Are you 80% angry and 2% sad? Why ‘emotional AI’ is fraught with problems
“Emotional AI’s essential problem is that we can’t definitively say what emotions are. “Put a room of psychologists together and you will have fundamental disagreements,” says McStay. “There is no baseline, agreed definition of what emotion is.”
Nor is there agreement on how emotions are expressed. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and in 2019 she and four other scientists came together with a simple question: can we accurately infer emotions from facial movements alone? “We read and summarised more than 1,000 papers,” Barrett says. “And we did something that nobody else to date had done: we came to a consensus over what the data says.”
The big idea: can you inherit memories from your ancestors?
“Scientists working in the emerging field of epigenetics have discovered the mechanism that allows lived experience and acquired knowledge to be passed on within one generation, by altering the shape of a particular gene. This means that an individual’s life experience doesn’t die with them but endures in genetic form.”
Happy #NewstodonFriday! Once again, the many newsrooms who have an active presence in the #fediverse have produced inspiring, informative, interesting stories, and we’re highlighting their work in the thread below. If you like what you see, follow the profiles and boost their stories. If you’re a journo or newsroom that we don’t know about or if there’s a newsroom you’d love to put on our radar, please let us know in the comments.
Is the testability of a theory essential to good science or is there room for more unconstrained exploration of ideas? @thetransmitter looks at whether this might be the case in relatively young fields like neuroscience.
The Cooperative Neuron: Cellular Foundations of Mental Life by William Phillips, 2023
The Cooperative Neuron is part of a revolution that is occurring in the sciences of brain and mind. It explores the new field of cellular psychology, a field built upon the recent discovery that many neurons in the brain cooperate to seek agreement in deciding what's relevant in the current context.
"Researchers publish largest-ever dataset of neural connections
A cubic millimeter of brain tissue may not sound like much. But considering that that tiny square contains 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and 150 million synapses, all amounting to 1,400 terabytes of data, Harvard and Google researchers have just accomplished something stupendous."
Seeing the Mind: Spectacular Images from Neuroscience, and What They Reveal about Our Neuronal Selves by Stanislas Dehaene, 2023
A lavishly illustrated and accessibly explained deep dive into the major new findings from cognitive neuroscience.
Who are we? To this age-old question, contemporary neuroscience gives a simple answer: we are exquisite neuronal machines.
The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’
"Perhaps the story to be written about near-death experiences is not that they prove consciousness is radically different from what we thought it was. Instead, it is that the process of dying is far stranger than scientists ever suspected."
@cogsci
The notion of role-filler binding as central to cognitive(ish) representations has been around for ages (possibly under different names, such as slot-value in GOFAI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence)). This is hardly surprising because it's effectively the same as variable-value.
The role is generally treated as though it's an atomic symbol, whereas it's not uncommon for the filler to be taken as a composite value (e.g. a tree). I am toying with embracing the idea of roles also being composite representations.
In a cognitive-agent/robotic context, I think it might be useful for the role to be a "sensorimotor program" and the filler to be the sensory input arising from running the sensorimotor program specified by the role. (This is heading towards a Predictive State Representation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_state_representation).
(1) I would greatly appreciate any pointers to discussions of role-filler bindings as sensorimotor predictions (similar or related to the sense above).
"Attention" could be construed as a "run/don't_run" flag in the sensorimotor program. This is basically treating attention as a kind of action and "don't attend" as not doing that action. (If that were true it's possible that there may also be other attention mechanisms, e.g. the precision weighting posited by Predictive Coding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding#Precision_weighting).
(2) I would greatly appreciate any pointers to discussions of attention as a kind of executable sensorimotor action.
The Tell-Tale Brain A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human by V. S. Ramachandran
With a storyteller's eye for compelling case studies and a researcher's flair for new approaches to age-old questions, Ramachandran tackles the most exciting and controversial topics in brain science, including language, creativity, and consciousness.
Applications for students and TAs are open for all Neuromatch Academy courses - Computational Neuroscience, Deep Learning, & NeuroAI! You don't want to miss this!
➡️ Student apps close March 24
➡️ TA apps close March 17
Are you a student interested in learning Computational Neuroscience in a hands-on way? Don’t miss your chance to explore the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning!
Our computational neuroscience course is the perfect way to gain practical experience and build a strong foundation in this field. Join us and become part of a growing community of scientists and researchers exploring the frontiers of computational neuroscience.
Student Applications Close Sunday, March 24 midnight in the last time zone on Earth.
Fundamentals of Brain and Behavior An Introduction to Human Neuroscience by William J. Ray
Fundamentals of Brain and Behavior provides an accessible introduction to the study of human neuroscience.The book has been carefully designed to accompany a typical entry-level course, covering core topics including the function and structure of the nervous system, basic human motivations, stress and health, and cognitive functioning.
I guess we do #introduction posts over here? I work on the #neuroscience (am I doing those hashtags right!?) of learning and memory, specifically how we learn while we navigate space and context. To do this, I take in vivo recordings (currently calcium imaging but ephys has my heart) of freely moving rats! After that, I use computational and mathematical approaches to analyze their neural activity! I am currently a BRAIN Initiative K99/R00 postdoc at Northwestern working with John Disterhoft and Sara Solla. I was trained at MIT with Matt Wilson, where I got my PhD in biology, and my BS is from Carnegie Mellon. Welcome!
Our Call for Papers is finally up! Come share your representational alignment work at our interdisciplinary workshop at ICLR in beautiful Vienna!
representational-alignment.github.io
"Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it is stressed that artificial algorithms attempt to mimic only the conscious function of parts of the cerebral cortex, ignoring the fact that, not only every conscious experience is preceded by an unconscious process but also that the passage from the unconscious to consciousness is accompanied by loss of information."
A lively and unconventional exploration of our senses, how they work, what is revealed when they don’t, and how they connect us to the world
Over the past decade neuroscience has uncovered a wealth of new information about our senses and how they serve as our gateway to the world.
A legendary record producer–turned–brain scientist explains why you fall in love with music.
This Is What It Sounds Like is a journey into the science and soul of music that reveals the secrets of why your favorite songs move you.