One thing that appears to be missing on the filial imprinting story is a mechanism allowing the "mommy" thought assessor to improve or at least not degrade over time.
The critical window is quite short, so many characteristics of mommy that may be very useful will not be perceived by the thought assessor in time. I would expect that after it recognizes something as mommy it is still malleable to learn more about what properties mommy has.
For example, after it recognizes mommy based on the vision, it may learn more about what sounds mommy makes, and wh... (read more)
Thanks!
Just to be clear, I was speculating in that section about filial imprinting in geese, not familial bonding in humans. I presume that those two things are different in lots of important ways. In fact, for all I know, they might have nothing whatsoever in common. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(UPDATE: I guess the Westermarck Effect might be implemented in a Section-13.3-like way, although not necessarily.)
Yeah, that seems possible (although I also consider it possible that it’s not a problem; by analogy, catastrophic forgetting is famously more of an issue for ANNs than for brains).
If the learned representations do in fact change a lot over time, I’m slightly skeptical that it would be possible to solve that problem directly, thanks to the lack of an independent ground truth. For example, I can imagine a system that says “If I’m >95% confident that this is MOMMY, then update such that I’m 100% confident that this is MOMMY.” Maybe that system would work to keep pointing at the real mommy, even as learned representations drift. But also, maybe that system would cause the Thought Assessor to gradually go off the rails and trigger off weird patterns in noise. Not sure. Did you have something like that in mind? Or something different?
An alternative might be that, if the specific filial-imprinting mechanism gradually stops working over time, it deactivates at some point and the (now-adolescent) goose switches to some other mechanism(s), like “desire to be with fellow geese that are extremely familiar to me” a la Section 13.4.
Reminder that I know very little about goose behavior and this is all casual speculation. :)
One thing that appears to be missing on the filial imprinting story is a mechanism allowing the "mommy" thought assessor to improve or at least not degrade over time.
The critical window is quite short, so many characteristics of mommy that may be very useful will not be perceived by the thought assessor in time. I would expect that after it recognizes something as mommy it is still malleable to learn more about what properties mommy has.
For example, after it recognizes mommy based on the vision, it may learn more about what sounds mommy makes, and wh... (read more)