Github's #1 bot (?) Markus Elfring is a big fan

AOP tends to involve too much magic/surprises for my liking, though I've only really come across it in Spring

Yeah, that’s what Wikipedia said.

But there are a few things that really are cross-cutting. Tracing, authentication, maybe a few others.

I don’t see how cross cutting concerns can be handled in a way that’s universal without being obscure.

The truism still rings true. It really is a small world 🗺️

Indeed :)

presumably though they're converted into spike trains in the auditory cortex somewhere right?

I guess... but the frequency of that doesn't correlate with the frequency of the actual waves, it has already been converted from the time to the frequency domain. Just like eyes perceive color in the terahertz range.

By having cones sensitive to those ranges

right... the problem is that... well... from what I understand, many neuroscientists believe that the "seat of consciousness" sort of sits in the front lobes of the brain - front-striatal-loops. But, for that to be true, you have to explain how the information gets from the visual cortex, auditory cortex and somatosensory cortex, into those frontal, affective areas of the brain.

To explain that, they tend to say that the stream of our consciousness is actually a very thin byte stream of only a few bytes per second... I can't remember the estimate... maybe a few hundred or a few kilobytes

Reason being, you have to explain how all that information from all those different features get integrated at only 200 hz

Ohhh, I understand what you are getting at, I think

So, the argument is that our actual consciousness is like a pinhole that quickly saccades across our perceptions

But the richness of my own subjective experience makes that very hard to believe, IMO

IDK, it seems to me that I am conscious about a very small subset of the stuff I should be percieving

There is constant 10kHz auditory input going on in the background

But it's not getting to that "seat of consciousness"

Unless it's relevant in conjunction with other inputs

But our TV is like 1080p, right? What do you subjectively feel like the resolution of your visual system is? Mine feels like... I don't know, 16K? 32K? Allegedly, only a pinhole of that gets through to consciousness.

If I focus my eyes on this last comment of yours I cannot read any of the others

In fact I only can read maybe a few words at a time

My brain reconstructs a 16K image from what it knows the other comments and my surroundings to be

at 200 hz, it's hard to integrate such a rich visual experience, and funnel it down to a few K, all while catching baseball

Where is that image reconstructed? and how do those 16K get to the frontal lobes all at once?

200Hz of what, BTW?

I don't know much of about this stuff

But is it 200 bits a second or 200 GB a second or each neuron fires at 200Hz?

The brain is believed to operate on a few different frequency ranges. The highest range is 200hz. That means that it is believed that the information communication medium of the brain - spike trains - move through the brain at those frequencies.

Less believed theories claim that quantum effects are being leveraged by our consciousness, allowing long-distance communication between neurons, much faster than the spike trains we're usually measuring.

I tend to want to believe the former, since I fancy the idea of seeing a human-like AI sooner rather than later. But this paradox about integrating such massive information at such slow rates makes me wonder if the later is rather true.

Most AI folks you hear will poopoo on the quantum theories of consciousness, because they desperately want to believe that consciousness is predicated on classical mechanics.

And they say that MRIs would likely mess with our consciousness if quantum activity was involved

Spike trains... so it's bits?

I am not familiar with the concept

yeah, perhaps you could just call them bits

And that 200Hz limit is everywher?

a given neuron has a tree of branches that respond to different spike trains differently... So there's a lot of parallelism, harmonization and dissonance between those spike trains.. So it's sorta analog too

Yeah, lots of communication takes place over brain waves that are in the 5 10 and 15 hz range. Super low.

There's another kind of synaptic connection called "gap junctions"

They synapt electrically and are much faster, but people haven't yet implicated them as some fundamental component of consciousness AFAIAA

So you have this communication that happens between the auditory cortex and the front lobes at max 200Hz... does that limit also hold in the intra-lobe signals as well?

Yeah, presumably it's a global limit

Some believe this circuit is seat of consciousness, sotospeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontostriatal_circuit

Even ancient trilobites from the Cambrian era are thought to have some homolog of that circuit.

So IIUC, for experiences from the sensory lobes to be experienced by our seat of consciousness (and for a person to give positive self-report of an experience) then it has to integrate with that circuit. Most information integration takes place in the thalamus

Neuroscientists have been able to show that when parts of the visual cortex, perceiving certain aspects of a scene, do not integrate with those fronto-striatal circuits, then people have no self-report of the experience at all.

So anyway, you'd have to explain how the rich diversity of all those rich sensory data sources are all integrated into those frontal loops so quickly.

And it may be possible, but I just don't think I've heard a reasonably theory on how yet.

Well, I don't know, but that first auditory layer I can explain

It's just reduced from the rich 20Hz-20kHz to a frequency analysis of some stimulated cells in the ear

Just like cones in the eye

Where you have the THz range that gets reduced to a "few" red, blue and green cones being stimulated or not

And that's a very mechanical process

Maybe the other layers above, reaching to consciousness, can be explained by similar abstractions

But that's too much for me to grasp

Yeah, there's lots of layers though... The visual cortex has 4 layers, some of which have sub layers. And the scenes and object semantics are built up there. So lots of data is being compressed into signals that summarize objects and whatnot

Which pass some information laterally across the cortices via waves, but mostly through the thalamus, where lots of integration happens. The hippocampus, two small lobes around the sides of the thalamus, have "place cells" that actually maintain a grid of our location within a subjective radius of roughly one mile.

All of that information has to bounce around, alot, and integrate, send it over to the frontal lobes to see what it thinks, check with the cerebellum to remember how to do the basic motor action, and the commit the decision back to the motor cortex, all while catching a baseball, all under 200hz

Let's put it this way: the human brain is thought to compute at 1,000 petaflops. That's 10 quadrillion (10,000,000,000,000,000) floating point operations per second. However, the "bus speed" of the brain is only 200 hz. How do you ship 10 quadrillion flops between each other when your bus is only 200 hz? Easy, right? You just have lot's of parallel busses. But the problem is that we know information must flow into funnels in the brain, so that different streams can flow into different circuits. So what kind of bus funnels can possibly integrate 10 quadrillion flops of computation at 200 hz? Not saying it's not possible, but I'm not aware of any hard-science theories on how that is supposed to work, given Amdahl's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

Does the brain even do flops, though? As programmers we tend to fall too much into the zeitgeist of trying to interpret everything as a computer, sometimes, I think.

eh, it's just an analogous estimate.. It's not like the brain is working with floating points.

When you strike the string on a guitar, how many petaflops does it process to turn that into soundwaves?

And that's a much simpler system, I think

But trying to emulate it digitally is still somewhat hard

When they say 10 petaflops, they're using some model of a neuron as an analog of an actual circuit. So if you had a guitar with a quadrillion strings, then you could use those harmonies to probably compute some big logic

> model of a neuron as an analog of an actual circuit It's not a circuit, though

Maybe this is derailing the conversation a bit, but if we were in 1619 we would be talking about how many levers a neuron is equivalent to

Or in 1819, how many steam machines

Yes, there is a physical theory of computation

But there also was a theory of thermodynamics, and of classical mechanics

fair point, but when neuroscientists are making claims about how much the brain can compute, they're trying to guess at how many different states a given neuron can switch on, like a circuit. They may not be right, but they're doing their best to approximate some computational power of a given neuron.

If it so happens that neurons can also tap into their DNA to store and retrieve information in real time, as some believe, then that could significantly increase that number of flops.

is it written in clojure?

I believe it is more of a mathematical model, but you'd have to ask him

I bet the word “composition” comes up a lot in both circles for sure.

FWIW: https://www.michielborkent.nl/mmm/stageverslag.pdf

How come?

Because I was introduced to Lisp there and I liked it

What is the "44khz audio feature translation thing?"

Afaik, human consciousness mostly exists below a 200 hz range. But human perception of audio is up to 41,100 khz. So presumably auditory features from the high range are being translated into features that fit in those 200 hz range spike trains.

Up to ~20k, really. That 44.1k is the cutoff for Nyquist freq