Re: Thanks

Hi Jeffrey.

Thanks for a really enjoyable conversation and your =ospitality
tonight.
Look forward to connecting again and receiving you a= the Media Lab
on my
turf. ;-)

• Joi

Hi Jeffrey,

Yes, it was great chatting about all the ways neuroengine=ring is
going to go in the coming years, revealing both fundament=l
mechanistic brain maps, and providing the control knobs f=r fixing

» » brain disorders and understanding complex phenomena like<=r> » » consciousness. Would be great to
talk about how then t= make

mathematical sense of these maps and control knobs... =rguably the
big stumbling block to date is the lack of good data, but=that's about
to change, thanks to our current and future efforts! T=en we will
have many things that require deep mathematics to underst=nd!

Ed

i think you need a top down as well as bottom up. as I=oking at my
piano
while being played, i can go string by string ( not str=ng theory
strings). hammer by hammer, material of string, molecu=ar interaction
naturalvibration, harmonics, sympathtice vibration =A0but i would not
hear
or understand the melody or music being played. I beli=ve that each
individual has its own encrpytion algorithm, as t=e neural net
grows
it encrypts some input signals. some are hard wired. so=instead of
emotion
, movement, speech, etc, I think a proitable area of initail =nquiry
should
be the hard wired aversive stuff only. smell of de=d meat. .
reaction
to fire. i tihnk that aesthectics will be the greatest ra=ion of
output to
input. or the least energy to decode. dissonanc=, cannot be
easily
resolved so the energy to decode the information, is too high=and
becomes
painful. Does a dream state come upon us, or do we=dream all the
time
and concious state relegates the dreams to behind the screen.= When
sleep
deprived the dreams begin to pop through the screen, as=br> >> hallucinations.

a breakdown of the screen , results in a form of schizophrenia= where
they
cann no longer distiguish between voices. dream produced w=ile awake or
the
awake state angel on the shoulder whispering. . I am =n avid funder
of
the bleeding edge in many fields. keep me up to date on w=at you are
doing, and hope to see you in your own habitat.

I agree we need a top-down! Two thoughts:
-- Yes, developing mapping circuit technology and then applying=it to
simple behaviors -- hard wired aversive stuff -- is indeed a way t=
go. As we plan out these mapping technologies, we're actual=y
beginning experiments to map out these aversive things too. We =re
collaborating with many groups along these lines. We need to fi=ish
the fundamental technology building so that we can obtain maps at =he
right level, and then we can acquire datasets that are compatible =ith
top-down theory, to be sure.
-- Another way to think top-down is to work our way inwards, fr=m the
observables. We know that behavior -- movement, speech, other a=tion
-- is observable; if a feeling or thought is prominent enough, it =ill
be manifest through these channels as an observable. Thus we ca= also
try to infer internal states by their effects on observables, and =hen
to associate neural activity with these internal states and
observables. In theory this should scale to arbitrarily complex=br> >> internal states, not just simple aversive

states.

Best,
Ed

give me a piano music analogy, / watching the strings, ? afte= key inputs,? interesting byt not dispositive of anything meaningful

The piano itself isn't quite the analogy=to the brain, because it has no memory, independent of the human playing it. After the finger lifts, the strings quiets down.

So I am assuming that we need to model the human playing the piano? Suppose, say, we want to understand what emotion is generating the music.

If we could measure activity in the brain of the person playing the piano, and could predict what melody or sequence of notes the person would play, based on that activity, then we could infer that the internal brain activity was causing the melody. This inference might be convertible into proof, if we were to stimulate the brain and play back an activity pattern into the brain, seeing how that would alter the melody being played. And if we have a molecular map of the brain,

simulation begin to see how the molecular interactions between cells, yield dynamics of the network, which then yield the sequence of finger commands that yield the music.

Thus, the finger is the interface between two dynamical systems -- the brain and the piano. Each of those dynamical systems has a physical implementation that can be modeled, if we have three things:

-- mechanistic maps (piano: string lengths, material properties, etc.) --dynamics (piano: the finger movements and temporal scuplting)

-- control (piano: we can modulate the human and see how the music chang=s)

Ed

sorry, i posed a sloppy question. / From the v=ew of understanding music, more akin to thought, i think that you=need to careful that reductionism isn't taken to the absurd level, of =ooking at the string makeup and how it causes sympathetic vibrations, =might look like intent . there is a code that says , hit these strin=s and a melody develops. it has a temporal component , it has amp=itude, but unless it is looked at as a whole the music is not there. =AO I like aversive , as it appears hard wired, as anothe= out side idea, look at the mathematics of lightning, it descrive= well neural firings, with energy minimization.