A cognitive scientist who's spent twenty years building cognitive architectures says the entire connectome project is mapping the wrong layer of the brain — and a 302-neuron worm is the proof.
Joscha Bach is co-founder of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness and one of the most original thinkers on mind, computation, and the substrate of cognition. We cover: why mapping every synapse in C. elegans for forty years still hasn't produced a working simulation, what neurons might actually be doing if they aren't the computers, why mind uploading rests on an unexamined assumption, the telegraph-wire analogy that reframes the whole field of neuroscience, and the experimental result that would change his mind.
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We mapped every single neuron in a worm's brain, 309 of them,
and the simulation still doesn't work. Here's why.
First of all, I suspect that it wouldn't work.
I suspect that the current models of neuroscience do not cumulate.
I don't think that if you were able to fully capture the chronic tone
of an organism and try to run it in a computer simulation,
it's not going to reproduce anything that looks like the behavior of the organism.
And that's not because I'm woo or think that we need new physics or something like this,
but I think that there is a misunderstanding about the role of neurons in an organism.
And I'm conscious that this is very radical and said by an outsider who is not actually
a neuroscientist. My knowledge of neuroscience doesn't go beyond that of an undergrad student
in the field. But when I look at this as a computer scientist,
when I look at an individual cell, and for every cell it's true that it's able to send
conditional messages to other cells. And this means if I look at a multicellular organism,
I look at a Turing machine, at a general computational system that can, in principle,
execute whatever program. You don't need neurons for this.
Whereas neuroscience is largely working with the simplifying assumption that only neurons
are computing and the information is only exchanged via spike trains and the content
of memories is stored somehow in the connections between the neurons.
There are experiments which show that you can teach some things to a caterpillar that the
butterfly knows. And in between the brain of the caterpillar, the nervous system of the butterfly
gets liquefied, its conic tome gets dissolved and then gets reassembled in a different shape.
So how is this information being preserved? There is some indication that memory might be
preserved to some degree in RNA, which means within the cell, and also possibly exchanged
via RNA across cellular boundaries. Once you are an animal that is able to eat plants to
maintain an energy budget to drive your telegraph network, that's very useful to have it because it
allows you to control your muscles very quickly because you can send information very quickly
through these wires to the organism, building wormholes in the three-dimensional ecology of
the space of the organism. There's a price that you have to pay for doing this for the signals
to not degrade over these long distances. You cannot just send chemicals or mechanical vibrations
or small EM fields to your neighbors as adjacent cells would be doing. Instead, what you need to
do is you encode everything into Morse code, into spike trains, so it doesn't degrade over
long distances. It's a bit awkward, but it pays off because you can basically send it very far.
As a result, it's much faster. Once you move your muscles so fast, you also want to make
perception and decision-making at the same rate, so you build yourself a second information
processing system to the normal body, the information transmission from cell to cell
over long distances. You have the second information system that is much faster and
decoupled from the first one because it uses a different language, a different code to translate
the information. The thing that is talking to you right now is this telegraph network,
but the telegraph network would not be functional without all the local operators that are connected
to it because it's actually about what's happening around this. A lot of the information processing
is going to happen in the areas around these neurons. So far, I'm skeptical about companies
that are promising that they will soon be able to run the conic tome of a mouse in a simulation of
a fruit fly because we cannot even run C. elegans in a simulation. We have pretty good models of the
conic tome of C. elegans because it's only like 309 neurons and a few thousand connections between
them, but the simulations of C. elegans in this simulator don't work very well to my knowledge.
Maybe it's updated in the last few months, but as far as I know, they don't produce worm-like
behavior. I think that's because the other cells are important too. Metaphorically speaking,
the neuroscientists might be like an alien civilization that has discovered Earth 100
years ago, and they look at the planet and they discover from their vast distance that they have
to Earth that there is this telegraph network that spans the planet, and they are able to
intercept signals on the telegraph network and to figure out parts of the Morse code,
even from first principles, and then they say very soon you'll be able to run a simulation of the
human telegraph network and thereby being able to predict and simulate human civilization.
Yoshiba just told me the entire field of neuroscience might be mapping the telegraph
network and calling it the civilization. If he's right, what is consciousness?
My conversation with Donald Hoffman goes even deeper. Watch that next.
