From morning mediation to neuroscience of habituation and physics/FTL

Three threads of thought on habituation, ultimate laws of physics and space technology which came to me in meditation this morning,,, 

It is fascinating to think how these three threads actually combine, and also how they combine with threads coming to me this morning. Some are central to staying alive when you get to age 70, among other things. 

=============== MORGENSDENKEN

Morgensdenken? Maybe that is a better term than samadhi or cosmic consciousness. A crucial reality in MY life, which I need to be aware of, is the gap or relation between the higher level of consciousness I experience almost every morning and the normal levels I move into, stage by stage, until I get to this laptop or to breakfast.

A major job for that "ME" of early morning consciousness, connected "spiritually" beyond my normal personal self, is to engrave a 

few key points into my mundane brain to act as signs of important things I should act on or think about. I might compare it to Sesame Street, where they begin by saying "This episode is brought to you  by..." That starting overview does not directly contain all that is addressed,  but it connects in a way that helps us stay integrated, keep it together. On a good morning, I share enough with my wife that there is a stage combining her thoughts and mine in a way which gets still higher.

THIS MORNING -- the three "Sesame Street" themes were dark matter, psychohistory and habituation, each pointers to VERY large topics worthy of an entire lifetime of research, each full of important aspects humanity would benefit from getting deeper into. But five minutes of morgensdenken often has more content than normal consciousness could handle in an entire day. So where to begin? 

========= HABITUATION: neuroscience and survival after 70

Some neuroscientists would say "Habituation? That's old hat, as exciting as knowing what EEG is. If anyone is so sheltered that they don't know how basic it is, tell them to BUY Bear, Connors Paradiso, or at least that older standard text you used to cite all the time." (https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/fundamental-neuroanatomy/author/nauta-walle-j-h-feirtag-michael/.

Dover should reprint that!) 

Ah, but is it really so simple?

A key part of my morgensdenken months ago was consciously remembering .. a kind of conscious affirmation, the phrase "Light, love and life" (LLL), which is almost like a prayer in many streams of Western mysticism.

WHEN YOU START an engineering project, it is usually incredibly important to start (each day?) with a formulation of a goal, of what you are really trying to accomplish, so that you won't be distracted. For me, the LLL affirmation is really a way of maintaining full awareness of what I am trying to do OVERALL, what the overall larger utility function or value is which energizes and motivates me, at all levels. (I deeply respect the friend who prefers FFF, faith family and friends, but these are connected. LLL is like U , and FFF like J, and Don knows what I mean... too  much to explain within this paragraph.) 

One morning, I thought of it as "LLL and hope express where we must put most of our energy, but fear and doubt are equally fundamental, to be seen and managed but not accepted too far." 

However, here is a key aspect of this kind of practice. WORDS like LL can lose power and energy when we repeat them too often.

HABITUATION really is a central reality in human mental and spiritual growth. Optimal, full growth requires that we be as aware as possible of habituation, how to use it and yet keep IT under control so that it does not sap our energy.

Habituation -- e.g., as in "familiarity breeds contempt." Certainly in human relations, like husband and wife, there is a very real and serious danger that the phenomenon of "familiarity breeds contempt" can cause errors in thought which exact a real price.

When we repeat words too often, we may start losing sight of their meaning.

Even in  morgensdenken, there is a risk in letting LLL (or other affirmations or prayers or whatever) echo in our minds, in a way which causes habituation and regression to an overly formal ego verbal level of thought. So... simple solution... REMEMBER to  evoke not just the words, but augment awareness of what the words STAND for. Remember to FEEL -- to become fully aware --

of the actual flows of .. energy, qi, feeling, sensation, even connections and images.. which the words are intended to represent.

In the brain, "J" (and derivative signals of J and e and U) is IMPLEMENTED by nonverbal flows, like the chemical flows which Freud postulated in his early theory of psychodynamics. WE HUMANS learn to use words to point to these realities, and talk about them,  but the flows themselves exist even in rat brains which do not even use words; first order sanity (1OS) includes

full awareness of that level of our consciousness, a level which is GREATER in a sane (1OS) human than in a rat.  (Yesterday, Nancy told us about symptoms of humans who may have become inferior to rats in some ways. Excess formalism can do that to people. We debated what state Putin is in right now, and in near future.)  

But how do we overcome the worst kind of habituation, where familiarity really does lead to blindness and a kind of unconsciousness?

My claim was that we CAN overcome it, that the brain DOES have natural ways to learn to keep habituation in its place, but ... in essence, they require using or even cultivating a certain level of awareness. In an ideal world, one of you  would even 

be interested in writing a serious paper on this (and maybe attaching me as a junior coauthor, to help give feedback as you write).

In addition, this has HUGE practical implications for examples like maintaining our health as we age. (Ludmilla and I also had a deep and intense conversation of a chapter Minsky wrote for Computers and Thought, by Feigenbaum and Feldman, which led to  neurolinguistic programming and many other follow-on threads , some of which would be more useful if reinterpreted and regathered. I was aghast at SOME of the things Minsky later used to build his fame, but that entire book had a huge impact on my own understandings, and should be remembered.) EXAMPLES as a key tool for conscious, 1OS thought...

A practical implications...when we are children, the brains NATURAL way of learning habits and habituation is of huge value to us.

I will never forget my old neighbor from College Park, vice principal of a famous local Catholic K-8 (or K-12?) school, who put such great stress on teaching her children GOOD HABITS. We come much more capable and coordinated as we learn such habits... some of which are rigid stimulus-response patterns stored in hindbrain, some of which are "action schemata" stored in basal ganglia invoked as POSSIBILITIES by axons from neocortex to basal ganglia. These kinds of action schemata are modeled as "decision blocks" in my mathematical theory of mammal brain intelligence (aka mammal level consciousness). 

(https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.0554). 

At a certain level of child development, the circuits in neocortex and lower brain which invoke these schemata become automatic. We do not have to THINK about how to drink from a glass; we just DO it. It becomes unconscious (or should I say "subconscious"?). It takes up little space in the Global Workspace of Consciousness (which is part of the brain theory expounded in Werbos and Davis). Yet... it is a reminder that information can flow even at high levels of neocortex itself without echoing a lot in higher level awareness. That is habituation.... 

HOWEVER: for me, it was a huge change of life for me in 2019 when I had a severe fall and concussion, when visiting an unfamiliar place in Boston (where sheer habituation had NOT given me the habits to prevent a fall under certain novel circumstances). Later, my GP in Virginia told me: (1) you were lucky to live at all after that kind of fall; (2) you will be limited for the rest of your life now; and (3) MOST people your age have even worse things, which they don't talk about because they are so embarrassing. 

Later that year, I had important plenary talks to give in Korea and Japan, and had great troubles walking without falling. The old system did not work any more. I have sent out photos of horrible bleeding I had from further falls in that period. 

But I am very grateful that my wife Ludmilla found a way to GET US THERE, at zero net cost, by flying from Virginia to Vancouver, and taking a Holland American (HAL) cruise from there to Tokyo. That cruise happened to include a qi gong tai qi instructor, whose large open free class we attended every morning. I mention him, because I owe him my life. (I also owe it to Ed and to Ludmilla.) I agree with Ed's principle that we need to really express and feel gratitude when it is called for, as a very basic   of spirit, of 2OS (or maybe 3OS, reflecting our deep spiritual connections to each other as part of our noosphere). 

Thanks to him, I cultivated a new kind of awareness, very consciously connecting from my total higher self all the way down to feelings and actions in the depths of my body. The EXACT OPPOSITE of childlike habits.

I was even able to navigate efficiently up and down damaged trails so dangerous they were marked as verboten by the Japanese. (If you don't believe me, or if you want to see a movie of kami, see https://photos.app.goo.gl/rwkhfdcUN74jGrvx9 ).

BUT I HAD TO MAKE SURE TO BE FULLY CONSCIOUS AT EVERY MOMENT, the exact opposite of normal habituation. 

The full story is much longer, of course, but here is the key point. The kind of neocortical level habits we learn in childhood can be replaced by a combination of new neocortical circuits AND SOUL circuits, which absolutely REQUIRE that key inputs be registered as higher level representations in the giant pyramid cell global workspace of consciousness. The older we get, the more important it is that the soul part of the circuit grow stronger and more unrelenting. Some core schools of qi gong and tai qi, in  Taiwan and Nanjing for sure (and maybe also in more remote locations we have visited, like one depicted in early chapters of Journey to the West), assist that crucial aspect. I just pray that misuse of internet will not destroy the 2OS and longevity of millions of people who could be doing better.... 

In neuroscience terms, the life of sensitive people over 70 with 1OS sanity includes attention to the feedback on risks and errors which can result when vigilance is reduced even for a moment in awareness of the feedback which we can see protecting us. WE LEARN to maintain a stream of awareness which we do not habituate away.

And some of us also learn to learn NOT to fall into mindless habituation towards our spouse, on any of the relevant levels (there are many!). We learn to KEEP LEARNING, a very fundamental drive of our 2OS and 3OS selves, from morgensdenken to life after nightcap.

==============

OOPS! what about dark matter and psychohistory?

Psychohistory was supposed to be a major theme of the BPM list, the Cosmos and History (CH) thread, but I have seen more hope of that on another list, just emanating from Space Renaissance International 

https://spacerenaissance.space/. I HOPE IT WILL PROVIDE A NEW CH discussion:

the group on the web: https://groups.google.com/g/sri-open-forum

You can write to the group using this address: sri-open-forum@googlegroups.com

==================

For dark matter: I firmly reject the idea that any of us has the kind of visualization power which Deepak has hinted at at times.We do not just make up and change the laws of physics we experience in our lives as w e go along. Many on the SBOC list feel so happy with such assumptions, but for me it is a bit horrifying because too much acceptance of that as a possibility would be a threat to my sanity, because of how heavily it might fit.

 I saw the first two "Bell's Theorem" experiments come out decisively differently in a way which no serious physics has ever explained even today. Via NSF, I also saw the final spreadsheets from the very most precise relevant experiments ever done, which the famous leading lab decided not to publish because of how utterly unhinging the results were (all fitting Deepak's idea). I chalk it up to PSI, which is a LOT easier for me to make sense of  than utter cosmic solipsism threatening to point to ME.. 

But now... morgensdenken... IN MORGENSDENKEN, we can tune into higher intelligence ENOUGH that we can see an important window into what IT sees. It is not so crazy to imagine that IT might have the kind of power Deepak postulates.

We should not confuse being an avatar with being a "god" (whatever that means), or perception and empathy with choice and action.

So maybe now I can assimilate more of Deepak's thought without threatening my sanity TOO much.

But as a humble Chinese village scholar of ten centuries ago (with the solar system as my village, and Von Neumann as my Bible), I can still be honest about NOT KNOWING which is the ultimate truth, the HCER-based worldview defined in 

http://www.werbos.com/mind_brain_soul.htm, something like the cosmos as a giant dimensionless neural network.

==============

IN ADDITION to those two coherent possibilities... this week, a discussion with three of you reminded me of  THIRD possibility.

Parallel with that, Yeshua's last Sunday (whose link he will send you) included Hal asking why Yeshua and I never talk about topics like hierarchy and structure and recurrent decision networks on the list. BUT ACTUALLY WE DO!!! It is a central aspect even of things I cited above. But there are details we do not hammer into people here because... humanity is in danger of killing ITSELF by a fall worse than what I risked on Mount Fuji, even as we (and folks like Putin, Biden and even Xi) need to learn FAST how to tie our shoelaces before we lose our hope of learning ANYTHING higher than that. (I attach an overview of how we are in danger of killing ourselves "here and now", maybe this year or maybe within a century or so.) 

In the higher levels I usually do not want to bother you with... Nancy and Shelley reminded me that I once was VERY active in experiments with highly conscious astral projection, ending at the end of 1978. 

(https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2020/09/classifying-my-first-person-spiritual.html).

NOTHING I have experienced since then pointed to anything like a hope to achieve FTL space travel(which  Shelley mentioned in our SRI discussion), except maybe Alcubierre effects which might well fail forever. (Unknown.)

Not only general relativity but Einstein's more advanced later metric theories seem to say the same, and who else (besides two I bcc) knows about THEM?

BUT WHEN I GO BACK AND RELIVE A MEMORY of time threads I explored in that 1974-1978 period, I recall... a very tricky experience, which MIGHT be a typical astral illusion (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Fox whose book I read closely back then) or might be real.

I recall having seen a space vehicle VERY similar to what I later saw in serious papers like the attached and like a drawing by McMoneagle in his book on remote viewing and time. I remember it had FTL capabilities. I was able to ask another person in Paris on the same time line what kind of physics they had discovered to make it possible. He said "eight dimensions and 16 pointer fields." So MAYBE that might be a possibility??? Or could the mind of the cosmos conjure it up?

Who knows... 

Brief summary of deep debate on how serious are the threats from internet to human existence

 Do the risks of human extinction due to the coming growth of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) combined with the Internet of Things (IOT) rank at the top of the list of existential risks we now face, along with the worst risks from climate change and the risks which still exist from misuse of nuclear technology and biotech?

On World Futures Day, Vint Cerf (father of the internet) gave an excellent overview of current policies on internet risks, which generally assume that we are far away from the time when AGI might be as dangerous as some fear. Paul Werbos, who was recently awarded the IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Prize for two of the underlying technologies behind the recent revolution in deep learning, and more powerful AI, said that extreme changes in technology -- both risks and opportunities -- are far greater than most decision makers and policy specialists in this area begin to know.  

The diversity of views is based a lot in the sheer fragmentation and proliferation of work in this field, due to the many immediate applications of simpler internet and AI technologies. He urged us to look closely at
 http://1dddas.org/activities/infosymbiotics-dddas2020-october-2-4-2020/dddas2020-video-presentations,
to learn just how great the diversity of views and knowledge really is. What one expert group assures us is far away has already been implemented in working physical engineering systems in another. In 2014,
the most advanced conference in the field, the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, invited Werbos to speak in several plenary sessions and submit a paper, https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.0554, giving a roadmap for building AGI with intelligence comparable to that of a mammal brain. Cerf mentioned some problems in object recognition which the neural networks now being discussed in computer science could not handle, which were handled already at level two of that four level roadmap already being actively developed in  China following that IEEE roadmap. Cerf asked also asked for tangible examples of such more advanced AGI technology. Werbos cited https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1047.5534&rep=rep1&type=pdf. As of 2022, a more advanced technology roadmap has been developed, leading up to Quantum AGI,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772941922000011. 

Actual foundations of physical reality and life

I hope that one of you actually has a real interest in trying to find out what the real ultimate "law of everything" for our cosmos -- the underlying laws of physics -- might actually be. Just in case, I am writing down a few key points about the best we can really know from the best in math and science NOW. 

 Since 2019, I HAVE tried to give youtube talks and other summary overviews making a few very basic points, as in http://www.werbos.com/mind_brain_soul.htm. I made three key points there: 

 (1) Contrary to popular belief (which basically denies reality altogether), Hard Core Einsteinian Realism still fits ALL of the information available from science (and even PSI). So far as we really know, we may yet be living in a curved Minkowski space, following equations given in Moshe Carmeli's book Classical Fields. The main problem with that is the many challenges in CONNECTING those fundamental equations to the more macroscopic world and experience we actually try to cope with.

(2) For practical purposes -- the next big advance possible in hard core physics is in empirical quantum optics, supporting a LARGE stream of new possibilities for Quantum Information S&T (QuIST), all of which can be grounded in the Everett theory of physics (as later implemented by David Deutsch, for quantum computing). This DOES require more work in how to model the macroscopic objects used in experiments, as we have discussed with Yeshua many many times, but it still relies on the theory that psi dot = i H psi governs everything in our cosmos. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772941922000011 for a review of that stream of new possibilities. 

 (3) MOST IMPORTANT TO THESE LISTS: the phenomena of life and mind are basically just EMERGENT phenomena, as described in the draft paper Approximation3. (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xYsM5O2K0oszjrA2Psq08v5mpfiaT_Yd/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106196437506611684133&rtpof=true&sd=true ) THIS MEANS THAT all of our real universal understanding of these phenomena is based on various "frameworks" or approximation schemes, whose value is totally dependent on how well they approximate the behavior of the probability distributions which emerge either from the dynamical system psi dot = i H psi, or from the Carmeli type of dynamical system. For the Everett system, this means the grand canonical Boltzmann density operator, as given in Chaikin's book and elsewhere. For a very broad subset of the Carmeli types of system, it means the entropy function which I derived in my paper in cond-mat at arxiv years ago. I usually insert lots of caveats, but this is where my discussion ends, because I have little contact lately with the people who might build usefully beyond this basic story, and implementing the story. (e.g. a caveat: I bcc folks who may take us beyond curved Minowski space to differential geometries Einstein pioneered in later life, but we have a lot of work to do at a shallower level than that. ) 

 BUT: a few of the loose ends out there remind me of the larger story, and demand that I address some further details. First: DOES THE ALTERNATE HISTORIES VIEW OF PHYSICS CHANGE ANYTHING VERSUS EVERETT, AND IF SO WHAT? 

 There has been a lot of excitement about "entangled histories". For example, see http://frankwilczek.com/2016/GHZ-test-for-entangled-histories_v17.pdf, the seminal empirical work by Wilczek and Tsinghua et al demonstrating entanglement ACROSS TIME. This has huge implications not only for technology but for PSI. "We are not drinking from a firehose. We are sipping from a gigantic ocean in four dimensions." This is important in a practical sense, for our life and technology, but does it change the underlying physics? The HCER foundation ALREADY treats time as "just another dimension," but how do we connect that to technology and life and such? The attached paper on 4D Fock space gives part of the answer. Frankly, I was surprised to see that paper buried in my file as I started writing this email. ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MR9GqvsXuc1Zs9aPeiCek4pk1EuU_Cwk/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106196437506611684133&rtpof=true&sd=true ) It cites some of the obvious bits of prior work, such as the 4D Fock space version of how to derive the statistical scattering matrices predicted by what Scully, Wigner and O'Connell called "distribution functions", mappings from statistical ensembles of classical fields to density operators in 4D Fock space. 

 For QED (with non normalized photons) , this basically changes nothing from the story I summarized at first above. But the dynamic operator H can change a bit with nonlinear boson fields underneath, as the previous papers I cite described. THIS CHANGES the grand canonical Boltzmann operator to use the updated version of the dynamic operator. Strictly speaking then, that implies a modified Boltzmann operator for the 4D Fock space case, which is then strictly equivalent to the predictions of HCER. And so, a full complete version of the Approximation3 paper would also show you all that Boltzmann operator. What does that change for life, mind and technology?

 Well, just another level beyond https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772941922000011 and something to consider in upgrading the attached Approximation3 to a more complete paper (and field of research). A field of research? Well, the unification of our understanding of all emergent phenomena would be worthy of that.

Could our brains, souls and effective governments all be based on neural net math?

At World Futures Day yesterday, a leading futurist in Germany asked me this question. My reply this morning: 

================================

Good morning!

It was a very great pleasure yesterday to hear from you, from Mila, from Vint Cerf  (the true father of the internet, now a VP at Google) and many other old friends in the World Future Day discussion. As Mila suggested... these kinds of discussions which grow into real spiritual connections are so important to our lives in so many ways!!!

You made  a brief comment which deserves a lot more followup. Maybe it is just as well that we did not have enough time yesterday!

In Mila's session, I quoted the old saying of engineers: "When your only tool is a hammer, the whole world starts to look like a collection of nails." And I went on: For almost 30 years, my main job was an engineer, but not the kind who makes hammers. I was the kind who makes brains... intelligent systems designed to do what brains do, fully informed by neuroscience and helping advance neuroscience itself. 

As of now, a few of us understand and have tested a whole new unification of neural network mathematics,which  not only fits what we see in the brain (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5125075/) but ALSO OFFERS important insights in how to design human organizations which work (e.g. see https://www.amazon.com/nerves-government-political-communication-control/dp/B0000CLW5Q/ as an early starting point) and in understanding our noosphere, in which we are like cells or groups of cells. 

It is universal and powerful mathematics, the best we can do in a cosmos governed by classical physics in the classical way.

=================================================

YOUR COMMENT:

Is it just about NETWORKS? What about field effects?

===========================================================

Please forgive -- but old men like us do have a right and even a duty to tell stories, especially of happy instructive memories.

You remind me of the ONE OTHER person who asked me exactly the same question, just as clearly as you did, with even more intensity.

This happened in the early 1990s, in Radford Virginia, when I was the new (third) President of the International Neural Network Society (INNS), introduced by my friend Sam to Karl Pribram, who was then one of the world's two leaders of systems neuroscience.See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqF__KofTZE for some discussion of Karl and of Walter Freeman (the other great leader), 

and for some of the collaborations involving Yeshua and me. 

 

Karl was deeply offended by the Neural Doctrine as formulated by Stephen Grossberg (first President of INNS), the basis of all of Steve's models. THAT VERSION of neural networks assumed asynchronous processing - no clocks, governed by ordinary differential equations (ODE). It assumed that all the RELEVANT information flows go from the inputs to neurons (synapses) through a cell body governed by well-known membrane equations, on to outputs set to the axons (output cables) of cells. No backwards flows, no field effects. All learning based on changes in synapse strengths, which were "Hebbian" IN THE SENSE THAT the changes were all functions of LOCAL variables included in the forwards-moving calculations.

Karl was deeply worried that INNS might be another narrow rigid cult, like some of the modern Bohmian cults (where I do NOT include hard core realists as core members of those cults, even though they sometimes try to show up and remind them of "the first Bohm"). "That neuron doctrine simply does not fit what we really see in real empirical work." 

I was SO happy to be able to reassure him that no, INNS was not that kind of religious cult, that Steve very carefully organized it to be open and cross disciplinary, and even supported my nomination to be the new President after Widrow. (That happened when I left the room for a moment to go to the men's room, and was rather stunned when I came back.)  Backwards flows of information and clocks were absolutely central to Karl's view and to mine, as he was happy to learn. Yeshua and I have validated our theory of how the clocks work in the best hard data available when we did a decisive comparison https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5125075/.

Regarding backwards flows... Karl wrote an endorsement for my book, giving the original papers on backpropagation,

at https://www.amazon.com/Roots-Backpropagation-Derivatives-Forecasting-Communications/dp/0471598976/. On that web site you can look inside, and see exactly what Karl wrote. It is an important part of understanding how Karl really looked at things. 

BUT WHAT ABOUT THAT THIRD AXIOM OF STEVE'S DOCTRINE, THE ISSUE OF FIELD EFFECTS?

Karl Pribram and Walter Freeman were both VERY strong proponents of the importance of field effects in the brain.

I hope, Heiner, that you read this far, and are delighted to learn this.

People who really follow Pribram or Freeman would also ask what you asked. Karl's Magnum Opus, Brain and Perception, certainly talks about field effects a lot. Kar and I also had long discussions. And Walter's Magnum Opus, the book by Freeman and Kkozma, also has MANY diverse views represented on that.  (Including Vitiello, Baars, and me... not identical, though I generally agree with Bernie on the big picture.) 

But what KIND of field effects, HOW?

Karl explained, both in his book and in what he said, that he was most impressed by electromagnetic effects (which by the way is what holography is about in most human technology) up in the dendrites of neurons and even connecting groups of large neurons like the giant pyramid cells which he and I both revere(d). THESE ARE THE REAL GREAT PYRAMIDS WHICH WE NEED TO REVERE! The ones in Egypt are but shadows of this great real thing, present in YOUR neocortex! (And, I claim, in the nervous system of our noosphere as well.) 

"Those nonlinear cell bodies and axons are just the READOUTS, truncating and transmitting the IMPORTANT information, calculated by a vast linear holographic system, not unlike Hopfield networks, linear but very very complicated." 

Karl and I were invited to lead a special session in the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC) world conference, held that year in Chicago. I thought I gave two talks in that session, but unfortunately I quickly find only ONE of the two (attached). Karl's is listed at

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/665/proceeding,  as https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/271800. In that talk, and (I think) in my chapter in Karl's edited book on rethinking quantum theory 

https://www.amazon.com/Rethinking-Neural-Networks-Biological-Proceedings-ebook/dp/B00JKF0B9G/, I proposed that Karl's view of those field effects could be modelled by showing how Hopfield like linear field effects could be used as part of defining (and training) a piecewise linear neuron (or set of neurons), far more powerful than the standard linear model. I think Karl agreed with me that this captured his view of these effects and what they mean for the brain far better than the usual field ideas which were either "in the  mud or lost in the clouds." Back at NSF, I even funded a proposal by Todd Leen (NOW AT NSF HIMSELF!!) to develop a kind of piecewise linear neuron model which I felt might open the door to this additional degree of possible power.

Why have I done virtually nothing with a model/design which might offer orders of magnitude more power than the simpler types of neural network model popular today, even in most of my own work? 

ONE REASON: As one person, connected to HUNDREDS of life or death unmet opportunities, I find it hard to budget my time. I must prioritize. And hope that Todd himself might appreciate the thread I viewed him as our best hope for, which could indeed feed into many other threads (some of which he too may be putting time into now). 

Another -- when we get to hardware, there are OTHER ways we can implement this kind of higher order power which I sometimes try  to advance, either for new advanced dedicated neural network hardware and for new types of quantum neural network hardware

(as in https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772941922000011 and in extensive supporting material). I would be happy to discuss further, because these are important threads.

Yesterday, Vint asked about neural network designs which could handle issues like object recognition (and decision systems taking advantage of object identity). I will not repeat that long discussion here -- but here is a relevant story. In 2014, in a plenary talk at World Conference on Computational Intelligence (Beijing), I presented a ROADMAP of neural network designs (grounded in good old classical physics, with a caveat or two) https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.0554. Object identity, rising up from old style simple networks to convolutional neural networks to CSRN and Object Nets and beyond, was all reviewed as part of STAGE 2 of that roadmap. So that roadmap gave pointers and citations on how to solve the kind of problem he discussed.