Lets Play Pong

the "game" of the flies?

It’s all about the neurons. The COOLEST thing I learned doing this post was that we can make new neurons throughout our life. When you are 61, that is good news.

The Ragged Edge — Before We Start

While I like reading multiple books at once, three seems to be my limit and I have exceeded my speed limit. I am currently time-splitting between “Thinking Fast and Slow”, “We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland”, “The Cave and the Light”, “Songs of America”, “The Information”, and “This Tender Land”. If anyone can guide which one I should throw off the ship for a while, I am all ears. I like them for different reasons but would love to hear some insight. Luckily since I first wrote this, I finished two of the books and set one aside. I feel better. In the spirit of one less distraction, I decided yesterday to deactivate my Twitter account. I had been reducing my number of “follows” each time I checked in. Almost twelve years ago I did the same with Facebook. I hope I feel as good about this move as the last one! Watching the reports of Facebook/Meta stock circling the drain in the last year or so is a hopeful sign IMO.

It All Starts With Neurons

Neurons are the building blocks of intelligence in all animals, from flies to humans. A fly has about 100,000 neurons. They don’t seem that smart. Prepare to be surprised!!! My readers and I, by comparison, have about 86,000,000,000 (billion).

I think we would all agree there is a striking difference between a fly and a Substack subscriber! Here is some context if you are interested. This is a link to different animals and the number of neurons they have. Planning and speculating are quite different than instinct. It seems that neurons in our frontal cortex are the ones that seem to be the key to the amazing progress of humankind in the recent history of the Earth. So while we have about 86B, a lot of them are associated with our primitive brain. The ones that “matter” lead to that bulge at the top of our skulls (a bit like dolphins).

Today’s Story

A bit ago, a Substack friend referred to my Newsletter as “eclectic” in its choice of topics. Now that is a fun word and I am a fan! I use Grammarly and it sends me a monthly synopsis of my writing that includes the number of words scanned, tones in my writing, and vocabulary. I enjoy words and plugging in the correct one for the point I am trying to make. I remarked to her comment advising that eclectic might be interpreted as “a bit random” but in a much more polite way. Today’s story is a tribute to my eclectic topic selection I guess. Here is how we got to today:

• One day I read a story (first heard a synopsis on the treadmill) about the most basic of videogames Pong and what is involved to be able to play it effectively.

• The next day on the treadmill I watched and listened to some YouTube videos about neurons and how they are the secret sauce to decision-making whether instinctual or let me think about it.

• Today, I met with my Creative Writing group. We are a fun lot with extremely diverse reading and hobby interests. While we were meeting, my mind wandered. I was thinking about the snippets above and somehow landed on an intriguing book I read more than a decade ago titled “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond. As I got into my car after our get-together, I realized I had the makings of an unlikely post.

Let’s Get to It

As part of my mindfulness when I post I now pay close attention to the length of my writing. We are already at 3 minutes so I better get moving! Plants do not have neurons but seem to have rudimentary decision-making capabilities that are “rooted” in biochemical processes. I have a post in the works about how plants seem to think and communicate in networks. All animals have neurons and these are electrical in nature. Instinctual responses appear to be based upon specific centers of our brain that do sensory stuff. We don’t develop color perception, we have a preset capability to process light into a certain, and limited range of colors and spectra. Our color range is super-narrow. We are just full of ourselves and think it unprecedented.

Let’s Play Pong

So it seems to perform a specific sensory thing, the secret is rooted in having a preset structure to do it. Scientists decided to grow a set of neurons (sort of a blob) utilizing mice and human characteristics. They settled on 800,000 neurons so something like eight common houseflies worth, so about what you see if you cut a watermelon outside. Here is the story from the Guardian that describes what they built. This is a blob of human neurons that scientists pre-wired (like a function center in your brain) to play the video game Pong. The link is fun as it even includes a video of a blob of neurons purpose-directed to play Pong. If you are not into the reading here is a YouTube video of the petri dish of neurons playing Pong.

AGI is REALLY hard

Why is this cool? If you were to immerse yourself in the specialty of Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) it will become quickly obvious that the concept of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is REALLY HARD and not making much progress. When scientists tackle some elusive problem in AI, they accumulate a bunch of training data to help the AI learn something VERY SPECIFIC. While this field (doing one specific thing) is making rapid progress it has nothing to do with AGI, the kind of stuff we do everyday and make it look simple! One of the things that makes us VERY SPECIAL is that our minds can rapidly see stuff, make the right choices and realize almost instantly what KIND of problem we are looking at. A great example of this is our amazing ability to discern context. We can tell when someone says “get out of here” whether they want us to leave or are just amazed by something we just said. We usually get it right. That problem is WAY MORE COMPLEX than playing Pong.

Here Comes Jared Diamond

So what does today’s unusual topic have to do with Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel? One of my favorite takeaways from the book was how RANDOM it was where humans scattered in the beginning and how the trajectory of their achievements as a culture was strongly limited by what happened to just be in the area they settled. He spends a bit of time explaining why if you did not have a domesticable animal it was pre-destined that the culture would not advance beyond a certain level. Advanced cultures needed animals that could be penned and might provide milk for consumption. This allowed folks to stop roaming. Animals that COULD BE DOMESTICATED could be used to allow one lowly human to use the power of the animal to clear the land and tend to the farming of things. Native Americans, for example, did not have a milk-producing, domesticable animal native to the area and hence remained hunter-gatherers. None of this has anything to do with intelligence, but rather chance and nothing more. Despite the clear evidence that life emerged in Africa, cultural advancement required migration out of Africa to flourish as we were down to about 40,000 when we finally decided to leave. It would never be likely to get a lion or tiger to pull a plow as domestication would never be possible. At this point, please ignore Sigfried and Roy as we know how that story ends.

One of the KEY takeaways from Jared Diamond was that we humans haven’t developed foods ourselves. In EVERY case, we started with something that ALREADY existed. We eventually learned to tweak things but we did not invent the pecan because we found the almond. Rice, wheat, corn, barley, and all the rest just happened to be wild grasses in the area we decided to put down stakes. All of human history and its innovation is rooted in the EMULATION of nature. This, for me, is why AGI is a fool’s errand currently. Artificial General Intelligence will become a reality ONLY AFTER we study, learn and emulate the workings of the brain itself and just copy what we can observe. We currently lack the ability to EMULATE the brain since we simply do not know enough yet.

What is the secret sauce? How does a VERY SMALL blob of neurons discern context when we hear “get out of here”? We know this is accomplished with nearly no brain activity whatsoever. We also know that the most advanced silicon “brains” we build lack the ability to discern despite providing computational power far beyond a human brain. There is magic in our heads.

The School of Athens, a fresco painted by Raphael in the Pope’s library. I am currently reading “The Cave and the Light” thanks to a friend sharing his copy. I have a cousin with a theology background. The engineer in me is interested in how the paints were formulated to last 500+ years :) — My cousin and the book hurtle me headlong into the philosophy around Western Culture. Does it all begin and bifurcate based on Plato and Aristotle? I’ll have to finish the book and see if my attitude adjusts.

Will we ever figure this out? Going all the way back to Raphael’s masterpiece “The School of Athens”, there is a school of thought that purports there are things not for science to know. The celestial and the earthly are separated and crossing into the other realm is either not possible or simply wrong.

Today was about a lot of things. It is hard to know if any of these topics are interesting to a large subset of you. I consider them the questions of our time and the now visible barrier between humanity and further progress. We are hurtling headlong into these frontiers and don’t know what we will find. Perhaps they will be beyond our discovery or comprehension. My betting money is on humanity reaching further into the beyond. Miniaturization and implantation of measuring devices into our bodies seem the most promising to me. I have always bought into the mantra:

You cannot control what you do not measure

The Next Step

The answer to seemingly impossible questions is to first find a way to measure. Way back in the past I did a series of posts about the state of the world when we referred to the observable planets, the moon, and the Earth as an array of objects ending at 7th heaven. We did the very best we could and invented whole Philosophies built around the limitation of the human eyeball! The instrument that changed everything was the telescope. Instead of a rudimentary and somewhat fixed set of regions in our brains that help us make sense of a bunch of light that passes through our eyeballs (upside down), we began to build telescopes. EVERYTHING we had purported going back to the first time humans looked up could be placed on the ash heap of history!

My instinct is that humankind will methodically develop instruments to observe what goes on inside our minds. The broad branch of science focused in this area is probably nanotechnology. It seems once we have instrumentation inside of us, the opportunity to observe the unexpected and hence get a clue to how a bunch of neurons knows how to react to “get out of here” will be added to the array of things we figure out. Once the mystery becomes obvious, the work will commence emulating nature and lead us to a brave new world. Here is an OLD post from the period right around the time when I actually started pursuing subscribers. This one holds up pretty well.

I See

The Poll & Music

The idea of a group of neurons playing Pong is really CRAZY. Today I get to throw out some fun music as a result. Here are two songs in no particular order (one and two). Both of the songs are embedded in links to the greater album. Save them for later! For those of you in the album rediscovery phase, (1) The Police — Ghost in the Machine & (2) The Alan Parsons Project - I Robot are pretty good places to start.

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What’s Next

I am moving to once a week and decided to shift to Monday mornings so you can spend your weekend in peace. A whole week to stew on my eight minutes or so of something. So Monday, October 31st is close enough to November to call it good. Next time will be my first interview. It is titled “My Friend The Connector”. If there is SUCH A THING as a hook to your next post in Substack, this is it. I concluded long ago that Substack is loaded with people who LOVE TO READ. “My Friend the Connector“ does more for encouraging reading than anyone I know and he also has the COOLEST LITTLE FREE LIBRARY (LFL) I’ve seen in the wild. See you every Monday morning hereafter. If it is not too much to ask imagine your favorite LFL or better yet take a picture. I will share my favorite on Monday.