Karlo @karlo@qoto.org

fun fact: even on CPU, stable diffusion images develop faster than polaroid film

I'd like to share my favorite talks of 2022, spanning disciplines like Cognitive Science, Molecular Biology, AI, Philosophy, and Neuroscience

TALK 1: Lars Chittka showcases the remarkable bee mind through clever experiments. It is striking that a pinhead-sized brain can recognize complex stimuli, use simple tools, learn from 🐝 friends, and possibly even process basic emotions. Coolest of all is an experiment that shows bees represent shape multimodally (word is this study caused a lot of buzz). https://youtu.be/Iut33k3MHyI

TALK 2: Hessam Akhlaghpour lays out an RNA-based theory of universal computation. He first observes that actually, universal computation in Turing's sense is not all that elusive. In systems that use simple rules and in which memory usage can grow, it shows up pretty often. Moreover, universal computation is powerful and can solve a lot of problems, so it would seem odd that life would have evolved without it. His guess is that RNA may implement it, and he goes into great detail on how it could. 🧬https://youtu.be/mOTeek3eC1g

TALK 3: Sanjukta Krishnagopal shows how you can build intelligent neural networks without backpropagation. For context, in AI you can pursue engineering or science, and these are quite different projects. If you want to understand how the brain learns, then it is wise to constrain your modelling work to biologically plausible learning mechanisms. There is no evidence that the brain uses backpropagation -- the standard learning algorithm -- so exploring alternatives is a honey pot scientifically even if performance drops. Krishnagopal shows how a dendrite-inspired gating mechanism can get you learning. https://youtu.be/2Xr0XcyhMCc

TALK 4: Lauren Ross discusses causation in the life and mind sciences. Causation is front and center in science, so it's a good idea to be clear about what the concept means. Ross details a few philosophical views, and also observes that there are many causal structures in nature; we can talk about mechanisms, feedback loops, cascades, just to name a few. There was also a Q&A point that stuck with me: as we can glean from the Lyme's disease example, necessity and sufficiency do not always entail causation. I always thought those were a litmus test 🤔. https://youtu.be/w9cwZjd249c

And here a few more recommendations from the past year... 🍯

- Manjari Narayan https://youtu.be/7-TTS134DnA
- Luiz Pessoa https://youtu.be/m346unJ1yro
- Yejin Choi https://youtu.be/JGiLz_Jx9uI?t=2944
- Jeffrey Bowers https://youtu.be/7C_0vBnWDYo
- Rosa Cao https://youtu.be/gEFtH_z3_xk

Happy new year! Another year means another year-long keogram! Every 15 seconds throughout 2022, my trusty all-sky camera took a picture of the sky above the Netherlands. Combining these 2.1 million images into a year-long keogram reveals this picture, which shows the length of the night change throughout the year (the hourglass shape), when the Moon was visible at night (diagonal bands), and the Sun higher in the sky during summer, as well as lots and lots of clouds passing overhead.

"Webspaces: Rebooting the #3D Web - a new way to create self-hosted 3D worlds on the web using just HTML" ~ https://gfodor.medium.com/rebooting-the-web-in-3d-with-webspaces-9e58847e042c ~ is an open #metaverse closer to reality now? ~ tip @techmeme

For the holiday, a thread on how to befriend crows.

--

Befriending crows is a wonderful thing.

I have many crow friends at home and at work. They bring joy at unexpected moments and can rescue a miserable day even without shaking down the dust of snow that Robert Frost described.

This thread is an updated version of one I posted at the bird site in July 2019.

#birding #birdwatching #birds #urbanbirding #crows #corvids #crow #corvid #crowfriends

FoV-NeRF: Foveated Neural Radiance Fields For Virtual Reality
https://www.immersivecomputinglab.org/publication/fov-nerf-foveated-neural-radiance-fields-for-virtual-reality/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ehAvaseawk

@gordon
Egocentric: you are the spider
Egoless: you are the web

Highly recommend this thread

RT: @glupyan@twitter.com

As a cognitive scientist (trained in the connectionism), I find large language models (LLMs) not just scientifically relevant, but critical to the future of cog sci. Why? Here are two reasons + some "but what about.?"

https://twitter.com/glupyan/status/1604672416201973761?t=lpTMvGesF-Fl48SydDC6Hw&s=19

#cognition #cognitivescience #nlp #nlproc

Here is an #introduction post so that I can find my people while the #fediverse is having a moment:

Hi, I'm cdata! I'm a former browser #engineer and currently building https://subconscious.network with @gordon . #Subconscious is a networked #notebook and browser for a new kind of #web built on #ContentAddresses and #SelfSovereignIdentity using a protocol we call #Noosphere .

Also: a proud #dad , a #sustainability and #bicycle enthusiast and an avid #TableTop and #BoardGame player.

Manuel Blum and I study #consciousness from a #TheoreticalComputerScience (TCS) perspective.
TCS is a branch of #mathematics concerned with understanding the underlying principles of #computation and #complexity, including the implications and surprising consequences of resource limitations.
For a TCS perspective on #consciousness, see, https://bit.ly/38zAhf6
For a TCS perspective on #FreeWill, see, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.13942.pdf

A small thread with some experiments in my particle simulator demonstrating a few ideas from physics.

If you throw a bunch of interacting particles (like these positive & negative charges) they probably won't form stable compounds (except for tiny periods of time).

𝗘𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 is one of those terms that is just too semantically challenging. Usually we say that something *emerges from* something but I heard a suggestion that it really should be *emergence in*.

The idea (roughly) is that if you use the standard "from" you're committing to the creation of something "new" that leads to (potentially) all sorts of problems. On the other hand, "emerging in" treats the issue as a multiscale time-evolving system property.

Check here from tons of good discussion with Mark Bickhard:
https://braininspired.castos.com/podcasts/330/episodes/bi-109-mark-bickhard-interactivism

#neuroscience
#complexsystems
@NicoleCRust
@Gualtiero

The Game of Life, only recursive. Try zooming in and out! https://oimo.io/works/life/ #CellularAutomata #GameOfLife

mindblowing new discovery in Conway's Game of Life: any buildable pattern in Life can be constructed from the collision of 15 gliders.

https://btm.qva.mybluehost.me/building-arbitrary-life-patterns-in-15-gliders/

the key principle: distance itself can be used to encode information. by determining the correct starting [x,y] coordinate for each glider, any future state of the Life universe can be created, with effectively unbounded complexity. 🤯

(via @OscarCunningham @danstowell)

A mesmerizing timelapse of the Sun in ultraviolet light, captured by the SDO spacecraft over the course of a month.

Credit: NASA/SDO
#sun #nasa #space #astronomy