MW #6 | From the Bottom to the Top
Chaos and emergence, a crash course on human behavioral biology, ways of tackling physical anxiety, Meta-Reinforcement Learning, and a Macaque Playing Pong
Welcome to Mind Whoosh! A newsletter bread-crumb trail of thoughts, learnings, and speculations following my spelunking journey through minds, metaverse, and this messy human meat-space we call ‘reality.’
In this Issue:
- Chaos, Emergence, and Human Behavior
- Anxiety is in Your Body, Not Your Mind
- Open Source Library for Meta-Learning Research
- Neuralink Shows Monkey Playing Pong via Brain Interface
- Upcoming Virtual Events
Chaos, Emergence, and Human Behavior
Here’s a mental exercise for you: Try listing out the five MOST AMAZING things you can imagine. We’re talking stuff that blows your mind again each time you take another moment to think about it. Perhaps you’re even fortunate enough to spend your days grappling with them.
I’ll go ahead and share one that’s been confounding my braincase for a while; How does something profoundly complex arise from simple parts? How do you get an ant colony from a mountain of aimless ants? A bustling city from random clusters of buildings, complete with Starbucks and UberEats? A brain teeming with electrochemical activity as it puppeteers a fleshy human body around the world for 87 years to spread their genes and write blog posts?
While revisiting this domain over the past week, I found a fascinating lecture series from Stanford. You’ll find two entries below focused on complexity and emergence to get some mental juices flowing. I recommend the whole series if you nerd out on behavioral science and evolution.
Lectures
More Complexity for the Curious
Professor Robert Sapolsky, an American neuroendocrinologist at Stanford, has one of the most binge-worthy series of lectures I’ve ever seen. The entire class is recorded and available for free on Youtube and focuses on Human Behavioral Biology. It makes excellent passive listening material, but he also provides a lot of helpful visuals via whiteboard. However you best digest, this is highly relevant across all walks of life, labor, and love. It’s the kind of perspectival shift that begins to transform how you look at the world.
Books
He assigns this book(Not a textbook) for the class, which I highly recommend for a deeper dive into chaos theory. The study of emergence is still incredibly young as an area of research.
Anxiety is in Your Body, Not Your Mind
It’s something most of us have experienced in one form or another. Something tears you out of your comfortable world and safe headspace. Perhaps you’re casually riding your bike. Your mind wanders, from the conversation with your dad last night to the BBQ place your friend recommended the other day. You’re rather hungry…maybe just a quick stop for lunch on the way back ho…WHOOSH! A heavy rush suddenly tears past you, ripping you out of your thoughts, careening by so close that you can feel the wind on your face, the rumble of the ground beneath you. Your whole body tenses like spring steel. A bus cuts across the corner just feet before you.
“Whoa, FUCK!”
Heartbeat in your ears, you stumble sideways off your bike, a quivering tangle on the ground. Deep breath; sharp inhale, feverish exhale. Jittering and shaken, you begin to collect your nerves from the sidewalk around your feet. After a moment, you continue; the threat is clear. “You’re fine,” you tell yourself. The danger has passed; you’re still alive. Somehow you can’t shake the uneasy sensation in your gut. Your whole body remains on edge as you make your way back home, sprawl out on your floor, and take deep breaths to try and release the tension. Everything is fine; you can calm down now, right?
Anxiety is the whole body perceiving a threat. Animals deal with this all the time in the wild. Pay attention, and you’ll notice that even your dog or cat has behaviors for dealing with this kind of whole body and mind tension, like shaking or sprinting around in circles. Children do this as well, but we’re mostly discouraged from random bouts of jumping around or uttering weird noises in our excitement by the time we are “Matured.”
We tend to forget that we are also animals. Composed of the same fundamental mechanisms for survival beneath a subconscious blanket, our thin slice of self perches blindly atop the iceberg. Our fixation on the cognitive loop distracts us from the underlying causes of tension. It’s as if we often experience inexplicable anxiety because we seek a rationale for the feelings rather than confronting them directly. We anxiously anticipate the future; our imaginations marinate in fear and conjure chimeras instead of focusing on the reality of each moment.
“Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
The linked article Anxiety is in Your Body, Not Your Mind is an excellent read on anxiety’s basis in the body and some healthier ways to deal with it based on more recent neuroscience and psychological research.
Open Source Library for Meta-Learning Research
In AI, Meta-learning refers to an artificial agent’s ability to “learn how to learn.” It’s a trivial skill for humans navigating the world. In contrast, it’s one of the more challenging problems to train and measure progress consistently in artificially intelligent systems. The DeepMind team recently published an open-source library called ‘Alchemy’ that provides a standard benchmark for meta-reinforcement learning research.
Neuralink Shows Monkey Playing Pong via Brain Interface
Neurolink recently released an impressive demonstration of a Macaque monkey playing pong with its mind. This kind of tech has been around for over a decade using wired electrodes embedded into the patient’s skull. The real innovation here is that they have a fully wireless implanted brain interface relaying neural activity to a remote computer which translates them as inputs for the game.
Upcoming Virtual Events
AI Tech Talk: Information Extraction with Experts in the Loop
How to Build Enterprise AI products by fmr Google Product Leader
I hope you found something to get excited about here! If you appreciate any of the things I’ve gathered or written about here, consider sharing this with other like-minded humanauts in your circles. Right now, the best thing you can do is help find a larger community of people who can benefit.
This post was originally published in Mind Whoosh! on Substack.
