Partnering with Researchers at UCF, Harvard, and Carnegie Mellon to Develop New Forms of Memory Storage and Recall

Partnership with Carnegie Mellon University for Project TOGGLE.

The way in which the brain stores and retrieves memory and information nonlocally across the tissues differs significantly from the way in which memory is stored and retrieved digitally. Developing and studying new forms of memory storage and recall are the goals of Project LATCH and Project TOGGLE.

I have had brief email discussions with Dr. Tononi many years ago, and I suppose his "Global Workspace" idea makes sense in that you need a mechanism to broadcast (and bind) information and memory nonlocally across the tissue to perform the equivalent of backpropagation and perceptual binding. The one issue I have with Tononi's idea is that he asserts this theory but there is little empirical investigation as far as I'm aware, and that's something that I would like to change. The Blue Brain project has mapped the neural networks in tissue to a high dimensional lattice and so achieving perceptual binding could be akin to the NP-hard shortest vector problem (SVP) or learning with errors problem (LWE). This was estimated by researchers like Dr. Tsotsos and some have proposed possible classical explanations for how the tissue can achieve this (like predictive coding), but I find them to be unconvincing. My view is that regardless of how you configure a classical neural network, the physics is fundamentally different and incomplete.

The problem with the idea that you can scale an arbitrary neural network up enough to reach some complexity threshold beyond which you achieve "consciousness," or that consciousness itself is a gradient of complexity is that in my view consciousness and perceptual binding is an NP-hard problem, and no classical or even quantum computer in themselves are known to be able to break lattice problems in a tractable amount of time. As you scale a conventional neural network it reaches thermodynamic limits of scale beyond which there is a point of diminishing returns on scaling. The brain operates on only 20 watts while these AI chatbots require their own nuclear power plants for the data centers and GPU clusters for training, and ultimately require constant interpretation and training by humans-in-the-loop as when they are trained on their own outputs quality decays rapidly. 

The idea I have is that the way in which information is bound in the brain or "broadcasted" across the tissue to achieve the learning updates and perform the equivalent of backpropagation is that (possibly topologically protected) spin entanglements evolve (or are "orchestrated" as Penrose puts it) to a point of saturation defined by entropic limits (related to gravity through the Ryu-Takayanagi formula) beyond which there is a cascade of superradiant biophotons which have a property called orbital angular momentum which broadcasts the collective spin information across the tissue. This mechanism is what we wish to explore with projects BLUEBIRD and SIDECHANNEL.

In a sense, this is related to the idea that you reach a threshold of complexity beyond which a system can become "conscious," but the difference is that in a classical and conventional neural network there is no perceptual binding - the mechanism to actually broadcast the error signal and also to bind the information together to give the perception of time is missing or brute forced. You also do not necessarily need a very complex neural network - in fact there is research that shows single celled paramecium display complex learning behaviors and memory storage and recall. 

Letter from Sandia National Laboratory.

Letter from Dr. Gabor to partner on projects SIDECHANNEL and BLUEBIRD.

Letter of commitment from UCF.

Research in coordination with Harvard researcher for Project TOGGLE.

Dreamscape Systems Inc. Backed by NVIDIA

Dreamscape Systems Inc. is now backed by NVIDIA's Inception Program for startups.

Dreamscape Systems Inc. (our startup) has now secured a partnering with NVIDIA through their Inception Program to provide compute and cloud resources. This will allow us to rapidly prototype products. In the future we intend to move products to the edge (as in through on-site compute and storage) to facilitate self reliance and privacy in addition. More news to come.

God, Gravity, and Consciousness

Sir Isaac Newton's work on gravity is well-known, but he also dabbled in alchemy, and his views on god and gravity are often misunderstood.

I have been thinking for over a decade and a half on the moral status of AI and what makes humans unique when compared with AI. I have written on this extensively and recently refused the interview process for Anthropic for a research position. I am currently leading a research effort to determine the differences, which is the goal of the GATE Program:

The GATE Program and Project Sidechannel to Study Quantum Brain Effects

My Philosophy on AI

Why I Refused the Interview Process for Anthropic Research Fellowship

This so-called "spark of humanity" that folks are looking for has a clear basis in physics - the way in which the brain works is different, and distinguishes the way in which people interact and how they interact with AIs, which is central to the business model of AI, which is credit assignment. When people interact socially, hyperscanning studies show interbrain synchrony, and synchrony of heartbeats, and this corresponds with learning in classrooms, social adjustment, performance in teams, and collective effervescence in collective activities like concerts. AI is a mass surveillance ouroboros and fundamentally a tool of financial engineering to compress, flatten, and digitize human interactions, and then sell them back at a price. Instead of building local communities that buffer the complex demands of a late-stage society, people are offered the illusion of community through AI tools. That is its primary danger. AI is a large mirror held up to a society that sacrifices change for continuity, built to prop that society up while alienating people from one another.

Brain Backpropagation Doesn't Work Like AI Architectures

The idea that "free will" and agency are inherently tied to the physics of consciousness has a long tradition and has more recently been under serious investigation, and this physics might explain why attempts to simulate a brain in a conventional computer like OpenWorm have failed.

The brain implements the equivalent of backpropagation (or credit assignment) at 20 watts, while these datacenters and GPU clusters now require their own nuclear power plants - a hint that the physics is different. Credit assignment must be gated in order to maintain the business model for AI, in order to digitize and monetize information, which is also what makes it inefficient and different than the way in which humans connect. Sam Altman recently claimed that it was a good idea to replace people with datacenters because it expends less energy to have a data center than to raise people to the age of 20. This is the primary goal of AI as a tool of financial engineering:

https://ninza7.medium.com/the-ai-revolution-is-eating-itself-alive-967b6e2ed1b3

(PDF) AI Models Are Not Conscious and Are Massively Inefficient, Causing Complexity and Scalability Bottlenecks to Artificial General Superintelligence Risking Technological Singularity and Loss of Societal Dynamism or Institutional Collapse and Renewal

The fact is that AI is currently used to prop up the economy. As a society ages, it becomes more complex to prop up institutional stability. In order to stabilize institutions like financial institutions, AI ("AGI") is the "god of the gaps" solution that is presented. According to Joseph Tainter in his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies," these feedback loop solutions like mass surveillance (as in surveillance neoliberal capitalism) in societies reach a point of diminishing returns until societies collapse and devolve into anarchy or imperialist wars of expansion. As children introduce chaos into society, a society that gates access to resources and becomes too rigid and complex to navigate also as a consequence introduces too much socioeconomic anxiety, where (young) people are more likely to opt out of having children:

Why The "Technological Singularly" is Just Us

Backpropagation in the Brain Does Not Work Like AI Architectures

AI is Not Conscious and the So-Called "Technological Singularity" is Us

What Happens to the Right/Left Political Spectrum at Catastrophe Points in SocioEconoPhysics Theory?

It has been quite frustrating that there are clear differences between the way in which the brain works when compared to AI which are at the heart of the AI business model that separate it, and yet very few people are looking into this.

I think that it is important to be having these philosophical discussions and I want to address some comments here, based on a discussion from Catholic theologian Dr. Camosy that I saw, and I understand that in Catholic theology there is a difference between the physical and metaphysical, and therefore categorically the human spirit would have a metaphysical component which is eternally separable from the physical substrate of the body, which is also represented in the Holy Trinity with the Holy Spirit within Catholicism.

While it is true that consciousness "exists outside of the brain" I want to offer a more precise examination of what exactly that means. You have a similar duality in science:

In a 1975 paper with Basil Hiley, David Bohm wrote that "the inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality." He spent much of his later career on this idea, and in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980).

This idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and that its interactions with the rest of the universe partly define it, is similar in principle to what they are getting at. In fact, collective intelligence in groups of people scales faster than intelligence isolated in people, which demonstrates this difference.

The clearest Catholic statement I could find is Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical Laudato Si', which repeats the line "everything is connected" throughout. The idea is that the brain tissue in itself does not fully define it, whereas its spirit is defined through its entanglements and interactions with the entire universe and can even transcend the death of the tissue in its influence.

In physics, I will look at this through the lens of sociophysics, econophysics, and quantum physics. Quantum physics resembles metaphysics in that it has a duality between the material world of classical physics and a "spiritual" world (like Cartesian dualism between "body" and "mind") that behaves very differently, with particles popping in and out of existence, appearing in multiple places at once, and so on. In fact you can see that human behavior follows interference patterns and quantum decision trees rather than what you would expect to see from a classical computer.

Sir Isaac Newton's conception of God is often misunderstood to be deistic, like a clock maker that sets the deterministic universe into motion, but in actuality his idea was that God was a force that would periodically interfere in the universe to keep it in order, and that God manifests in the universe through the force of gravity. The reason that this is important is because according to Dr. Penrose, the way in which the brain achieves perceptual binding is through gravitational collapse of evolving ("orchestrated") wavefunctions in brain tissue (which is an NP-hard problem and cannot be replicated by quantum or classical computers, though some have suggested otherwise in ways I find unconvincing) is tied to gravity (Orch-OR theory).

But since gravity is a force that keeps galaxies together, and is only weakly felt within neurons, how could it possibly be implicated in consciousness? Well, gravity itself is thought to be a thermodynamic or entropic force. While gravity (or the behavior of the fabric of spacetime) plays the role of keeping the universe in order, at smaller scales it establishes limits of entropy (chaos) that a region of spacetime can inhabit - so its role is less in its place as a force and more in that there is a saturation of a complexity bound, beyond which an OR event is triggered, which becomes the clock "tick" in our conscious experience, like frames in a movie.

While quantum physics represents the behavior of particles at small scales, and general relativity represents the behavior of objects at larger scales, gravity sits at the intersection with macroscopic quantum-like effects and conformal fractals across scales (for example, through the study of scale invariance in quantum chaos in my discussion with Ed Witten).

We are exploring this through the GATE Program in coordination with Oxford University, SDSU, LLNL, and SJSU, and understanding this physics can also explain avian magnetoreception, which we are exploring with Project BLUEBIRD:

https://www.trevornestor.com/post/nsf-accepted-my-grant-pitch-for-studying-quantum-brain-effects

We are currently deploying the economy to build out AI infrastructure rather than using AI to build out the real economy. Rather than a financial bubble, AGI is a moving goalpost designed as a black hole to digitize and monetize all aspects of human relationships, and absorb all the capital in an economy, starving out and outcrowding the agency of the host population. AI fracks and flattens social capital, steals ideas, and then sells them back to the population at a price.

What the AI does in organizing information can be credited to investors, and where it fails or produces harm, the companies can evade accountability and claim that the AI has "broken out" and has a mind of its own (a lie). Like a black hole, the AI bubble is designed with circular financing such that all capital flows through a number of key players - much like you might consider all light geodesics terminating at the same singularity trapped by gravity.

The way in which memory is distributed across tissues in the brain is different than what would be seen with neural network models which treat neurons as binary logic gates.