ICYMI, this week's SFI Seminar by Fractal Faculty Stuart Firestein (@Columbia) on "what started out ass a very simple-seeming problem [re: #olfaction] and turned out to be very complicated":
"Everything we know about the world comes through these little holes in our head and the skin covering our body, processed through tissue specialized to interpret it."
"The thing to notice about [sight and hearing] is that they're [processing] fairly low-dimensional stimuli."
"Even a simple smell is composed of a VARIETY of molecules, and these are high-dimensional from a chemical point of view. And it's also a somewhat discontinuous stimulus. How do we get from this bunch of molecules to this unitary perception of something like a rose?"
"You could make the argument that humans have the most discriminating palate of any animal on the planet — including dogs. If you have a dog, you know it'll eat nearly anything."
Stuart Firestein on the olfactory system as a model for understanding sensory processing:
"There are only three kinds of neurons in this system. Like many sensory neurons in other systems, they're these kind of ciliated structures...as far as we know there are no interactions between these cells until they get back to the olfactory bulb and synapse."
"Normally a chloride channel would be inhibitory, but olfactory neurons do this cute gthing where they actually pump chloride into a relatively high intercellular concentration, so these channels are actually chloride defluxes. It's a built-in amplifier, as it were."
"We wanted to ask a kind of a silly but fundamental question: What actually is an odor?"
"There are some very odd bits of business that go on with these odor molecules...for some of them, the only difference is that they rotate polarized light in one direction or another."
"These two odor molecules differ only by one carbon atom, and yet Hexyl acetate smells like bananas and Heptyl acetate smells like pears. On the other hand, here are two molecules that don't look ANYTHING LIKE each other, and yet smell IDENTICALLY like sandalwood."
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"A key feature of this is talk is that we make sense of what each other are saying IN PART by what they say, but ALSO by what we expect of them."
"Language transmits info against a background of expectations – syntactic, semantic, and this larger cultural spectrum. It's not just the choices of make but [how] we set ourselves up to make later choices."
"I think what really drives [the popularity of the #multiverse in #scifi] is regret... There's a line in @allatoncemovie where #MichelleYeoh is told she's the worst version of herself."
"I don't think we should resist melting brains. I think we should just bite the bullet."
"When you measure the spin of an electron, or the position...what happened to all of the other things you could have seen? Everett's idea is that they're all real. They all become real in that measurement."
- SFI Fractal Faculty @seanmcarroll at @guardian theguardian.com/science/audio/…
"At the level of the equations there is zero ambiguity, but the metaphors break down. The two universes it splits into aren't as big as the original universe. The thickness of the two new universes adds up to the thickness of the original universe."
"One way to represent the kind of #compositionality we want to do is with this kind of breakdown...eventually a kind of representation of a sentence. On the other hand, vector space models of #meaning or set-theoretical models put into a space have been very successful..."
"Humans are prone to giving machines ambiguous or mistaken instructions, and we want them to do what we mean, not what we say. To solve this problem we must find ways to align AI with human preferences, goals & values."
- @MelMitchell1 at @QuantaMagazine: quantamagazine.org/what-does-it-m…
“All that is needed to assure catastrophe is a highly competent machine combined with humans who have an imperfect ability to specify human preferences completely and correctly.”
"It’s a familiar trope in #ScienceFiction — humanity threatened by out-of-control machines who have misinterpreted human desires. Now a not-insubstantial segment of the #AI research community is concerned about this kind of scenario playing out in real life."
- @MelMitchell1