
Your Mind Is Eight-Dimensional – How Algebraic Topology Is Unlocking  [video] - espeed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akgU8nRNIp0
======
qubex
(This is one of the few YouTube channels I subscribe to, pity this presenter
left to concentrate on her doctoral thesis.)

I suppose the “eight-dimensional“ reference in the title comes from there
being “up to” eight-dimensional directed simplexes detected in the
reconstructed neural networks?

~~~
EtDybNuvCu
Yes. Dimensionality can be a little tricky here; what's meant is that eight
dimensions are required to express some of the simplices, if we were to
interpret them geometrically.

Honestly, I'm more interested in the cohomological features of this network,
which would help us find loops and other curiosities in high dimensions. I
figure that there have to be some interesting loops in there somewhere.

~~~
qubex
As an applied mathematician (and one that put himself through the paces of the
mental contortions necessary to understand Penrose's twistor theory) I reckon
I'm one of the few people here that actually know what “cohomological” means,
and agree with you.

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Alex3917
The guy who proposed this committed suicide because no one believe him:

[https://www.wired.com/2008/01/ff-
aimystery/](https://www.wired.com/2008/01/ff-aimystery/)

~~~
pdfernhout
Thinking about thinking in certain ways for certain people could be an
existential risk (akin to a recursive stack overflow or to a self-modifying
program overwriting its own essential code?) -- just like the story of the
centipede tripping over itself and being unable to walk when it thinks about
where to place its feet instead of just walking.

That said, people who tend to be extremely focused like these two people
(Chris McKinstry and Push Singh, dead at 38 and 33 respectively) mentioned in
the Wired article you linked to may also sometimes neglect other aspects of
their life that support good health (sunlight & vitamin D, good nutrition with
a variety of phytonutrients and omega-3s from whole foods instead of eating
quick-to-ingest junk foods, regular exercise, family, friends, community,
sleep, spirituality, time in nature, and so on). They may also be exposed to
environmental toxins related to their work.They might also be inclined to take
risks most other people would not. Or they may some unresolved underlying
personal issues that lead to their focus in the first place. Or they may have
seemingly-random accidents as with Singh having chronic back pain from an
injury -- although perhaps if he had been stronger from these other factors he
would not have been so badly injured from moving furniture or might have
recovered quicker? Depression is also a condition that leads to rumination --
so there may be some overlap among those who ruminate a lot from a tendency to
depression (even as part of bipolar transitions for McKinstry) and those who
do deep dives into how the mind works.

There are a lot of tragedies in this world -- but there are also a lot more AI
researchers, philosophers, mathematicians, and librarians than the two
mentioned in the Wired article who are living healthier lives. For example
Marvin Minsky and Isaac Asimov both lived to old age (88 and 72 respectively).
Immanuel Kant and Jean-Paul Sartre made it to 79 and 76 respectively. My
undergraduate advisor at Princeton, George A. Miller, who started WordNet just
as I was graduating, lived to 92. Marvin Minsky had been one of George's first
advisees -- I was one of George's last ones.

On the original article link to the video of the design of the mind and "eight
dimensions" \-- while no one knows for sure, it seems the brain is a
combination of different systems that are adapted for different purposes and
represent external state, internal state, and goals in different ways.
Conscious beings like humans can switch which of these subsystems they are
most attending to at any one time (or perhaps consciousness may reflect a
switch arising from non-conscious processes). Marvin Minsky talked about this
as a way of problem solving -- representing problems topologically,
linguistically, and in other ways and then picking the representation that
seems most productive at any given time to move closer to goals. So maybe
there is something equivalent to an eight dimensional representation in the
brain, but I would tend to doubt it is the only way the brain represents data.

Alternatively, if one interprets the video as just being about one suggested
way of modelling the brain with an eight dimensional representation and
simplices and simplicial complexes -- sure, with Turing equivalence, there are
lots of systems that can model anything. The question is more (similar to the
previous point on the brain itself involving multiple representations), in
what contexts is the model useful and how does it compare in that way with
alternative representational systems? It may be a great choice in most cases,
but that can't be determined from the video alone. However, we can also run
the same software on a lot of different hardware, and lots of different
software on the same hardware, so a good analysis of human neural hardware as
typically eight dimensional may still not tell us that much about the software
that actually runs on it or that could or should run on it.

Also, models tend to simplify things in order to be cost-effective to use for
some purpose. Another HN article from today is about "Brain Cells Share
Information with Virus-Like Capsules" which may be related to long-term memory
perhaps being encoded in RNA. So, where does that indirect communication fit
in an eight-dimensional model based on direct neural connections andhow
neurons directly cause each the to activate?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16139798](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16139798)

Broadly spreading hormones in the brain also may add another indirect
communication layer of complexity not represented in this eight-dimensional
model.

To circle back to the Wired article, McKinstry and Singh seemed focused on
some sort of linguistic encoding of knowledge with their Mindpixel and Open
Mind projects. While linguistic knowledgebases may potentially be useful, as
above, language is only one way the brain represents information. And as
useful as language is for communicating or storing certain types of knowledge,
language may not even be the primary way most humans think most of the time --
especially given humans are such visual creatures, and as above, all the
larger variety of information processing systems in the brain which are
constantly running alongside human language processing.

Speculatively, one can wonder if a certain apparent narrowness in both
McKinstry's and Singh's thinking about intelligence might have connected to
not thinking more broadly about their own lives and what could have been
possible? And sadly, often additional schooling as in Singh's situation just
makes people even narrower:
[http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/](http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/)
Although one might think that was less true around the MIT Media Lab and in
Marvin Minsky's orbit? Also, the lack of a basic income might create a lot of
unneeded financial stress like in McKinstry's situation where he pursued a
commercial approach via a questionable "stock" offering that may have
alienated him from a larger open source and academic community or produced
worries about returns to investors? Of course, a lot of happy people have PhDs
and/or work at companies that sell stock -- so those choices and their
consequences are not a whole explanation either. As with the brain itself,
cause and effect in a complex network of interactions can be essentially
impossible to explain in a simple way.

It's also sad that two people with some similar ideas and ambitions seemed to
be in more conflict than harmony, which probably was not helpful to either of
their mental states. Related:
[http://www.alfiekohn.org/contest/](http://www.alfiekohn.org/contest/)
"Contrary to the myths with which we have been raised, [Alfie] Kohn shows that
competition is not an inevitable part of “human nature.” It does not motivate
us to do our best (in fact, the reason our workplaces and schools are in
trouble is that they value competitiveness instead of excellence.) Rather than
building character, competition sabotages self-esteem and ruins relationships.
It even warps recreation by turning the playing field into a battlefield. No
Contest makes a powerful case that “healthy competition” is a contradiction in
terms. Because any win/lose arrangement is undesirable, we will have to
restructure our institutions for the benefit of ourselves, our children, and
our society."

------
ajmarcic
Any finite graph can be embedded in three-dimensional space without edge
crossing. [1]

Thankfully the human connectome doesn't need eight-dimensional space to exist.

[1]
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02522826](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02522826)

~~~
topologie
Yeah, but, like 3-D spaces are like so last year. ;)

Also, paywall free version of paper:
[http://brainmaps.org/pdf/graph.pdf](http://brainmaps.org/pdf/graph.pdf)

------
topologie
I had to recommend to most people I shared this with to check out the previous
video first:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlI1KOo1gp4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlI1KOo1gp4)

"Your brain can be modeled as a simplicial complex, and Algebraic Topology can
tell us the Betti number of that simplicial complex..." is not the most
layman-friendly way to introduce a video... :)

