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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

Is this the first time the concept of neural networks of neural networks has been proposed? I think it’s close to an idea I’d been knocking around in my head but never studied NNs deep enough to encounter.

I wouldn’t be shocked if consciousness were composed of hundreds or even thousands of NNs. Or even a tree thousands of levels deep.

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Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind was published in 1986.

A core tenet of Minsky's philosophy is that "minds are what brains do". The society of mind theory views the human mind and any other naturally evolved cognitive systems as a vast society of individually simple processes known as agents. These processes are the fundamental thinking entities from which minds are built, and together produce the many abilities we attribute to minds. The great power in viewing a mind as a society of agents, as opposed to the consequence of some basic principle or some simple formal system, is that different agents can be based on different types of processes with different purposes, ways of representing knowledge, and methods for producing results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind

As far as I know, nobody takes the "Society of Mind" theory seriously anymore and none of it lives in present day AI work. There was never a clear algorithm that could be constructed from the chapters on K-lines.

We have a fair idea how many layers are involved in some activities, such as eye-hand response times, because we can divide the observed delay by the speed of a single layer. It's not a lot of layers. Reference needed.

The 100-step rule is a connectionist theory constraint from below in cognitive science and neuroscience that states that no primary brain operation (e.g., face recognition) can take more than 100 neuron firing “steps.” This imposes a temporal restriction on primary brain processes of 500ms. (Feldman & Ballard, 1982)

That’s neat. But neurons also trigger multiple neurons. So a single neuron is potentially part of numerous hierarchies.

No, it's not. The idea of "neural networks of neural networks" exists as long as neurology is a thing. It's the underlying structure of any network that it can be subdivided in sub-networks. The article tells nothing new, but is making sensationalist assumptions instead.

> Or even a tree thousands of levels deep.

That can't be true otherwise it would take you a minute to form a conscious thought. Biological neurons are slow. If anything, artificial neural nets are 'deeper', going up to 1000 layers.

We need instruction pipelining...

Google was doing something like this: https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/03/using-machine-learning-to-...

There's network in networks: https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4400 And network ensembles in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensemble_learning

Essentially saying the brain is a system of systems

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