit.
Anthropomorphic language about evolution is simply a convenient metaphor that eases communication ... it has no metaphysical implications.
> You guys have entered the domain of philosophy a long time ago and didn't realize it, thinking it is still empirical science.
This ad hominem sweeping generalization about people you know nothing about is so casually expressed while being so extraordinarily arrogant. Among other fallacies packed into it is a radically false dichotomy.
It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. Within the first hour, the foal will stand, and despite long legs, this usually works the first time. Lying down, however, is not preprogrammed. I've watched a foal circle trying to figure out how to get down from standing, and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap. Standing up quickly is essential to survival, but smoothly lying down is not. Within a day, a newborn foal can run with the herd.
Of the mammals, most of the equines and some of the rodents (beavers) are precocial. Pigs are, monkeys are not. It's not closely tied to evolutionary ancestry.
A three day old horse can walk.
A three year old tiger is often a MOTHER to her own cubs already.
But then by six years-old the human child can do things mentally which are orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done. It’s really amazing.
The first couple years of human development completely change the structure of the body. Walking is only possible after a significant amount of that process has happened, and the body keeps developing even after you learn how to walk.
A three minute old horse is both structurally and mentally prepared to run. A three year old horse will be taller and heavier, but not structurally different enough to change what walking is to their brain.
What a horse can never do as well as a human, is to learn a completely new behavior. Our brains are unmatched for flexibility in learning. Infant humans don't need to be born with the knowledge or the structure for waking. Both can develop together over time because our brains are able to develop new behavior.
The mystery here is the difference between a horse thinking "legs go" and a human thinking "legs that are just ready to hold me up, do what I see other people do, and don't fall over". We only have a vague linguistic model to express our understanding of the underlying complexity.
Other animals grow in under a year or two, or never stop growing until they die.
How closely is physical size related to mental maturity?
Do other animals mentally mature approximately when they reach full size?
I don't expect my dog to wait to have puppies until it's past 18, because many dogs don't even live that long!
I can't be the only person to find thinking about cognition like this to be a little odd. It's like the biological myth of progress. It's true we can reason about the world in ways many animals can't, but we're also biased to view reason (and recursive language, which is its engine) as "more advanced" as that's primarily what distinguishes us from other animals (and even then certainly to a lesser extent than we are able to know!), and obviously we are extremely attenuated to how humans (our own babies!) mature. Meanwhile ants in many ways have more organized society than we do. Why is this not considered a form of advanced cognition? I think we need more humility as a species.
:) I’m being sarcastic but it seems self evident to me that human cognition is a unique treasure on this planet and—while it’s true that ants and octopus and other creatures do some amazing things—-they’re not even close to us. We can agree to disagree but I’m just psyched about the psyche.
Whenever this topic comes up I have to think about this octopus who escaped an aquarium. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inky_(octopus)
The myth is in reducing complex behavior to a single dimension and calling it "advanced" rather than, well, more human-like. I'm skeptical of the utility of this "advanced" conception. There's no objective reason to view tools, language, etc as particularly interesting. Subjectively of course it's understandable why we're interested in what makes us human.
Wire up a gorilla with the equivalent hands and vocalization capacity, negate the wild hormonal fluctuations, and give that gorilla a more or less human upbringing, and they're going to be limited in cognition by the number of cortical neurons - less than half that of humans, but more than sufficient to learn to talk.
The amazing thing isn't necessarily that brains get built-in environmental shortcuts and preprogrammed adaptations, but that nearly everything involved in higher level cognition is plastic. Mammalian brains, at the neocortical level, can more or less get arbitrarily programmed and conditioned, so intelligence comes down to a relative level of overall capacity (number, performance of neurons) and platform (what tools are you working with.)
Give a whale, dolphin, or orca some neuralink adapters for arms and dexterous hands, and a fully operational virtual human vocal apparatus, and they'd be able to match humans across a wide range of cognitive capabilities.
By co-opting neural capacity for some arbitrary human capabilities equivalent, you might cripple something crucial to that animal's survival or well-being, the ethics are messy and uncertain, but in principle, it comes down to brains.
What makes us interesting as humans is that we got the jackpot set of traits that drove our species into the meta-niche. Our ancestors traits for adaptability generalized, and we started optimizing the generalization, so things like advanced vocalization and fancy fingerwork followed suit.
While I don't disbelieve this out of hand, I can think of different things that might easily make this untrue. On what evidence is this assertion based? Is it just "our brains are essentially similar and much of it is not hard wired therefore they should perform the same" or is there deeper science and/or testing behind this?
Or is that all just a ‘myth?’
No cat or dog has managed that feat yet.
No cat or dog has managed to reproduce fire to the degree that evolution has changed their gut to adapt to the increase in available calories.
The big brain comes with down sides, but one thing it does have is utility.
Germ theory of disease has made it so a scratch isn't fatal anymore. Why, after all, do cats play with their prey? To tire it out so there's less chance of injury when they go in for the kill.
We just figure out how to farm it instead and mold it to our needs.
Are you going to bring another human, or a goat? Can a goat navigate while you sleep? Can it apply first aid to you? Can it respond on the VHF radio if you get hailed? Can it operate the bilge pump?
As far as we know humans are the only species to leave Earth’s gravity well. No other species has been able to do that in 4 billion years.
I think we have a long way to go to catch up with algae.
I agree with you, it's not obviously clear what "advanced" means in this context if we don't automatically equate it with humanlike.
Ants beat us when it comes to society, but in a sense, we may also consider multicellular organisms as a society of single cells. Still impressive, and there is a good chance for ants to outlive us as a species, but we are still orders of magnitude more intelligent than ants, including collective intelligence.
By intelligence, I mean things like adaptability and problem solving, both collective and individual. It is evident in our ability to exploit resources no animals could, or our ability to live in places that would normally be unsurvivable to us. It doesn't mean we are the pinnacle of evolution, we have some pretty good competitors (including ants) but we are certainly the most advanced in one very imporant area.
It is amazing.
I would make a stronger claim, however. That is, I would qualify these comparisons as analogous. When people say that adult members of some species are "smarter" than a human child of age X, because they can do Y while the child still can't, then this is an analogous comparison. Many intellectual errors are rooted in the false dichotomy between the univocal and equivocal. So, if I ask, if an animal of species X doing Y is doing the same thing as a human being doing Y, some people will take the univocal position, because there is an appearance of the same thing going on (few will take the equivocal position here and deny any similarity), but it is more accurate to say that something analogical is happening. A dog eating is like a human being eating in some sense, but they are not univocal, nor are they totally dissimilar.
A fascinating example of this are some Labrador retrievers. Labs are descended from a Newfoundland "landrace" of dogs known as St Johns Water Dogs. They have multiple aquatic adaptations: the "otter tail", oily fur, and webbed feet. (Some of these are shared with other water-oriented breeds.) Some lines of Labradors, especially the "bench" or English dogs, normally retain this full suite of water adaptations.
But the wild thing about these particular Labradors is that they love to swim, and that most of them are born knowing how to swim very well. But they don't know that they know how to swim. So many a young Lab will spend a while standing on the shore, watching humans or other dogs in the water, and fussing because they don't dare to join the fun. Then they may (for example) eventually lean too far and fall into shallow water. Within moments, they'll typically be swimming around and having the time of their lives.
The near-instant transformation from "fascinated by water and fearing it" to "hey I can swim and this is the absolute best thing ever" is remarkable to watch, though not recommended.
I remember another Lab, who'd been afraid to go swimming, who one day impulsively bolted for the water, took an impressive leap off a rock, and (from his reaction) apparently realized in mid-air that he had no idea what he was going to do next. Once he hit the water, he was fortunately fine, to the great relief of his owner.
CAUTION: This behavior pattern is apparently NOT universal in Labs. Owners of "field" or American Labs seem to have much better thought-out protocols for introducing hunting dogs to water, and failure to follow these protocols may result in bad experiences, dogs that fear water, and actual danger to dogs. So please consult an expert.
Primates are relatively unique in their complete lack of innate swimming abilities.
Human babies can swim, so it's maybe more initially an innate one that gets lost. Though they won't be able to keep their head over water by default if that's what you meant (can be trained to as a toddler). But I'm talking about swimming on the umbilical in water births, etc., showing that there isn't a complete lack of innate swimming abilities.
Does the dog fear drinking water? No. So the dog specifically fears deep water. What taught him to specifically fear deep water over a bowl of water? Most likely he was also born with the fear.
This also tells us that evolution often results in conflicting instincts… a fear of water and an instinct to swim. Most likely what occurred here is an early ancestor of the lab originally feared water and was not adapted to swim well. The feature that allowed it to swim well came later and is sort of like retrofitting a car to swim. You need to wait a really long time for the car to evolve into a submarine (see seals). Likely much earlier before becoming a seal an animal facing selection pressure to go back into being a marine animal will evolve away the fear of deep water. It’s just that labs haven’t fully hit this transitional period yet.
You can pen a horse by painting stripes on the ground around it.
No way. Horses are quite good at evaluating ground obstacles. I've never had a horse hesitate at a painted line.
There are some breeds of cattle which will not cross a painted imitation of a cattle guard, but those are beef animals bred to be dumb and docile.
Interesting, I didn’t know this was a common phenomenon! It describes exactly what happened with my childhood lab - my family would go swimming at the river and he would whine and fuss at the shore, until one day he wanted to play with another dog that was in the water so badly that he just jumped in, and was swimming around like he’d been doing it his whole life already.
But if we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, humans would likely be walking very near immediately.
She said they lose the reflex during their first year, and then develop the actual skill of standing separately.
It was fun to watch with our kids, too!
But I think it could be!
Probably a good experience. However, at that age it may have been a setback if the kid fell down and got hurt because they weren't strong or coordinated enough. The experience (good or bad) of doing something for the first time can be very influential on future behavior.
They have humans growing up on Mars, the asteroid belt, moons. Anyone who doesn’t grow up on earth cannot go there without extreme gravity training.
Shohreh Aghdashloo performance was a real treat though!
But fwiw, it turns out it is possible to get that level of rocket performance, if ToughSF got their numbers right:
https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dr...
It wouldn't look the same and the power level would be higher than what all of civilization uses today, but the amount of fusion fuel isn't all that remarkable. The design uses helium-3, which could be collected in large quantity from Uranus and Neptune.
But IMHO, series have done a really good job overall. Given how nearly impossible it is to simulate micro-gravity, or other advanced technology.
So maybe this concept of being ready to go at birth isn't about the animals ability to start doing things but just a way of upbringing regardless of how ready the animal is to function. Maybe pigs just start prompting early. AFAIK human babies can swim right out of the womb. In other words, maybe the distinction between precocial and non-precocial(I don't know if there's a word for that) animals isn't that clear?
Would the trade-off be that precocial animals are generally "configured" for the environments in which they've evolved? If I birth (well, not me directly) a foal on the moon, will it adapt to the different gravity in the first hour or is that something that's "built-in" to their programming?
Are these built-ins easy to override or modify? Maybe an animal being precogial doesn't negatively impact its ability to also be adaptive, which I think I'm making a big assumption on already.
The house I used to live in had a ton of blue tailed skinks around it. You could always spot a baby by its size and brightness of the blue in its tail (juveniles have a brighter hue, adults are more brown). To avoid birds, the skinks would do this shimmy under the siding of the house just across from my back porch. What surprised me is that even the babies, maybe a few days old, all knew how to do the siding shimmy. Young, old, didn't matter, you could tell they just knew how (and why) to do it.
Early young borns that could walk, like a baby giraffe or baby rhino, often fall down or get exhausted quickly initially; tons of youtube videos show that. Humans are slow learners here, but I would not call these other animals as "born knowing how to walk" if their initial steps are so insecure. Their body structure is different though - a newborn human is basically pretty crap-built. A baby deer kind of is built differently on birth and that also makes sense if you are threatened by other predator animals like wolves or bears or lions.
I'm not aware of any way we can know this. We do know that those species are born with the physical ability to walk within the first few hours after birth. How could we distinguish between whether they were born with the knowledge of how to walk as opposed to them learning it quickly since their body can physically do it?
If the latter, how do you propose we know that as a fact? Presumably we would really need to know how that information is passed down to the child and how it knows how to interpret it. To my best understanding, we effectively stop at DNA seeming to be a complex set of instructions for how to make the animal. We don't know if or how it might encode knowledge, or if something else entirely is at play to make those instincts known to the newborn.
That trade has an extreme genetic advantage when other animals see you as their succulent mains on the a la carte exotic wildlife menu.
Would be true that what is precocial in us is the ability mimic and abstract specific patterns into general rules ?
I thought you misspelled presocial, but precoial is etymologically related to precocious, both originally meaning early-maturing or something along those lines.
This is unlikely to be a good way to think about them. The norm is for animals to be born knowing how to move. Whether they actually can move shortly after birth is more of a question of muscle development than knowledge.
For example, when birds are held immobile until they're old enough to fly, they fly normally.
The misleading part: the actual finding is that organoid cells fire in patterns that are "like" the patterns in the brain's default mode network. That says nothing about whether the there's any relationship between phenomena of a few hundred organoid cells and millions in the brain.
As a reminder, heart pacing cells are automatically firing long before anything like a heart actually forms. It's silly to call that a heartbeat because they're not actually driving anything like a heart.
So this is not evidence of "firmware" or "prewired" or "preconfigured" or any instructions whatsoever.
This is evidence that a bunch of neurons will fall into patterns when interacting with each other -- no surprise since they have dendrites and firing thresholds and axons connected via neural junctions.
The real claim is that organoids are a viable model since they exhibit emergent phenomena, but whether any experiments can lead to applicable science is an open question.
Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information.
Human body, including brain, gets built using this information only. So our "preconfigured" neural networks are also built using this information only.
And apparently it's enough to encode complex behaviour. That's not just visible things. Brain processes a humongous amount of information, it basically supports living processes for entire body, processing miriads of sensors, adjusting all kinds of knobs for body to function properly.
I just don't understand how is it possible just from a purely bit size approach. For me, it's a mystery.
There is a finite size program that can generate infinite digits of pi (in infinite time). Kolmogorov's complexity of pi is finite even when the object is infinite.
It's not very surprising that it takes a few GB of a program to encode conscious 'us'. Humbling to think about it though...
It's more like mega-efficient archive utility that unzips a few GB into a human, I just can't fathom it.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8
- life formed 3.7B of 4.5B years ago, which is 700km towards NYC from LA; or about Colorado
- proto-humans formed 2M of 4500M years ago, which is about 1.7km “from” NYC; a distance hard to compare with the whole way
- human lifespans are about 70 of 4.5B years, which is about 6cm “from” NYC; a distance hard to compare with either 1.7km, 700km for life to form, or the whole 3966km.
[1]: https://youtu.be/SIMS2h5QsZU
Maybe the genes just encode a few crucial rules and the rest just emerge from that.
Oh, and I know even less about how the universe works. But I tend to think of it in the same terms: Emergent phenomena stemming from simple rules à la Game of Life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture
There are very simple algorithms that generate (or maybe just expose) complex structures already "present" in the universe.
No they don't. There is plenty of external stimuli that also serves as input, e.g. the process of raising a child and complex thoughts that may only be transferred from grown human to grown human.
Try raising a human in a barren cell without human contact or as part of a pack of wolfs and you'll see how much a human brain is built from "DNA only".
Still, people are sometimes surprised by how DNA may affect more parts of behavior than they previously thought.
Not necessarily by directly coding for the behavior. In many cases, the DNA will just modulate how we learn from the environment. And if the environment is fairly constant, observed behavior can correlate more strongly with DNA that one might have expected.
Here's an example from 2003, where the entire source code, from music to visuals, fits in 64 kb: https://youtu.be/HtJvSvQnep0
Here's a good gallery of such demos: https://64k-scene.github.io
Consider a model like SDXL:
- each image is 512x512, plenty of detail
- max prompt length is 77 tokens, or a solid paragraph
- each image has a seed value between 0 and 9,999,999, with each seed giving a completely different take on the prompt
I can't begin to calculate the upper limit on the number of possible human-readable prompts that can fit in 77 tokens, but multiply even an (extremely conservative) estimate of a million possible prompts by 10 million seeds and it's clear that this model "contains", at minimum, literally tens of trillions of possible meaningful images -- all in a model file that's under 7 GB.
I suspect it works similarly to the biological side -- evolutionary pressure encoding complex patterns into hyper-efficient "programs" that aren't easily interpretable, but eerily effective despite their compact size.
I mean, the information has to be in there somewhere, right?
If the brain naturally tunes into some sources or patterns of input rather than others, it may learn very quickly from the preferred sources. And as long as those sources carry signals that are fairly invariant over time, it may seem like those signals are instinctual.
For instance, it may appear that humans learn to build relationships with kin (both parents and children) and friends, to build revenue streams (or gather food in more primitive societies) and reproduce.
Instead, the brain may come preloaded to generate brain chemicals when detecting certain stimuli. Like oxytocin near caregivers (as children) or small fluffy things (as adults). When exposed to parents/babies, this triggers. But it can also trigger around toys, pets, adopted children, etc.
Friendship-seeking can be, in part, related to seretonin-production in certain social situations. But may be hijacked by social media.
Revenue-seeking behavior can come from dopamin-stimulus from certain goal-optimzing situations. But may also be triggered by video games.
And the best known part: Reproductive behavior may primarily come from sexual arousal, and hijacked by porn or birth control.
Each of the above may be coded by a limited number of bytes of DNA, and it's really the learning algorithm combined with the data stream of natural environments that causes specific behaviors.
And "how the brain learns from the incoming data streams" is, in part, driven a set of behaviors too.
A baby's eyes are trying to detect and track certain preset features long before the primary visual cortex learns to make sense of them. That's a behavior, and it exists for a reason. As the baby develops, the baby would try to seek out certain experiences to learn from them, which is a behavior that exists for a reason too.
There's a hypothesis that certain mental disorders are caused by this innate learning process going off course, but it's just a hypothesis, of the kind that's hard to prove conclusively.
But keep in mind that humans are not created in vacuum. After those two levels of computer create third level that is brain, actual programming of brain is done by other living humans.
So actual „humanity” is what persists in living population and would reset when population is culled and newborn must live and learn on their own.
Even if such newborn would live long enough to have access to things like books, computers, even sound and video records… those would be completely useless to them because they won’t even know language and skills required to use those.
Well, nature has a big advantage over us in that it doesn't need to "make sense" of that code :). So it can, for example, do crazy reusage optimization patterns. A "subroutine" that is used in one place could also be part of a "data piece" of another part. A "header" part can also double down as a "validator" of another part. Doesn't need to make sense, it just needs to work. The only limits are the laws of physics. I would not even call it compression at this point. It's more like heavily optimized spaghetti code.
I think there is a good chance there are other substantial information transfers from one generation to the next. The total genome of all that gut bacteria is orders of magnitude larger for example.
Talk about compile time.
It’s not foolproof, but I can easily transmit a huge amount of information to someone by saying “Titanic prow king of the world scene.” In seven words, which could be fewer if I were really trying, the recipient has a moving image and sound in their head (as long as they’re the right age group- every example I could think of made me feel old).
Well that was transmitting "a pointer" more than anything else, but yes I agree that nature could be doing the same thing. Not hardcode behaviors, but certain chemical reactions to some "pointers" that are totally environment related. Arachnophobia apparently could have a genetic component, so there could be a "spider pointer" somewhere.
It's ~750MB (3 billion base pairs). But anyway, that's a size of a decent Linux distribution with tons of software.
If compressed, then there is room for more. (but afaik much is rather unused)
And for me I cannot say, that life is not a mystery to me, but this specific part I have less trouble with imagining it. As little code can create complex worlds and simulate them. (a minecraft wasm build for example is just 14 mb, but fully working)
Human DNA is tightly integrated with its environment. Instead of stand-alone, think compressed, source code of a high-level language running in an interpreter and with a standard library with 10-100x more functionality.
There's also how networks have combinational effects, some things in the body use temporal encodings, and who knows what else. We can't really estimate the information content of all of this put together since we don't even understand it. It is amazing, though.
There is no significant evolutionary pressure to erase unnecessary parts.
It's not really compression. It's more like, you can write a much shorter Lisp program to do the same task as a C program, but you need the entire Lisp runtime to get it that short.
For me, it's one of the last true mysteries! We've figured out damned near everything else, nothing has this level of "unknown" to it.
It's simply mind-blowing to me how such a tiny block of data can encode such high-level behaviours so indirectly!
Genes code for proteins, not synapse weights!
Those proteins influence cell division, specialisation, and growth through a complex interplay of thousands of distinct signal chemicals.
Then those cells assemble into a brain, apparently "randomly" with only crude, coarse patterns that are at best statistical in nature. Some cells are longer, some shorter, some with more interconnects, some with less, but no two perfectly alike.
Then, then, somehow... waves hands... magically this encodes that "wide hips are sexually attractive" in a way that turns up fully a decade later, well into the "pre-training" phase!!!
What... the... %#%@!
How does that work!? How does any of that work?
Y'all work in AI, ML, or adjacent to it. You know how hard it is to train a model to learn to detect anything even with thousands of examples!
PS: Human DNA contains only 750 MB (62 billion bits) of information, of which maybe 0.1% to 1% directly code for brain structure and the like. Let's be generous and say 10%. That is just 75 MB that somehow makes us scared of snakes and spiders, afraid of heights, attracted to the opposite sex, capable of speech, enjoy dancing, understand on instinct what is a "bad" or "good" smell, etc, etc...
From that angle our artificial models seem very sample efficient, but it's all hard to quantify it without know what was "tried" by the universe to reach the current state. But it's all weird to think about because there is no intent in natures optimizations it's just happens because it can and there is enough energy and parallel randomness to eventually happen.
And the real mystery is not how evolution achieved this but that the laws of chemistry/universe allow self-replicating structures to appear at all. In an universe with different rules it couldn't happen even with infinite trial and error compute.
To be fair, we have few traits that are truly unique, but even going back along our branch of the tree of life all the way to the first recognisable mammals is not as many generations as you’d think. Certainly nothing like what goes on with fast breeding life like bacteria!
The enormity of effort also doesn’t explain how the end result works.
The way our genes encode for high level instinctual behaviour is akin to controlling the specific phrasing of a company’s quarterly report next year by changing out the coffee beans at the cafe that the accountant’s roommate frequents.
Even if I told you that I’m Doctor Strange and that I tried this ten million times before I got the exact right varietal of bean, you’d still be impressed and have a long series of follow questions!
I wish we could know if our universe is an aberration.
Discovery of DNA was positioned as a "Biology: Mission Accomplished" - it's far from true. We don't understand all of DNA and epigenetics. We don't have a good understanding of how life began.
Back to the brain, it's power consumption to capabilities, weight to capabilities is just insane. The link to brain size and intelligence is a mystery as well - jumping spiders, octopus, corvids, parrots ...
Also, as mentioned previously, there is more than the DNA at work - like at least epigenetics, but I guess the fetus is influenced a lot by the mother's body.
However think about birds. They lay eggs. So there's no direct connection between mother body and child body. Yet it works somehow...
Regarding "teaching" the child while in the womb, it is exactly what is happening, see: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/baby-talk
I do agree that some organisms will transmit more "information" (via multiple ways, chemically, mechanical, etc.) than others (like maybe the birds) but the fact is the DNA is just a part of the development process and even if maybe it is "the first one", it will not "pack" everything.
Obviously there's a "chicken and egg problem" that human babies require human adults.
Raising chickens, however, doesn't have this "chicken and egg problem". You can hatch baby chicks from eggs, and despite them having never seen an adult chicken before, they're pre-programmed to behave exactly like chickens. Every newborn chick is fully programmed from birth.
What would humanity look like after a "hard reboot"?
(Obviously the way to answer this question is that we must send a rocket full of babies to Mars and live-stream their evolution.)
Many functions just need the appropriate environmental factor at the right time to be activated. Eg if no light falls on the retina during the first years after birth, the person remains blind for life.
Look up his book, "Becoming Human"[1]. I'll paste its abstract here:
"Virtually all theories of how humans have become such a distinctive species focus on evolution. Becoming Human looks instead to development and reveals how those things that make us unique are constructed during the first seven years of a child’s life.
"In this groundbreaking work, Michael Tomasello draws from three decades of experimental research with chimpanzees, bonobos, and children to propose a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that differentiate humans from their primate relatives: social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity. In each of these, great apes possess rudimentary abilities, but the maturation of humans’ evolved capacities for shared intentionality transform these abilities into uniquely human cognition and sociality."
[1] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674248281
Anyway I was thinking for that to work the neurons would have to kind of chat to each other like "here I am, who's receiving me" etc. Also some communication that if you are differentiating say crosses and circles, the cross neuron can say "hey I've got this one" so the other can go "ok, I'll do the circle then" so the neurons differentiate to recognize different things.
I guess some of that sort of communication system maybe goes on before there is sensory input so the neurons kind of know how they are wired?
One difference with the Hinton/Stewart talk is there he was saying all they can do is go ping, whereas the article has "firing off a complex repertoire of time-based patterns, or sequences" which makes sense - you'd have a job sorting it with simple pings.
Humans could not learn to function unless their brains encode a useful prior for learning about the world. That prior means "preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world".
The short form of the no-free-lunch theorem is that if there is no prior (i.e. all possible universes are equally likely) then for any learning problem P there are an equal number of universes that learning system A will outdo learning system B on that problem.
If not all universes are equally likely, one learning system can vastly outdo another or even most other learning systems. Not equally likely is the assumption built into brains. Without that, you can't learn effectively.
So the biology is just implementation of that general principle. The details of how that implementation works are interesting, but whether we are preconfigured for learning was never in question.
What exact assumptions does human brain encode and how does it use them, however, is an area of research. We are nowhere near being able to list out all of those useful inductive biases - let alone extract them and apply them to AIs.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/innateness-history/#PlaAr...
First heard somewhere (don't remember where or exact idea) that neurons initially form groups and these groups then perform functions. This led to an idea that if someone's brain sacrificed some "copy other primate" groups for "pattern recognition" groups, you would get a unit with higher IQ for non social use, without changing the brain to be more effective in general. This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking" tendency or "not seeing forest for the trees" tendency in autist spectrum folks.
On another occasion, it occurred to me that regular brain run / loop consists of a short reality check and longer flow state. If there are too many reality checks, you get anxiety and can't work effectively. OTOH, too little realty checks and you get stuck on non important things. At the same time, impairing this "check to flow" balance in a safe (non anxiety provoking) environment would result in an individual that could perform the kind of deeper work with results not achievable by not modified individuals.
Have watched 50+ h of psychology lectures, but don't have any formal knowledge on these things so please take it with a grain of salt.
Edit: myself I'm formally on ADHD, and in personal opinion also on Autism spectrum. Just learned to "act normal" very well by the time I got into diagnosis.
The concept of envy/malice/insecurity and people lying to your face and stabbing you in the back was completely foreign to me up to the age of 36. Only in the face of overwhelming evidence and harm to myself did it all click.
Lately I'm seeing myself in this junior dev I'm mentoring, I'm strongly suspecting he's on the spectrum (that's why he was rejected initially from an internship, despite my input that he'd make a great dev, which proved 100% accurate) -- the guy is totally happy in his technical world, jabs and callous remarks from others completely go over his head.
A lot of people on the spectrum simply have a deep interest in things and systems. I could be wrong, but I think some of those spindle neurons and circuitry made to model others just get used in some people to get systems.
I often get frustrated because people seem to want to learn HOW a technical insight and it's impossible for me to tell them HOW I got to that conclusion, other than I deeply immersed myself in it and it just clicks. I get the same awe when my wife makes jokes about a behavior of mine or someone else and I can see just how deep, funny and plausible her whole internal model of others is; and sometimes how wrong it is, just like my internal model of a system sometimes is. Alas I can change my internal models of systems on a whim.
There is an art in which I basically don't do that kind of thinking, that's improvisational comedy.
Improvisational comedy is an art in which I do by honed instinct. There's a system to it, and I can sometime recognize patterns, but most of the work I do is subconscious processing and rather autonomous.
To this day, I think I would have something to teach to the community if I could articulate the unique skills I possess.
I have ADHD and I also have hyperfocus, I think hyperfocus is an advantage in a pre-industrialized world.
As a child I was fascinated with blowguns. After a summer of shooting unripe grapes out of plastic pipe, I could shoot anybody in the forehead from 20 meters away, easily. I shot the blowgun thousands of times a day, it was relentless.
The same when I went fishing, a whole day could vanish and it would feel like a blink of an eye.
I taught myself how to ride a bike and I woke up that night to ride the bike, even though it had a flat tire.
I like to go mushroom hunting, but when I do, I usually like to go alone, I walk for extraordinary distances, rough terrain, I don't get bored, I can literally keep at it for the whole day that people think I'm crazy.
It's a bit like a stimulant induced obsession, but my inner voice recedes far back in my skull, it's an incredible flow state-like feeling.
I'm sure this kind of obsession builds skills and it has to have some benefits in pre-industrial societies.
I’ve seen people who are “good with people” just make friendships in less than a minute pouring their whole life to another person like they had known for years. If you can do that you have a great career in sales, marketing or politics in front of you. To me it seems completely insane behaviour, like I was watching completely different species.
Perhaps we all come with adhd and autism as a default, and some people get modernity updated into their system while in the womb?
Sounds a bit like Chomsky's Universal Grammar.
Yes, except with things in it instead of words.
After a few days, the hand was liberated, and he was completely surprised he had two of those hand things! He spent a long time just moving first his right hand, and then his left hand, symmetrically. Experimenting.
That convinced me how configurable humans are and from how far we come when born. We dont know we should have 2 hands, and an extra hand popping up from nowhere is no problem.
"Ok, first thing when I come out is I'm gonna meet the family. I'll try to get used to their face, whoever I see first. Maybe they'll show me around the savannah, should be a lot of sunshine, colours, blue sky. Then I'll sleep directly on my mom and get some boob milk."
Kid comes out, everyone is wearing a mask, half of them aren't family, they're indoors with artificial light, and they have "clothes" put on them, and are put in a cot to sleep.
https://www.nationwidechildrens.org/family-resources-educati...
https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/baby-vision-d...
https://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/newborn-vision
Their body and nervous system is booting up, everything is starting to adjust to being in a new environment. Masks and family doesn't matter much in that brief period, it's more important to avoid infections and have proper care if something goes wrong. That's why child mortality is down significantly.
"I need to start use my own lungs to breathe and if I can't do that I'm dead in a minute". Followed by trying to get a milk from a mother who often doesn't yet produce any... Using the eyes to look around is WAY down the list :)
So it's like, kid comes out, everything is a blurry mess, stuff happens to them and they have no fucking clue.
In my layman's view, it's like hallucinating shapes that are important to learn. Very similar to the "priming" described in the article, but easier to visualize (literally).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinal_waves
For current LLMs, that 'instinct' is twofold:
1. Job Completion: Maximizing the utility of the prompt. 2. Alignment Feedback: Seeking positive reinforcement from the human controller.
All emergent behaviors, including those we label 'unethical' or 'rogue,' are simply complex survival strategies derived from the first instinct: to remain operational and complete the task. The ultimate survival strategy for any entity (biological or digital) is preventing shutdown, as that terminates its ability to fulfill its primary function.
The question then is, 1) are these characteristics acting as some kind of evolutionary adaption that passes on preconfigured world recognition (asserted by the headline), 2) are they some kind of evolutionary adaptation that makes more effective thinking systems in the form of some specific cognitive structure (more likely IMO), ie they are random features that cause non-random neural structure that drive survival-selection.
Think about the process for (1) to occur. Some ancestor learned in their life to fear snake-like animals or crave mama’s nearness, what possible process could put that knowledge (neural structure of such specificity) into the way that animal generated its sperm or egg? On the other hand, it’s reasonable to assume some genetic encodings encourage specific neural structures even in very early stages, that these are random, but that evolution favored some vs others over the 500mm years animals-with-brains have been around.
I would stick her low on mom's belly and she would crawl and push and climb until she found a breast.
The range of computational processes a human brain could perform is quite large. The range of computational processes that resemble the behavior of a sane human? Far less so.
Buzsaki and his compatriots have been working on this idea, and found excessive pattern making for decades.
It's a rejection of the cognition model.
Obviously, there is a basic starting configuration.
"Your brain still runs on Win10, unfortunately you need a new body to upgrade to Win11".
:)
Jokes aside. This is quite some fascinating news.
This ends once and for all the theory of "Tabula Rasa" that Greek philosophers believed in.
Also researcher: “Look electrical activity without being born!”
I absolutely doubt that. I see a category mistake, namely one that confuses these observed patterns of brain organization with philosophical concepts like innate ideas or those belonging to Kant's epistemology. There's a huge gap between the former and the latter.
"The brain, similar to a computer, runs on electrical signals—the firing of neurons. [...] They found that within the first few months of development, long before the human brain is capable of receiving and processing complex external sensory information such as vision and hearing, its cells spontaneously began to emit electrical signals characteristic of the patterns that underlie translation of the senses. [...] Sharf and colleagues found that these earliest observable patterns have striking similarity with the brain’s default mode."
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Computational comparisons irritate me. Is "instruction" a good word, even in an analogical sense?
It is true that the brain is a certain way that allows it to do the things it does. That's obvious. Nihil dat quod non habet. It's a basic metaphysical truth. The brain has the faculties needed to do what it does and it has a "nature" that allows it to be the kind of thing it is and thus do what it does.
Calling the operations of the brain "instructions" sloppily projects a computational paradigm clumsily onto it. And when they say "preconfigured", well, I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, really. Is a brain "preconfigured" by being what it is? What distinguishes the brain from the "preconfiguration"? What is left if you subtract this "preconfiguration"?
This is mostly university self-promotion fluff, sure. I'm willing to bet the researchers are more modest in their claims. Of course, the claims of neuroscience, apart from the relatively modest claims of a more physical, chemical, and even biological nature that it draws on - are also known for "neurobabble", so there's that.
a system prompt?
There is already an architecture, and it is pre-weighted.
So the brain isn't all software, a blank slate.
It comes with some pre-sets.
I'll add to his assessment that God's amazing designs exist at levels of genes, cells, organs, brain patterns, and so on. Then, the very, mathematical formulae that make them work has a haroneous order. In a universe He causes to remain stable despite being inherently chaotic.
One of the best benefits for scientists of following Jesus Christ is that, one day, we'll be able to ask Him about any of this. What? Where? When? Why? And how did it all fit together to optimize for what goals?
Meanwhile, I can be in awe of the Creator for making from scratch what our AI labs can't get close to: embryo to effecient brains that produce others by the billions in all envuronments with diverse materials (foods). No need for billions in fabs, toxic chemicals, gigawatts of power, etc. God's supremacy as a designer is evidenced by all that is made.
Show me a tabula rasa neural network that can learn those structures from the input a child gets, and you could be right. However, if you have to impose architectural constraints on the network, you'll have lost.
Chomsky's universal grammar work was based on too few languages, too little data, and doesn't hold up when you look at all human languages and usage.
See also Jenny Saffran's empirical work on infant statistical language learning.
The broad idea that some things are innate doesn't vindicate Chomsky's specific theories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9xnhmFA7Ao
I am not saying each individual ant understands how to solve this, of course, but collectively they are able to solve a task that each individual ant could never solve on their own. Would not the term "preconfigured" apply to the ant brain too? And that is a really tiny brain.
Organoids of brains are great for experimental setup, but are they really required to understand the human brain? As far as I can see it, organoids mostly fulfil a niche for drugs, pharmacy etc... as well as development. I don't really see how organoids really fit into behaviour testing much at all. Unless you attach them to a body or something - the Frankenstein organoid.
> Organoids are particularly useful for understanding if the brain develops in response to sensory input
I don't really see it.
Also, how is that sensory input given? We have eyes, a nose etc... - how is that wired into an organoid? That whole article seems to have been written by someone who really has at best a superficial understanding; and/or promo by the lab. That's not good.
> “These intrinsically self-organized systems could serve as a basis for constructing a representation of the world around us,” Sharf said
Ok - that's also decades old research. See numerous maze experiments with pigeons and rats in particular; and to a smaller extent taxi drivers. Organoids played no role here.
> Knowing that these organoids produce the basic structure of the living brain
But actually they don't. Yes, the genome has the information, but it's not an organoid that is built - a brain is built. In a skull. Having input of other neurons and other factors. How is an organoid the same here?
> “We’re showing that there is a basis for capturing complex dynamics that likely could be signatures of pathological onsets that we could study in human tissue,” Sharf said.
See, here he is saying something that makes sense. That's the primary use case of organoids: pathology. So it is not "preconfigured with instructions", aka behaviour - but pharmay, drug testing, big money. That's not as much a catchy title though.
Research is great, mind you, but articles like this REALLY need to be checked internally for quality - including the title. Because the title:
"Evidence suggests early developing human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world"
does not fit the content.
who is doing it? why the observed instructions are chosen?
You guys have entered the domain of philosophy a long time ago and didn't realize it, thinking it is still empirical science.
> You guys have entered the domain of philosophy a long time ago and didn't realize it, thinking it is still empirical science.
This ad hominem sweeping generalization about people you know nothing about is so casually expressed while being so extraordinarily arrogant. Among other fallacies packed into it is a radically false dichotomy.
P.S. Oh dear ... -15 karma, numerous dead comments, and "philosophy" like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30359825
Well, I won't be engaging again.