Previously

I talked with Max Harms yesterday about representing the human mind as a pattern, and how its physical form is based on our connectomes. This concept can change how you experience learning, and life, as you picture changes happening in your own physical brain with each memory.

I taught myself Ain’t Misbehavin on the uke the other day. Each time I play it, my fingers find the chords a little bit quicker. I play for a while, get smoother, put down the uke. If we are patterns, then something quantifiable changed in my brain to hold that knowledge and familiarity with the tune, something physical. If we are physical patterns, then a thought is physical. A memory is physical. Ideas are.

Aren’t ideas the opposite of physical? If ideas are physical then everything is. Philosophy has a couple millennia head start on me here, and I humbly defer. If physicalism is true, then maybe there is only the standard model. Occam might not mind that.

If ideas, skills and memories are physical, what do they look like? Literally - do they look like themselves? do they look like tensors in 4,000 dimensional space? Are they static or kinetic? Can one memory take different physical forms at different times, as long as it’s “functionally” equivalent?

What shape is Ain’t Misbehavin? Later, I pick up the uke and play some more. I lost some, the Ain’t Misbehavin pattern dissipated a little - did it physically fray at the edges? did the bonds of its physical structure weaken? Did it chemically diffuse into its surrounding tissue?

“Let it go”
-my Brain, Duologue

I start from a better spot than I started from last time, catch back up to where I was, and end up a little “stronger”. The pattern regains structure. It was built, disassembled, then built again. Forgetting is part of learning.

I once worked with a singer who said that knowing lyrics on stage meant being able to call them up when you’ve forgotten them. So she practiced learning them, forgetting them, and remembering them again.

(I’m having to invent my own vocabulary for the concepts of learning, training, forgetting, in this framework. )

My fingers have callouses now and that pleases me. It means I kept at it. I didn’t drop ukulele like other things I started. My body is learning the instrument, outside the neurons. Playing a string instrument made a pattern on my fingertips.

In an Octopus, the patterns of knowledge and skill and experience are more distributed throughout their being. Their tentacles have internal patterns for their skills. I wonder if different tentacles have different life experiences and different knowledge. Might they develop specialties, become a “mixture of experts”, so to speak?.

LLMs are certainly patterns; they can be copied verbatim. But some say perhaps no more patterns than humans are. In some surveys, asking LLMs what animal they identify with, the majority respond Octopus. Is that because their patterns are spread throughout their being?

As the Ain’t Misbehavin pattern develops in my connectome, it takes less of my attention. I could carry on a conversation while playing it.

Hmm!
What is “my attention” - separate from the thing playing the Ain’t Misbehavin pattern? there’s the Me which is constructing the initial pattern. All of my conscious self is needed there. But when the pattern is firm enough, that self can do something else while handing off playing the pattern to some other process.
What’s going on there?

As the pattern gets more reliable and crisp, then conscious Me can access my musicality. I am freed to think about variations as autopilot plays the basics. Where the process has a 7th chord, musical me has bandwidth to sub in a ninth.

The pattern constructor which took all my attention now hands off the process to the pattern runner, and starts building a new one. I may start learning the lyrics.

Ain’t Misbehavin’
-Fats Waller

No one to talk with
All by myself
No one to walk with
But I’m happy on the shelf

Ain’t misbehavin’
I’m savin’ my love for you

I’m savin this pattern. It misbehaves sometimes. It’s an iterative process.