Jamieson Warner

The blueprint for this "grand unification" already exists: --------- 🔹1961: Landauer established the thermodynamic cost of bit erasure (ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/53924…) 🔹1982: Bennett resolved Maxwell’s Demon, proving that logical irreversibility (erasure), rather than measurement, necessitates thermodynamic work (link.springer.com/article/10.100…) 🔹Late 1990s: Jarzynski and @gavincrooks related non-equilibrium work to equilibrium free energy. Their Fluctuation Theorems were later used to derive the entropy production cost of statistical inference (journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/1…; journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/1…) 🔹2007: Kawai et al. proved average thermodynamic entropy production equals the KL divergence between forward and backward path distributions( journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/1…) 🔹2009: Sagawa & Ueda incorporated information theory into this framework, bounding the energetic cost of measurement and feedback (journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/1…) 🔹2019: Wolpert extended stochastic thermo to formal computational architectures, including Turing machines and boolean circuits (iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108…) 🔹...and many more works in thermo/non-equilibrium stat mech that are waiting to be formally connected to computer science/ML concepts. --------- Formalizing this mathematical connection is a central research interest of mine. Reach out if you have ideas (DMs open).

They are ants solving a geometric problem and it is mind-blowingly colorful.

@bayesianboy Good luck!

When I apply for professorships I like to leave a little typo or two in my materials as a kind of bounty and if the committee finds it they get to hire me. My own little game show where I am the prize ♡

Excited about self-organising sytems? Do you have a cool paper, either in the works or ready? Then consider applying to our Evolving self-organisation workshop at @GeccoConf ! Submission Deadline March 27 Also check out the amazing workshop website: …-self-organisation-workshop.github.io/gecco-2026/

I increasingly think so much intelligence is embedded in the connectome. I wrote about how this connects with AI-generating algorithms: what we need are connectome-generating algorithms. jamiesonwarner.com/self_organizin…

"Discovering intelligence algorithms that evolution invented in the most expensive training run in history" Interesting framing!

Connectivity is all you need. Forget trying to understand function. Let biological data carry us toward engineering animal-like minds.

@doristsao @NicoleCRust I’m not sure, to point 5, that we will necessarily be able to understand the components. Nonetheless, connectivity data might still have use within an AI pipeline like a homing beacon toward animal cognition. I’ve posted a plan of how that might work: jamiesonwarner.com/self_organizin…

@doristsao @NicoleCRust This goes to show how informative the connectome is for producing behavior. But modern ML doesn’t use this trove of biological data at all, even as we are aiming toward human-level or human-like intelligence.

My thoughts on connectomics and upload: 1) there is zero question connectomes are invaluable, and we need to get them for mouse, monkey, and human 2) the human, or even monkey, connectome seems a long ways off given costs (roughly $1/neuron). The projectome (map of all the axons) seems eminently reachable and should be a top priority imho 3) but even having the full connectome would only tell you numbers of synapses, not actual synaptic weights, and the two can be hugely divergent (eg only 5% of synapses onto V1 layer 4 neurons come from thalamus, even though this is the major driving input) 4) given #2 & #3, I think we can get to upload in the sense of building a functionally equivalent organism much faster through understanding the algorithms of the primate brain than through blind copying 5) in putting together something as complex as the human brain we would definitely want to check that the various pieces work as we go, which we can only do if we understand these pieces 6) I don't think upload in the sense of blindly creating a digital copy is the path to the abundant transhumanist future--actual understanding of brain structures so we can intelligently interface with them, and emulate their function in code without copying all the details, is. All to say, we need functional understanding to go hand in hand with anatomical mapping!

@fleetingbits Reminds me of this work by Akarsh Kumar, scroll to the “boids” section arxiv.org/abs/2412.17799

i've been experimenting with searching for interesting neural boids. here are some patterns.

Cells feel each other

This is dissipation of a blob as it mixes and splits chaotically. This is the Lorenz system, and in time all initial conditions converge to its butterfly-esque non-equilibrium steady state (NESS).

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. -- A. Einstein (1879-1955)

Next session: How does active inference solve a major problem in reinforcement learning? Find out Tuesday, Jan 27 — “Making Sense of Active Inference: Optimal Control Without Cost Function”

I made a reading club about the **physics of information**. …mation-physics-reading-club.github.io

The cecropia moth is North America's largest native moth. 📽: mackattack_zoology/ig

Somehow it was learning how many people are fulltime employed to maintain the Golden Gate Bridge that flipped something inside of me in my understanding of the entropic force civilization has to constantly fight against. Before that moment I thought — I had not applied real conscious thought — you simply build a building or anything really and then you just … have it. After that I understood everything is constantly at the brink of being lost.

Vibe Coding Robotics Part 7 Implemented an ornithopter mechanism with Gemini Pro, and generated a Leonardo da Vinci style UI using Nano Banana to go with it.

This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it.

@DilumSanjaya @hive_echo These UIs are beautiful. How hard would it be to add physics — to calculate the lift, weight, and torques involved?

Language is a wild holographic meta-semic psychoharmonic music magic system and the fact that it works at all points to a DAZZLINGLY intelligent existence-force underlying [gestures widely] All This