Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…So I’m not saying there isn’t something special about humans in the architecture of the Learning Subsystem at all. But yeah I think it’s pretty widely thought that this is expanded. But then the question is, “Okay, well, how does that fit in also with the Steering Subsystem changes and the instincts that make use of this and allow you to bootstrap using this effectively?” But just to say a few other things, even the fly brain has some amount, even very far back… I mean, I think you’ve read this great book, A Brief History of Intelligence, right? I think this is a really good book. Lots of AI researchers think this is a really good book it seems. You have some amount of learning going back all the way to anything that has a brain. Basically you have something like primitive reinforcement learning, going back at least to vertebrates. Imagine a zebrafish. Then you have these other branches. Birds may have reinvented something cortex-like. It doesn’t have the six layers, but they have something a little bit cortex-like. So some of those things after reptiles, in some sense birds and mammals both made a somewhat cortex-like, but differently organized thing. But even a fly brain has associative learning centers that actually do things that maybe look a little bit like this Thought Assessor concept from Byrnes, where there’s a specific dopamine signal to train specific subgroups of neurons in the fly mushroom body to associate different sensory information with, “Am I going to get food now?” or “Am I going to get hurt now?” Brief tangent. I remember reading in one blog post that Beren Millidge wrote that the parts of the cortex which are associated with audio and vision have scaled disproportionately between other primates and humans, whereas the parts associated, say, with odor have not. And I remember him saying something like that this is explained by that kind of data having worse scaling law properties. Maybe he meant this, but I think another interpretation of actually what’s happening there is that these social reward functions that are built into the Steering Subsystem needed to make use more of being able to see your elders and see what the visual cues are and hear what they’re saying. And in order to make sense of these cues which guide learning, you needed to activate the vision and audio more than odor. I mean, there’s all this stuff. I feel like it’s come up in your shows before, actually. But like even the design of the human eye where you have the pupil and the white and everything, we are designed to be able to establish relationships based on joint eye contact. Maybe this came up in the Sutton episode. I can’t remember. But yeah, we have to bootstrap to the point where we can detect eye contact and where we can communicate by language. That’s like what the first couple years of life are trying to do.…

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