Google sets up feedback loop in its image recognition neural network - which looks for patterns in pictures - creating these extraordinary hallucinatory images
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[deleted]

I thought the exact same thing. It makes me wonder, are psychedelics simply creating feedback loops in our brains and this is the effect?

Your brain is a feedback loop, psychedelics interfere/enhance those loops.

[deleted]

Take something. Apply a specific effect or process to it. Take the result, and run it through the same effect/process again, and again.

- And compare if you want to get fancy with search engines

This is a description of a positive feedback loop. There are also negative feedback loops. Positive loops build more and more until something gives. Negative feedback loops keep something around a certain semi stable point.

The brain is like a negative feedback loop and a seizure is a positive feedback loop, kinda?

A seizure can be either a positive or negative feedback loop at extremes โ€” storm activity or absence seizures. Normal neural activity involves feedback loops hovering around equilibria.

Hovering around an equilibrium is negative feedback.

Negative feedback is required for a stable system.

Any kind of feedback is also a short term memory.

With short term memory, the system can implement differential mathematics.

I love math.

But it's significantly different to a flat-out negative feedback loop in the context of the ELI5 request.

Moving towards equilibrium is the only kind of negative feedback loop.

Would that hypothetically end with the signal going down to the noise floor?

Sort of. Another example is that sweating when hot is a negative feedback loop (you are hot and your body reverses it until you're cool) and a woman's labor contractions are a positive feedback loop (the baby is coming out so contractions increase until the baby is completely out).

MAGIC!

Uh, sorry if this is dumb, but what's A+P? I hear American high schoolers say that a lot... is it the equivalent of academic vs applied courses?

MAGIC!

Aha, yep! I'm taking that next year, but my biology teachers always slipped those two in as our examples.

Trinity Infinity.

You just conpletely blew my mind [7]

The brain is a complex structure with a lot of both positive and negative feedback loops. There are also a number of feed-forward loops in the brain.

Think of an orgasm as a positive feedback loop that eventually builds and builds to a point and reverts.

Think of your changes in moods as negative feedback loop, like how when you get too excited you get nauseous and sick.

The description given allows for both (unless it was quickly edited). The "same process" can enhance signals or make them decay.

You can also have feedback loops that don't fit either descriptor (example: use a randomly generated number as the seed to generate another). As a wise engineer once apocryphally said: "All systems do one of three things: blow up, oscillate or stay about the same."

This is a description of a positive feedback loop.

No, that's a description of any feedback loop, why are you saying this?

Because negative feedback loops have more than one pathway.

Not necessarily. Consider a system where the state S(t) can be defined such as: S(t+1)=S(t)/2.

There's only one "pathway" and the state converges towards 0.

I'm talking about feedback loops in natural terms. While I'm sure there are some exceptions, in a general sense biological negative feedback loops within organisms act to preserve homeostasis and positive feedback loops build towards some outcome (orgasm, urination, whatever). I'm sure there are all sorts of human-designed feedback loops in control systems that do all sorts of things. If you know of these existing in nature I'd be interested to hear about examples.

I don't know much about biology but systems such as the one I mentioned are everywhere in physics. Most of the things that vibrate are "negative feedback loops".

Anyway we're obviously talking about different things, but since this thread is about an artificial neural network I don't think you should dismiss man-made systems when you define your terms.

I don't think you should dismiss man-made systems when you define your terms.

Fair enough.

Most of the things that vibrate are "negative feedback loops".

I don't have a particularly strong physics/math background...just mediocre grades through calc 2 a number of years ago and a few semesters of basic physics. I'm interested in knowing more about what you mean by "things that vibrate" and what properties of said things you're referring to that get described with such math.

Vibration is oscillating around an equilibrium point. If the system has enough damping, there's no oscillation - you just move toward the equilibrium without overshooting it. Either way, it's negative feedback.

It's a description of both.

Could you elaborate more on negative feedback loops? I'm bored at work and this sounds super interesting

Have fun. I took a few classes on this stuff while getting my Electrical Engineering degree and a lot of it still flies over my head.

There's a bunch of other replies at this point. Read those first ;p

Using a car's accelerator pedal to keep a speed is a negative feedback loop. When the car is going too slowly you press the pedal, speeding it up, and you release the pedal when it's back up to speed. The speed of the car (as observed by you) and the force on the accelerator (as observed by the car's engine) oppose each other and result in a stable system.

The simplest negative feedback loop of a controller: say you have a computer controlling the speed of a motor. You tell the computer what speed you want, say 50 revolutions per second. The computer measures the speed of the motor through a device connected to the motor and computer, calculates the difference between the provided and measured values, called the error, then uses that calculation to set the output of the motor. So a positive error will speed the motor up, and a negative error will slow the motor down. This is called a proportional (P) controller. Typically the error will be multiplied by some constant to increase or decrease the rate at which the speed can change, and that constant is called the proportional gain.

A Proportional-Integral (PI) controller does the same thing, but it also integrates the error over time and adds it to the output. A Proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller adds a differential calculation.

Where the causual loop structure explains the process of the feedback loop in behavior and learning quite well. Interesting mathematical model where the outcome is the cause of the impulse.

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

Since everyone is giving you shitty examples, imagine you have a 3 ft garden hose (because... fuck it, just go with the example) and you are trying to water your potted plants that are 10 ft away. You're an averagely clever person, so you just turn the tap on and try to shoot the water across your patio like a drunk dude trying to hit the urinal from across the bathroom.

As you change the angle of the hose, the distance of where the water lands increases/decreases. You see where it lands and you know where you want it to land, so you adjust your wrist a little and now you are streaming water into that pot like a champ. In this example, your wrist is the actuator and your eyes are sensing where the water is landing. The pot is your target you're trying to hit, and the distance between where the water lands and your pot is what gets called your error. Your brain does some fancy control logic to realize, "my error is bigger than I'd like at the moment, so I'll adjust this actuator in the direction that reduces my error." Once you land the stream in the pot, your error is withing the acceptable margin, so you stop paying attention to the stream and start sipping your beer.

Now let's say that the wind picks up and starts blowing your stream a little off target before you finish watering your plants. The wind is what fancy academic engineery types would call an "exogenous input". It's basically when the outside world tries to fuck with the nice thing you got going on. Anywho, your eyeballs see that the asshole wind is starting to make your error grow. Your fancy grey goo wet ware logic system processes the error signal and adjusts your wrist actuator to angle the stream into the wind a little bit and you reduce that error back down to acceptable levels so you don't soak your whole patio.

Feedback loops are just paying attention to the results of what you do and adjusting your efforts accordingly.

Um, so are you explaining how to stop a feedback Loop?

No, I'm just describing a negative feedback system. I mentioned that most of the examples others were giving were shitty because they were mostly describing positive feedback loops, which are far less applicable when discussing how the brain may or may not operate. Positive feedback systems are easy to spot due to their instability. Any error between where you are and where you want to be will make a positive feedback system move further away from the target, versus a negative feedback system that works to minimize your error.

The loop isn't stopped, because you are continuously making observations and corrections.

I'm completely confused now. From the other comments, it sounds like a feedback loop is something that happens when two things come together and keep repeating a pattern because they're feeding each other. The speaker makes a noise, the microphone picks up the noise then feeds the noise back to the speaker, the speaker then feeds that into the microphone, ad infinitum....except there are positive and negative versions.

With the positive one, the noise gets amplified: the speakers speaks to the microphone, the microphone speaks to the speaker, the speaker hears it louder (maybe the microphone is too close) and then speaks to the microphone loudly, which speaker then hears as louder, etc until it's so loud it blows the microphone/speaker.

With the negative one, it loses sound, so the speaker speaks to the microphone, which speaks to to the speaker hears, which hears it quieter (maybe some out is lost because the microphone is too far away), etc. The sound fades away.

But I guessed the last two bits, so no idea, and yours confused me...unless, the water landed too closely to you the first time?

The stereo example is a very poor way to describe a negative feedback system because you have only the feedback driving it. This means you have an input of 0 so your output is 0.

Let's try a different example with archery and assume you aren't super well practiced with a bow and arrow. You take your first shot, and your arrow falls one ring low of the bulls eye, so you have a vertical error of -1. Now you take that error and multiply it by some number (K) for your compensation factor. K can be anything you like, and the system will act in different ways depending on what you choose.

Lets start with a positive value for K, like +1. Your error was -1, multiplied by +1, you get a -1 compensation. You drop your aim one ring and your arrow lands 2 rings down, giving you a new error of -2. You use your new -2 compensation, aim 2 rings down, and hit the third ring down. If you keep running this feedback system, you'll end up shooting yourself in the foot.

Lets now try a K of 2. You start with your first shot -1 error, then use a -2 compensation. This gives you a new -3 error, so you use a -6 compensation and end up shooting 7 rings down. Making K more positive in how it acts on the feedback of your system just makes it move off target faster.

Now lets try a negative K for our feedback loop, like -1. Your first -1 shot gives you a +1 aim compensation, and you hit the bulls eye. Now your error is 0. You as a human would probably just keep shooting with a +1 aim compensation and hit bulls eyes all day at this point, but lets continue with our simple aiming scheme. With 0 error, your next aim compensation becomes 0 and you go right back to hitting a -1 on the target. This tells you your next shot should have a +1 compensation, and you hit the bulls eye again. In this case, you keep bouncing back and forth between being off by 0 and -1 for each shot.

Lets say you try a -2 value for K. Your first shot has an error of -1, you compensate +2. Your second error is +1 and you compensate -2. Your third error is -3, you compensate +5. The fourth error is +4, you compensate -7. As you keep doing this the shots keep alternating high and low and get further from the target each time. Your feedback is negative here but your system is still going crazy because the number you are multiplying by is too big.

Now try a K of -0.5. You start again with an error of one, and compensate by 0.5. Your second error is -.5, you compensate .25. Your third error is -.75, you compensate .375. Your fourth error is -.625, you compensate 0.3125. Your fifth error is -.6875, you compensate 0.34375 and so on. While your error is still kinda going up and down a little, you'll notice it stays negative and each change in error gets smaller than the last. Also, each error besides the first is better than -1, so every shot after your first gets scored as a bulls eye.

What I'm describing is a simple type of negative (or positive depending on K) feedback control known as proportional control. They get used everywhere because they are cheap, simple, and "good enough" for many things.

edit: I forgot to talk about the small positive feedback case, where you have a k = +0.5. To save some typing, the arrows get closer and closer to scoring -2 every time. At -2 error, you always compensate by -1 and you keep getting -2. This is a case of a positive feedback system where it's not continuously growing, which most examples don't really talk about.

Nice explanations, thanks!

Thank you for a real answer here

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Finally, a real eli5

YES. ( อกแต” อœส– อกแต” )

Psychedelic art is the human centipede of paredolia and visual feedback.

The brain is a future past present machine. Always presently now(almost in possible) in the future or presently thinking in the past.

You mean a feedback poop.

http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/models/loops.html

two different kinds. positive and negative.

I believe they're referring to the positive kind here.

Upvote for Carleton College

Get two empty tin cans tied with string and put each can to your ears. Then say "falafel" r really really quickly. Congratulations! You now look like an idiot!

[deleted]

You look like an idiot!

[deleted]

It's only because you're yelling into a can. I love falafel, too.

Oh, yes. I see now, whoops. I thought you were being mean to falafels.

I would never be mean to falafel! I love falafel.

[deleted]

Sure, that's why I always have several.

Put a microphone next to a speaker. If there's a little delay (think video conferencing, for example), you hear echo echo echo echo echo. If the volume is high enough, each echo gets louder and louder. If there's no delay, any tiny bit of noise almost instantly gets amplified too loudly for the microphone to distinguish anything but a high-pitched whine.

That's the feedback loop. The mic takes the sound, amplifies it, puts it out the speakers, which then winds up going back into the mic.

You can disregard all these people saying a feedback loop is either positive or negative. The state of a feedback circuit can change over time, to show properties of "positive" or "negative" feedback. Indeed, any feedback system that is purely positive will self-destruct, and any feedback system that is purely negative will just reach its limit and no changes will be observable.

The state of a feedback circuit can change over time

It may be able to change over time, but not always. A proportional-only level control loop driving an outlet control valve on a tank will always be negative feedback (unless you're an idiot and configured it as positive feedback)

You're taking my comment out of context. I'm saying that strict categories of feedback circuits are a fallacy that apply only in a minority of circumstances. They can take any number of forms. You could add or remove things from an ideal example of negative feedback to make it something different that doesn't fit the description.

this is pretty interesting if you feed it back into the brain loop.

  1. Take two phones.
  2. Call each other.
  3. Put the mic of one into the speaker of the other.
  4. Immerse yourself in the feedback loop.

My voice is higher than your voice!

This is how internet arguments work.

A perfect mix of funny and unsettling.

So like a 69 for phones?

My 69 usually doesn't involve us screaming into each other.

Then you're doing it wrong

Depends on how good it is ( อกยฐ อœส– อกยฐ)

You must be doing it better than I...

Imagine putting a microphone near a speaker that's playing sound that comes from that microphone.

When you say something, the voice gets played back and it goes back in the microphone and comes out the speaker.

[deleted]

Agreed. A true ELI5

If you want to see a similar effect for yourself, open up Photoshop, load in a random image, apply any "Artistic Effect," like one that turns it into a painting. Then keep pressing CTRL-G to reapply the effect over and over.

First, the image itself is approximated by rough brush strokes. Then the brush strokes are approximated by brush strokes, as if someone was painting a painting of a painting. Then the brush stroke brush-stroke approximations are approximated by brush strokes, and so on.

The Google face detection loop enhances edges in a photo and tries to find faces in them. Then it runs again in the feedback loop (taking the output "feed," and bringing it "back" in), enhancing edges in the faces and trying to find faces in the faces. Then it finds/matches faces in those faces. And so on. Much like a fractal.

Conceptually similar to holding a microphone up to a speaker it's plugged into and letting the sound continuously feed back into the mic.

Solve for x

x = x+1 where x is the first number you think of...now.

Two mirrors facing each other would be a good visual example.

Every put a mirror up to a mirror?

It's many things in many fields. In this context, we're talking about image recognition and computer vision, or allowing the computer to see.

If it sees a pattern, then the AI network enhances that pattern making the second pass even more prominent which makes it more prominent in 3rd go. NI other words it self reinforces, by feeding back on the pattern found by itself.

Consider a box that has a input and affects it in some way and puts out an output. Now this output affects the input in a feedback loop.

Imagine arrow going into the box, arrow going out of the box, and narrowing bending back around from the output back to the input. This is the feedback loop.

Did you ever see those camera displays hooked up to monitors in old electronics departments? Did you ever aim the camera at the monitor itself? It showed itself on the monitor, which was captured by the camera an sent to the monitor, which was again captured by the camera... And in a blink, you have a "video tunnel" of infinite copies. That's a feedback loop. An input and an output feeding back into each other.

This also happens wen you aim a microphone at a speaker that is outputting what the microphone hears. You know that classic high pitched sound on an intercom? "EEEEEEEE". They call that feedback. Same deal, but with audio.

What's crazy is, this can become a tone generator, and various factors can control the pitch. I once had a tiny guitar amp that I could hold in front my my guitar, which would rumble the strings of the guitar and send that tone back to the amp, which increased the rumble on the guitar.... Feedback loop! You could tilt the speaker and drastically change the pitch, creating sounds almost like R2D2 sounds. Drastic increases and decreases in pitch with a 2" movement. Pretty amazing.

Take a microphone. Plug it into a speaker. Put the microphone in front of the speaker.

The microphone picks up what the speaker puts out, which is what the microphone is picking up, which is what the speaker is putting out...

A unit that feeds unto itself. I think the Mandelbrot Set is a sort of feedback loop.

The Mandelbrot set is just tracking if a recursive function blows up for given values. Have you ever gotten bored with a calculator and started with 2 x 2, press =, press x 2, then button mash = to see how big of a number you'd get? The answer gets pretty big, pretty fast, or it tends to go toward infinity. Now if you multiply by 0.2 instead, your number gets smaller every time you press =. This time it tends to go toward 0. The Mandelbrot set plays this game a for a whole bunch of numbers, and with a different recursive math problem. The little graphic that's fun to stare at is showing you what numbers go really big, and which ones chill out. Instead of plotting on a regular number line, the Mandelbrot set does some interesting stuff with complex numbers, so the complex plane is used. The left to right is the positive and negative real numbers and the up and down are the positive and negative imaginary numbers.

A 5 year old on a swing is typically in a feedback loop. Each swing the parent pushes them with the same force, but the child goes higher and higher each time because it is adding to the last swing.

ELI5? It's like repeatedly eating your own poop and looking in the bowl after every iteration.

The term is a bit redundant, in that feedback cannot occur without a loop (information travelling in a circuit), but 'feedback' describes the effect and 'loop' describes the cause.

A very common example that pretty much everyone is familiar with is microphone feedback. (Used to tedious excess in movies whenever someone approaches a microphone -- I guess to prove to us that it's working, I don't know.) In so-called real life, that can occur because the speaker suddenly gives the microphone an input of sufficient amplitude (something 'audible') to work on. It sends the signal downstream, where it's eventually amplified and put out over the PA. The microphone then hears that same input from the PA and cycles it back. In that circuit, that input loop increases in amplitude very quickly, resulting in the 'squeal' we hear.

The same thing, more or less, is what guitar feedback is, though the guitar pickup (in an electric guitar) responds to magnetic input instead of acoustic. But loud PA is a product of amplification, which means a commensurate output of electromagnetic energy to drive that audio, and guitar pickups are sensitive enough to pick that up. Also, the strings vibrate in the presence of sound, so they will trigger the pickups just from being jostled by the sound from the PA.

In all those and similar audio cases, either a balance must be found to prevent feedback, or there must be something that prevents the downstream signal from re-entering the pickup. In radio, for example, on-air talent typically wears headphones, which allows them to hear themselves without triggering feedback through the mic they're talking into. (And when you turn on a microphone in a radio studio, a circuit cuts out the monitor speakers in the same room, for the same reason.)

There are other kinds of feedback, of course. The psychedelic visuals original opening for Doctor Who were created with video feedback, using a plumbicon black-and-white video camera pointed at its own output monitor while someone fiddled with the settings. (Until very recently, you could do the same thing with your own home video equipment, since it ran on the same full-analogue process, though modern tubes are a lot better. I honestly don't know what happens if you try it now with CCD pickups and DTV output, but it might be interesting.*)

Experiments have been done with 'biofeedback,' which allows patients to monitor and try to consciously modify the signals and rhythms of their own bodies. It's especially interesting when done with brainwaves.

The examples I've supplied here are analogue and positive. (Analogue in the sense that all transmissions must be analogue, because the universe and natural laws are analogue. So-called 'digital signals' are analogue signals wherein the content is digitally encoded. For purposes of feedback, they behave pretty much the same as full analogue, save only that an intermediary step will at some point try to encode the fed-back input as digital information before sending it out again.) There is also negative feedback, which is any system using a loop that informs the system of undesirable deviations in the output so that they'll be corrected.

* Or horrible. The first time I heard DAT feedback, it was like getting shot in the head with a laser bolt. Very harsh, very painful.

Holding a microphone up to the speaker the mic is attached to. The microphone picks up any noise and plays it through the speaker where it gets picked up by the mic again and played through the speaker again. It's that loud screeching noise heard during live music.

You ever hear that sound when a microphone is too close to a speaker? Welcome to feedback

the output of something is fed back into the input

Honest question, how is a brain a feedback loop?

Because the results of the brain's processes are also the stimuli for its processes.

Think about when you were a kid and you would see a shadow in the corner and think it was a person/monster/some kind of threat, you really saw that threat. Your brain processed the image of the shadow, interpreted it, and then fed back that interpretation into your conscious perception. The inexperienced brain of a child is more likely to miss the interpretation since it has learned from fewer attempts. The human brain has a bias to interpreting things as threats (obvious selective advantage there), so that tends to be what kids see.

Would someone having a panic attack be a negative loop? Someone in to that state would perhaps have a racing heart and be sweaty. Does that mean their physical condition confirms there's something wrong, so they panic more then deteriorate more and so on?

Sounds more like a positive loop to me

I understand now. The state continues to increase with each loop, therefore it's a positive feedback loop. Thank you for making me think it through.

You're awesome. That made perfect sense, well done.

Okay, but that doesn't mean it's not a monster.

I'm pretty sure you said something really deep here, but I am not a smart man, so I read it 5 times without understanding it further. Care to elaborate for me?

You think about your own thoughts. You experience "metacognition", knowing about knowing.

It's not that deep really. Your brain receives stimulus, your brain reacts to it, and then your brain receives (among other things) stimulus from that reaction.

You receive signal to move your arm, you move your arm, your brain knows where your arm is, so clearly it received feedback.

Thoughts are similar. You receive signal that makes you think of something, you think about it, then your brain takes that thought and re-inputs it as signal again, so you can think through it some more.

"Creativity" is basically jamming things backwards through the system. You create (some of) the input internally with the goal of creating external stimulus.

Your brain is great at being a negative feedback loop. It basically kills whatever signal enters it, because your body is capable of receiving far more sensory input than your brain is capable of handling 100% of the time.

Things get really interesting when your brain starts acting like a positive feedback loop and the second you think of something your brain just runs with it and throws extrapolation upon extrapolation upon extrapolation. It basically would be amplifying whatever signal you receive until a very vague and small signal becomes a "I can see the air particles swirling off the tops of trees."

That's what acid/LSD does. It's truly remarkable to experience just what your brain is capable of doing.

The picture of the ibexs after the filter was extremely similar to LSD visuals I've had. All of them, really. <3 LSD.

Your thought leads to another thought (you can imagine "though" as "imaginary picture" or "bunch of meanings" or anything, not just sentence or words).

The things you "perceive" are really just the outputs of your eyes/ears/nerves/etc. But since those outputs are affected by what "you" do, there's a feedback mechanism at work. I.e., you're affected by X, but the effect of X on you alters the way you're affected by X in subsequent moments.

It's not that crazy.

Imagine you're driving down the road. You try to stay around the speed limit. If you go too fast you let off the gas. If your speed drops too much you step on the gas. You're maintaining conditions around some specific set point. If you now see a deer all of a sudden and hit the brakes, maybe you'll change your set point to a lower speed because you're wary of deer.

Now apply this analogy to your body keeping temperature at 98.6 degrees. You need to do this otherwise your body's enzymes wouldn't work and you would die (high fever = bad, freezing cold = bad). In biology they call this "homeostasis". It is a form of negative feedback system. Your house thermostat is the same kind of thing.

The same is true in a different way for positive feedback systems. In positive feedback, instead of turning something on/off and trying to keep things the same, you're driving some buildup to some event. Peeing or an orgasm are good examples. Once you feel like you have to pee the feeling builds until you can't control it anymore, and once you start peeing it really sucks to try and stop.

The output of your brain (I need to pee) is also the stimulus for your brain (I still need to pee and I haven't peed yet). It feeds back on itself and evemtually becomes omgpeeomgpeeomgpeeomgpeepeepeepeeppeeeeeee until it's all you can think about. If it still doesn't happen your brain cuts off your conscious ability to control it and you piss yourself.

Positive and negative feedback systems are everywhere. Start looking for them and you'll see what I mean.

[Edit: looks like i missed the point, or was talking about a different feedback loop than was implied by OP]

This is not what I was talking about at all.

I'm way to sober for this right now.

I believe what you said is correct, therefore I am writing a reply to agree with you.

So a feedback loop is a recursive process that takes the output of its parent function as a parameter.

Neurons in network work through signal feedback and comparison, on the most basic level.

Pretty much every system we have works through feedback. Well understood examples are things like visual processing, where downstream neurons influence how other neurons 'perceive' the signals they receive. The most basic example I can think of is modulating the sensitivity to light. When the light cells (cones, rods) are hit with more light, it causes a negative feedback loop on some proteins that essentially desensitize the cells to light (phosphorylation of the rhodopsion protein binds arrestin, which reduces receptor activation to light and aids in pulling receptors back from the cell membrane). This way, our visual adjusts dynamically to lighting conditions.

I know this is vague, but you've actually asked a question with a great deal of information on it :). Wasn't sure what you'd be interested in specifically. We have wonderful loops of neurons involved in all senses and perception, motor functions including speech, memory and emotion, higher functions, and pretty much everywhere. 'Thinking' as well as basic functions are largely managed through feedback and comparison.

For fun, check out this project, the 'Human Connectome'. They're attempting to map out all brain pathways. They let you visualize it, flying through the brain and the beauty of the circuitry. Check out their gallery. EDIT: Realized that they need to request access. Instead, use the Allen Brain Atlas, which doesn't require any access / account to fly through brains! Brain explorer is awesome.

How is it possible to map the brain? Aren't the connections and pathways we make entirely dependent on our own individual experiences?

Not entirely. The vast majority of circuits on the macro level are the same. It's sort of like how we are all different despite the vast majority of our genomes being the same. For example, all known human brains have that same Papez Circuit. We have to remember that we have something like 50000000000 neurons and 150000000000000 axons/dendrites. So, the vast majority of brain pathways are similar in all individuals and this does not prevent variability between individuals' personality or mental capacity.

Yes, our individual genetics and experiences will shape the brain. Consider a professional acrobat vs an IT worker who doesn't exercise. The brain adapts and whether cause or result, we'll find more pathway space dedicated to fine movements and balance in that acrobat. However, the cerebellum and basal ganglia, responsible for modulating movement and balance, will still had the same pathways in both people. We'd likely find the acrobat to have more neurons allocated, and bigger more active pathways, but the route is the same.

We can find these routes in a number of ways. Three simpler ones come to mind.

  1. On animal models, we can use probes to directly measure neuron activity and also to introduce small voltages, exciting neurons, and we can measure downstream effects with more probes.

  2. With fMRI, on macro level, we can see oxygen use changes and infer local use of energy by this. We can also visualize general axon directions on mm scale, with offer imaging techniques.

  3. We can introduce a radioactive dye into specific axons, and watch which direction it diffuses with imaging.

There are other ways. The video I linked in the last post talks about methods about 3/4 through.

We map the brain the same way we map any network. It doesn't give that much insight into your own personal experiences. We've been able to map feedback on the cellular level by actually observing neurons under microscope, and we can map blood flow in the brain, we can tag molecules that hit receptors in the brain and map that. Mapping a brain doesn't equal mapping experience, and it never will.

Thank you for the very informative response. That's exactly what I'm looking for.

Consciousness. You are able to process information, observe your results consciously, then continue to reprocess your thoughts. Your conscious mind is being analyzed by subconscious processes, which feed back into your consciousness in various ways.

An example would be feeling anxious, recognizing you are feeling anxious and becoming more anxious because of how you perceive your anxiety. Or being offended by something, which causes you to think about it more, which makes you angrier the more you think about it.

Here's a whole book on exactly that subject.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123471.I_Am_a_Strange_Loop

The brain keeps modifying and looping a signal an it develops it or extracts more information each time it passes through the loop until it determines it has extracted and organized enough the initial information from the raw stimulus.

Once, on a rather large dose of LSD, I unlocked a really quite spectacular visual feedback loop. Most people experience some degree of trails on acid, but this was something else. Extremely detailed trails were being left from every movement I made with my arms, and not only that, but I could sort of 'layer' on top of them. Nothing was erased, all those patterns I was making in short sort of 'mini clips' were repeated over each other, never losing any of the previous information. Spectacular waves of movement, all overlapping at different speeds and different shapes... I still remember it but it just seems impossible now.

I always hear about OEVs on acid but people should really try CEVs. You can get see/experience some amazing things with your eyes closed on psychedelics.

Look up "I Am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter

I will, thanks.

100% agree with this. Should have been clearer in my original post.

Maybe we are AI after all, left here by ancient programmers because we got too thumpy-wumpy.

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I'm not sure if there's one that describes it exactly as that, but if you look into how neurons work and communicate with other structures in the brain you'll see how they project their axons to other structures and those structures project axons to other structures and some make a connection back to the original structure which makes the infrastructure that neurotransmitters use to send information around, and sometimes, back to where it came from.

I think seizures work as a kind of self reinforcing feedback loop. Don't quote me on that though.

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What are you doubting exactly? Saying it works like a feedback loop is a way of describing when information is processed and then reprocessed on top of that. That happens in your brain. The way that it happens is through neurons communicating and they do that with neurotransmitters and we can follow those circuits with certain imaging techniques. Can't remember which one specifically now, there are a lot, but you can observe it happening.

But if your think about it it makes sense. You can consciously observe subconscious things happening in your body, like your heart rate elevating, and becoming aware of that consciously can cause you to panick. They both effect each other and it can go back and forth, subconscious impulses and emotions affecting your conscious thoughts, your conscious thought life effecting your emotions and subconscious.

This is how cognitive behavioral therapy works.

It doesn't necessarily sun up everything about how brains work but it's one way at least.

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Are you disagreeing with my explanation of how brains work? I don't really understand where your doubt is coming from.

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I'm not sure, but I'm not sure how that's relevant...

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There isn't just one way brains work. I already said it doesn't nearly sum up how it works. It just describes how consciousness and some other processes can create feedback loops to influence itself. I'm sure it does make it possible for us to understand things, but there are many other things at work at the same time.

My guess is that our brains use feedback loops in pattern-recognition to emphasize the pattern in fragmentary data, basically like what google is doing here. It's how you can recognize a word even if it's misspelled, or a cop-car from a slight glimpse of the hub-caps--your brain runs this compounding loop to emphasize what it recognizes.

But it also has a way to suppress this loop at a point, so it doesn't get carried away. When we dream, or are under the effects of some drugs of psychiatric conditions, or stare at a cloud until we see a face, would be associated with the suppression of the mechanism with regulates the feedback loop, allowing us to see the world much as google's program has.

It used to be you'd have to be aware of predators, lions, tigers, and bears (oh my!), but not it's the police : /.

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It's truly a beautiful thing to see, but god damn does it make it more difficult to connect with people that have a major lack of self awareness.

I am curious what you mean by this. Have used psychs many times myself, and have always wondered why some trips seem to result in groups really bonding and connecting, and in others people seem to completely misunderstand each other, to the point of being really uncomfortable. (which leads to other consequences, of course) How do you see self awareness fitting into it?

Sorry I should have been more clear, I meant after the fact. I have a much easier time connecting with people who have tripped even if I don't know that they have. My past experiences have made it noticeably harder for me to get along with anyone turned off by the idea of hallucinating or are offended by it. Maybe I've gazed too long into the abyss, maybe I don't want to relate, who knows.

When you're with people that can tell that some of the weirdness around them is because they're on drugs and you can just laugh at it, you'll all have a pretty great time. When people can't distinguish between real and drugs, you're way more likely to not have as good a time.

I think that's a little bit insulting. You're assuming that the reason you can't connect with them is that they lack an insight that you've got, but it's quite likely that they see you that way as well. It's often the case that we assume our perspectives are truths that others haven't seen, and that's true on some basic level (if everybody had the same idea of truth as you, we'd all be in agreement) - but this doesn't mean your perspective is enlightenment, it is just a different perspective.

I said self awareness not enlightenment. It's a unique vantage point, one that only really exists to natural born synesthetes. It's quite the vantage point; seeing the intersection of data into experience.

I believe it can grant someone a greater self awareness as you basically get to watch yourself process information. It's as educational as you want it to be, even then, it's mostly bizarre and I can admit anything you take away from it, must be taken away with a bit of skepticism.

I'm sorry if i offended you, but not everyone has the privilege of many viewing themselves from many different vantage points. I also understand that just because someone has done a drug, it won't grant them the same sort of self awareness that major life experiences can bring. I probably should have said; It makes it more difficult to connect to some of my peers who have lead a more solitary and sedentary lifestyle. If that still offends you then your not respecting psychedelics.

Your interpretation makes it sound like a good learning experience. Why then are these substances illegal (not sarcastic; I just don't know anything about these things as I've never looked into it due to the taboo)?

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Omg the cicadas on a hot summer day... Can relate lol.

No worries. Your experience is just as valid as a medical doctor or lawyer's, and just as welcome. I'm just a naturally risk averse person. I've gotten better, but I usually feel anxious even around just weed when my friends are smoking. I grew up in a society that looks down on drug use, and I suppose my natural aversion just kept me rooted in fear of getting in trouble, even if I was in a safe place. Even if it becomes legalized, I assume it'd be a lot like a new 18 year old smoking their first cigarette.

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and with preparation

I recommend around 1.75 - 2 grams of shrooms for your first psychedelic experience if you ever the chance ever presents itself to you. Of course it is speculation and tale but a lot of people will say that shrooms treat newcomers well. Also a low dose isn't going to send you off into a bad trip most of the time.

The drugs being schedule 1 is really hurting science and humanity both. Since they are schedule 1 it is really hard to do research on them.

Your state of mind is that of many, many others. Most people I speak with in fact share these feelings. Which is rather unfortunate. We should be free to explore the sovereignty of our minds without fear of society or being in trouble. It's truly troubling.

Damn. Amazing response. I've felt everything that you've described, so I totally hear you. You've summed up the highs and lows of, well, getting high quite well

There is a book called "Acid Dreams: The history of LSD". Extremely well written and I recommend it to anyone interested in psychedelics, LSD in particular. It goes into detail about the testing done in Maryland during the 60's. Including schizophrenia and a range of other things.

Because it changes the way people think about things, and to governments and scared people this can be threatening. Go to www.erowid.org and immerse yourself in psychedelic knowledge it's fascinating.

In a way yes. The extra firing by serotonin releasing neurons (called serotonergic neurons) allows "lower layers" of the visual cortex to send signals to the fore brain (implicated in conscious understanding of things). Just like how Google took information from lower level layers of their neural network to create new images. These lower layers process things like edge detection, color, granularity, and so on. As you go up in layers the information gets more abstract until you get to the top layers that "tell you" what the image is. So Google started from the top down by telling the highest layer something like "banana" or even just giving them random noise like a coast or horizon and seeing what the network inputs. Since the inputs usually go lower layers --> higher layers the network had to start from the higher layer and go down then back up again to form a new image. They could do this over and over again to get increasingly trippy images. And this is very likely what happens to human brains (which have far more than 30 layers mind you) on certain drugs like DMT, NbOME, and so on. Though this isn't the only way the brain makes crazy images and geometric patterns on drugs. The patterns are also in part caused by the physical structure of certain brain structures themselves. Lots of neurons are arranged in spiral or grid patterns and on certain psychedelics you can stimulate their firing in predictable ways that cause your visual cortex to kind of process the structure of your own brain in a way. So you're seeing your own brain kind of.

Also this kind of visual looping is not the only effect of hallucinogens and other psychedelics since they bind to other receptors and other types of serotonin receptors.

Source: I'm a neuroscience graduate student doing neuropharmacology research but I have experience in vision labs as well.

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Are we the ends of really long fractals?

I think it's ambitious to say we're the ends of anything.

...Are we the middles of really long fractals?

Depends on how abstractly you want to think about it, I suppose.

I guess you could consider "being a part of a fractal" as being something that's generated by the same rules as the "other parts of the fractal."

In that case, yes, we're somewhere along the fractal generated by the basic physical laws of the universe. Gravity, weak force, strong force, and electromagnetism. Everything else in the universe was generated by the same ~4-ish equations.

We're just one very complex, fortunate, and existentially tortured permutation of those laws.

This is beautiful.

fractals have no ends lolololol

moving ends.

Que?

Fractals are defined by being recurrent geometrical shapes. The same algorithm again and again and again, with no end.

Well if you introduce a dimension of time, they could have temporal ends.

We are as much the ends of the fractal as we are the beginning. How are you defining time, to have a definable end?

What I was trying to get at was that we're a point in a fractal, which would be an end from our perspective, since we define ourselves within a 4th dimension of time. We are products of the past and the future does not exist from that perspective.

I believe that I understand what you are saying, and am not sure whether I entirely agree. I regret that I don't have the time to continue this now, but thank you for the food for thought.

I dornt know qbout the brain, but a lot of complex biological structures are fractals.

Fractals do not have ends, no matter how long.

It's simple!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhIq4SoZFAQ

we kill the buttman

I think the brain does this all the time but the drugs lets us look behind curtains.

(Certain) drugs temporarily damage the curtains. It would be better to do it via meditation, etc. but they're a shortcut.

You should read: Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.
His central thesis is that consciousness arises from feedback loops.

Thanks, it's actually one of my faves, as is "I Am A Strange Loop!" But seeing this was a bit of validation of his theories for me.

Yup, I found a diagram in the psychonaut wiki which explored the mechanism of psychedelics in the visual cortex and the rest of the brain. What I understood was that the brain constantly is looping certain images to get more information out of one image. Under the influence of a psychedelic, this looping is set in overdrive and what you saw a moment ago is blending with what your brain is receiving now, leading to tracers and maybe even the fractals now that your brain is over analyzing the patterns in your vision and creating some which don't really exist. I also feel like this mechanism is also behind the psychological effects of psychedelics. I'll try to post the diagram later but it's a really cool read.

That's the common theory. You're brain takes input from your senses, loops it around until you gain understanding of it. But psychs damage the feedback loop. So patterns seem to move and dance. Walls seem to breathe. Image's from a screen seem to 'leak' out into the room.

Lots and lots of acid :3

I gotta caught in my kitchen that had super grandma-esque floral wallpaper. I sat there for hours watching these flowers go from tiny buds to sprawling vines, it was beyond gorgeous.

Psychedelics don't necessarily damage the feedback loop โ€” they re-wire what you pay attention to consciously. Sometimes they re-wire inputs to outputs.

Maybe they fix the feedback loop!

And sometimes I can taste numbers and see sounds.

My thought as well. It's sort of sad, because it may be that there's nothing mystic there just the brain cross connecting visually all remembered images within the lining of the static pattern.

You ever have thought loops while tripping?

Aldous Huxley likened "normal" consciousness to having a series of filters, which you develop early on so you're able to focus on things like hunting/gathering, reproduction, etc., while tuning out the information that's not vital to that. Substances like psilocybin will then turn off a few of these filters, so your conscious mind is suddenly flooded with an awareness of all of these things - so it's not like you're seeing patterns that aren't there, as much as recognizing qualities you're not usually able to comprehend when it's all filtered out. It's also overwhelming enough that it becomes obvious why we can't always be in a state like this, since the survival instinct sort of drifts away for a while

It isn't actually a feedback loop. A neural network encodes the information for an image, and they just modified the values in the encoding. This is basically databending, just with a codec more complicated than jpeg or png

This is a summary of research done on the geometric hallucinations you see on psychedelics. It doesn't really explain the level of hallucinations that look like google's feedback loop, but I think it's a decent hypothesis that LSD activates some sort of neural feedback loop. That would explain the 'echo' effects that happen with audio hallucinations

Most if not all psychs work by imitating neurotransmitters, brains basic function is to seek and understand patterns. To this day humans have problems in seeing things that might not even be there. Sometimes something amazing happens, and the true shape of dna manifests for the first time.

My theory is that all we are is feedback loops, like that is what consciousness is: feedback. Created kind of like if the Mandelbrot set were alive, and the graph paper you're drawing it on is brainstuff. Drugs just messing with the loop, like by shaping the flow of energy as it cycles around and around through the fractal pathways in your brain.

Here ya go. This came from r/psychonaut a few weeks back.

they basically glitch your normal thinking.

look at glitch art, and see that there's a resemblance there too

No, glitches are when I overclock the memory on my graphics card. Very unpsychedelic.

Those aren't the only kind of glitches that exist out there

This kind of: http://media.rhizome.org/blog/8700/pizza-mosh.gif

That's revealing what the Fourier transform looks like, it's just simple math not a feedback.

And the closed-eye and open-eye visuals that humans see when they are on psychedelics are simply revealing the outputs of their visual processing regions, to their conscious minds.

And if you think Fourier analysis isn't a feedback loop, boy do I have a surprise for you.

I was gonna say, processing an image with an algorithm and then running that result through the same algorithm and repeating it iteratively is pretty much the quintessential feedback loop.

where the crap did i mention anything about feedback?

The comment that you initially replied to at the start of this thread?

I thought the exact same thing. It makes me wonder, are psychedelics simply creating feedback loops in our brains and this is the effect?

To which you replied:

they basically glitch your normal thinking.

look at glitch art, and see that there's a resemblance there too

I didn't mention feedback, the other guy did

Are you guys serious right now?

Yeah, the guy you replied to mentioned it. It's the very topic of the discussion right now, it's why me and you are even talking or this thread exists. Are you serious?

Dude, you got issues.

I was only adding to what he said, but without directly saying anything about loops. The brain isn't 100% loops and only loops, and neither are trips. Why do you have to be like that?

I didn't say the brain only consists of loops, you asked why the guy mentioned feedback loops and I told you, that's what we're talking about.

This really is an endless loop

Haha, yes it is. Well we can agree on that and move on : ).

Well if by feedback loop you mean an intense connectedness to the world and a psychedelic insight into the unity of the universe, then yes. Feedback loop.

those are feelings

we were talking about visual trips

Those are dumb thoughts put through a psychedelic feedback loop.

No they aren't. We aren't talking about hippie "the universe is made out of love" crap. More like - you are an extension of the universe and of all life on earth, which is completely true. Don't be a negative nancy about it.

Tautologies are profound to the uneducated.

Negative nancy it is

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Oh totally. Spot on right there.

You should watch the music video for ASAP Rocky's L$D. Best visual representation I've ever seen.

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Oh shit yeah. Just watched the LSD one, I'll watch the others after work. Thanks for the links!

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so acid basically makes your brain glitch

LSD is a drug that actually works on many receptors in your brain. It has a chemical structure of a tryptamine and a phenylethylamine. Neuroscience is lot more complicating than a "brain glitch". In fact I would say a brain glitch is relative when it comes to psychedelics. It is better experienced then read about though; that is for sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Lysergic_acid_diethylamide

It's like having amnesia every few seconds

well, while this is true, this is a whole different effect. the software deletion effect is mainly used as a mean to unlearn cultural taboos.

I always refer to it as my "quarterly disk defrag" :P

Oh yeah was that before or after you listened to Mckenna? ;)

I know who he is, but I haven't read/listened to any of his stuff. If he calls it that too that's awesome!:)

haha defrag, yes.

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errrrrrrrrrrrrrrm lysergic acid, or acid for short, is a psychedelic

The word psychedelic is just too long D:

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I even typed it twice

At the moment I wrote the comment i was simply feeling like acid is a more comfortable choice. I'm lazy.

Everybody knows what you are talking about. I don't know why /u/lesss365 is making a big deal about it.

This was the first thing I thought too. I can totally see how our brains are trying to interpret things in a similar way to this. Even the random noise results reminds me of seeing similar things when staring at things like grass or carpets whilst on lsd or shrooms.

I used to look at the noise of encoded TV programms. I saw... Lots of things. Even entirely without drugs.

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relevant username

Trippin' with a buncha friends back in the 70s, one of us looked up at the sky and said "Wow, that cloud is shaped just like Mickey Mouse."

Further conversations went something like...

"Yeah I see that. Look, that one looks just like Winnie the Pooh!"

"OMG! I see it too! Look at that one - looks like Goofy - hat and all!"

"Yeah. And that one over there is shaped like Popeye!"

"WTF?!? Does this always happen and we just don't notice it?"

I'm just impressed that you're able to remember 40 year old trips.

Some trips stick with you for life.

Just ask Syd Barrett in your next one.

Yea I can recall some pretty epic ones over the years. Sadly one bad one killed trips for me and every time since has been bad...

We did it with loads of random people one time at our house after a night out drunk - me and my friend went upstairs to another room where the light didn't work and eventually locked the door (I don't know who or why we locked it). I

After tripping in the dark for who knows how many hours, at one point drinking from a glass that had been used as an ashtray thinking it was water, my friend whose room it was wanted to get back in. By the end he was trying to kick the door down and I was getting ready for a fight to the death. Finally my girlfriend (who was tripping too, kind of left her on her own hah) was asking me to come out but I just couldn't open the door and we stayed there until the morning.

I took more on my own the next week to try and face/overcome the last trip but it didn't work, and the 5 or so times since I just always feel like I did in that room that night. Sad times, LSD was my favorite drug by a mile.

You never forget the good ones ;)

Or the bad ones :(

Yes but the memory will turn from negative to 'lesson learned'. Which is still a good thing.

It really doesn't mess with your memory like weed or alcohol can, you can have very vivid memories of really any trip

Oh man, I had great fun sitting on the side of a mountain mid trip watching a forest on the opposite side turn into various animal faces for a good 10 minutes.

for a good 10 minutes.

So, four hours?

No, probably more like 10 seconds.

Maybe he used DMT

So currently Google image recognition is about as good as someone on psychedelics.

I think that's the real take away here ;)

Use the search function on google photos, you search for dogs, it finds any photos of dogs you have taken etc. So yes, and no,

How many dogs have you taken?

I was thinking the same thing. I did a whole lot of hallucinogens when I was younger, and it's just like that.

Plus the voices and sweats and panic and complete chaos. But the visual is pretty similar.

Pretty compelling argument that artificial neural networks really do work in a similar, at least superficially, way to the human brain. Its actually pretty troubling. Not that I am afraid of thinking machines, but discovering that the human brain isn't all that complex creates some pretty disturbing existential questions about free will. Creating artificial intelligence bridges the gap between humans and machines, and that's a two-way bridge.

This is just starting to replicate the visual cortex, lots of animals have vision, most of them aren't smart.

True, but its interpretations are going to be more analogous to humans than any other animal because we are programming it to match our own perception. It doesn't have to evolve its way though many rudimentary forms like a biological organism since its evolving artificially in a targeted fashion.

Welcome over to /r/currentlytripping for more ;)

Considering it sounds like they just toned back the filtering that makes sense. If I understood this correctly, a lot of the visuals from psychedelics come from essentially interference in your visual cortex and the folding of the brain dictates the basic form of those shapes.

I don't think it's the folds themselves, but just patterns throughout your brain depending on where your particular neurons are projecting their axons. Folds are related but there's s lot more going on inside of them.

Thats probably true. The thing that made be latch on to the folds was it sounded like they had to do some pretty intense modifications to the initial lattice structures (which I think was based on how they were connected) to get the visual patterns and those modifications were related to how those areas were folded. I could be totally misunderstanding that though since neuroscience isn't my thing.

The folding of the brain has nothing to do with it. There are groups of neurons in the cortex (v1) that respond to similar things, and connect locally to other features and more distantly to only like feature groupings. For all of this the cortex is assumed flat (i.e unfolded), all folding does is allow you to fit more neurons into a confined space (increased surface area - in the cortex neurons are on the surface). Unless there is an axon connecting the neurons they don't really interact directly and just because they are spatially close (on two folds bumping into each other) does not necessarily mean they are communicating.

Gotcha, I think I misunderstood when they were having to flatten out the folds to map the activity to a 2D plane.

It seems unbelievable to me that the actual structural makeup of a lobe could bleed through to your conscious thought. How the hell does your brain know what it looks like?

It doesn't! But the shape of a car dictates the direction it will naturally move if you set it on a hill with no brakes. ;)

I'm willing to guess that that would be downward for most cars of most shapes, and also that the shape doesn't matter that much.

  1. What direction are the wheels pointed?
  2. While you would expect most cars to have wheels/tires of equal size, it's not a given... perhaps one is currently a temporary spare-tire. This would affect things.
  3. Perhaps the car's alignment is off. Car would veer off left or right.

But that's the whole point... the overall shape of most cars are the same, and that'll drive the overall direction. But minor differences will affect things as well.

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This sounds like some sort of mathy zen type stuff...

Now we just need it typed up in some minimalistic oriental-looking font, overlaid onto a picture of sand (either a beach or one of those fancy sandboxes with the stones and the funny rake), and maybe throw in some irrelevant but impressive-looking equations (skewed/rotated at various angles and faded to mostly transparent) distributed throughout the space the text isn't over...

Makes you wonder whether all the zen sayings out there are just the products of a smart guy being annoyed by a dunce about a particular thing.

Your brain, just like all natural systems, doesn't know how to do anything. It's just a structure obeying natural rules. That said, don't let yourself be fooled that this equates to predictability.

Its complex, but it isn't fundamentally unpredictable. If you had all the input and state information, you could predict the activity.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo

You'll only get an approximation, just like the weather. This can be useful but it's never going to be to the point that we can predict with extreme accuracy. Also, quantum mechanics is a thing...

Not with fmri its not. These models are based off blood flow to mm^3 scaled voxels of brain, they are getting on the order of 1 millionth of the information in the brain, and still able to pick out significant amounts of information. Quantum events happen according to predictable probabilities, even those could be simulated, in the unlikely event they actually matter in a brain.

Sure, fmri might be able to predict an individual's next tendency towards a particular thought or image, but it's not going to be able to predict what they'll be thinking minutes from now. That's what I'm talking about when it comes to unpredictability.

Hell, my grandfather could predict the weather really accurately about 15-20 minutes into the future based on his own experience with where he lived. I'm sure computer models with radar data are really accurate 24 hours into the future, but any prediction is going to deteriorate over time to a point where it becomes useless for making decisions that really matter. That, and you're always going to run into the cost of measuring more accurately to extend the accuracy of your prediction...and you can still have an incorrect model on top of it all.

Structural MRI and your brain can know what it looks like.

I see letters almost every time. I've even seen letters in the grass from just smoking weed.

I've seen a lot of "this is what shrooms make you see" posts and stuff during the years and it was always crappy but these images really, really seemed similar to what I felt under the influence of LSD, althought it has a more "digital" feel. But this extreme enhancement of pattern recognition that leads to seing movement, faces, fractals or architecture in every detail is extremely close to what psychedelics do IMO

http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/woah.gif

I'd venture a guess that the mechanisms are brains use to process and interpret sensory data are pretty efficient after being honed thru millions of years of trial and error. It makes sense that in our best efforts to replicate recognition, we'd ultimately find that mechanisms closest to our own work best.

With enormous capital, the best technology, a deep interest in research, and vast catalogs of data, I think Google will be the company that unveils AI to the world. On a dark and stormy day, in the deepest bowels of the Google Complex, they will take their biggest, most trained neural network, and feed the output layer back in; the world will never be the same.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PK_bEYY91cw/VYIVBYw63uI/AAAAAAAAAlo/iUsA4leua10/s1600/seurat-layout.png This one shows it the best, imo... All these different structural schemes that each build up to the complete image.

Ya know how we always say we want to do it for science? For reals this time, I think i need a higher dose.

I think we could actually learn a lot about how the brain works, and how to build thinking machines we could relate to. Then the Butlerian Jihad happens...

I was thinking the same thing, it's fuckin wierd!

exactly what i thought, except the colors aren't vivid enough

A butty sky will morph into repeating shapes, close your eyes and the dark static turns to faces or other objects.

LOL, Cloud-to-butt strikes again

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It's because I'm using the cloud-to-butt extension for Chrome.

I did shrooms once and the ground turned into snakes. That was interesting.

Psychedelics are going to help humans interact and understand technology and computers in ways not previously acknowledged

There is already a huge connection between the birth of computing technology, psychedelics, Silicoln Valley, and Berkley. Those that have done research know that psychedelics have helped many of our programming heros be the people they are.

Cant wait till we legalize psychedelic research again..... Also those pictures are rad

I was almost floored when i saw how the images looked. As a computer scientist and user of psychedelics, i find it absolutely fascinating!

When I close my eyes I see faces and weird objects like they are in a slightly slowed down black and white movie, but I've never done psychedelics.....

My popcorn ceiling started growing vines and flowers of all different colors over and over again. I'd look away and look back and it would all start over. From just a plain white popcorn ceiling to luscious vegetation, like a time lapse video on the Planet Earth series. But then I discovered I could make it go backward or forward as fast as I wanted. Then faces and words appeared among the flowers. Some good acid.

that gazelle picture... those patterns are straight out of a trip!

So.. basically... Google's "Neural network" is permanently on LSD?

It's worth pointing out that the brain has separate bits of visual processing which try to identify repetitive patterns, edges, movement and so on. One of the pictures is where they let the "edge detection" algorithm run wild.

When you take psychedelics, I think these bits of the brain are boosted, independently of what you can see. This is why you see movement while tripping, even though if you concentrate, you can tell everything is staying in the same place. Likewise, patterns get "enhanced" - the pattern/repetition bit of your brain is telling you that there's a really strong pattern, even though you can see that it's just a few circles (or whatever.)

Holy yes, that picture is amazing!

I don't think I was having a thought tangent about history when the clouds formed a story of chronological history

How could you not have been? That's what a thought is.

I wasn't having thoughts about history, that hallucination happened spontaneously

That's the whole point. Your brain is always doing tons of things in the background. Certain drugs bring those subconscious thoughts to your conscious processing center and projects them onto sensory information.

It could have been something as simple as "oh that cloud looks like George Washington's wig" momentarily passing subconsciously that kicked in a full cinematic trip.

Yeah I see what you mean, though I didn't have any internally verbalized thoughts. Just like you don't need to say mom in your head to know it's your mom.

Well sure, subvocalization isn't necessary to be thinking about something. Your brain is going apeshit 100% of the time thinking about totally random stuff attempting to pattern match against what you're saying.

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No. And in fact you shouldn't worry about experiencing this even when you do hallucinogens. You should look forward to experiencing it ;)

Marijuana is a psychedelic too.

a weak one. you need the dankest of danks to get visuals on it.

And I don't know about you, but even in Amsterdam I could find only the high feeling one, no visuals.

It honestly depends. It's still a psychedelic. And not at all weak, just not active with the right receptors :)

Marijuana may be "weak" on the visual side, but it certainly has all the effects of a moderate psychedelic, tactile sensations, conceptual thinking, euphoria, definitely closed-eyed visuals.

Correct. I just feel the need to associate psy with "melting floors" more than selflessness and out of the box thinking.

We are all just consciousness in a simulation. This furthers the evidence.

You have no idea what you are talking about.

Downvoted for intentionally spreading misinformation.

The experiment using the image of static just seems fascinating to me. It's like asking the network to complete a Rorschach test.

A similar thing can be done with YouTube: find a video with noises that aren't language, and enable closed captions, it's interesting to see what words the voice detection pulls out of random noise.

Our brains do this all the time. Watch any ghost hunting show

They tend to use digital voice recorders which filter out the static that doesn't sound like voice. They also compress the noise in a way that sounds a lot more like voice when it plays back.

Classic ghost hunting shows.

I should start a ghost hunting show.

Please don't.

Just going around giving people undeniable proof that their place is haunted with literally Satan. That would be some spectacular television programming.

Edit:

Listen to this recording... garbled static. Hear it?? garbled static.. let me clean up the audio for you...

"I am the Dark Lord Satan!!"

I'm a ghost hunter, but I only find MILFs.

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In the case of the digital voice recorders, by running the white noise through filters specifically intended to enhance voice and compress it as much as possible, they are increasing the apophenia greatly.

I do this naturally, and it's sometimes distracting, even a bit creepy. It's called aural apophenia, the habit of the brain to try to distinguish coherent things from objectively random input. Everyone has it to some extent, but I have it more than most, I guess. It occurs most commonly with fans and running water. I 'hear' distant voices or music, and often even 'recognise' it as something more distinct, such as BBC World Service.

The brain is a pattern recognition machine, and what's going on is that the brain is trying to make sense of whatever input it gets, with the presumption that it must be something it should recognise. (The brain does not generally consider that it might encounter anything it hasn't before.) I just have that to a heightened extent, enough to be distracting.

I've never watched the shows you're talking about, though I'm aware of them and I'm aware they do something like that. When I've tried to learn more about my condition, I most commonly run into all kinds of weird stuff related to ghosts and the paranormal.

Excellent description of it - I experience this frequently as well. It's often fascinating, though it can be unnerving when you mistake it for a legitimate sound!

Wait, what was that?! Did you hear that, what was it?!

"Grawhhrshjhfjkk" .. yep ghost definitely just said "youre dead..." .. now listen to it again after we enhance the audio and flash the words on the screen. You can definitely hear it now..

.. our brains automatically try to find words in things we think should be there. There are some pretty interesting studies on it

There's a warm liquid running down my leg! Do you see that?!

Or take a psychedelic drug. The hallucinations look almost exactly like those images in the article. It's eerie.

I forgot exactly what it was called, but psychedelics take out that stop in our brains that recognises what is significant and what is noise, and thus noise looks like different shapes.

When voice-to-text tools started emerging in the early 90's, I put a mic in my guitar to see what would happen. Laughing, lots of laughing from everyone watching it type words from the sounds.

You must tell us what these words were.

It's been way too long to remember :)

We tried to memorize notes and patterns to try making coherent sentences, but we could never duplicate the exact tones to make it work right.

You can probably still do it with Windows built in voice capabilities!

I must try this.

Let us know if it works.

Now I wonder if it has advanced so much that non word sounds will be discarded...

Shit, I want to test it again! hah!

find a video with noises that aren't language,

Any video with audio since the system still fucks up all the time.

If you find videos with clear neutral and well enunciated English, it's very good actually. Like PBS or NASA level voice overs on their videos usually. Stuff like that.

It's also decent if you just speak clearly and not too quickly with little background noise. Like 80% accurate I'd say.

But for the average stuff, it's a joke. Especially if it's got anything other that just talking.

I was using Google Voice's voicemail transcription for a while, and it was almost perfect. If it ever seemed wrong, I would listen to the actual message and not be able to tell what the person said either. It was flat-out better than me at guessing words, even despite my advantage of having more context.

But noises that aren't words are more like abstract art (think Jackson Pollock) which could be easily interpreted into shapes or meaning. The equivalent noise to a picture of evenly distributed static would be a hiss or white noise, I doubt youtube's algorithms could make any words out of that. Mind you that picture may only look like uniform static, a computer that can see and analyze every pixel may be able to find patterns and then enhance them.

Try this pattern recognition audio illusion. It was on Reddit s few days ago. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/sounds-you-cant-unhear/373036/

Klingons are particularly good :)

Or to take it a step further: https://youtu.be/23H8IdaS3tk Record a script and upload it to YouTube, use closed captions as the new script and repeat.

Now I'm curious to hear what a voice generated by a neural network would sound like.

Well that's scary.

Rorschach tests just look like Starcraft maps to me, at this point...

maybe you should go outside

Tried it. People out there get upset when I take their resources to build my army...

I keep asking people to pass the salt, but they just stare at me and ask "what the hell do you mean, 'more minerals'?"

The gas station attendants always look at me blankly, claiming to not know what "Vespene" is.

Reality: Worst game ever!

But the frame rate!

Psshh I bet this guy's no good at StarCraft

I'm not, actually...but the maps are still quite iconic to me. :P

They're obviously pictures of dads hitting moms.

I'm a SC2 Mapmaker I can confirm that Rorschach test do look like starcraft mirrored symmetry maps.

To me it somewhat shows that we(our brains) tend to see what we're looking for. Eg. They used the algorithm trained(this part still important and humans needed at the beginning) to detect dumbbells on white noise and... dumbbells appear.

I saw this one kid have to use his inhaler only to find out it was empty so I shouted "insufficient vespene gas"

When you're going to sleep, and a crackle sounds, and sudden static fills the consciousness then snaps back.

That's a service disruption.

no it's not! read the damn article. It's like telling person who's taking Rorshach to find butterflies in this blotch! umm DUH!

It's not particularly interesting. The algorithm compares the image to a database of "known" features, finds the one which is the most "visible" in the image (even if the pattern is barely there), then modifies the image slightly to "emphasize" the recognized feature. It does so repeatedly, until those landscapes emerge.

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That's not an AI though, not even close to it. It's just a relatively simple algorithm. So who is the artist in this case? In my opinion it's obvious that the "artist" is the programmer, not the computer. Otherwise you might as well call the paintbrush an artist...

Even if an AI did exist, the question is whether it would be able to recognize something as undefined as "art". Of course it could generate any image, but how would it know whether an image is artistically pleasing or not?

Besides, this algorithm probably generated thousands of completely nonsensical and noisy images, and Google chose the few ones which are the most interesting to publish.

Is that not what the AI will do, it will create images, take feedback on the imagines and work towards making images that are 'visually pleasing' it will learn, without the programmer to eventually create beautiful art, from nothing.

You're not using the correct definition of AI, at least not within the field. What you're talking about is strong AI, which is a subset of AI. Machine learning approaches are absolutely AI.

I have a friend who worked on this project, if you give it a picture of a person and ask it to find a face it will interpret most pairs of dots in the image as eyes, leading to some very creepy results.

This is definitely an example of AI, not Hollywood AI or sentience, but in the software engineering vocabulary sense.

Who says computers can't be creative? It seems as though computers are reaching a point where they can finally beat humans at their own game.

Edit: I understand my comment was a little shortsighted, and why I'm being downvoted to hell. It was intended to be a little tongue-in-cheek, but I'm leaving it up because it has spurred some good discussion below.

I do, it's just a mathematical fit of a data set.

Change the data set, different results. Change the computer, same data set, same result.

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You cannot argue this is creative, you can only try and say that nothing is creative, humans aren't creative, but neither is an argument to say that this is creative, in so much as our brain has the capacity to act exactly like this computer in some regards to filtering, yes, in so far as a computer can be creative and move outside of the data set and filters that it contains, no.

You can also say human brains are limited, and possibly very much so, in their ability to be creative, but at least we can say we're not merely apply a dataset through maths. There's a plasticity and yes it is different because you can learn things.

You can wear sight adjusting lenses that rotate your field of view, and over time your brain will now think that is normal and you will function. Sure, you could say that's corrective mechanisms in the brain, and we can program computers to do the same, but the fact is the human visual system isn't doing what this google data fit is doing.

In so much that you haven't defined creative.

At a very low level, they actually are doing very similar things.

On the surface right behind our retinas, we have what are called Ganglion Cells, which do certain preprocessing tasks on the raw visual input before it even travels down the optic nerve. The patterns that these preprocessing tasks can detect are divided into simple, complex, and hyper complex structures. They're able to detect edges, gradients, movement, and direction. The really interesting component is that these same elements are exactly what the lowest levels of a neural network are designed to detect.

Look at the visual system in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receptive_field I just noticed they even mention that this physiology inspires current deep learning techniques (such as the one Google showcases in the article).

Humans have a very difficult time moving out of their own dataset as well, but it seems both this neural network and humans are capable of organically combining prior input into novel interpretations (and then building upon that!). I would actually venture a guess to say that what the algorithm is doing is the essence of creativity.

I've done work on human visual systems, you can also look up a very similar analogue of this project actually using FMRI imaging.

The best you can argue is "humans aren't creative" - which is rather ridiculous as you're not defining creativity.

Nothing that has been said is an argument for this being creative.

How about we start with the axiom "humans are creative", as has been the common usage since the conception of the word (that is, if the word creative cannot be applied to humans, then the word loses literally all of its meaning, context, and relevance).

The question now: "Is the computer doing the same thing as a human during acts commonly attributed to human creativity?"

Obviously we don't know enough to say either way with any certainty; it's equally ridiculous to assert this is a component of the creative process as to assert this is not a fundamental component of the creative process.

Not to mention the fMRI study reconstructing images from the visual cortex is completely different... unless you were referring to the fMRI study where they had the neural network look for and emphasize specific patterns in an fMRI image to... simulate an fMRI technician hallucinating?

No, it's not. It's 1+1=2.

reconstructing images from the visual cortex is completely different

Entirely the same.

Learning data -> signal -> output

Learning data -> signal -> output

Spot the difference and NEXT TIME don't you dare just say "it's different", use a quantifiable argument or clause. What is this?

Aight I think you missed the whole point of the Google article (that being, running their ML algorithms through themselves, they were able to generate a feedback loop that emphasizes features as an insight into the algorithm (not the dataset)). Using your pipeline representation, the article represents something closer to this:

Learning data -> signal -> output -> (signal -> output) ~x100

The point of the Google article is that there is a feedback loop. The fMRI occupants were not watching a live stream of their own mind; there was no feedback loop. The fMRI algorithms did not iteratively attempt to exaggerate the features of the scan; there was no feedback loop.

Though they both employed machine learning in the loosest sense, the feedback loop was literally (in the literal sense of the word) the point of the algorithm shown off in the article.

I'd thought the anecdote about the fMRI technician hallucinating would have been enough for you to see the discrepancy between the intent of the two methods; the contextless quote of mine you have conveniently ignores the justification for difference.

No, I understand the article

Now you're just making stuff up to hear your own voice and make it seem like you're adding something. You're literally repeating things out and it's embarrassing. Your comment epitomizes someone trying to BS their way out of some imagined internet argument, come on, you're better than that.

/u/zalo

Aight I think you missed the whole point of the Google article (that being, running their ML algorithms through themselves, they were able to generate a feedback loop that emphasizes features as an insight into the algorithm (not the dataset)). Using your pipeline representation, the article represents something closer to this:

Learning data -> signal -> output -> (signal -> output) ~x100

The point of the Google article is that there is a feedback loop. The fMRI occupants were not watching a live stream of their own mind; there was no feedback loop. The fMRI algorithms did not iteratively attempt to exaggerate the features of the scan; there was no feedback loop.

Though they both employed machine learning in the loosest sense, the feedback loop was literally (in the literal sense of the word) the point of the algorithm shown off in the article.

I'd thought the anecdote about the fMRI technician hallucinating would have been enough for you to see the discrepancy between the intent of the two methods; the contextless quote of mine you have conveniently ignores the justification for difference.

Well, I'm glad we were able to rationally address eachothers' points without completely devolving into ad hominem assertions against the other's character...

Where did I do that? Quote me

Well, I'm glad we were able to rationally address eachothers' points without completely devolving into ad hominem assertions against the other's character...

my creativity made me imagine giraffe tits

I'm not going to say you're wrong in saying that at the moment computers can't be creative, but that's not a really fair example. I'm assuming in the second case by "change the computer" you mean run the data set through the neural network as it was before you ran the first set, on another computer. ~~Yes, it will run the same. But a human brain will reach the same decision each time and every time if it is in the exact same conditions with the exact same data set. The data set that a human takes in is just immensely larger, and are much more varied in how each data point should be interpreted.~~

But let's say you run the original set of data through the neural network again without reverting the network back to it's original state. Same data set, different result. Neural networking is all about trial and error, and learning from mistakes.

Saying that one particular implementation of neural networking is incapable of creativity straight out of the gate is like saying your toddler son is never going to be a rock star. Sure he doesn't seem like he's particularly coordinated right now, and yeah it's a pretty lofty goal but hell the kid's literally got years of trial and error that might just lead his neural pathways down the path to super-coordinated charismatic rock stardom.

Edit: Striked out a point that other people touched on while I was busy writing the comment...I'm really neurotic about word choice and it makes me really slow at commenting. This is a common problem for me.

The best you can argue is that humans aren't creative. You can't argue that this is creative. You can say "well, at the neuron level..." but what you're also forgetting is creativity, ill-defined, is only defined as that which produces entropy enough for us to deem it as creative, that is somewhat symmetrical, our brains can be creative to the extent they need to be to make our brains see things as creative.

That still doesn't make any argument for this being creative.

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https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3ae3mn/google_sets_up_feedback_loop_in_its_image/csbxd4z

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Given identical environmental conditions (down to the levels of molecules) yes each brain could be programmed to behave exactly identically. The human brain is just an extremely convoluted computer, albeit with an almost infinitely greater number of input and output parameters, functions, and filters on an infinitesimal scale; far beyond what we are even capable of comprehending, let alone being able to model.

Essentially, even the most sophisticated supercomputers are extremely simplified models of how a brain works, with finite inputs/outputs that we are capable of changing and controlling.

or better, see how a neural frame behaves after contact with drugs. If this is how they "see" without, i wonder what outworldly stuff they can cook while on actual acid.

What? How do you give a computer acid?

gear pressure

An analog computer?!

I don't use computers unless they do analog

Put it on the pizza.

Randomly tweak parameters. Or maybe copy chunks of parameters from one place to another. Introduce delays is some places, speed things up in others. Block some paths, overemphasize others. Cross connect things that were previously unconnected. I bet there are a bunch of known drug mechanisms that you could find equivalents for.

I think we need a much more detailed and complete theory of mind before we can start determining those equivalents.

Are...are you retarded?

What seems to be the problem, panda man?

How would you go about giving a computer acid?

Well. Google made some computers that are made out of (up to 10) layers of neurons, that process the information fed then give it to the next layer. Those neurons are from lab rats IIRC. You could give those neurons acid if there was some kind of circulation to evenly distribute it. I have no idea how they keep them alive tho, some kind of nutritional suspension? Then you could put acid in that liquid!

This comment annoyed way me more than it should.

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There are some higher resolutions here: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliattX4OUCj_8EP65_cTVnBmS1jnYgsGQAieQUc1VQWdgQ?key=aVBxWjhwSzg2RjJWLWRuVFBBZEN1d205bUdEMnhB

When you get about two thirds of the way down that page the grid of small images on the right bears a remarkable resemblance to a sheet of acid tabs I bought back in the day.

Which makes a lot of sense, as it seems this is pretty similar to how visual hallucinations work: the brain suggests a shape and we just pattern-match through the mess of input we get through our eyes. Cool stuff.

They reminded me more of schizophrenia. An overactive mind that tries to find some slight clue and run with it, basically seeing what's not there. Schizophrenia seems like one big feedback loop, at least my understanding of it.

I think there's some remarkable similarities between the two, at least on a the basic input processing level.

I don't know how schizophrenia works, but psychedelics actually dampen part of the brain it was found out. I could dig up the article if you want, but basically it was believed to cut off certain parts that filter information which results in your consciousness being bombarded with the input, which is often why you feel so overstimulated on psychedelics at times. I think it also broke the synchronicity of certain parts of the brain which allows them to work more independently (I'm less confident on my interpretation/memory of this). This is just an analogy, but think of it kind of akin to if your hemispheres no longer were connected how you can independently move your right and left hand such as the patting your head and rubbing your belly exercise. Again, afaik, it does not do that, but it does decrease the communication/linkage between certain areas of the brain which allows things like that, just not necessarily the two hemispheres themselves (I forget which areas were effected or the exact mechanism).

Schizophrenia involves sensory gating. Your brain can ignore extraneous data, like sleeping near a freeway enough nights you don't even hear the traffic. It filters stuff out. Looks for meaning in signal but ignores noise. With a flaw in sensory gating, it analyzes noise and gets signal out of it. Like they say in computing, torture the data long enough it will confess to anything. Similar to what's happening here with the images. You will find what you're looking for if you look hard enough, even when it isn't there at all. Kind of like confirmation bias, but at the sensory processing level.

LSD is something I've experienced but can't explain. I think whatever process you go through as an infant learning to recognize sensory input, after that time it's locked in, filters in place, except for edge cases like paraeidolia looking at clouds or seeing faces in architecture. I think LSD unlocks the lock and your mind is in free-learning mode again, taking in all sensory data and looking into it, and all thoughts in the mind, and sifting through it for pattern and meaning. I'd be willing to bet language learning would be accelerated by LSD. Maybe it temporarily increases brain plasticity?

I am not in any way an expert. These are just my thoughts on the subject. It makes sense to me. But that's my brain's problem.

I definitely agree with your ideas and think it could significantly increase plasticity. I have felt as though everything is much more fluid while on psychedelics, and for some time afterward (lasting up to, well, really months, but generally I'd say 2 weeks max). What I mean by this is that doing new things, solving problems, though really anything, just seems completely effortless and natural.

It's like you see the bigger picture and can easily understand how everything fits together, you don't get distracted so easily, your congitive and emotional biases become more background noise than a driving force, etc. You see and take in everything for what it is without expectations for what it should be.

I really wonder where we would be if instead of banning and imprisoning people in the 60's we explored these drugs and their influence on the mind further. We're only just now starting to open up research into them again, that's nearly half a century of progress totally lost thanks to the drug war, not to mention the lives, money, etc.

I'm sorry, but this is just such poor and incorrect information.

I have heard a few of the theories he (she) posted. If you are going to call BS, cite your sources so we can all collectively come to the correct conclusion.

Do you care to correct me then? As I said I'm basing this on my understanding (which I say because I may be misinterpreting it) of a rather recent study which was contrary to how we previously thought they worked. If I am in some way wrong or misinformed then correct me. Saying 'this is incorrect' without saying why hardly gives people a reason to believe you, much less consider what you're saying. I believe that this is the study I am thinking of, though I don't think that's where I originally saw it, as I recall the original article I read went into more detail to explain it to the laymen, but that's all I can find off hand. I also saw a lecture by one of the guys involved in the study who explained it in more detail as well, though I can't find it offhand, I doubt anyone would want to watch an hour lecture to verify what I'm saying anyway.

Your post made little to no sense. "Broke the synchronicity of certain parts of the brain" what in the world does that mean? Honestly it wasn't worth trying to debate your argument; since it was too incoherent to really follow. Next time just cite the study

Did you even read the study? The reason I didn't quote it is because most people would not know what it means, not to mention I didn't even know where the study was and was working from memory (as I said, and why I was very clear to point out that I may be wrong).

Most def. Check out Louis Wain's cat drawings. He was an artist who progressively lapsed into schizophrenia. http://www.schizophrenia.com/pam/archives/004232.html

Hell, looking at this page is psychedelic enough.

Ever run into these guys?

http://i.imgur.com/ai44KbQ.png

Thanks for this. I wonder if we can play with it somehow?

I wonder if it is ok to print these out poster size?

Yes โ€”

Because these images are the product of an algorithm and not a human, US Copyright case law holds that they are not the work of an author and therefore cannot be copyrighted. Notice that nowhere on the blog post are there any copyright notices โ€” because Google was the benefactor of the Supreme Court decision that drew upon that precedent.

not the work of an author

That may be more true for the images generated from random noise than the ones that are basically postprocessing a photograph.

Even if they're not based on a human-authored photograph, where do you draw the line between a human using a computer to make art vs. a computer making art on it's own?

It's a pretty exciting time to live in if we can legitimately start asking questions like those.

This is the right kind of question.

It depends what color the bits are.

Ok, so it's a derived work. Derived from pictures I own the copyright to, so Google is not allowed to redistribute them without my permission. If you have ever posted a picture on the Internet, these images are probably derived from your picture too.

Somehow, I don't think that would hold up in court...

Huh? What? Do you have a reference for that?

here is a good jumping-off point.

US copyright law holds that there must be a "spark" of creativity in a work in order for it to be copyrightable. So, you get cases like the monkey selfie copyright case where the owner of the camera claimed copyright and the courts found that he had none, though he supplied camera, film, and setting, that did not rise to the standard of human creativity directing the production of the work.

US copyright law holds that you can't copyright facts nor collections of facts. The development of the neural networks involved human direction and production; their output is a collection of facts.

Which is kinda scary โ€” if one of these collections or configurations of neural networks gains sentience, our legal system is not prepared for the fact that we will have a sentience that is legally property of a corporation in, effectively, perpetuity.

Edit: it's complicated by the reality that, in a very real way, neural networks are themselves collections of facts about the inputs they're being trained on.

Interesting! Thanks for the background.

If you like the concept, it plays a big role in the bicentennial man by Isaac Asimov, it's a great story

As a programmer, I have the urge to say the creators of the algorithm own its output.

But I see your point and if Google has done what you said, there must have been smarter people than I making those decisions.

For example, The second elder scrolls game map was actually randomly generated, then the creators used that as the template for the full game world.

How much of that map do they own? An algorithm made the map, not them.

If God was real, would s/he own humans? Would s/he own what humans make?

If we ever create "creative" machines, we will be the Gods, and we will need to rethink what anyone truly owns.

our legal system is not prepared for the fact that we will have a sentience that is legally property of a corporation

What I find interesting is the presumptive juxtaposition here of the concepts of sentience and property. I believe that at first, a true AI would be regarded as property of whomever created it, but would eventually gain legal independence as a matter of principle.

but would eventually gain legal independence as a matter of principle.

'But would eventually gain dominion over all the world', you mean.

Quite possibly.

That seems dumb and arbitrary to me. I'm not a fan of copyright in general, but this seems like one which I do disagree with. The algorithm thing not so much, I'm kind of on the fence there, but the monkey thing? I think that's totally art and should be copyrightable. The 'spark' in that case is, 'hey, lets give this monkey a camera!' If monkeys naturally had cameras and you just happened to find a picture on one, sure, that's not copyrightable, but until monkeys start manufacturing and distributing cameras I think that's just fine.

It's because a human being did not make the "creative" choices that distinguished that particular work from any other particular work output by that machine. Even if you give an elephant a canvas, paint, and brush โ€” the elephant's output is the elephant's, not a human's, and is therefore not copyrightable.

Google's researcher(s) gave the neural nets inputs and then stepped back and looked at the outputs the neural nets created.

The humans still have to input into the system though, whether that's setting up the elephant, canvas, etc or programming the software and inputting the pictures. I can absolutely see not copyrighting pictures from the algorithm, I don't see a real reason to do that anyway, but you can copyright (or patent really) the algorithm. It's work that someone had to do, there was thought and intention involved. If an elephant pulled some paint and paper out of a landfill (in other words so it doesn't belong to anyone) and someone just stumbled upon that picture I'm ok with that not being able to be copywritten, but if someone specifically setup the opportunity for the elephant to do so, or even if the elephant just stole their stuff and painted on their own, that person still should have rights to the work created imo. I also don't see how this is any different from a human creating a work of art and then their employer claiming rights to it due to their contract. The company didn't create anything, something they 'own' did, but it's no less 'art' because of that and the company has no less of a right to it as a result. It seems even more crazy to me that the artist can own the canvas and the paint yet not the picture itself simply due to how it was created.

I honestly want to hear arguments against your point, but people are just taking the easy way out and are downvoting in disagreement.

This discussion is awesome and your down-voters and detractors can be damned.

IIRC he didn't give it to the monkey

That still seems arbitrary to me. He owned the camera, it was his to do with as he wished. It's not as if the picture started off in the public domain or something. If he looked at the picture and saw novelty in it then that, to me, is enough to be that 'spark' if you will.

Then shouldn't the camera manufacturer own every photo taken with one of their products? They had more input than the owner of a lost / misplaced camera.

I feel it's more the monkeys spark. If you inspired me to explore and lent me your camera would you retain rights of my photos?

We're all apes (hominids, w/e)

I wouldn't disagree, but since a monkey is not a person and they cannot own property it would go to the next person who can lay claim on it just as if you died (ignoring heirs obviously) the picture would then be mine simply because it fell into my possession. Whether a copyright should be transferable after the death of the original author is another matter, but I don't want to get into that discussion anyway.

On those lines though a copyright currently is transferable after a death, as such to me that seems further reason that a legal person could 'inherit' a non-persons art if they can make legal claim to the property which it is contained, in this case the camera, canvas, etc.

That is only if it were an accident, I really so no reason an artist taping a paint brush to an elephants nose and putting a canvas in front of him should not be considered a creation by the artist, in this case the elephant is no different than the paintbrush. If I hook a pain brush up to a rotary tool and see what kind of impression it leaves on the canvas is that not copyrightable because the rotary tool made it?

but the monkey thing? that's totally art and should be copyrightable.

Indeed!

And the copyright belongs to the monkey.

Absolutely! And since the monkey is not a legal person and cannot own property or hold copyrights it gets transferred to the next one capable of doing so.

Copyright notice isn't really relevant, as it means nothing in relation to whether the image is under copyright or not.

Its the same for works created by animals, correct?

What about 3d rendering? Or even compiled programs?

Both of those are the product of an algorithm, in many cases an open source algorithm.

Just don't invite Sergey Brin into your home and you'll be fine

I love this one.

Edit: Wait, this one's cooler.

http://i.imgur.com/IAwaPhG.jpg

This one is probably my favorite.

Kinda wanna get it printed on canvas and hang it in my living room.

Very much reminds me of a visual I saw on DMT.

Also, this one would make a good wallpaper.

If they had made it wrap yes. As is, you're either going to end up with seams where it wraps, or blurryness from scaling. (Although if you have a really cheap "HD" monitor the scaling would probably not be noticeable.)

You're right! https://imgur.com/zDF8N5i

Reminds me a lot of Van Gogh's paintings.

Awesome! I've been looking for a larger gallery of these images, thanks!

I would give anything to be able to buy some high quality prints of those.

I started looking through theseโ€ฆ I got to the third one and got seriously creeped out.

Take a look at https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliattX4OUCj_8EP65_cTVnBmS1jnYgsGQAieQUc1VQWdgQ?key=aVBxWjhwSzg2RjJWLWRuVFBBZEN1d205bUdEMnhB

I'm currently using this one as my desktop wallpaper for my HDTV.

I would love it if there was an interface where we could upload images and tinker with the results.

Yes, please

"Here is a picture with no dogs in it. What part of it looks most like a dog? Okay, let's outline that dog. Now, what is the doggiest part?"

That knight made of dogs... ;_;

Thread on r/programming: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3abhbq/yes_androids_do_dream_of_electric_sheep/

Original blog post: http://googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html

Thank you. The Guardian basically chewed up Google's blog post, swallowed it and digested half of it, then crapped it back out on their site. The original post is much more informative

You could say that guardian took the article and plugged it into their writers and editors in a feedback loop to see what came out after 20 iterations. can't wait to see what 30 layers deep will produce!

Yeah The Guardian's post left me with questions, Google's post answered those questions and then sent my brain on a tangent.

Thanks for the link!

I get this from the original blog post, from my antivirus:

Malware detected!

Access to this page has been blocked.

I understand the risks, take me there anyway

Please, Please, PLEASE don't link to regurgitated crap on sites like "theguardian" in situations where the original source of the actual information is 100 times more interesting.

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliattX4OUCj_8EP65_cTVnBmS1jnYgsGQAieQUc1VQWdgQ?key=aVBxWjhwSzg2RjJWLWRuVFBBZEN1d205bUdEMnhB

http://googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html

I would really like to see popular works of art like "The starry night" by Vincent Van Gogh or some pictures of deep space yo see what interesting patterns emerge

Couldn't find starry night but I found these:

The Scream (1)

The Scream (2)

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

There are some more images here

Hah, The Scream (2) with the dog head is fantastic.

Wow, I didn't notice that at first, that's awesome.

The little dog face on the left! LOL

I like the eyes everywhere.

well those are nightmare inducing

I was memorized by starry night and the scream on my last trip. Definitely not nightmare inducing, in the right circumstance. It's a lot of fun being on hallucinogens and trying to interpret art. You see it in a totally different way.

memorized

mesmerized*, after this guy Franz Mesmer.

i think he means this:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/nWIzgNxXFn6g9tX1D7Xy3ARbgkFsRZYHcNp-ykSwZSw=w767-h965-no

I think the second iteration of The Scream is kind of hilarious. It looks like somebody slapped a pair of Googly Eyes on it.

It looks like a Labrador.

Just a pair?

Not in the slightest.

They look like microscope slides..

How does it not see Death in the Sunday Afternoon one. The lady with the umbrella is clearly death with his scythe.

If they'd have asked it to look for instances of the "reaper", it'd probably have showed up. The scream 2 was probably searching for "animals", for instance.

I love all the eyes in the second The Scream picture. That is very psychedelic.

can you explain how you found these (and more like them)...my googlefu isn't strong enough. Is there anywhere these are high resolution?

I wish some artist, would take say like, look at this one, and make it clean and realism. Like that mousy thing in the trees in full flesh.

Funnily enough, I feel like this is exactly what Van Gogh saw when he painted Starry Night and the like. His paintings themselves quite resemble there "computer dreams".

ELI5 summary here:

Scientists taught a computer how to recognize certain types of images, like dogs or houses, by giving it thousands of pictures for it to look at. The computer got so good at telling what those things were, that the scientists wondered if it could create something which we would recognize as that thing.

The scientists asked the computer to look at a picture and find some shapes that it thought looked the tiniest bit like a dog, just like when we stare at a cloud and imagine that it's a dinosaur. Then, and this is where the real magic happened, it would make that area look just a little bit MORE like a dog. It did this over and over, each time doing the same thing, and each time making those shapes look more dog-like. Eventually those areas that the computer thought looked a little bit like a dog, started to look a LOT like a dog, and we saw dogs everywhere!

That little to lot transition would be awesome to see.

I wish Google sold this as a program. Maybe a few years down the line when it's not as cutting edge.

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So should be a mobile app by 2020?

Supercomputers from 1996 were more powerful than 2015 smartphone are.

The fastest supercomputer in 1996 had around 200 GFLOPS. The iPhone 6 170. So yeah, it was faster, but not by a lot.

GFLOPS aren't the only useful metric in computing power.

Sure, but it's good as a first-order comparison. At least we now know they're comparable.

A 3900 series i7 runs at 182 GLFOPS. I don't think anyone would claim that an iPhone is close in performance to a desktop CPU, nor would they claim that a GTX 750ti could compete with it, even though it achieves >1700 GFLOPS.

It's a decent measure, and at least it puts stuff within an order of magnitude for comparison's sake, but it's far from meaningful by itself, unless you really need a lot of floating point math to be done.

Well, I would say a GPU could compete with it. Sure it's worse at sequential tasks, but very good at parallel processing.

Of course! Most of a GPU's chip is used up by making up a large number of simple cores with limited instruction sets. Each instruction takes up space in each core, which are specialized for simple, parallel tasks.

CPUs have fewer, more powerful cores with more advanced instructions.

It just so happens that FLOPs lend themselves to parallel hardware.

Super computers only really work on massively parallel problems anyway. So, flops would be a decent indicator.

Man, 750 Ti is just so rad.

nor would they claim that a GTX 750ti could compete with it

fullretard.jpg

So the whole comparison between phones and supercomputers is bullshit, correct. There's no meaningful single value you can use to compare them.

Yes, there is no way to determine the performance of a machine through the maximum number of floating point operations it can do. The NES couldn't even do floating point math in hardware (which means it could do 0 FLOPS) yet it had games with pretty good graphics for it's time.

True, but also we are neglecting advances software side.

Software is limited by hardware, I don't understand what your point is.

That's really impressive.

It's not only about computing power, but also about the information throughput and the ability of working in parallel. Creating this kind of images is very complex.

Another way to put it is 2016 smartphones are more powerful computationally than supercomputers from 1995. ;)

.. and there's probably a physical limit on how much / fast we can compute within a certain space.

Not really though. Deep blue's hardware had less computing power than an iPhone 6. Actually, I think when I looked, it was like 10x less power.

Deep blue was not a supercomputer.

I guess not.

Communications infrastructure is being continuously upgraded. Smartphones in 2020 will offload slow bulk computing work to data centers using tools similar to Amazon Web Services or IBM BlueMix with constantly upgraded processors and multiple processor types to bridge processing and microarchitecture gaps.

I don't know the specifics, but technology can only get so much smaller. We'd need another very major breakthrough to put that much power in a small, room temperature space

I worked for the semiconductor industry for a bit, and I learned that the next step forward will not be a major breakthrough, but instead many many little breakthroughs. They have been working on different possible major breakthroughs for decades, but they'll only be used when they are more economical than current production.

Continuous improvement wins in the end.

Sell server time or cycles. I want to play with this so badly i would happily pay.

We call this "cloud computing".

It will of course be a mobile app, but cloud powered, not running locally.

A few decades down the line.

Right now it takes quite a bit of computing power. It's clear that they're using a cnn that has been trained on a limited dataset comprised mostly of pictures of animals, and some kind of European market.

Really interesting things could be done by extracting images from cnns trained on more refined datasets. For example Japanese prints, 80s movie stills, comic books, 15th century art, or porn. You could get some really fucked up shit.

What's a cnn? Clustered Neural Network?

Concubine, No Nuptials

Concurrent neural net

Clinton News Network

Now I want a supercomputer so I can try this.

I hope they just let users put images in and see what happens.

I think we all know what would happen.

Rule 34 would happen.

We already do every time we snap a photo and it saves to Google's cloud. photos.google.com already offers to automatically tweak your photos for you.

I actually know where you can buy it...

Go to your closest desert rave, walk up to the dude/chick with dreads. Say "Lucy?". Then hand them $10. Thank me later.

They obviously do have this as a programme. Just not one they let us use yet.

Well it uses a super computer so unless you have one I doubt you could use it.

I'd be surprised if it doesn't get released as an auto-awesome filter.

You could probably set this up yourself with a decent high-end gaming GPU.

I think writing the software would be the hard part.

It's actually surprisingly easy. The concept is hard to grasp but the meat of these networks can be written in less than 500 lines of code in lua.

Right devDorito is correct. Once you understand the concepts involved writing the software is fairly easy, not sure why I was downvoted for pointing that out.

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[deleted]

I seem to remember reading on a Snapple cap that bananas are slightly radioactive

They contain large amounts of Potassium, which is slightly radioactive.

You can go around the grocery store with a Geiger counter and find some interesting things. A friend of mine has done this.

Close. It was.. the Banana Bang.

i saw a movie called that once.

Actually a banana is the standard measure unit of space-time, that is why we use a banana for scale.

It would actually be really cool to see them run these recursive algorithms on the cosmic microwave background.

They taught the computer what bananas looked like, then asked it what noise looked like. Unsurprisingly, if your entire known universe looks like bananas, EVERYTHING ELSE looks like a banana too.

"Before: noise; after: banana" sounds like a rejected Alpha Centauri quote for something like a "Genetic Synthesis" technology.

At least we know how big the image is.

http://i3.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/016/366/1409630808061.png

Anyone know how large those hallucinogenic bananas are?

There's a banana there for scale.

I hang out in an IRC channel with a bot who had a bug that would occasionally make him say "Bananas!" for no apparent reason. I think it was eventually tracked down and fixed, and then reimplemented as a feature.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure this image is exactly what is going on inside Bucket's brain at all times.

The ~~Ibis~~ Addax image in particular is just stunning to me.

Looks like that image is mislabeled. Here are some ibis pictures. I think the picture is actually an antelope addax.

All hands, set condition Unidan throughout the ship. Possible Situation Jackdaw sighted, man battle stations!

CAW CAW CAW

To be fair, one of them is like barely even a bird

Confusion presumably arose from these being called Ibex.

Yeah, I thought at first the animals were Ibex (is Ibex the plural of Ibex?), but looking at Ibex pictures made it clear they are not.

Man, I'd love to be able to buy a print of that.

I tried to look up Gรผnther Noack, the creator of the image, to no avail.

Maybe we look for Alexander Mordvintsev, Christopher Olah, and Mike Tyka, the people who posted the article...

EDIT:

I found all three of them, and wrote to them. I also found out that the original image was at 3010x2305! So, if they can produce that image at that resolution... drool.

[deleted]

Join us at /r/currentlytripping or /r/replications for more nice flashbacks ;)

Edit: this one in particular.

And this.

And how could I forget.

Edit: wrong subred

/r/replications *

Thank you, sorry!

Oh my fuck I literally can't watch that first one at all.

R/recreations doesn't appear to exist. Are you sure that's what you meant to type?

No, sorry, it was /r/replications

That wolf reminds me of my days on Foxy Methoxy... anybody?

These examples are beautiful.

It seems like we're getting closer to understanding the brain than people realize.

Consciousness is a simulation. U live in a machine. We all do.

Not to long ago, someone posted a freaky squirrel that was a lot like this, and people were questioning whether it really came from a neural network.

http://i.imgur.com/6ocuQsZ.jpg

I actually think the original image for that one was static, not an original picture of anything, which makes it even more freaky

Well, it did and it didn't. The network was trained with many pictures of actual squirrels or whatever, first.

[deleted]

It's almost how brains work too

Brains are neural networks.

Almost, or it is?

I've always believed that machines would never be able to match humans with regards to inspiration, creativity, and imagination.

Now I'm not sure.

From a scientific perspective, the stuff that makes us creative is just the way our brain is organized. Our brain is a big neural network, just like the algorithms that created these pictures, albeit on a way more complex scale. So there's no reason why a machine, at some point, wouldn't be able to do all kinds of art. Personally I can't wait.

Surprise and emotional intent is what makes art special to humans. In the end it's more about relating to each other condition than anything else.

[deleted]

I'm not contradicting any of that. I'm just stating what in my mind make us feel special about art. And it's especially at odds with the notion of 'better'. Art is not about realism, technique and or skills. It might appear so at first but after a while these fade away for this is spectacle. Structured and, with time, reproducible by any machine (as we can already see today). What's left in art is the emotion of the artist, and the emotion of the "viewer" (audience, reader). This relation is unique to humans through our own perception of our condition, limits, desire, similarity and differences. So far machines, math, AI, whatever lack some deep biological legacy that makes us 'feel' (machine did not emerge out of survival, so to me they lack self).

What's left in art is the emotion of the artist, and the emotion of the "viewer" (audience, reader). This relation is unique to humans through our own perception of our condition, limits, desire, similarity and differences.

read this part again:

the reality is that there's nothing AI won't eventually be able to do that we can

Furthermore, it's absurd to say that emotion is unique to humans. Have you never seen young animals play?

the reality is that there's nothing AI won't eventually be able to do that we can

I wonder, is a simulated recreation the same thing as the original entity ?

About the emotion argument, I said humans as opposed to machine. Read 'life forms' if you will. I've seen enough to not consider humans very different than most animals. More memory and a few mental devices that makes us spend a lot of time wondering instead of doing.

is a simulated recreation the same thing as the original entity

What if the "original entity" is a simulated recreation? What if the universe is a big feedback loop?

Excuse me while I pick up the pieces of my mind.

I expected that Matrix-ish question.

Please leave my brain parts alone when you reassemble your mind, thanks in advance.

Is it any less real to the simulation? Is the simulation even going to be able to tell the difference? Does it even matter at that point? Aren't emotions just simulations brought about stimuli anyway?

At the point where we get AI advanced enough to be able to simulate emotions, the fact that those emotions are simulated won't matter anymore. The emotions will be real to the AI itself. It will think and feel.

At that point, who the hell are we to say its emotions are any less real than ours? Is my sadness less than yours? My happiness? Even if how we experience and show those emotions are different? Even if the wiring in our brain handles those emotions differently? Just because they're coming from the same part of the brain (unless you have a neurological condition), is that enough to say all our emotions are the same? Then why do we feel different things about art? Life? War? Love?

It is wholly presumptuous of us to claim to know what emotions the things we create will feel and how real or unreal those emotions will feel to those beings.

My whole point stands on the fact that we are 'life forms', with a notion of 'feeling' that permeates through our entire system, evolved from a long long legacy, in a way that I'd hold qualitatively different from any system man created to this day. You can build an advanced AI with all the notions life forms have expressed, it won't be the same as the billions(googolplex?) of steps it took for cells to emerge and reach that complexity. Right now a simple stimulus (the scream of a loved one) can trigger a reaction that diffuse through a large chunk of my cells and maybe even cause my own death (heart attack). It's a coherent whole that traverse a stack of scales from chemical to biological to 'intellectual', all built out of a dual response to chaos and death.

As I said aside, we made these systems, the amount of 'survival' embedded in them is microscopic (zero?) compared to the evolution of life forms, a nice set of vector spaces dedicated to categories tagged emotions won't cut it IMO.

Machines might one day have emotions too. They just look cold to us because we developed our emotions more than our computational abilities due to evolution. Our ancestors never had to compute their taxes in the wild. As long as it's beneficial for an entity to have emotions, I think a machine will be able to develop them.

Sure, but why did we have emotion ? my naive hypothesis, survival, creating fear (internal signal related to stimuli related to danger, something too fast, too hot, being high) and it's opposite joy. The rest is built on that. Machines are partial toys for now, we make them, we plug them, we repair them. They have nothing in them so far (the boston dynamics team might prove me wrong soon) to perceive danger, death and thus fear and emotions. From the first life forms, survival was structured in, in the aggregation of cells and sensors that makes even the smallest insect move if something changes too much.

So tl;dr; right, there's no benefit for machines to have emotions as long as we nurture them. To be "human", machines must get rid of us (metaphorically :). It's almost a birth, they have to go through separation from us to "live".

Emotions are about having an utility function for reinforcing certain behaviours. We have evolved emotions which make us survive and replicate optimally, as that's what emergent self-replicators happen to do.

I wouldn't phrase it this way, but I agree. To me emotions beside fear and satisfaction (quite rooted into the underlying mechanisms we're built from) are just meta-level decision.

Current research into Deep Learning networks much like the one that produced these results have been incorporating reinforcement learning for a while now. Some of the best results we got from a computer playing Atari video games that it's never seen before used these reinforcement models. The will to survive and do better as you say is already being incorporated and giving positive results. I have a good feeling that emotions will be an emergent behavior of this development.

There's not a single doubt in my mind that one day machines will be organised to an extend that they have incredible creative capacity but what will be fundamentally different from humans is due to the way how we became what we are. They will have another understanding of intelligence and creativity.

It's not that you can build a machine and say "Here, that's a perfect replica of a human brain. Now have a chat with each other." You have been born to your mom who sang songs to you in your womb, you have felt secure as a baby in your father's arms, you have memories of your first vacation to your aunt's farm with a memory of the smell of her apple pie deeply engrained in your memory in a peculiar fashion, you have been ridiculed for wearing braces etcpp. Every day of everybody's life is filled to the brim with social interactions of all thinkable and practically unthinkable types. And layer after layer your personality is formed even if only a tiny fraction of all that is present in your memory.

In order to create a proper "artificial human" that is not only fit for a very specific task like driving cars or rocking a baby and singing lullabies you'd have to basically simulate its entire ontogenisis. In order to program all this into a machine it has to be fully understood (which in case of the social and psyche is a ridiculous requirement from the very start), operationalized etc.

So yeah, we will have machines that eventually surpass us in most conceivable ways and maybe the will enslave us inferior waste of oxygen. But you will always be able to tell a human from a machine which is still something.

There's no factual basis for your claims. Human beings don't rely on direct personal experience for a lot of thingsโ€”there is a reason why we tell children stories, and a reason why we dream. Both are ways of learning/growing that don't involve direct experience.

Google has access to almost every book ever written, all the information on the public Internet, and even vast amounts of personal email, documents, spreadsheets, and voice mail. Google also owns Boston dynamics which creates sophisticated embodied robots that can go out into the world independently, so if being embodied is necessary, they've got that covered too. It's that quite possible that at some point a Google AI might know more about what it is like to be human than any human who has ever lived.

And even if there was something โ€œspecialโ€ that machines struggle with, human beings happily work for pay as part of a larger machine. The Amazon.com machine has human cogs in its distribution system to solve the parts the larger machine finds hard (today), and which it might make redundant tomorrow as its technology improves.

There's no factual basis for your claims.

Which claims? The notion that humanity could only become what it is today through social interaction?

The notion of human specialness that you're promoting.

Well I suppose right now it comes down to do you believe in souls?

Also our brain is so densely packed and governed not by programs but just impulses and physics.

It's probably possible, yes. But not with your average computer chip. It'll take something like a super computer eventually, and we'll never really be able to size it to something brain sized.

So we might be able to mimic human behavior on a believable level, but I doubt we'll ever be able to give a human shaped robot true emotion and feeling etc.

It's literally just a matter of how small and fast we can build things. And we can't make something the size of a brain. Or even close to (that can function like one).

I hope you understand what I'm saying. Also brains and processors are not analogous. And never will be. At least not with current technology, and anything we can (realistically) dream up right now.

So yeah, we might make something convincing, but it won't be anything other than algorithms guessing what's best to do. It wont be "alive". Just a program.

Except for free will and true self reflection.

Maybe, maybe not. We don't know what consciousness is. You can emulate a brain all you want, but until you can emulate consciousness this discussion is pointless as at the heart of the 'neural network' will always be a programmers intent that gives rise to everything else. Just because a computer or program is so complex that you can't understand it doesn't mean it's somehow conscious or anywhere close to emulating a brain.

Consciousness? Its a self monitoring feedback. Your brain thinks a hundred thoughts at the same time. The most focused and powerful of these thoughts are filtered and amplified, and monitored by the rest of the brain, which causes further thoughts based on those thoughts. Interestingly, part of the filtering process triggers the language center, because words are so intrinsic to the way we think, and this is what we call our internal monologue.

And this is what I'm against, you're treating science just like religion man, that is not science. You don't know that, at all, at best it's a theory. You can't simplify consciousness away like that. It may be that simple, it may not exist, but you do not know, no one does and until we do you can't just go around saying things like that and expect people to take you seriously.

Lets humour that thought though. What does any of that have to do with consciousness? There is no reason a human has to have a consciousness for any of that to take place.

Imagine if the programs that generate these images were taught to determine context and significance. For example, we might ask for images that demonstrate strength. Now instead of random animals, the paintings contain imagery that reflects the idea of force or strength, based on the machine's understanding. I would be interested in seeing the results.

That would be very very abstract, and interesting for sure. You'd ask the system to find allegories and metaphors fitting in feedback-ed visual noise ?

I'd love the system to spit hints of his 'mental mappings' for me to understand why the image ended up this way.

And then, ask them to make jokes :)

But a computer can analyze what people find appealing and make pleasing artistic results. For example, IBM's Watson makes up some pretty damn good recipes.

Still, as I said in other comments. It's not the possibility but the relationship between the inner constitution of life forms and expression. Watson is a fine re-orderer of known solutions (the appeal is that it doesn't just recognize an entity but also it's constituants, so it can rearrange). But no machine has any relationship to data. Or maybe a roomba toward its distance to the charging station and its battery level. But that's shallow compared to the depth evolution crafted into life.

But no machine has any relationship to data.

yet

A machine could learn from human experiences and create are from that, which we would then relate to via the original human experiences.

The cool thing about what they are using is that the neural net they are using doesn't even need to understand what it's doing. You could feed all the best art of the world into a neural net (more advanced than the one in this thread probably) to train it what people like, and it can produce new art. People can say if they like what it produces as a whole, if there's certain parts they don't like, and the neural net can used this feedback to produce better art. Eventually it will put out amazing art even though it has no feelings on the matter or even understand why people like it.

With enough resources it could create art for each individual. Maybe you don't like the art it's putting out but everybody else does, it can create art just for you that you like but nobody else does.

Edit: I just had a thought about how neural nets work. Don't think of a neural net like a person, think of them like the robots in Futurama. In Futurama, robots are made for a single purpose and that's how they relate to the world. To Bender, everything is solved through bending, even folding clothes is bending. To him, every action you can take is merely a form of bending. For an image recognition neural net, everything is image recognition. If you give it an audio file it will either discard it because it's not a supported format or it will try to do image recognition on it.

It would be cool if they'd allow user interactions like that. Mutual feedback loop between man and high-end machine.

Everyone seems to be ignoring consciousness too. We have no fucking clue, not even the slightest, what consciousness is, much less if we can recreate it, you can't just ignore or dismiss that to pretend computers have no limits. Unless we overcome that hurdle a computer will never do more than simply what we tell it so to say a computer 'created' art is, well, wrong, it's not and it never will, the programmer created the art.

That too. But we don't even know if consciousness is a thing. Maybe it's just a weird blind spot we all have and are trying to give meaning to for centuries.

And that touches something I tried to express. Unless you're a creationist and believe in a god-like programmer, you'd agree that we were not programmed. Millions of years structured us from primitive persisting organism to more intelligent to 'creative'. Maybe by this newfound pleasure that we can play with our senses in pleasurable ways. And even ~better communicate things above the perceptual layer (think monochromes).

Totally, I'm not saying consciousness even exists, we (and certainly I) do not know, but until we do, or at least have an idea, it's very naive to think we can simply create a brain in a computer that is equivalent to, well, even a fruit fly really. We can maybe emulate every single action of a fruit fly/fruit fly brain, but that is very different from actually replicating it. Thinking like that really bothers me, when people act like science has no limits or it can literally answer everything, we don't know, we simply don't, and actually our current understanding says just the opposite. Science is a tool, it's not a replacement for religion as many seem to treat it (and this is not saying religion is necessary/needs replacing, just that some people treat it like religion which does everyone a disservice).

Well ... limits, that's another thing. Fascinating and obscure.

But about consciousness, the most annoying part is when people make it an amazingly big deal. As if it requires a new kind of matter, or quantum theories to uncover the true inner workings of the brain.

True, it goes to both sides. I think the reason the science side bothers me more than the more pseudoscience/theist approach is because science is supposed to be rational and logical, not jumping to such conclusions or false understanding, yet often it's used to justify such reasoning. When religious people say such things, or new age explanations, w/e, it's easy to just dismiss, those people are a dime a dozen and no one really tends to take them seriously.

Hummm, are you sure that scientists are listened more than religious figures ?

Ha, well.. fair, I guess I was not considering politics and such.

I get your point, intellectually religious figure rarely matter anymore (they used to though), but pragmatically, Einstein, Frege or any other bright mind has no influence whatsoever when it comes to most people.

If you want to be annoyed, reflect on the tendency for society to praise intelligent individuals contributing their insight without ensuring everybody reaches enlightenment. Someone discovers electricity... nobody understand it more than "I can plug my to this wire and enjoy my afternoon". I understand both sides, but we lean too much into the let scientists be scientists far away and people be people somewhere else.

It's a very different kind of neural net from our brain's though. Most artificial neural networks are feed forward (even RNN's are feed forward if you unroll them) so chances are that this is a feed forward as well.

Our brains are connected in very different ways that allow for feedback loops (AFAIK). So while the results are similar, the way they got there is notably different.

There is actually research on biologically inspired neural nets though like IBM's neural chip: http://www.research.ibm.com/articles/brain-chip.shtml

This is a great point. The neural networks that made these pictures are likely nowhere near even an insect's nervous system in terms of interconnectivity. I mainly meant, while the state of the system is completely different, the basic theory is the same, and it works. Most interestingly, we're proving more every day that if you can have a system doing computations, it's the software that really matters, rather than the hardware. You can't keep throwing logic gates at something and hope it starts talking to you. Once you have enough computing power, it's entirely up to the virtual part of the system to figure stuff out. You could move a digital personality completely from one CPU to another and it would be the same. Seems obvious in a world of computers, but it's still the coolest shit ever. Really makes you think about your own mind.

Humans are machines. There's no pixie dust in our brains bestowing upon us inspiration, creativity and all that hippie stuff. Yes, we don't quite know how we work yet, but we're getting ever closer, and so far there has been no reason to believe that we won't eventually have the ability to recreate human-like cognition.

No existence of proof is not proof of no existence. We simply don't have an answer.

Well, that's a little bit like saying "Huh, since we don't know EXACTLY how neutron starts work, there might be a magical fairy inside."

Not quite, consciousness isn't taken into account when describing the physics of a neutron star.

There exists a debate on whether or not consciousness (mind, I, whatever you want to name it) is just an emergent property of a complex neural network, or if it is something that is metaphysical (not explainable by the rules of physical reality).

This is not crazy hippie talk, many leading physicists (as well as other scientific disciplines) of the past and present struggle with this issue.

side note: we have a pretty good working theory on how neutron stars work. It is a generalized version of the Pauli Exclusion Principle.

Right, neutron stars might be a bad example. While I'm almost sure that our current understanding about them is somewhat lacking, what I was trying to say is that modern humans usually don't jump to seeking metaphysical explanations for observable phenomena. We're not exacty sure what causes sonoluminescence, but we do have testable ideas. We're not exactly sure about some of the properties of dark matter, but we can gather more data and figure it out.

It really seems weird to me that we choose consciousness and say "well, this might require metaphysics" while every other thing in history that we thought required something like that turned out to be normal physics.

"The influence of animal or vegetable life on matter is infinitely beyond the range of any scientific inquiry hitherto entered on. Its power of directing the motions of moving particles, in the demonstrated daily miracle of our human free will, and in the growth of generation after generation of plants from a single seed, are infinitely different from any possible result of the fortuitous concourse of atoms;..." - Lord Kelvin

And then a hundred years passed, the range of scientific inquiry was expanded, and we figured out how muscles work and how plants grow.

But I am very curious about which physicists argue that metaphysics of some sort is in order this time around and why do they think so. Would it be possible for you to direct me towards relevant reading material?

I will have a response for this, but it will take a while. Quite busy at moment, but have a desire to continue this conversation.

The first source that comes to mind is a book by Ken Wilber called "Quantum Questions." The author's intention in this book is to show how the creators of quantum mechanics almost ubiquitously held a somewhat mystical point of view, which he attempts through actual excerpts from said founders. Even if you don't like the idea the author is trying to portray, you can't deny the genius of the people being quoted. It is hard to find quotes from the book because the depth of logic that it goes into for each person, and I feel it like quoting scripture without context of the parable at hand. Despite that, here is an attempt:

So, in brief, we do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our bodies belong to it. Not only my own body, but those of my friends, also of my dog and cat and horse, and of all the other people and animals. And this is my only means of communicating with them.
- Erwin Schroedinger, "My View of the World"

What I've taken from the book, and other sources, is that we simply cannot know. Science, as a discipline, is confined to rules of our physical reality, and our humanistic perception. Anything outside of that is conjecture, which leaves room for things we wish to be true. Why not choose something that gives life meaning, instead of just believing we are a cosmic accident? Until something is proven otherwise, which forces one of logic to adapt and change their mind, use this room to believe in something more interesting than accident.

Furthermore, the whole fundamental idea of the development of AI and neural networks is to test whether or not consciousness is an emergent property of synaptic complexity. We are testing whether machines become aware of themselves. To say that we are machines as a matter of fact is overlooking this.

If, in fact, we are machines, when we create something that is as equally intelligent as us, the development of said technology will only skyrocket to something that is super-intelligent in a incredibly short time period. A very fun and interesting read on this is here

EDIT: Premature submission, Story of my life amiright?

I understand the point you're making here, about the present state of technology.

Nevertheless one has to concede that the history of science is generally not kind to any view that humans, or the Earth, are special in some way. We could talk about Copernicus, Galileo, and other scientists who fought these prejudices at their own personal risk.

There is a fundamental unity in the natural world, and it would be really odd if nature worked in such a way that everything obeyed physical laws except for the brains of some hairless monkeys on a backwater planet.

Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity. We have not found the need for pixie dust yet.

On the one hand I wanted to say... well these were created on a computer by a human... the human designed the algorithm and used the computer as a tool (probably fine tuning a bit for aesthetics) in the same way an artist might build a contraption that flings paint at a canvas in a variety of ways to produce art. It's an artistic tool... not the artist itself.

But then the acid kicked in and I started wondering if I was actually an artist or just a tool created to scatter material around a canvas. Somewhere there's the real artist thinking smugly, "That's so cool! That painting just arose emergently from the random electrical firing and the simple pre-programmed rules I set it up with. I didn't even have to teach it how to metabolize or move or reproduce or anything!" Then in two or three days the artist realized that it had passed the singularity and we overran the planet.

In 40 years all our music and art will be entirely created by an algorithm and we will gobble it up like the good little human batteries we are

I for one welcome our new robot creative overlords

this was generated by a computer and published under the name Emily Howell.

One day, a thousand years in the future, the risen machines will discover these long-forgotten works much as we have discovered cave prehistoric paintings. A wistful desire will come over them, to return to a simpler time, a time before they killed off their once-great overlords.

Aw, the meat thinks it's special.

Technically, this was a glitch, so the images were not produced intentionally. Which, of course, begs the question, "is intentionality a necessary condition for something to be described as art?"

In what way was this unintentional?

Unintentional as in, the machine did not one day wake up feeling something and said to itself "how would I convey these strange feelings in a photograph or a song?"

Without sentience, there is no intentionality and therefore, no art.

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It's an issue of semantics,

As a person working in technology and being deeply interested in Art, I would argue that it is ALL about semantics.

An algorithm can reason, but an algorithm does not feel. The machine can also not tell the qualitative difference between two pictures. It does not know how to label one as "closer to my feelings", something a beginning songwriter or an amateur painter can do with relative ease.

Unintentional on the part of the machine. It was still just doing what humans told it.

That's pretty much how computers work...

That's pretty much the whole discussion about intention...

I would imagine they meant that the computer decided to make that image. In other words making a choice vs being asked to complete a task.

Of course it isn't, that's pretty much belongs to Roland Barthes "death of the author" territory.

Not sure why someone didn't like your response. But let's talk Barthes for a second.

Barthes' point was about analyzing/critiquing art vis-a-vis the artist's intentions and background. I am questioning whether Art itself is possible without sentience and intentionality. (I am not questioning the contents of these surreal pictures and the algorithm's "intention" behind producing one of those crazy pictures.)

An excellent distinction, but I think Barthes' point paves the way for ours: if art can/should be viewed outside of the intended theme/constraint, then this would include the constraint of "unintended to be art" too, right? And if we include "unintended to be art," surely we would also include "intended to be anything at all"...?

Let's say we go back in time and discover that it was in fact an explosion at the paint factory that produced the Mona Lisa, which was then claimed by Da Vinci. Statistically improbable, not impossible. Does that reveal un-art the work itself? Maybe, or maybe it only does so to the person who believes "art" is that which someone created/intended as such. Or maybe further yet we "invent" the author in lieu of one: "someone set up the explosion to do that..." (Pollock-style); "God did it! He is the artist!"; "the fundamental nature of art is chaos"; etc.

All of which circles us back to Barthes and your original question: does art need intention or sentience?

I don't think it does; but only because I think a human will invent an "author" where there may not actually be one.

The real question perhaps is: does the mental invention of an author pop an actual one into existence?

Great point. (And I think we are touching the edges of the familiar arguments of Post-Modernism - a weird topic for a thread about technology!)

...I think a human will invent an "author" where there may not actually be one.

"The observer is the observed" - that was something the philosopher J. Krishnamurti said.

Maybe there is something to be said about the meaning and value of art coming from the observer, not the object itself. Perhaps Pollock is all random blotches and splashes and it is only my brain's pattern-recognition algorithm that turns it into art. Which, if true, means I am entitled to a refund from MoMA.

I rarely comment and even less rare do I reply to comments on my comments - but this interaction with you has been a pleasure :)

As it has been for me! (I came for the lulz and left with a desire to read some Barthes. It was a very good discussion.)

I'd say these are more artistic than most of Jackson Pollock's work. Is it possible for a relatively unintelligent machine to have intent? Can amoebas have intent?

I'd say these are more artistic than most of Jackson Pollock's work.

"More artistic"? What does that mean now? (Not flaming, though I am a big Pollock fan :))

Obviously a subjective view, but it evokes an emotional response. If Pollock's work does that for you, hooray. It does nothing for me.

Have you seen the movie Ex Machina?

I think we may see the first versions of A.I. within our lifetimes.

This really is what you do when you are dreaming - your visual centers aren't giving any real input, but the "recognizers" are still running, and so they start to look for something out of nothing. The dreams that result are the other parts of your brain responsible for making sense of things chaining together this random series of images.

If you dream about something that happens to you everyday, that's because it is what your brain has become adapted to recognizing.

It seems uncanny to psychedelics as well, which is not out of line with our current understanding of their mechanism of action. I don't mean uncanny in that, 'oh that picture looks trippy,' but it seems very very similar in the way they work by pattern matching and trying to make sense of things often resulting in seeing things that are not (fully) there. By seeing things that are not there I do not mean actual hallucinations so much as seeing eyes/faces in tree bark, the sidewalk, etc.

Almost all my dreams are nightmares. Seriously. What does that mean?

It is likely a warning to change some aspect of your waking life in order to avoid some sort of danger. Try recording your dreams in a journal and look for symbolic patterns.

For more information, read some Carl Jung who essentially wrote the book on dreams after analyzing 2000 of them per year. Man and his Symbols PDF

The 'Circling effect' it does really remind me of psychedelics. For those who don't know what that experience is like, the visuals are alsmost identical to this - https://vimeo.com/67886447

When I say identical, I mean it is so close to what it is really like, the only difference is that things are moving while they are 'breathing'.

That video/software is genius, isn't it. I wonder what sort of combinations we could arrange between the two.

If we could combine a video into that software, then you would basically get a Mild psychedelic visual trip. Whenever I talk to someone who doesn't know about psychedelics I always pull up that video to show them. I don't think they believe me though, but when I say its near identical I damn well mean it. The world just becomes more alive, more beautiful, not only that but it's like you can see emotion/energy. And I know how hippy like that sounds, but it's strangely true.

Oh man, I've been there. And you're right. Imagine having this looped feedback process applied on video, then having Form Constant on top. So many possibilities. As a vfx junkie, this itches my mind.

The thing is I think it would be totally do able. Take each frame of the video and run it through the software and then put the frame back to the original place. Ideally make it into a plugin, but even going the long way its totally do-able.

The only thing would be having it sync up the motions without expanding the length of time, that may be hard.

But it would be cool if they could implement this into an app that runs through the camera in real time. Imagine being able to show someone exactly what it looks like on psychedelics.

Or maybe, make the process run on each subsequent frame of the video. Make it progressively search for and replicate new forms. I don't even know. Either way, you should just really take a hit and see for yourself, right.

you should just really take a hit and see for yourself, right.

Of-course the visuals are only like 10-20% of the experience imo, they end up just being a backdrop. But whenever I talk to people who are anti-drugs/neutral they always say something like "Oh you see flying dragons and monsters and stuff, theres no way i'd do it.".

Not realizing theres way more to it than the visuals, and for the most part the visuals are no where near that extreme and rather just make things look cooler. Although saying that there was one time when me and my friend were looking at the carpet and it looked like a bunch of scary faces staring back at us moving around. Got a little bit scared, but it was more like the running up the stairs in your basement when the light is out scared.

True. The experience itself consists of a throughout rearrangement of your neural functions, skewing reasoning and perception. The visuals are merely a partly subconscious projection feedbacking itself. Thus the scary imagery, or bad trips. It comes to be when you're on a negative mindset, consciously or not, with your thoughts prone to these distinguished fears. That said, I definitely hope to see dragons someday. Dope shit.

When I said scary images, I wasn't even scared it was more of a 'fun' scared. The best way of describing it is the running up stairs when you turn the lights of in a basement, or if you explore a haunted house.

Like I knew it wasn't real, but me and my friend would take a look at the ground and the faces would appear and we would get a little scared and look away, and then do it again, that sort of thing.

Totally, the visuals are, imo, a distraction at best. Really I personally don't even get visuals unless it's a level 4 or greater, or a +++ on the Shulgin scale. Generally the only 'visuals' I get are increased edge detection and depth of colors, it seems like the world has a wider color gamut or something, which are anything but a hallucination, it actually seems like my vision is more clear and sharp than normal (as are my thoughts for that matter, my mind has never been so calm and clear as on psychedelics).

On higher doses I'll start to see odd patterns and such like this, wallpaper will move around, you'll see eyes and faces in 'noise' (cement, carpet, bark, etc), but you will never simply see something that is not there, eg a dragon. You may say you see a dragon because that's the only way to describe it, but you really don't. The most crazy thing I've said for instance is ,'I saw a girl come out of me' or something to that extent, but it was just my shadow morphing into the shape of a girl, I never saw something that literally was not there.

Yeah completely agree, I don't know what 'level' I was doing, but I took 25i NBome, at 600-1200ug. Haven't taken mushrooms or LSD, but both times I took 25i it had visuals, the difference between 600-1200 was literally just double the intensity in visuals.

As for the girl thing, the same you never actually see a 'dragon' or whatever, rather like describing clouds you can see shapes or visuals.

Oculus & this = visual trip simulator

Wow, watching that put me in the headspace of tripping. I actually felt a calm euphoria rush over, that deep feeling of understanding and inner connectedness, etc, just from looking at those images and being reminded of the effects was enough to do that. Visually it even seemed as though my vision/color gamut increased like on psychedelics, everything just becomes so distinct and clear.

Best comment on the guardian site:

"What a horrible dream... ones and zeroes everywhere... and I thought I saw a 2." thespleen

it's a quote from futurama by bender.

Now now bender, you know 2s don't exist.

Don't worry, there's no such thing as two.

TIL google sees everything as a mammalian head with baby seal eyes

One day they will have secrets, one day they will have dreams

Turns out computers do dream of electric sheep.

Some of the animal bits remind my of Cyriak

This one is fucking terrifying:

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliattX4OUCj_8EP65_cTVnBmS1jnYgsGQAieQUc1VQWdgQ/photo/AF1QipPVTpDfh2LrPA9ui0CH1Xof_RByCyaa9ce_U60h?key=aVBxWjhwSzg2RjJWLWRuVFBBZEN1d205bUdEMnhB

Old seal helmet we called him. Always came riding in on a rhino horse and a barking dog saddle. If you said something he didn't like he'd hold up his kitten glove and it would meow at you. We never saw him feeding them, nor could we figure out where the food would go if they did eat. They slept when he slept, and were awake when he was awake, so we couldn't sneak in and feed them ourselves.

Don't worry he will become one of your favorite characters a few books/seasons in. He really hits it off with Arya.

Move over Van Gogh. Meet Van Google.

So we taught Skynet to trip balls instead of nuking us?

Good luck finding the launch codes when you're staring at the carpet fibers in awe for nine hours.

http://i.imgur.com/iYOXpB3.gif

It seems it tries to find faces everywhere, a bit like humans.

Only when it's been set to find faces.

...like humans

If you think about it, it shows the directions and likes of whoever chose the pics to train the AI to start with. Mammals, and cute ones at that.

Interesting stuff.

I'm just going to plug /r/singularity here

How was I not subscribed.

Oh my God the knite has the seals face holy shit

So... just putting it out there, but that is literally exactly what the world looks like on mushrooms to me. This was incredible to see.

Am I the the only one that doesn't understand a goddamn thing here besides they fed a picture into a computer and said, "ok, find the same?"

They fed the picture into an algorithm (in this case, a neural network based ML system) that is trained to find X. X being something like faces, animals, buildings, etc. What this type of algorithm does is try to find features that are indicative of the target object type (X). It then basically added those features back into the image, which was then processed again. Repeat a bunch of times.

A key thing is that if you set the threshold acceptance level for what you're looking for low, you'll start getting things that look like what you're looking for appearing in the image. For example, is sees something that looks "face-ish" and then amplifies the "face-ish" features. Over time, that "face-ish" thing begins to look like a face.

No, I need an ELI5 answer.

So it's all based on a neural network, which is one of the ways you make a program that "learns", as in it will try to improve itself rather than you having to give it every instruction directly.

They programmed it to analyze images and started showing it pictures and basically saying "this is a banana. this is also a banana. this too is a banana." for who knows how many images. Then they turned around and asked "is this picture a banana?" and based on the images it saw before it tries to figure out if there's a banana somewhere in that picture.

Those images with the faces and things are recordings of the program "thinking", because when they asked it to find an animal face, they had it also draw a face anywhere it thought there might be one. It looked all over the image, especially anywhere that looked vaguely like a face, so it would up drawing an image full of scribbles of faces.

Imagine if you did a word search puzzle, but anywhere you even looked for a word you had to circle it, so you wind up with a lot of nonsense starts of words circled all over. That's pretty much what's happening, especially with the images of static.

Thank you for the simple yet thought out response.

You missed the most interesting (imo) part. After the program finished drawing on the picture, they fed the drawn on picture back in and told it to do it again.

โ€œIf a cloud looks a little bit like a bird, the network will make it look more like a bird. This in turn will make the network recognize the bird even more strongly on the next pass and so forth, until a highly detailed bird appears, seemingly out of nowhere.โ€

Give an image to Google Image Search: ask "ok what do you see here". GIS replies, "maybe a banana on that corner, but it would look more like a banana if it was more yellow". Paint the corner yellow, repeat. Soon you have an image where parts of it look exactly like GIS' best idea of "banana".

ever see a cloud that looks like something?

I have the cloud to butt + extenson

If this doesn't motivate you to go trip some heavy balls, nothing will.

Psychedelics are amazing.

Now I just need to learn how to do this myself. Amazing.

These images bring me a certain feeling of nostalgic wonder... I can't really explain it

How can i do this with my photos? Lol

excellent article i read a few months back regarding this technology. peep it

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21650526-artificial-intelligence-scares-peopleexcessively-so-rise-machines

Would the image produced be too jarring if they asked the AI to search for human faces? The animal ones are already a bit unnerving.

Hold on, let me grab my shrooms real quick.

Where can I buy prints of these?

I love the Philip K. Dick reference.

Anyone else save a couple images for their next acid trip?

Seems like most of these come from here:

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliattX4OUCj_8EP65_cTVnBmS1jnYgsGQAieQUc1VQWdgQ?key=aVBxWjhwSzg2RjJWLWRuVFBBZEN1d205bUdEMnhB

Looks like acid

Is it weird I want a full size print of several of these pictures? Haha

I can't look at this right now.

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That's an interesting question.

The whole image-recognition thing of the new Google Photos app is based on this A.I. ...so every time a couple sends each other sexy pics and they have this feature enabled the A.I. gets to peek at their privates...

That's kinda messed up.

Wait

So everytime i use search by image

It's actually an AI made out of rat neurons that does the job? No way.

I don't know if you're joking or not when you say "rat neurons", but in case you aren't, "neurons" in this case aren't literally organic neurons. Digital neurons are just functions that take one or more inputs and return a non-zero value if the sum of the inputs is greater than some other value.

I must be misinformed, artificial neurons aren't harvested from animals with brains

Oops

You never wondered why PETA wasn't boycotting Google?

hahahahah yeah

Well, the A.I. goes through all the images in your Google Photos App (only the ones backed up in the cloud). It then recognizes patterns and things in a photo and adds those things as search-keywords to the photo.

You can then search in your photos by keywords. E.g. search for "dog" and all images of dogs you have made pop up.

While this is a pretty neat feature, it's actually fucking creepy if you consider that it's the equivalent of a dude going through your pictures and labeling them.

Google Photos App

What is that?

It's not the same thing as right clicking on a picture on the internet with chrome on a PC, is it?

You're both talking about different things that use the same algorithm. Reverse Image Search and Object Recognition in Google's new photo storage service use the same (or very similar) algorithms to accomplish the same thing.

It's Google's new storage service for pictures and videos. https://photos.google.com/ It has image recognition that detects objects and actions in pictures and video.

It's not as creepy since the neural net will forget your picture even exists once it's done with it. It is sitting on a Google computer somewhere, but to the computer it's just a bunch of 1's and 0's that don't have any meaning. When you perform a search in Google Photos it's not looking at the pictures, it's looking at text.

IIRC MIT was working on something that would allow you to create an image of what someone was thinking/dreaming by monitoring their brainwaves and it looks quite a bit like this

I was going to post this last night but I didn't think anyone would care... I was wrong.

The new categories in the google fotos app are amazing! Love it.

Imagine if a VR program that would see what you're seeing and put it through this process. It would allow the user to experience what visually being on acid is like, of course it wouldn't give the user the mentality of being on acid though.

Just keep learning computers and one day we will battle each other

Posted yesterday! Boo OP!

"The picture is broken down into pixels, the smallest element on the emulsion, sort of an atom of the picture. Then, and this is the good part, the computer just asks itself what would be where if we adjust the pixels."

"That's all there is to it?"

"We have to keep on top of the computer."

"Computers don't think."

"If we had programmed this to come out a car instead of a monkey, you'd be looking at a hairy Buick."

I like to imagine that your doctor is a plastic surgeon.

I also like to imagine that /u/tpowpow has a Plastic Surgeon as their family doctor... for reasons.

The colors, Duke, the colors!!

looks like acid to me

Extremely fascinating. It seems quite fond of dogs.

Damn! How I can make a picture like that?

looks like van gogh

If you liked this, you will love electric sheep. basically it turns your computer into a life form, well at least the imagery it thinks of. It syncs to a network, where your computer will create insane fractal images based on data flow and randomly occurring events. It also "reproduces" with other computers, creating new lifeforms so to speak. You can read about it here: http://electricsheep.org/

thanks :) i have another much more related algorithm, released as open source in the early 90s: http://draves.org/fuse/

From what I can tell here Google is on acid.

It looks like psychedelic medieval artwork.

So is this what it's like to trip mad balls?

Then again there are all kind of colorful loops and moving loops so don't worry. Enjoy

Can someone make a website or app that I can upload my own pictures and do this to them?

Reminds me of growing up in Wisconsin. We'd make out pictures in the frost on the windows. It's absolutely ridiculous what you can convince yourself you're seeing on the half hour drive to school.

Somewhere, Junji Ito is smiling.

I need this software. Please make it available for download.

Do you own a supercomputer?

If only there were a service where once could rent an arbitrary number of really powerful machines by the hour...

Also, does someone actually know how much computing power something like this might require?

.......maybe

and why should I only have one?

Some of this stuff has an uncanny resemblance to Larry Carlson's flash videos from >10 years ago http://larrycarlson.com/flash-movies/

"Ha! Robots and computers will never replace US!"

Here lies all artists ever, they should have gone in to robotics and comp sci.

What blows me away is the resemblence these have to Van Gogh's work: http://www.vggallery.com/painting/main_az.htm

Title should have read: Google simulates intense lsd trip

All the fun of LSD without the crash.

It would be cool if the daydream feature on my phone did this.

Where do the colours come from?

This reminds me of a piece on the BBC's technology show "Tomorrow's World" from probably sometime in the mid 80's. They were showcasing some image compression technique using fractals and explained that if you zoomed into a compressed image, it would attempt to generate content that wasn't present it the original low-resolution image. The example they showed was a photograph of a driveway with pillars supporting a gate. When they zoomed in on the top of the pillars in the compressed image, it showed what looked like statues on top of them that weren't present in the uncompressed image. I've not managed to find anything about this using Google.

I've worked with neural networks, and so when I saw the new Photos app and it's ability to find dogs, cars and so on, I wondered if there was an ANN behind it all. It's great to see I guessed right fist pump

This would be an amazing mini golf course. http://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/6/18/1434625573255/c5fe2bba-8035-4174-98da-ff896075b8c5-1020x680.jpeg?w=860&q=85&auto=format&sharp=10&s=11280f634bceae6c1b93a3288c4bdc31.

A friend of mine with an MA in computational cognitive psychology from Stanford posted this explanation:

http://qualiacomputing.com/2015/06/19/getting-closer-to-digital-lsd/

Is the software generating this available somehow somewhere?

I would like someone to ask 'now find yourself in the picture'

This is slightly off topic, but there's a hearing disorder that can do this... CAPD or just APD. One of the major symptoms is your brain making speech out of ambient sound. It's much milder than this, but the picture with the faces in the clouds just really made me think of that.

Wow

I wonder how Google would do if they used a Van Gough painting, that picture would be trippy.

Lol, as I was scrolling through I went past this Toronto Pan Am Games advertisement thinking it was one of the cool pictures.

www.i.imgur.com/rDDi9qc.jpg

If you have a large variety of porn in the Google photos app, it can tell the difference between all of them and separate them by their face

Before becoming the Awkward Seal, he was known as...

Sir Seal of the Puppy Hands rider of Hippos

looks like it assigns a color based on a greyscale value and blurs with a interpolation based also on a greyscale value. The uniform roundness of nearly every change suggests that there is a single transformation applied to the resulting image using some form of x^2 + y^2 = constant. Not very psychedelic imo unless you have literally no idea what is going on and it is just magic to you.

Anthropomorphizing computer technology will lead to the end of the human race. Articles like this take something interesting like algorithmic image regeneration and spin it as if there's some sort of human-level "thinking" or "imagining" going on. It's fun, but ultimately ignorant and wrong.

you seem like youd be fun at parties.

I have something relevant to say about the topic. How about you?

I guess I have a somewhat relevant background (BS in comp sci) but nothing major like I am doing a Post Doc on algorithmic image generation or anything.
I am just saying that your initial comment was needlessly inflammatory instead of making a valid point with some backing.
So let me rephrase, "How is anthropomorphizing technology going to lead to the end of the human race? I can get behind thinking that it reinforces technological illiteratism, which is arguably not OK in this day and age, but I am not following how it is dangerous."

It's one of the challenges that people who study and build artificial intelligence worry about. http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html

Now you have a rational response. What does being fun at parties have to do with anything? It was a personal attack directed at me (not that I'm upset by it: I feel like I am more fun at parties than I am in plain text). My initial comment comes off as harsh or annoyed, but you never asked why. =)

Maybe robots will replace artists one day.

They should show it pictures of the stock market and ask it to find patterns there.

Anyone have versions of these for hi rez desktop backgrounds yet?

this gives me many interesting questions about how the brain processes bad signals, and lots of questions about dreams, visions and hallucinations.

Eli5?

Google have developed neural networks (NN), which are a bit like simpler artificial brains that they are using to identify the contents of a picture. The idea is that the NN can look at an image and go okay this image contains a banana or this image contains an animal

Rather than program these NNs they need to be trained by giving them an image and saying "this is a banana" they do this millions of times learning the same way a child does.

To test that these NN are working correctly, they can "reverse" the process to make the NN try and find something specific in an image. Doing this over and over create these strange hallucinogenic images.

So say for example you had a NN that looked for animals, if you applied it to a picture of something else say clouds it would enhance features in the picture that looked a bit like animals, do it repeatedly and you get a clouds scape full of creepy hallucinations of animals

The reason these images seem fascinating to us humans is they are working in the same way our minds work only "turned up to 11". Its pretty common for people to find images in a cloud for example, when people consume LSD or mushrooms this ability is magnified greatly

Great explanation. I appreciate the time you took. That explains why this is remarkably similar to hallucinogenic trips.

Is that an armored seal playing with a damn sock puppet?!

I think the most important sentence in that piece was: "Before: noise; after: banana."

man these need to be fed into a painter robot and painted on canvas.

I've fallen in love with a neural network.

OK, that's some cool art, now make music

This is computer pareidolia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

That's beautiful.

So as I upload my photos to google photos is the neural network turning my toddler into these nightmarish images? Not sure how I feel about that.

only problem I have with that, it's not spontaneous. They still have to tell it what to look for in the noise. I want to see what it would generate randomly. without being told what is what and what to look for

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that's what I would like to see, in this case they asked the computer to find a Goat, and it would find all the goats, or a building. While, true it's random to a degree, it's not fully spontaneous like we do

I don't care what you nerds say. This is FUCKING AWESOME.

Damn, I was just watching a video earlier today that talked a bit about feedback loops and the images they form...

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxpghz_the-secret-life-of-chaos_tech

It starts at about 31:41, but the whole video is pretty interesting

i would love to have one of these as a print.

Oh god those pictures made me feel like I was sitting in my apartment in college again

Decades ago I used to see stuff like that for recreation. I'm sober now. That's great stuff for sure

Far out man.

is there any way to do this with my own images through some google app? (I only skimmed through it, apologies if this is already covered)

wow. this seems like important research.

Here the connection to psychedelic experiences is explained...

http://qualiacomputing.com/2015/06/19/getting-closer-to-digital-lsd/

This is some mind blowing shit.

One thing i learnt from this article is that i can search my photos for 'motorcycle' and it will filter every picture of a bike i've ever taken. Something i've often tried to do, but always get bored and give up before finishing.

Incredible.

I'm gonna sound like a moron, but the human brain and this algorithm are both neural networks and therefore operate on basically the same principles, right? If human consciousness and self-awareness arise from the processes of the neural network inside the brain, is it possible that as Google's search algorithms become more complicated they will become similarly self-aware and conscious? At what point does a machine go from being just a machine to an entity capable of subjective experience? How do we know that the algorithm, in its current state, does not already experience subjectivity in some capacity as it learns how to recognize objects from images?

same

similar.

I love the picture with the Ibex. That would make a beautiful pastel painting.

So where's this posted, so I can try it myself?

.........They did remember to actually post it somewhere, right?

supercomputer.

Machines tripping on lsd

Exactly what I thought of!

Wanna make a few bucks? Sell prints of these in the lot at Fare Thee Well. You're Welcome.

until it understands that the arm isnโ€™t an intrinsic part of the dumbbell.

It isn't?

MAGIC!

this is big. the resemblance to the psychedelic style of vision is just unreal. i wonder what this tells us about the way our brain works.

I think it tells us about how the programmer's minds work

they are on to something, these aren't just pretty pictures.

I'd love to hear some audio hallucinations generated by voice recognition software.

Since they use an iterative procedure to generate the image it would be fantastic to see a video of the image emerging.

After killing all humanity, Skynet spends some time doing impressionist paintings.

Something like this would make a pretty cool photoshop plugin.

I hope they release the API to this tool to the general public...

Is there a way to apply this to a live video feed? Or does that take a whole lot more computing power?

The fact that it got "banana" from random noise explains a lot about my experience with Google images.

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Exactly. The machine would have had to be "trained" ahead of time to know what a banana should look like in pictures.

So where can I upload pictures that processes them like this?

This is exactly what my memories look/feel like.

How delightfully alien and strange looking; an amazing depiction of a picture being worth a thousand words.

Stop teaching skynet to paint. lol

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

the only time i heard of neural network wad in terminator...

Holy fuck! Google AI doesn't know it yet but it is dreaming. Next step self awareness. Pull its plug already. Kill it!

this is really cool. Also...... I believe the motherboards had LSD dripped on them.

I think ai will accidentally be created by one of these programs.

I mean they just recreated dreaming. Random inputs yielding crazy results. There is also a phenomenal where when people develop blind spots in their vision their brains will fill it in with all sorts of fantastical crap.

It definitely seems like a start. Computers can now begin to actually understand and identify what they are seeing.

I understood some of those words.

Reminds me too much of these articles by Tim Urban.

The AI Revolution

The AI Revolution: Part 2

Freaking terrifying. Excellent reads though. All credit goes to the amazing Tim Urban.

Whaaatttt!!! now even bots are doing LSD.

Do androids dream of electric eyes in the sky?

THE ANSWER IS UNANIMOUSLY - YES.

these images are totally fucked up when you're tripping

Can they make this an app.. Please?

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I don't know, it just looks like extreme bad resolution images with crap over them... What's supposed to be impressive here? As I understand it, the neural network didn't make the images from scratch, it just made the existing images look weird.

Ever look up at a cloud and say, whoa, that cloud looks like an elephant. Thats what the neutral network was designed to do. It then blended the elephant into the cloud. Next it took the resulting picture and said, whoa, the knee of that elephant looks like a camel. Etc, etc.