davidsaintloth

Karma: −15

davidsaintloth 24 Jun 2015 2:13 UTC
−6 points
in reply to: davidsaintloth’s comment on: The Brain as a Universal Learning Machine
(part 3)

:20 days later I asserted the primary importance of one particular dimension of sensory experience over the others, that dimension being the one we have from the moment our fetuses form, somatsensory experience...the sense of touch. I asserted that cognitive complexity built around this primordial sensation and the connections built in the mind to enable embodiment. I discussed how cognition and consciousness must clearly be constructed by reference to its variable non existence at birth and slowly being built into the mind as the infant matures and learns about the world. I explained a recently published articles conclusion that it was easier for younger babies to learn various concepts than older babies in terms of the flowering of abstractions created in the mind as one pieced together a consciousness, I asserted an inverse relationship between speed of evaluation of various salience traits with number of previously gathered salience elements.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2013/11/dynamic-cognition-in-babies-in-abstract.html

In April 2014 I focused on one of the more important autonomic driving dimensions, the need for a power source. I posited that this need would be a key attribute of dynamic cognition that exhibited sufficient apparent randomness to emerge truly novel cognitive dynamics that would be identified as being “conscious”. http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2014/04/azimo-best-and-last-of-modern-day.html

In June 2014, a paper describing the cognitive unique relationship of a set of siamese twins provided confirmation for a hypothesis that consciousness could be distributed but also be substrate dependent at the same time. Many feel that these two attributes are complementary but they are not if one thinks in terms of a salience based cognitive dynamism , sensory and memory evaluations can drive completely different sensory and action mechanics.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2014/06/salience-theory-joined-at-mind.html

Today I present a simplified diagram showing the simple dynamic cognition cycle, I posit that any hard AI must have modular connection of the kind indicated by this graph. Feed forward and feed back happen in such a way that “action” execution can be continuously refined as new sensation triggers comparison and salience evaluation...all our hopes, dreams, thoughts and physical actions emerge from this cycle being executed and by so doing emerging our conscious self.I call this the “simple” cycle because it doesn’t describe the sub modules necessary or their self connection, for example very important modulation must be provided by autonomic and emotion salience sub modules as part of the “salience” node shown in the diagram, also the question of how different sensory dimensions (touch, sound, vision, taste...etc.) are multiplexed into this engine and further used to remodulate action to various degrees is not described. The more complex dcc diagram will be the basis of architecture for what I hope would be the first emergent self aware dynamic cognition (hard AI) on a non biological substrate. That more complex diagram is a work in process as I am still unsure of all the necessary sub element connections (I am sure I have all the modules) but it is 99% complete. I look forward to start writing code for such a cognition using the substrate of a smart phone in the next few years.In October 2014, I am not saying much still about how I would implement the comparison and salience nodes which are the meat of the difficulty of artificial cognition...building a mind. This article also addresses the idea of emergent evil AI and touches on the suggestion of mind “uploading” that some have wildly speculated about.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2014/10/on-evil-ai-and-one-type-of-uploading.html

I redesigned the cognitive flow diagram to look more like a control systems diagram. I also explained how the Sensation, Comparison , Salience and Action nodes function in the context of dreams and what that means for any emerged AI.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2014/10/new-cognitive-flow-diagram-and-possible.html

In 2015 I considered more deeply the importance of play in the process of emerging dynamic cognition of stable cognitive form and the ability to quickly encode reality in its dimensions of sensory capability. Ultimately I have concluded that play is akin to research coupled with drive, a reason for doing..in many cases emerging a feedback that benefits learning and thus the ultimate reason for it’s emergence is found. In creating an artificial cognition then the need to simulate the emergence of play will in its success be a sign of the correct direction being followed.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2015/02/dynamic-cognition-on-meaning-of-play.html

The passage above taken from a Facebook note that is public that I’ve been updating with new articles in the area of research over time:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/david-saintloth/discovering-the-dynamic-cognition-cycle/10152513149708057

davidsaintloth 24 Jun 2015 2:12 UTC
−4 points
in reply to: davidsaintloth’s comment on: The Brain as a Universal Learning Machine
(part 2)

:By the end of February I realized that the likely first substrate for emerging a fully dynamic cognition would be one which had sufficient sensory dimensions and autonomic drive dimensions to serve as the basis for building a salience module. The most ready such device is a smart phone and so I proposed that smart phones will be the first devices to on their own become self aware ONCE they are designed with the correct salience driven cycle.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2012/02/when-your-smart-phone-comes-alive.html

A whole year went by as I struggled with my own survival issues before I came back to emotion as a critical salience component. I was stimulated by research which showed how emotion could be added or subtracted to memories! This was a direct confirmation of the basis of the salience theory proposed over a year before which posited that emotional and autonomic import was simply a weighting factor added to memories.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2013/02/emotions-identity-crisis-in-our-brain.html

:5 days later I attacked head on the nonsense I’d been reading from many so called experts in the neuroscience, philosophy and machine learning space regarding weather or not consciousness was even an attribute that could emerge from a non biological substrate. I explained why this was nonsense and provided an outline of how simply adding salience modulation was all that one needed to emerge dynamic cognition (consciousness) …as it was an emergent trait from a fine grained number of very deterministic actions converging. http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2013/02/on-consciousness-there-is-no-binding.html

:A few months later in April I came across research that posited a reason for the billions of “glial” cells in the brain, cells which weren’t neurons but served specific function in the cognitive process that at the time was not known. The assertion that these cells were important to establishing “attention” made perfect sense to me as a means of controlling cognitive flow over general thought so that the switching between sensory experiences could in a way persist, this would serve as cognitive glue and thus solidify a unitary self. When pathological this subsystem could lead to autistic individuals incapable of tuning out certain types of experience or readily switched from one to another too easily, the need to simulate attentional persistence became clear to me.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2013/04/autism-astrocytes-and-attentiona.html

:With the ADA implementation essentially complete the similarities between the ADA approach and the requirements of the Salience theory left little doubt that some extension of the ADA approach would be involved any any effort I mounted to build a dynamic cognition. Chiefly because the modeling process of AOW required establishment of relationships that were very similar to the stratification relationships that emerge in different sensory processing layers of the neocortex. I realized that AOW entities modeled biological sensory dimensions 1:1 and thus the algorithm could be the basis of the more general cortical algorithm that would be needed to create a functioning dynamic cognition cycle. Also I realized that the approach had the necessary fractal nature, hieararchical composition in being able to encode “action” across to any desired depth across a given sensory space. This way sounds could be decomposed into entities that modeled frequency, pitch, variation, harmonics and volume, images could be decomposed into floors, walls, objects in motion, objects standing still....etc. and so on across the sensory dimensions. Fractal resolution being key to building the arbitrarily deep set of nested relationships between entities in any given sensory dimension.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2013/05/ada-on-road-to-dynamic-cognition-how-is.html

In September I came back to astrocytes and described them as a buffering system for experience in brains and that the depth of the buffering system would modulate the apparent consciousness. This was clear in the first examination of astrocytes as important to attention but specified how they were important...essentially as a queue for mixing data coming in with data being acted on in a controlled way.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2013/09/an-engineering-analog-for-function-of.html

Then in November of 2013, I codified a set of hypothesis to form the Salience Theory of dynamic cogntion and consciousness. The key insight being the principle of cognitive equivalence in salience driven action and thought, consciousness in this theory is the same as dynamic cognition with only resolution of shifts from abstraction to abstraction (thoughts) being different between different classes of “mind”. I surmised that so long as the salience modules (emotional and autonomic import) could correctly provide feedback and feed forward to the right degrees cognitive dynamism would erupt....and be sustained...in the same way that it is sustained in an internal combustion engine when the spark plugs are fired in the correct sequence to gas injection in the cylinders.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2013/11/salience-theory-of-dynamic-cognition.html

davidsaintloth 24 Jun 2015 2:12 UTC
−5 points
on: The Brain as a Universal Learning Machine
This fits very much in my findings having written a dynamic cognition theory that sees the key to cognitive dynamics as being in getting the reinforcement learning right.

In the Salience theory of dynamic cognition I’ve put forward, salience (which is a descriptor for the functions performed by the emotional and autonomic centers of the brain combined) is the reason why the generalized algorithm of the neocortex (which I assert is nothing more than comparison after sensation, selection after comparison, and finally prediction on top of the selection. Salience is what is used to decide what to predict which then does or does not drive action.

I’d been refining the theory privately for a few years and only posting some tid bits to my blog but then in 2013 decided to release a post to introduce it formerly and put forward some testable hypothesis.

I assert that not only is salience the driver of dynamic cognition but it also gives rise naturally to self awareness and thus consciousness. In fact consciousness is an illusion of the constant dynamics of salience driven action modulating events caused by responses to sensory experience. Levels of consciousness only being distinguished by levels of resolution to which sensory experience can be encoded in the brain (two places determine this resolution, sensory resolution plus memory capacity).

Cognitive dynamics emerge as possible responses in the salience selection space over the k dimensions of sensory experiences that the cognition is able to perform salience driven dynamics over. In a human being the main dimensions of note are olfactory, gustatory, somatosensory, visual, auditory.

Generally a control flow diagram for dynamic cognition (the minimal set required in the theory) involves 4 nodes of transformation and feedback between them.

Sensation (the organs that capture a given data set from world space… the 5 senses...etc.)

Comparison (the place where incoming sensation is compared to previous salience “tagged” sensation [memory, most immediately short term memory but also long term] and predictions are made via “selection”)

Salience (the place where comparison predictions are tagged with their emotional or autonomic import factors)

Action (the final node that can remodulate sensation directly but only if a dynamic threshold determined by Salience evalution triggers it ..otherwise comparison and salience evaluation continues.

Associated important findings of the theoretical frame work for salience are that the autonomic and emotional centers are critical to get right if we are to emerge self aware cognition. The need to avoid pathological cognition is great...also the need to create cognition that cares about our needs is also important. I’ve put forward ideas on how this would be done in a salience based dynamic cognition.

I’ve compiled a chronological series of my articles on the theory compiled over the last 5 years or so.

The first post was from April of 2010, which posed the question of weather or not emotion was required as a guide for cognitive dynamics...at first I was of the mind that it could be discarded or replicated using neo cortical dynamics alone but later came to realize that emotion was not a throw away element it was a core aspect of how salience enabled selection which then drove action. This would be a major element of the salience theory pieced together over the next couple of years.

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2010/04/emotion-no-longer-has-to-be-our-guide.html

My curiosity continued to be explored in July, 2010 when I wrote the following post, which posited ideas for the reason for the development of emotions. I surmised that emotion lay at the center of the riddle of what intelligence was particularly consciousness but had no way to formerly draw a connection between the two, not yet. This post was still important because it allowed me to latch on to the idea of emotional salience to survival (as opposed to being driven by a need to serve social urges first) as being an important piece of the dynamic cognition puzzle.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2010/07/why-of-emotion-from-whence-did-it-come.html

The neuroscience was clueless to the control systems and neural network work that the machine learning and electrical engineer space had long explored. The engineers and machine learning researchers were clueless to how neurotransmitters were being used in the brain between different cognitive modules to effect processing of music, storing of memories and the big prize, how a self aware and dynamic cognitive process could emerge from the very discrete operations happening in the mind. I wrote articles on emotion and it’s purpose and put forward a theory of dreams (which has since found much support in empirical research).http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2009/06/yet-another-theory-of-dreams.html

:The theory of dreams was important to the work on cognition because the fundamental question of what happened to “you” when you fell into sleep without a dream state was a core focus. I concluded that “you” only existed when actively experiencing, comparing, evaluating and doing...that there was no difference between this process and consciousness...and by December 2011, after I’d started and mostly finished the implementation of ADA and implicit AOW I wrote out the theory that salience required autonomic and emotional modulation along with memory comparison to sensory input.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-does-idea-form-autonomics-memory.html

The idea that it was salience driven cognitive dynamism that led to consciousness fundamentally enabled by what I called “drive”, “drive” I analyzed to have both autonomic (physical often involuntary) and emotional components. I concluded that the underlying reason for drive was irrelevant to the emergence of dynamic cognition but that the number and level of sensory dimensions was important for setting the interacting complexity of abstractions that could arise in such an emerged mind but without the emotion and autonomic modulation no dynamism of any kind would emerge...only reflex would exist. Around this time I started looking more widely into the work of neuroscientists and came across Giovani Tonini’s Integration Information theory, I was amazed by how right this generalized approach to consciousness seemed to me. However I found it had fundamental flaws in that though it did an excellent job of explaining the cognitive landscape in terms of what was called Qualia space it didn’t explain how Qualia space turned into self aware agents with drive. This latter piece being answered by my ideas on salience still being formed.:The same day I wrote out a set of diagrams that detailed the cognitive cycle based on salience, the image below is taken from that sheet:http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2012/03/integrated-information-does-not-equate.html

:By early 2012 I’d completed the bulk of the ADA implementation and fresh with it’s statistical approach on action deltas in mind realized that the problem of paranoia would be important to tackle when building a free learning intelligence that would use salience determination. If the emotional and autonomic modulations were not constrained it would be easy to build pathological minds...of the sort to make our worst Sci Fi. nightmares seem pedestrian. I talked about this fear of paranoia and explained the need for caution in approaching creating dynamic cognition that emerged self awareness (consciousness).http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2012/02/with-completion-of-ada-action-delta.html