Agent Revolution

Listening to AI experts talking about the brain is painful. As a neuroscience researcher, I was excited when I first saw that this interview was about the brain. But I stopped watching the video after 3 minutes. Marblestone admits that he's clueless about the brain but almost immediately starts talking about what types of loss and reward functions are used in the brain, while making comparisons with deep neural nets. Dear Lord. 🤦‍♂️ Please. The most important learning principle in the brain is the precise timing of discrete sensory events (spikes). Everything that is needed for perceptual learning is contained in the sensory spikes themselves and their relative timing. Visual learning relies on movements in the visual field. Essentially, the visual cortex learns by eliminating timing contradictions in the input spikes. Any allusion or comparison to loss or reward signals is a category error. Error feedback signals in the brain are only used for goal-directed motor learning. Deep neural nets (and function optimizers in general) are not even in the correct galaxy, let alone the correct ballpark of the AGI solution. AI experts fool themselves and others to believe that they're researching intelligence. They are not. They are computer automation experts. They should refrain from talking about neuroscience and stick to their own field. It's unnerving. 😬

Neuroscience prediction My position on consciousness is clear. It requires a knower and a known, a soul and a compatible brain. I'm so confident of this that I will predict that AGI cannot be solved by a soul denier. Only a soul believer can do it. Why do I say this? It's because a soul denier is forced to believe that the visual cortex perceives a 3D vista. It doesn't. The visual cortex is a discrete signal (spike) cataloguer. It has the same architecture as and works exactly like the auditory cortex or the somatosensory cortex. It relies on the precise timing of sensory spikes to make sense of the world. The only difference between vision and hearing is the sensors. The beautiful and colorful 3D vista you think you perceive in the real world is mainly a creation of your soul. Yes, your soul is a very powerful thing. It's what makes humans exceptional. I love the soul. 😍