
Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything - dangirsh
https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neural-theory-of-everything/
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taneq
> But we’ve also mostly been doing it wrong, trying to explain the brain using
> methods that couldn’t possibly generate insight about the things we care
> about.

Wow, it must suck to work in neuroscience and find out that your entire field
is pointless because this guy says so.

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loa_in_
This comment is inflammatory, how is it at the top? Statements saying we're
doing it wrong are either revolutionary or misinformed, and I don't see that
it's obvious either way

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taneq
I thought it was a reasonable response to an inflammatory position. If you
think you've discovered a new approach that works better than the current
ones, you can announce it without dismissing an entire discipline as
hopelessly ineffective.

~~~
xtiansimon
I read the article (once) and didn’t encounter this passage nor much criticism
in general.

Most of the article outlines in a positive way the annealing idea and it’s
related extents.

Inflammatory ‘comment’, sure, but hardly a main theme for the article.

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AstralStorm
I do not like the lack of actual support in the data for this idea.

Not in developmental science, not in neuroscience. Not in how we understand
cellular mechanics to work. Neurons and glial cells are born, grow, die and
chemically change all the time.

Psychedelic therapy is in the infancy. Go and run trials before building sand
castles of theory.

Most importantly, the testable assumption is what, adding energy would change
belief? But of what form and sort? Neurons organize into attractors? Then what
do they look like and what's the process? Without that it is woo.

~~~
ilaksh
Right. There is no testable assumption. This article is philosophy, which was
the precursor to science. They are using an entirely outdated paradigm.

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johnsonmx
You may want to see discussion here:
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zcYJBTGYtcftxefz9/neural-
ann...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zcYJBTGYtcftxefz9/neural-annealing-
toward-a-neural-theory-of-everything?commentId=oaSQapNfBueNnt5pS)

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ilaksh
This is really interesting but I would almost use the word "pseudoscience".

I mean a lot of it seems to be on the right track to me in a broad way, but
its problematic because it is a mashup of real scientific ideas but the
process seems to be more like a philosophical essay. You can't get scientific
or engineering progress from philosophy.

There are good reasons that most of academia moved on from philosophy.

~~~
normalnorm
> There are good reasons that most of academia moved on from philosophy.

There are philosophy departments in almost every reputable University I
know...

Everything that is non-STEM is underfunded, it doesn't matter if it is
philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, etc. This has nothing to do with
academia itself, but with the managerial society we live in, where MBA-types
decide on the value of everything with simplistic, dumb and short-sighted
economic metrics.

Science absolutely needs philosophy. Science _is_ philosophy. There is not a
lot of encouragement to do real science/philosophy these days, because this
requires deep thinking and following all sorts of unknown paths. Everything
must be justified in terms of what gadgets can be built with the discoveries.

We are going through a profoundly anti-intellectual stage in western culture.

~~~
ilaksh
To see the difference between science and philosophy, compare this article to
a reputable scientific paper.

You will see that science includes a testable hypothesis, experiments and/or
analysis, and conclusions derived from the data.

This essay contains none of that.

~~~
normalnorm
Philosophy encompasses science. Testable hypothesis are a philosophical idea,
justified on philosophical grounds. You can't justify the very idea of
"testable hypothesis and experiments" by using testable hypothesis and
experiments. There is a branch of philosophy devoted to this type of question,
called "philosophy of science".

One very famous philosopher of science, Karl Popper, gave us the idea that for
something to be considered a scientific theory, it must be possible to devise
and experiment that could, in principle, falsify the theory. Still, the issue
is not settled and there are alternative positions. These are deep questions.

One interesting thing to retain here is that science provides empirical
knowledge, but there are other forms of knowledge. You alluded to "testable
hypothesis", and so you in fact deployed non-empirical knowledge.

The scientific method gave birth to a branch of philosophy, first known as
"natural philosophy", and modernly known as "science".

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mannykannot
I do not think there is any value in disparaging philosophy, but in responding
to such attitudes in the current context, it would be more useful to discuss
what the branch known as philosophy of mind is achieving now, rather than the
significance of philosophy in the foundation of science.

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KhoomeiK
I like articles like these where you can't tell whether it's about
Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, or Psychology till
you're a significant chunk in.

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0db532a0
Paradigm-shifting ideas. Thanks for posting. Sounds like this could be A New
Kind of Science.

~~~
etaioinshrdlu
For those who don't know, A New Kind of Science is when Stephen Wolfram of
Mathematica fame wrote something like 1000 pages in layman's terms to convince
you of his pet theory that the universe is a cellular automaton.

I didn't the hate the book but it was pretty weird and not super scientific.

~~~
0db532a0
I regret being so cynical about this post and the book I mentioned.

It's a really nice book. Lots of beautiful illustrations and interesting ideas
with code snippets for generating those illustrations. I found it fascinating
as a kid. The message wasn't too important for me, and I didn't really have
the background to draw my own conclusions from it anyway.

Someone on IRC, who was a big fan, introduced it to me.

I actually started programming with this very book, copying the examples from
it into Python and then Scheme (introduced to me by that same guy) and Common
Lisp. I respect Wolfram's dedication. It's the type of dedication that brings
us things like Mathematica and TempleOS.

The guy who introduced me to this book and then Scheme had contacts at Wolfram
Research and later sorted me out with a free copy of Mathematica. I could
never have afforded that with my pocket money, and I wasn't at university yet.
He was a big underdog in the community and had his own problems too. What a
great guy.

He's still going strong today: [http://xahlee.org/](http://xahlee.org/)

There's something to be taken even from book like this. It would be good to
revisit and re-evaluate the book as someone who now has a semblance of an
education in the area. I wish I didn't sell it.

~~~
1996
I share your views. TempleOS and Mathematica are monuments to what the human
creative spirit can achieve.

Let's not be too fast to pass judgement on their authors while having done
1/100000 of what they did

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hirundo
> being young is like microdosing on LSD all the time

If we invent significant life extension, microdosing may be a required part of
the protocol just to keep the brain plastic enough to function. It may already
be beneficial as a routine geriatric prescription. "Go play with grandma,
she's on her weekly trip."

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ngcc_hk
Another major area of life. Nice to read.

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crimsonalucard
To hold a concept of certain complexity within the brain the brain itself must
have greater complexity than the concept.

Thus humans can never understand the brain because the brain has equal
complexity to itself and for the brain to understand the brain then it must
have greater complexity than itself which is impossible.

Like many other things in life, we can only hope to understand a simplified
and symbolic representation of brain. The problem is... it's quite possible
that human intelligence itself has no higher level abstraction that we are
capable of holding in our head. The processes that create consciousness,
stripped of all the fluff and irrelevant details, may be of sufficient
complexity that our brains will not be able understand what's going on.

In short I fear that the ultimate goal of neurology may be a fruitless
endeavor.

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oscargrouch
The problem with your line of reasoning, is that you are thinking in
technological progress only through individual achievement.

This is what technological iterations, through generations of human beings,
give us all. Humans achieve super-human level of technological achievements
because we iterate over what others have left for us.

Knowledge is like a stair, made from the hard work of many great human beings,
and even for hard problems, with enough ammount of iterations, and with
consecutive progress (without social deterioration) we can achieve anything.

Somebody will fill that "last" step in the stair that will make a paradigm
shift to all of us..

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Agebor
Yes. You might find interesting some very rated ideas as this article -
Bayesian Brain. In this view, the brain is a complex system that learns to
adapt to and predict its environment, similar to other complex systems like
even companies.

