technical-notes-on-synthetic-psychology

Geometry means that the graph of connections is not all over the place, but that there are rules that make you more likely to be connected to somewhere, presumably, usually to your neighbors, other geometries are thinkable and potentially interesting

Idea:

+---------------+          -+
|               |           | Here I roughly from 'columnar' cell assembles
|     A       A |          -+  (they are horizontal, saying column because it invokes cortical columns)
|        A      |   ^
|               |   |
|   B       B   |   v   ^
|        B      |       |
|   C  C    C   |       v
|     C         |
|     .         |
|     .         |
|               |
+---------------+

What could you do with a wave of activation going through the geometry?

                    [ 'wave maker nucleus' ]     (see also syn-fire-chain)
                             |
                             | Imagine a slow fiber here
                             |
+-----------+      <---------+   t1
| |         | A              |
+-+---------+      <---------+   t2
| v |       | B              |
+---+-------+      <---------+   t3
|   v       | C              |
+-----------+                |

Here, A, B, and C roughly correspond to cell assemblies forming from the input (remember cell assemblies are something like a data structure that represents some information)

wavemaker: A hypothetical element in the circuit that has the relatively stupid wiring of making (timed) waves of activation through the geometry. Limiting myself right now to imagining it goes top to bottom through.

The frequency of the wave maker is sort of the time resolution for this event flow anchor mechanism. This could also be implemented with a syn-fire-chain, listening to events in the system, instead of static time.

—

I have called a very similar idea an n-clock somewhere, for neuron-clock or neuronal-clock. You can count how often something happens (going around a clock of states) and something else in your assemblies can base itself on that. For instance, you can say 'Event b happened 3 neuronal events after event a'. Where neuronal-event is already allowed to be arbitrarily abstract - i.e. events coming from somewhere else in the cognition machine.

—

We might be allowed to imagine a wave-maker made from many neurons himself, so he could be swapping from t1 to t2 only under certain circumstances.

-> Still, it is joyful to try to come up with extremely simple elements, at least initially.

Consider this case,

1. Inputs already ignited cell assembly A, In other words, A is in short-term memory (the information representing the signal a) (signal-a, lower case; cell-assembly-A, upper case)
2. The wave maker goes through the neuronal area. In front of A, the additional activation from the wavemaker doesn't do anything (for the sake of consideration). On top of A, it doesn't do anything because it is active already

3. Now, just behind A, there is an interesting overlap in the circuit:

   A is activating the area behind A a little bit AND now Wavemaker (time sayer) is activating it too!

   This area now represents a question: Is there any part of the system that would mean a yet-to-be-allocated B?

   Is there anything in our existing signal processing machinery the region of this potential B is already listening to, that would now allow it to fire?

   If it does fire, Hebbian plasticity already automatically strengthens its inputs, I call those inputs lowercase b.

   Lowercase b is the answer to the question of what follows A in time. Keep in mind that A was active from short-term memory, to begin with.

   The relationship A->B is a 'follows in time' relationship, and we are allowed to represent it in our circuit.

   Braitenberg called this an Ergotrix wire. (Vehicle 11 - Rules And Regularites).

   Other names:

   Causality wire, e-line (borrowed from Ergotrix), across-line, T-line, time-wire, directed association, Association through time, also very similar to Minsky's Transframes

   It is especially satisfying that Hebb plasticity is resulting in both association lines (m-lines for Mnemotrix) and e-lines - simply because cell assemblies represent information across time. Allowing the association wires to form between something in short-term memory and something new coming in.

                    [ 'wave maker nucleus' ]
                             |
                             |
                             |
+-----------+      <---------+   t1
| |         | A              |
+-+---------+      <---------+   t2
| v         | ???                                   !         -> B
+-----------+  <--------------------------------------- b
|           |
+-----------+

If this works the way I think then such a mechanism would find and represent those b-signals.

—

One of the things a model of cognition will be able to explain is why are there orientation columns in the visual cortex.

It is a hunch of mine that something in the space of what I describe here is happening. But on what levels I don't know.

Something that somehow constructs itself from the fact that when you turn your head the world rotates - predictably so. Maybe the movement brain is allowed to be b-signals in such a scheme as above. When I say 'I am oriented at x degrees and now I am moving', the cell assemblies can already flow a little bit into the shape of x + speed-of-movement-per-timestep.

But whether one column now means one cell assembly 'region', I cannot say.

Whatever the purpose of the cortical columns, considerations like this at least get my imagination going in a space that looks a bit like where an explanation of such things would come from.

—

A wavemaker has some parameters that determine its behavior.

1. How many 'segments' of the neuronal area it reaches (n)
2. How well it is connected (density)
3. It's speed

(->wavemaker
  {:density 0.01 :n 5 :n-neurons n-neurons :wave-speed 5})

—

In general, something like causality is an important challenge to connectionist models.

I can think of other important challenges [more elsewhere].

• Perspective making: Make the differences between things more important than their similarities.
• Directed thought / fine-grained thought / focused thought: If everything just connects to everything else, how can you represent something like a story without the elements all flowing into each other?
• Purely connectionist models are frozen in time. But the brain needs to run on reality and navigate the world online (online means there is no pause to calculate something).
• These kinds of reasonings bring me to something like these activity-flow cell assemblies because by having the activity in the model we get to something that looks way more like alive memes, embedded, physical pieces of information with an agenda, reproducing themselves etc.¹

(doesn't need geometry)

 +-------------------+
 |  +--X             |
 |  |     +--O       |
 |  +-X   |          |
 |  |     +--O       |
 |  |     |          |  neuronal-area
 +--+-----+----------+
    |     |
    |     |
  line1  line2
[ orange nucleus ]
                      X - active orange neuron
                      O - inactive orange neuron

• Orange nucleus activates a random line each time step.
• An orange line goes into the neuronal area and activates a few orange neurons (can be random, just make a wire grow through it).

Consider a signal-a coming in, for the sake of argument, say that when any signal wire also resets the neuronal area.

From assembly calculus, we know that the connectivity of `wire-a` will produce a cell assembly `A` of well-connected neurons, that represent the information 'a'. I call these blue neurons, the ones that listen to signal wires.

                        signal-a
                           |
  +----------------------+ |
  |                      | |
  |       A    A   <-----+-+
  |        A       A     |
  | +-O       A          |
  | |                    | neuronal-area
  +-+--------------------+
    |
    |                     A - signal a (blue neurons)
orange line

Since we reset the whole area, all orange neurons are currently off.

Now in the next time steps, this is allowed to happen:

   +----------------------------+
   |                            |
   |  X       A   A  +X..       |
   |    X       A               |
   |   X      A   A             |
   |                            | neuronal-area
   +----------------------------+

X - orange time neurons, more and more
A - established cell assembly representing signal-a

As time passes, we activate more and more random orange time accumulation neurons.

From the properties of assembly calculus (the information mixing machine), you will see that there are now cell assemblies forming that represent the information

AX = (mix A X)

That is they are blue-orange cell assemblies that will ignite when A is active in the area and X happens. That means when A happens and then some time passes. So `AX` now represents '`a` in the past'. Or a-prime `a'`.

This is very useful because now somebody else in the system can associate (with Hebbian learning or equivalent) the concept of `(associate AX B)`.²

Now representing the information 'signal-b follows signal-a'.³

I call this n-clock accumulator, for a neuronal-clock accumulator. Accumulation because there are more and more orange 'time passed' signal neurons.

—

If you do not want to reset the neuronal area for every signal coming in, you can add some neurons Y, that listen indiscriminately to the concept of new information coming in.

           signal-x, any signal
             |
             |
             |
+------------+-----------+
|YYYYYYYYYYYY|YYYYYYYYYYY|
|  |         |           |
|  _         v           |
|  X                     | neuronal-area
+------------------------+

                          Y - listens to all incoming signals
                          Y -| X (Y inhibits X), representing a time reset

We can achieve this by forcing every input signal wire through a layer of Y neurons, leaving collaterals in this Y layer.

Y is allowed to be a well-connected cell assembly itself, but perhaps its inhibition model forces it to make a quick burst and then extinguish.⁴

Now you can hook up all the orange X neurons to be extinguished by Y, representing the idea that time is reset to 0. (Of course, this stuff is allowed to become arbitrarily complicated).

This overlaps (and indeed I had this in mind when thinking of this scheme), with the neuroanatomy of the pyramidal cell A-System and B-System, where A-System is remote signals coming in and the B-System is sort of the local group ('ensemble') of neurons that make some local computation on the inputs, then. -> The A-system pyramidal cells are allowed to take the role of the Y layer. If they all inhibit the orange neurons a little indiscriminately, then every new signal coming in can reset the time representation in the system.

—

You can go one further on this idea and come to something that keeps track of events more sophisticatedly: Instead of merely saying 'More time passes' you can say 'Event 1 happened, event 2 happened' etc. For instance, a simple thing would be to say 'One in-breath happened' or something. Then you can count the breaths you take between signal a and signal b. Sort of makes an anchor for representing a time flow then.

That is somewhat equivalent to a syn-fire-chain idea.

—

The n-clock accumulator might be implemented with a slightly simpler operation:

(mix random-noise A) -> A'

As time passes, you can mix random noise into the neuronal area.