It very well may be that it is impossible for us to imagine intellectual activities we can't do. Just as my dog can't imagine herself writing poetry in Japanese. Yes we can imagine ourselves being better at many things but I doubt we can think of new categories of thought. OK, I can be proven wrong by a single example. Your N4 is just a faster version of N3 and does not perform any new task.
As for another layer being "the next step". This is fundamentally wrong. Evolution has no goal and no direction. It moves at random and then natural selection does it's pruning. Also the rate of change in a species is inversely related to the size of the population. Humans are so numerous that change now is very, very slow. The next step is likely to be done by genetic engineering, not evolution. On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 7:28 PM, Valtér Hégér <[email protected]> wrote: > Jeff is going to hate this idea as it is not yet found in nature!! > The neo-cortex is made up of four layers. My guess is that at one time > this started off as just one layer, which evolved to split into two and > eventually four. What if more layers are added to this model? Isn't this > the next step of evolution? > The reason why this is interesting is that I was listening to Michio > Kaku's *The Future of the Mind* and started thinking about his > description of levels of intelligence, N0 (simple feedback system like a > thermostat), N1 (e.g. insect which can react to their surroundings), N2 > (creatures which are able to work collectively and identify gestures in > others), N3 (system able to project multiple scenarios into the future). > The question is what's the next level of intelligence able to do, which we > as humans cannot? Does intelligence roughly correlate to the number of > membranes in the neo-cortex? A wild speculation is that N4 should be able > to run all of these scenarios in parallel and able to process them > simultaneously, sort of simulate a quantum processor? I think this line of > reasoning was triggered by the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind > article. Has anyone tried to expand NuPIC to allow for more layers? > -- Chris Albertson Redondo Beach, California
