@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

axoaxonic

@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe

Studying mathematical/theoretical/computational neuroscience & data science in dᶻidᶻəlal̓ič (Seattle) -- more interested in studying nervous systems through abstraction than studying neurons to improve artificial systems

⚧ ND (ASD/mTBIs/cPTSD/ET/probably more letters) ⬛

Long time musician, now slowly inching my way thru academia as first in my close family to do so. Grew up unschooled, which gave me a heavy autodidactism habit

CW: Posts about disease, links to research involving animals

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NicoleCRust, to random
@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social avatar

Elaboration of "leading theory of consciousness is pseudoscience"
from the perspective of one (of 124) authors, Hakwan Lau
https://psyarxiv.com/28z3y

(For the 124 author post, see this from yesterday: https://neuromatch.social/@NicoleCRust/111074417017972359)

Among many highlights from Lau's piece:

Defines pseudoscience as

i) a set of important claims with far-reaching implications that are ii) neither currently supported by science nor are they likely to be so in the foreseeable future (perhaps even in principle), and yet they iii) masquerade as being already scientifically tested and established.

Explains why IIT is a problem as:

"Flat earth theory is clearly wrong but we don’t see articles appearing in Science11–13, Nature14, The New York Times15,16, The Economist17, NewScientist18,19, etc, repeatedly, over many years, sometimes by authoritative figures, proclaiming that it is a leading, empirically tested, and well established scientific theory. Therefore, flat earth theory is, in a sense, more ‘harmless’ and less threatening than the rise of IIT and panpsychism in the media."

Explains why IIT is pseudoscience as:

IIT shares many common features with other pseudoscientific ideas: that it is unresponsive to empirical challenges4–7; that it uses an unnecessarily complex and impractical4 language that diverges from mainstream science; that its popularity is mainly driven by the opinions by a few authoritative figures, and populist appeal8,23, rather than consensus within the scientific community or empirical success, etc. It is also notable that proponents of IIT publicly engage with religious leaders on the very topic of panpsychism24 and related metaphysical matters, and openly profess the ‘spiritual dimension’ of their ‘science’, together with controversial figures like Sadhguru25 and the New Age alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra26.

Also explains the events leading up to the letter and much more (for that, have a read).

Really curious to hear thoughts!
@WorldImagining, @axoaxonic +++

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@NicoleCRust @WorldImagining
I'm sure I'll have a lot of thoughts about it when I read this, it might take me a day to get to it though. Thanks for looping me in to this conversation

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@WorldImagining @mrcompletely @NicoleCRust Guilt by association reactions amplify the siloing of academia I think. As long as people are careful and critical they should be able to read and engage with even the most wingnut, out-there stuff. That being said, people who exploit sentimentality and people's need for finding purpose in life in order to sell books (and in the case of Chopra, an entire brand's worth of products https://chopra.com/ ) are helping themselves first and not much else.

NicoleCRust, to random
@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social avatar

Wow! 124 brain researchers call out what journalists call the "leading theory of consciousness" (integrated information theory, IIT) as pseudoscience.

https://psyarxiv.com/zsr78/

💯​: We need testable theories about the brain to move forward. Every theory starts as a proto-theory (and that's fine). But when theories are not even wrong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
we must acknowledge that.

Especially when the stakes are as high as they are here, with big ethical implications (eg for organoids and coma patients, as the authors describe).

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@NicoleCRust Apparently you can construct Reed-Solomon error correcting codes or Vandermonde matrices https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799 in a certain way that they end up having high integrated information, while being very inert nonconscious equations (cf. Matilde Marcolli, "Topological Model of Neural Information Networks" https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-80209-7_67). Seems like it's straight up wrong

NicoleCRust, to random
@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social avatar

6 thought provoking questions posed to @awaisaftab (psychiatrist) and myself (brain researcher) and we hit on so much:

The challenge of escaping reductionism. Theories of consciousness. Are mental disorders brain disorders? Why should anyone care about philosophy? Is epistemic iteration is failing? And what bits of brain research are awaiting their Copernican moment?

With nods to @summerfieldlab, @knutson_brain, @tyrell_turing, @Neurograce, @eikofried and so many more.

Read it all here (and let's discuss)!

https://awaisaftab.substack.com/p/advancing-neuroscientific-understanding

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@tyrell_turing @WorldImagining @NicoleCRust @awaisaftab @summerfieldlab @knutson_brain @Neurograce @eikofried How would someone even design an experiment to test whether or not brains can solve a problem in a noncomputable complexity class?

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

The state of Georgia has indicted over 60 protesters on organized crime and racketeering charges over their involvement in the movement to stop the construction of a $90 million police training facility in Atlanta that opponents have dubbed “Cop City.”

...

RICO charges can result in a fine or a five to 20 year prison sentence in Georgia.


https://theappeal.org/cop-city-protesters-hit-with-rico-charges-in-latest-act-of-political-repression/

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@jonny I keep wondering if the clerk writing these up ever stopped and was like, "this sounds fine actually"

NicoleCRust, to random
@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social avatar

On jargon - is it useful?

Is it necessary and useful for scientists to say "mnemonic" to refer to "memory" and "affect" to talk about "emotion"?

In other words, given that everyone understand emotion and mood and no one really understands what "affect" is until you are really deep into things, why is the term affect useful and important at all? And should we reserve it for deep dives (as opposed to public facing websites and such)? And does anyone call themselves an "emotion researcher?" or a "mood researcher?"

@PessoaBrain @knutson_brain

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@NicoleCRust @PessoaBrain @knutson_brain

In normal conversation I have a really hard time not using big/esoteric/technical words because they point to more specific details than general common words do. I've heard this is a thing that a lot of hyperlexic people experience.

If the jargon word conveys unique information, different than a more common similar word, I think it's useful, but if it says pretty much the same thing then it just makes the language exclusive and inaccessible

IcooIey, to octopus
@IcooIey@mastodon.green avatar

Seen in New Jersey. #random #octopus #ThickTrunkTuesday

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@IcooIey omg their habitat is spreading https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_tree_octopus]

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@IcooIey Hopefully they can adapt and habituate to their new environment on the East Coast

davidpierce, to random
@davidpierce@mastodon.social avatar

A few months ago I saw a picture of this weird computer made of wood. I went to LA to meet the guy who made it, and found a new vision for how we build and use gadgets. And, of course, to play with the wood computer! https://www.theverge.com/23841276/mythic-computer-keegan-mcnamara-pc-builder

A close up shot of the wood Mythic Computer, showing the white and beige keys and the 8-inch screen.
A close shot of the Mythic Computer screen, which runs NixOS.
Early designs of the Mythic Computer device, on a table, with leather swatches and tools.

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@davidpierce Very pretty case, but hmu when the internals are made of wood/plants too

dlevenstein, to random
@dlevenstein@neuromatch.social avatar

In preparation for our @CogCompNeuro GAC next week, I’m going to do some polls here this week to take the temperature of the room. 🌡️

Very curious to see the range of answers so please pass it on 🔁🙏 and feel free to elaborate - we'll try to take any discussion into account at the workshop

https://gac.ccneuro.org/gacs-by-year/2023-gacs/2023-1

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@dlevenstein @beneuroscience @jonny There was a long convo about this on here recently. A manifold can be any topological space with a (locally) Euclidean metric, so any neural anything that is differentiable enough to define distances between points will allow someone to create a manifold. Another counterexample, I think, could be taking a random sample of not necessarily connected neurons and measuring the mitochondria trafficking rates along their axons, using the norm of the differences to make a metric https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Definition:Metric_Induced_by_Norm

[edit: this is such a general way to make a manifold that you could probably make one out of any set of measurements, even if the things measured have nothing to do with each other, which could be not useful and misleading even if mathematically possible 👍 ]

Any neural information could be used to make a manifold via information geometry as well, but it'd probably be a good idea to call it a neural information manifold or something to avoid confusion https://franknielsen.github.io/IG/index.html

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@jonny @dlevenstein @beneuroscience

I've been taking forever to reply because I had work, pardon.

I was definitely doing the "read something very literally then infodump in a reply" thing, I see what you're saying. Was also taking the poll question very literally: anything neural + anything manifold.

A meaningful and useful manifold would have to reflect the interactions for sure, the underlying meaningful dynamics, instead of a bunch of disjoint state info. Otherwise it'd be easy to infer and interpret things about that aren't actually relevant, which is kind of a popular thing to do given all the cool shapes the data can make, but not really helpful for really understand what's going on.

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@jonny @dlevenstein @beneuroscience Singularities are scary, and differential geometry and homotopy are hard. Smooth surfaces => smooth sailin'

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@jonny @dlevenstein @beneuroscience Definitely a lot of cognitive dissonance between everyone talking about the nonlinear and nonlocal activity in the brain then producting very linear and very local mathematical objects to describe them

axoaxonic, to random
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

If people into category theory for neuroscience and people into topology for neuroscience want to interact more, here's a cool open access book to bridge the gap: "Topology: A Categorical Approach" Tai-Danae Bradley, Tyler Bryson and John Terilla (2020) https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262539357/

axoaxonic, to random
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

~9 years ago I was really into the work of Donna Haraway, and even got to attend a talk and crash a luncheon she was at. She has repeatedly brought up the work of systems scientist Beth Dempster, who addressed the closed, indepedent nature of Maturana and Varela's concept of autopoietic systems, and proposed an interdepence-network type expansion of them called "sympoeietic systems" https://web.archive.org/web/20210214033415/https://drago.intecca.uned.es/download/d3d3LmludGVjY2EudW5lZC5lcw==_230879_1484148400_10.1.1.582.1177.pdf [the only free pdf I can find is all highlighted, sry]

It emphasizes how change within systems, like organisms, almost always happens through interactions, as opposed to a more exclusively internal self-emergence in autopoeitic systems. This network of interacting systems can itself be thought of as a system itself.

It got to be a popular concept with humanities and critical theory scholars, but it seems largely unknown in the sciences. It lacks "formalization," but seems totally ammenable to it. There are already formal concepts of interaction, such as transfer entropy, mutual info, and interdependent networks https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-03518-5

axoaxonic, to firefox
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

A extension that changes the new tab screen to a to-do list.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-todo/

It's the most effective to-do I've ever used because it's in my face every time I'm getting deep into surfin' the 'net

DrLindseyFitzharris, to TwitterMigration

This wax model of a human head from the 19th century shows the internal structure of the brain, complete with its protective covering, the meninges, the eye, cheek, neck and jaw. Wax models were used for teaching anatomy to medical students or as part of popular anatomy shows.

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@DuBusGuy19 @DrLindseyFitzharris

axoaxonic, to Neuroscience
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

Sometimes I feel that focusing on anything but climate change and the environment makes me effectively into the "this is fine" dog. Thinking about thinking can definitely help though, because it relates to how we can change and adapt.

Does anybody have any ideas on how , , and can relate to studying ?

Belief change dynamics are really central imo, as is reinforcement learning. Using fossil fuels is really immediately rewarding (especially if you're like, an oil baron) and the abstract future reward of "going green" is often too distant for people. There's also community and cultural information flows, and other learning dynamics like imprinting and observational learning+mimicry.

Any other ideas?

gsuberland, to random
@gsuberland@chaos.social avatar

I've got Year 3000 by Busted stuck in my head. Make it stop.

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@gsuberland Time travel by replacing it with this classic rock song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShiShrR_nh8

NicoleCRust, to Neuroscience
@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social avatar

I’ve noticed a strong alignment between those who think that the computer metaphor for the brain makes little sense and those who’ve thought about how the brain might give rise to emotion.

As much as I love all the progress happening in NeuroAI to push our understanding of perception, memory & intelligence forward, I very much think they are right - there’s a crucial swath that doesn’t seem to fit with that agenda.

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@NicoleCRust Recently I read a book defining what "computation" is and isn't, "Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account" by Gualtiero Piccinini. A lot of it was about how the metaphor of computation might fit with the function of the brain. Near the end, the author sums up his argument, saying in part:

"Computation is explanatory. When a system performs a computation, that computation explains the behavior of the system. Computational explanation is a special kind of mechanistic explanation that applies to systems that manipulate appropriate vehicles by following appropriate rules"

That's where I see the idea of computation breaking down for emotions. Emotions don't like to follow rules, they're not always appropriate, and even if they explain interoceptive or mark somatic states they probably are so complex that they're uncomputatble. How does one even measure the [algorithmic] complexity of emotions?

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@NicoleCRust A lot has been looked at but not much has been figured out

What's difficult for me about the computation metaphor is that it uses a behavior (computing, following algorithmic processes) generated by the brain, then projects it back onto the brain. Kind of circular. Computation has been expanded to artifacts that do similar things, but those are creations of the brain. Even early descriptions of computational architectures were inspired by the brain: von Neumann only cited McCulloch and Pitts in "First Report on the EDVAC" and Konrad Zuse wrote about wanting to create a brain. It's like saying, "the brain does this thing that's modeled after what the brain does," which doesn't say much at all IMO

Emotions seem require multiple contexts coming together at the same time: memory, sociocultural, environmental situation, and body feelings. Maybe all these things can be broken down into a composition of computational subprocesses integrating into the experience of emotion, but contextuality and subjectivity are far from being computable at that scale. So the metaphor seems so alien to what people know is computation now, it would probably be better to find a more appropriate one

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@maxpool @NicoleCRust I think you're confusing emotions and feelings, feelings are the vague internal sensations. Even more vague for someone with alexithymia like myself to a degree. But the reactions, the emotional perception, require a lifetime worth of personal refining and sociocultural tuning to shape those habits.

What is the algorithmic complexity of an entire lifetime's worth of contexts and socio-environmental/body cues assimilated and integrated into the very context specific percise reaction at any given time? You're not just randomly shuffling that deck of cards but halting at a very specific card-order at a context-aware time almost instantaneously. What's the complexity of a context-aware haystack search of 8×10^67 card permutations for one specific sequence?

They are complex enough to send top down signals to change a person's entire state, even their entire life. Having to make a care decision as a loved one's health care proxy or starting the whole Trojan war from jealousy doesn't seem to be able to be reduced to a simple algorithm of "if sadness has this weight, love has this weight, etc then choose this treatment option," but maybe with a perfect future brain imaging and perfect information of a person's entire lifetime/memories, someone's emotional states and how they influence their actions could be inferred.

They're often habitual but can be novel and unique, at least in my own experience. So, the complexity has to be high enough to be flexible enough for stereotyped and completely novel reactions given by (often not spatio-temporally localized) context cues.

Speaking of own experiences, emotions are also subjective. There are statistical commonalities between emotions but no one way to experience them. I like to think my subjective experience is too complex to be computed, but maybe the functional states of my brain when they're happening are composed of simpler processes that happen to be arranged in a delicate and unique way, and the arrangement is where the complexity is. Gotta try to model it and see what happens

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@NicoleCRust If emotions arise from a mental process other than computation, what kind of process do they arise from? That seems to be the Copernican question

GottaLaff, to washington
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social avatar

I’m sickened.

Just drove by someone’s property going south near Vancouver, on the way to Portland & passed 3 huge flags on tall flagpoles. One was the Confederate flag, (couldn’t make out one, and 1 🇺🇸). I’m just livid.

Livid & sick to my stomach.

Yes, I know it’s a red area, we drive through every time we take our Canada trips, but the flags were new. Lots of Trumpy & religious signs, but this… is a 1st.

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@GottaLaff It's mostly in the rural PNW towns but Portland has a very racist history that's still around today. Vancouver WA is one of the sketchiest towns in the western side of the state.

CW racism and slurs in the article
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/racist-history-portland/492035/

axoaxonic, to random
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

Sometimes following the standard practice makes things not work as well. Like, it'd be so much easier for me to read math equations if the variables were named first, instead of writing out this huge equation then saying "where B denotes the constant parameter ... " after. Why are most equations written like this?

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@elduvelle That could be ideal but it could also get really cluttered really fast if it was all part of the same area on the page.
I found one mathematical computer science paper that declared all the variables at the top like it was a program and it was so much easier to read, anything is better than putting the meanings of the symbols last

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