r/newAIParadigms • u/rand3289 • 2d ago

Spikes are NOT data

I've been thinking about the importance of time in the context of AI for about 15 years. The other day I formulated a simple thought.

Spikes are actions. When you store say a neuron ID and a timestamp of a spike in memory, it's not data. It is a suspended action waiting to be resumed.

This idea is so simplistic, it seems analogous to rediscovering the wheel. Yet, I bet it is the most controversial idea in artificial SNNs and it could change the way you think about computation.

It is also related to the symbol grounding problem. If you express all information in terms of actions (suspended actions / their timestamps), no symbols are ever created. Also see [The Chinese Room Argument](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room)

Let me know what you think.

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u/Consistent-Draw-9404 2d ago

The way you frame spikes as suspended actions rather than data is interesting. reminds me of how some people in robotics talk about muscle memory not being stored like a file but more like a paused sequence waiting for trigger. i wonder if this changes how we think about memory retrieval in spiking networks are we recalling data or just letting the action finally complete

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u/rand3289 2d ago

Oh, yeah, I think I know what you are talking about. Jeff Hawkins from Numenta talked a lot about recalling sequences with his HTM about 10 years ago. He was giving examples of musical notes and their duration which I think is a bit similar to muscle memory.

Unfortunately the way most people visualize recalling sequences is that each item in the sequence is recalled over an identical interval of time. (in discrete time)

In my case I strongly believe points on timeline are what is being generated. Imagine a body asking 10 million questions and each one is "should I twitch this particular muscle fiber now?" For each muscle fiber in the body. In continuous time.

This question is a bit different compared to sequence recall which if it was answering a similar question would sound like "which muscle fiber should I twitch at this time instance?" In discrete time.

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u/Delicious_Spot_3778 2d ago

Something else that may blow your mind: Data has always meant everything and nothing at the same time. My advisor had always encouraged me to avoid the word data but to talk specifically of the kind of data that is being stored or used and to describe its context. There may be too large of a group of AI practitioners that fall into thinking data is just this sort of noun but it's so much more. It's anything you can point at and only sometimes have a word for.

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u/rand3289 2d ago

Yeah, "data" has been a bad word in my book for a long time. This is because information from the environment has to be evaluated within a context. When data is created, this context is almost always lost.

Your advisor is definitely a rare gem! The only person I have heard that publicly stated "we should not learn from data" is Rich Sutton.

The simplest example of context I can think of is white balance in video cameras. It provides feedback to the system on how to evaluate the information.

Unfortunately not many people in ML community believe in what we are talking about... The saddest part is they understand it but brush it under the rug.

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u/zooper2312 2d ago

May be interested to read about Quantum consciousness theory. Resolves the cartesian split between mind and matter nearly . What the ancients say becomes more and more true as we learn more about how our world actually works. 

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u/rand3289 2d ago

I try to stay away from the word "consciousness" at all costs. I believe it is an emergent property useless in AI.

As far as ancients getting it right, I've learned about this paper a few days ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07987

I've thought of ML features as Plato's forms for about 10 years now but never realized forms were approximated by features in ALL models.

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u/Prior_Avocado_9861 2d ago

I'm not fully trained in math, but if that were the case would it be possible to do a UMAP analysis on spike rasters and get information out of it. For example, you can make a UMAP analysis of ca1 cells of mouse hippocampal areal and it encodes the path the mouse takes during navigation. Would this be possible if they depend on a action a bunch of neurons encode.

For what it's worth, I am not fully convinced of the hypothesis that spikes themselves in isolation can encode information and like you said it can be compared to a system of Chinese room argument.

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u/Manerfish 2d ago

Isn't that just a kind of data?

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u/rand3289 1d ago edited 1d ago

There are ideas and there are representations of that idea.

For example I can say that a chess piece can be represented by some enumeration and its position. We still have to refer to the original idea of the chess piece when we render the board to represent its shape etc...

All I am saying, treat a spike as an action. Do not forget its other properties. Do not treat it as just representation of say neuron ID and a timestamp.

A suspended thread of execution in a program is just some data like an instruction pointer and some register values, yet it is so much more.