Human cortex can't represent arbitrarily complex abstractions in a single forward pass. It's depth-limited by the number of sequential inferential steps it can execute per corticothalamic cycle. That ceiling determines what kinds of reasoning are biologically possible at all, not merely how fast they happen.

A single cortical area can be simulated by ~14 ReLU transforms^[1] at ~4ms/pass. GPT-3 has 192 of these layers and can do a forward pass in <2ms. With sufficient data^[2], you can train a model of this depth for every microcircuit^[3].

So human cortex, given identical inter-region scaffolding and reward signals^[4], should be strictly computationally dominated by larger ANNs, even given arbitrary developmental time.

Beyond this, some otherwise embeddable concepts are inacquirable outside of critical learning periods (see perfect pitch^[5]). Synapses are physically encaged during maturation, especially in lower sensory/perceptual^[6] areas, and uncaging them with psychedelics^[7] indeed reopens critical windows.

An adult acquiring a genuinely new conceptual domain, i.e. real new primitives, cannot embed those primitives in early sensory cortex the way childhood experience shapes visual processing.

Say you're a young child who really loves plant aesthetics. You're so often attending to leaf and branch geometries that concepts like phyllotaxis become primitives. Later, as an adult, you find it really easy to understand network structures.

Or, more relevant to BCIs for alignment, suppose you're a very smart toddler learning about a linear algebra concept. The relevant representations are worn into early visual cortex; as an adult, you easily compose much more complex representations if they're well-grounded by the LA primitive.

Contrast with using naive adult infra for the same struct. It may introspectively feel similar^[8] to holding a new primitive, but takes far more computation and is less composable.

Reasoning with primitives feels like, in our example, rotating a solid object and intuitively feeling that its shape doesn't change; therefore, even though you didn't^[9] read about Liouville's Theorem as a kid, you can intuitively feel that shape conservationvolume conservation and extend that to nonstandard geometries.

But that horizontal leap took extra effort. You may have already embedded an autonomic circuit which runs through this process so fluidly that it feels ...

Cognition Enhahcement for AIS Acceleration

Cognition Enhahcement for AIS Acceleration