Tim Scarfe: prediction

Transcript context

…To what extent are the mechanisms of the brain inherently bound up with the fact that the implementation here is in living tissue? So I think it's really this sort of tantalizing evidence about how the extent to which sort of brain processes and signaling between neurons, not just the electrical specialized signaling that neurons do, but biochemically, it's kind of outgrowths of signaling that's happening elsewhere in the body all of the time. So that there's nothing that we shouldn't think of neuronal cells as distinctively cognitive as opposed to the other cells in the body, but that they're extensions of the ways that, cells signal anyway. And if neuronal function is so much just a manifestation of what's happening with metabolizing cells anyway, that makes it more of a stretch to say that a machine that's not living could have the same functionality. Yeah. I mean, no one's trying to sort of build artificial neural networks with living cells. No. No. But, I mean, there's an analogy in neural networks. There's this thing called the lottery ticket hypothesis, which spoke about pruning. Yeah. And what the researchers found is that you train this big dense neural network, and after it's trained, because you need the density for stochastic gradient descent for training tractability, after it's trained, you can prune away 90% of the connections and it still works the same And, maybe evolution and our biological instantiation, maybe it's the same thing. We've been through this billion plus year training process and all of these things we think are important like the instantiation, the auto poiesis, the agency and so on, maybe those are vestigial and we can now just kind of snip, snip, snip and we can just kind of create this abstract version. It seems reasonable. What do you think? It's just vestigial. I mean, I think we really need to take seriously the economy that is there and of biological information processing. Do a lot more with a very limited energy budget running our brains every day than is is like artificial neural networks are really really expensive to run. It doesn't strike me that biological cognition could get away with being that wasteful. That surely to keep things sort of blowing up in terms of like energy being consumed for information processing biologically, that there must have been a fair amount of pruning on the way.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.