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Brian Lakey's avatar

An alternative hypothesis for the evolutionary and neurogenerative development of recursion (or inclusive hierarchies) in homo sapiens may be due to the unique social development of the species and the selective pressures toward the internal mapping of complex social structures. While complex spatial navigation is not unique to homo sapiens (avian species particularly traverse great and complex distances, as well as many migratory land and water-based animals), the language and reasoning we attribute to intelligence (an to which the concept of recursion plays a critical role) certainly is. Similarly, the complex social structures that emerged as pre-homo sapiens group size increased has been attributed to the evolutionary increase in frontal cortex size. I haven't cited any support for this substantial claim, but I do recall this from some of my undergraduate psychology research (could probably dig up some sources).

There is some literature, although not much and not particularly current, about recursion as a function of social structure mapping. Something I may dig into more:

- Distinctive signatures of recursion (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2012.0097)

- Challenges for complexity measures: A perspective from social dynamics and collective social computation (https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.3643063)

- Reflexivity, recursion and social life: elements for a postmodern sociology (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1989.tb00048.x)

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Jason's avatar

It's interesting to consider recursion as an emergent survival and fecundity mechanism and the idea a single mental and neurobiological mechanism, even further that this mechanism involves place maps.

Right along with figuring out a neuroscience experiment to determine if places can be treated as objects in the brain, it would be interesting to come up with non-human experiments on recursion in objects and places to trace whether there is something like a evolutionary path in non-verbal thinking. I'd imagine there is, but how to measure it seems very tricky.

I enjoyed the visualization on the point of saccades - the idea of "thinking" as a kind of conceptual saccade. I always visualized embedded search (e.g. FAISS) as bouncing around multidimensional space like this.

Thinking about LeCun's recent blog post (https://ai.facebook.com/blog/yann-lecun-advances-in-ai-research/) in context to the notion of binding as a general property of feature propagation through concept hierarchies during navigation, a control/configurator module with a world module as necessary components to intelligence seems to agree with this proposition. This gets right to your point about a control policy. Taking the analogy a bit further, maybe something like FAISS is one of the more basic algorithms representing control and world modules for conceptual traversal.

Thinking about your discussion on syntax as analogy of traversal, transformer models come to mind. What could be said about modern transformers' similarity to place maps in this context?

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