"The Brain Is Full of Maps A Talk By Freeman Dyson"

Part of Edge.org's Possible Minds Project.

FREEMAN DYSON, emeritus professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied. His books include Disturbing the Universe, Weapons and Hope, Infinite in All Directions, and Maker of Patterns. Freeman Dyson's Edge Bio Page

[ED. NOTE:] As a follow-up to the completion of the book Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI, we are continuing the conversation as the “Possible Minds Project.” The first meeting was at Winvian Farm in Morris, CT. Over the next few months we are rolling out the fifteen talks—videos, EdgeCasts, transcripts.
 
THE BRAIN IS FULL OF MAPS

FREEMAN DYSON: I was talking about maps and feelings, and whether the brain is analog or digital. I’ll give you a little bit of what I wrote:

Brains use maps to process information. Information from the retina goes to several areas of the brain where the picture seen by the eye is converted into maps of various kinds. Information from sensory nerves in the skin goes to areas where the information is converted into maps of the body. The brain is full of maps. And a big part of the activity is transferring information from one map to another.

As we know from our own use of maps, mapping from one picture to another can be done either by digital or by analog processing. Because digital cameras are now cheap and film cameras are old fashioned and rapidly becoming obsolete, many people assume that the process of mapping in the brain must be digital. But the brain has been evolving over millions of years and does not follow our ephemeral fashions. A map is in its essence an analog device, using a picture to represent another picture. The imaging in the brain must be done by direct comparison of pictures rather than by translations of pictures into digital form.

Introspection tells us our brains are spectacularly quick, transforming two tasks essential to our survival: recognition of images in space, and recognition of patterns of sound in time. We recognize a human face or a snake in the grass in a fraction of a second. We recognize the sound of a voice or of a footstep equally fast. The process of recognition requires the comparison of a perceived image with an enormous database of remembered images. How this is done, in a quarter of a second without any conscious effort, we have no idea. It seems likely that scanning of images in associative memory is done by direct comparison of analog data rather than by digitization.

The quality of a poem such as Homer’s Odyssey or Eliot’s Wasteland is like the quality of a human personality. A large part of our brain is concerned with social interactions, getting to know other people, learning how to live in social groups. The observed correlation between size of brain and size of social groups in primates makes it likely that our brains evolved primarily to deal with social problems. Our ability to see others as analogs of ourselves is basic to our existence as social animals.

I go on to talk about what Danny Hillis told us thirty years ago in his paper titled "Intelligence as an Emergent Behavior; or, the Songs of Eden," which is of course a wonderful story that Danny invented to explain the evolution of speech from song. He had the idea that songs originally were the evolving species, and apes were just the phenotype.

How do songs actually evolve? They have to be remembered by an ape to survive. And how do you get remembered by an ape? Well, you have to give yourself some associated practical use. They have to be useful to the apes in order to survive. So, a song can only become fit to survive by associating itself with meaning. Thereby, you have a co-evolution of apes and songs so that the songs gradually acquire more meaning and the apes acquire more communication. In the end, that develops into speech. This is a beautiful idea. The song is of course analog from beginning to end. It is the sound and spirit of the thing that is transmitted, not the individual phonemes.

I’m suggesting that the brain is mainly an analog device with certain small regions specialized for digital processes. It’s certainly not true, as is sometimes claimed by pundits talking on television, that the left hemisphere is digital, and the right hemisphere is analog. It seems to be true that most of the digital processing is done on the left side. But the division of labor between the two hemispheres is still largely unexplored....

...MUCH MORE

Although Einstein was at the Institute for Advanced Studies when Dyson arrived they didn't pal around. From the Nautil.us interview with Dyson:

...There were many famous scientists at Princeton when you got there, including Albert Einstein. Did you ever get to know him?
No, and he didn’t encourage young people to get to know him. He never came to seminars, never came to lunch. We always saw him walk by every day. He was tremendously busy with affairs of the world, so he was very much in demand. People came every day. Important people came to visit, so he just didn’t have time for saying hello to the kids.

But it sounds like he didn’t want to say hello. Was it simply not part of his makeup to talk with the up-and-coming generation?
That was true. He didn’t enjoy teaching. There were two important things for him. There was his own work, which he always continued, and there was his public activity as a politician, which he did extremely well. He was a really serious player in the international game and actually had a good effect....

Dyson did get to play with Hans Bethe and Wolfgang Pauli, Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Feynman.
Some prior appearances:
Climateer Line of the Day: Some Old Hippies Retain Brain Cells, Comment on Big Data Edition

...Dyson is a kayak builder, emulating the wood-scarce Arctic natives to work with minimum frame inside a skin craft. But in the tropics, where there is a surplus of wood, natives make dugout canoes, formed by removing wood. "We're now surrounded by so much information," Dyson concluded, "we have to become dugout canoe builders. The buzzword of last year was 'big data.' Here's my definition of the situation: Big data is what happened when the cost of storing information became less than the cost of throwing it away."

 -- Stewart Brand, The Long Now Seminars About Long-term Thinking

  

"The Key to Everything" Freeman Dyson on Geoffrey West's "Scale..."

Until seeing this I wasn't aware Professor Dyson was still alive. The old boy hung out at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies at the same time Einstein was there. He knew all the physics brainiacs of the day, Feynman in particular and was sharp enough himself that Princeton grabbed him and made Dyson a Professor despite his lack of a PhD.

This review was recommended by one of the commenters on Izabella Kaminska's last posting at FT Alphaville which we linked in "UPDATED—A Map of Every City (plus Izabella Kaminska does a drive-by)".

And speaking of Ms Kaminska, why haven't the tech boffins at the Financial Times come up with a robo-Izzy until her return?

And quite a few more.