Grey Matters

by Max Solomon Bennett

The first was when protective lipid bubbles entrapped these DNA molecules using the same mechanism by which soap, also made of lipids, naturally bubbles when you wash your hands. These DNA-filled microscopic lipid bubbles were the first versions of cells, the fundamental unit of life.

DNA had officially become life’s blueprint, ribosomes its factory, and proteins its product.

Shortly thereafter, these cells evolved into what scientists call the “last universal common ancestor,” or LUCA. LUCA was the genderless grandparent of all life; every fungus, plant, bacteria, and animal alive today, including us, descend from LUCA.

So we have a common ancestor

This fueled the engine of evolutionary progress; for every defensive innovation prey evolved to stave off being killed, predators evolved an offensive innovation to overcome that same defense. Life became caught in an arms race, a perpetual feedback loop: offensive innovations led to defensive innovations that required further offensive innovations.

Wars are bound to happen

The neurons in the human brain operate the same way as the neurons in a jellyfish. What separates you from an earthworm is not the unit of intelligence itself—neurons—but how these units are wired together.

The original purpose of neurons and muscles may have been the simple and inglorious task of swallowing.

Life form evolved by usurping each other

Therefore, our bilaterian ancestor evolved a counterregulatory response to stress—a whole suite of anti-stress chemicals that prepare the body for the end of the war. One of these anti-stress chemicals was opioids.

Just as a soldier who returns from war cannot help but jump when they hear a loud noise

Conditional reflex

Thus, old associations are primed to reemerge whenever the world provides hints that old contingencies are newly reestablished.

Associations and old habits die hard

In machine learning, this is called the credit assignment problem: When something happens, what previous cue do you give credit for predicting it?

How do we decide the purpose of the cue

What was most surprising was how much intelligent behavior emerged from something as simple as trial-and-error learning. After enough trials, these animals could effortlessly perform incredibly complex sequences of actions.

Muscle memory

Within the small mosaic of only fifty types of olfactory neurons lived a universe of different patterns that could be recognized. Fifty cells can represent over one hundred trillion patterns.[fn1]

How do modern AI systems overcome this problem? Well, they don’t yet. Programmers merely avoid the problem by freezing their AI systems after they are trained. We don’t let AI systems learn things sequentially; they learn things all at once and then stop learning.

In the brain, the result was the vertebrate cortex, which somehow recognizes patterns without supervision, somehow accurately discriminates overlapping patterns and generalizes patterns to new experiences, somehow continually learns patterns without suffering from catastrophic forgetting, and somehow recognizes patterns despite large variances in its input.

Beauty of brain in a nutshell, which no AI has done till now

This means that even if the reward of an activity is negative, if it is novel, we might pursue it anyway.

Is this the reason for digital addiction

If the reinforcement-learning early vertebrates got the power of learning by doing, then early mammals got the even more impressive power of learning before doing—of learning by imagining.

Super power

The first thing that became clear to these nineteenth-century scientists was that the human mind automatically and unconsciously fills in missing things.

Consider the “cocktail-party effect.” If you are at a noisy cocktail party, you can tune in to the conversation of the person you are speaking to or the conversation of a nearby group. But you cannot listen to both conversations at the same time.

Multi tasking is a myth

The clearest demonstrations of episodic memory’s flaws are in eyewitness testimonies.

Rats that had done the task one hundred times did the smart thing—they no longer wanted to push the lever once the food was devalued.[27] But rats that had done the task five hundred times ran up to the lever and just started pushing it like crazy, even if the food was devalued. And in all these tests, the food pellets never were given; the group that had become insensitive to devaluation just kept pushing the lever without ever getting a reward.

Habits and muscle memory

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.

Mental rehearsal of motor skills substantially increases performance across speaking, golf swings, and even surgical maneuvers.[14]

Importance of mental rehearsals in military

There is also plenty of evidence for the idea that

Thus, animals who fell into the strategy of group living evolved tools to resolve disputes while minimizing the energetic cost of such disputes.

When given the chance to pick between these two experimenters, chimps always went back to the person who seemed unable to help and avoided those who seemed unwilling.[14]

Show willingness to help

First, easy access to fruit gave early primates an abundance of calories, providing the evolutionary option to spend energy on bigger brains. And second, and perhaps more important, it gave early primates an abundance of time.

We already saw in chapter 14 that mentally rehearsing actions improves performance when actually performing actions.

Directly copying expert behaviors turned out to be a dangerously brittle approach to imitation learning.

Learn from unsuccessful ops

are currently not hungry. In his paper discussing

Money, gods, corporations, and states are imaginary concepts that exist only in the collective imaginations of human brains. One of the earlier versions of this idea was articulated by the philosopher John Searle, but was famously popularized by Yuval Harari’s book Sapiens.

Every human culture uses cooking, and humans who attempt to eat fully raw diets, whether raw meat or raw vegetables, have chronic energy shortages, and over 50 percent become temporarily infertile.[15]