This is a demonstration of how the brain’s consensus mechanism works:

Permit me to explain why your brain is flipping its interpretation of the image. For starters, human vision acts very similarly to touch.

When your eyes look at an image, it is actually rapidly moving around and ‘feeling’ the image. The part of the retina, known as the fovea, can see color, and high resolution is just a small fraction of what you see in front of you. However, even if your eyes are moving, you see a stable image in front of you. …

Thrilled today to have anticipated around two years prior a paper that DeepMind just released. This is validation that my approach to general intelligence. Here’s the said paper:

Quoted from the paper “Our definition of a symbol draws on the work of the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce outlined three categories of relation — icons, indices, and symbols — whose definitions illuminate the role of convention in establishing meaning.” The authors conclude that “The views we’ve presented here seem to run counter to the past and current AI zeitgeist surrounding symbols, which emphasizes rigid mechanisms and particular representational forms.”

I’ve…

Nice to discover Judea Pearl ask a fundamental question. What’s an ‘inductive bias’? Pearl tweets:

“Help! What precisely is “inductive bias”? Some ML researchers are in the opinion that the machine learning category of ‘inductive biases’ can allow us to build a causal understanding of the world. My Ladder of Causation says: ‘This is mathematically impossible’. Who is right?”

A crucial step on the road towards AGI is a richer vocabulary for reasoning about inductive biases. Pearl explores the apparent impedance mismatch between inductive biases and causal reasoning. …

“Skill of solving Bongard problems lies very close to the core of ‘pure’ intelligence, if there is such a thing. Therefore it is a good place to begin if one wants to investigate the ability to discover ‘intrinsic meaning’ in patterns or messages.” — Douglas Hofstadter

Do you think fractals (i.e. iterative and self-similarity) are weird? Well, it isn’t as weird as biological iterative processes.

What’s even weirder is that humans have an intuition that something appears organic. What does it actually mean to have an organic design?

Christopher Alexander, an architect, who wrote ‘A Pattern Language’ that has immensely…

Does anyone ever become conscious of how they know how to ride a bicycle? Have you ever tried explaining to a child how to ride a bicycle? The child learns when they overcome their fear rather than understanding your explanation.

We understand how to ride a bike becoming familiar with the interaction. Although a bike is an unnatural thing with wheels, we are still able to mentally make it an extension of our bodies. The unnatural key to riding a bike is that it must always be moving forward. …

Daniel Dennett describes symmetry breaking using the neologism ‘strange inversion of reasoning’. He describes theories from Darwin, Turing and Hume as examples of these.

Symmetry, or invariance, is a relationship between objects such that their form does not change when they are re-positioned, rotated or made larger or smaller. In mathematics, physical space often exhibits symmetry. An object or figure of which an invariant form can be found has symmetry. It can be described by a set of transformations. A transformation is a mapping that carries every element in a structure into another position and preserves their relationships.The …

Damasio in his book ‘The Strange Order of Things’ argues that the core of condition lies in homeostasis. I agree with this generalization. But let me work out in a tweet storm how consciousness relates to homeostasis.

Human consciousness is related to awareness of surprising or threatening observations. It’s an error-correcting mechanism that lends attention to discrepancies of our expectations of the world.

The mind is composed of many layers of cognition. Also, its massive parallelism implies reducing the conditional checks required for error correction.

To do this, consciousness is engaged only in a time-sliced manner in a periodic manner…

The interview with CNBC of @chamath is a much watch because there is so much insight hidden underneath.

There are many things that caught my attention. The one thing was the abstraction that hedge fund strategies are all ‘momentum’ plays. What it seems to imply is that the marshaling of resources at an opportune time drives the future behavior of a stock.

From basic physics, we know that momentum is mass times velocity. So any ‘momentum’ tactic employs the variation of mass, velocity or both. Wrt stocks, mass is money and velocity is the speed of trade.

We cannot…