Our brains see affordances, not because we see 3D objects, but rather how we move to see our 3D worlds. This is different from inverse graphics.
Inverse graphics implies that a representation of a 3D object is created in our minds. If we assume the 'lazy brain hypothesis' then this doesn't make sense because it is wasteful computation.
When we look at a Rubik's cube, we don't instantly know where which colors are on which sides. We are aware of the layout only when we attend to it. It is an active form of perception rather than a photographic snapshot.
We see the whole first before we see the parts. We don't see it the other way around. That is, parts creating wholes. Deep Learning methods do this, but not human brains.
The adversarial inputs (i.e. visual illusions) that do fool humans differ from the kinds found in Deep Learning. The human kind fools us in how we 'feel' the image. Top-down re-construction rather than bottom-up.
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The more try to understand cognition, the more you realize how long the journey may be required to get human-like general intelligence.
Our frameworks of understanding cognition are getting better. However, one has to understand that cognition arises through emergence in complex adaptive systems. These systems are very difficult to set up and replicate.
To get an intuition of how large the gap truly is, one only needs to observe how awkward and non-organic in our present-day robots. Why can't they perform with the nimbleness of honey bees?
The idealization of the ethnic peasantry as the one true national class is the generating condition that lead to genocides in Nazi Germany, Armenia, and Cambodia. It is fueled by the resentment of the elite as the root of their own misery.
We need to learn from history and ask why a country like Cambodia will put a quarter of its population to death only because they were experts in different crafts. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian…
What collectively drives people to kill people on a mass scale? What makes people ignore their natural empathy for others? It is the collective delusion that the existence of another is the reason for one's misery.
Modularity is critically important for AGI, but we should avoid a naive formulation of modularity.
The most developed notion of modularity comes from computer science. We have notions of encapsulation and all kinds of composition design patterns that are strategically employed to trade-off one concern over another.
Modularity thus is understood as a controlled coordination mechanism between interacting parts. Certain information is allowed to be malleable while other kinds must remain immutable.
Netflix's Queen's Gambit must be the ultimate mathematical nerd series. One cannot underestimate the detail of this movie and how it takes you back to a different time.
The movie takes place in the decade of the 1960s. Where a young child mother dies and is sent to an orphanage. What's incredible is how this movie reveals the changes in 60s, the technology, architecture, interior decoration, music and fashion style.
But that's just a slice of the movie, it's about a gifted chess player. Few may have noticed that her natural mother wrote a Ph.D. thesis in group theory. This reveals her unique innate ability.