A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains

by Max Solomon Bennett

One inch behind your eyes is the most awe-inspiring marvel of the universe.

What a neuron is and what it does depends on whom you ask.

Radially symmetrical animals have only one opening—a mouth-butt if you will—which

I will

“neurons that fire together wire together.”

Gonna start using this

A strategy inspired by how Sutton thought the brain might work turned out to successfully overcome practical challenges in AI, and this in turn helped us interpret mysterious data about the brain. Neuroscience informing AI, and AI informing neuroscience.

With each scroll, there is a new post, and randomly, after some number of scrolls, something interesting shows up. Even though you might not want to use Instagram, the same way gamblers don’t want to gamble or drug addicts don’t want to use anymore, the behavior is subconsciously reinforced, making it harder and harder to stop.

Doom scrolling!

When you imagine moving certain body parts, the same area activates as if you were actually moving the body parts.

If this is true, can people missing a limb imagine moving it or does that part of the motor cortex get repurposed like in the case of blindness?

This is why people become more impulsive when tired or stressed—the aPFC is energetically expensive to run, so if you are tired or stressed, the aPFC will be much less effective at inhibiting the amygdala.

Hangry

If groups don’t have writing, such distributed knowledge is sensitive to group size; if groups shrink, and there are no longer enough brains to fit all the information into, knowledge is lost.

The human brain has parallel control of facial expressions; there is an older emotional-expression system that has a hard-coded mapping between emotional states and reflexive responses. This system is controlled by ancient structures like the amygdala. Then there is a separate system that provides voluntary control of facial muscles that is controlled by the neocortex.

But when you think about why 1 + 1 =, when you prove it to yourself again by mentally imagining the operation of adding one thing to another thing and getting back two things, then you know that 1 + 1 = 2 in a way that GPT-3 does not.

If there is anything that truly makes humans unique, it is that the mind is no longer singular but is tethered to others through a long history of accumulated ideas.

We are the stalwarts of this grand transition, one that has been fourteen billion years in the making. Whether we like it or not, the universe has passed us the baton.