"Here are some additional sources that discuss the concept of an egregore and how it can be applied to understanding group dynamics and the evolution of organizations:
"The Anatomy of the Body of God" by Frater Achad (Charles Stansfeld Jones) - A detailed exposition on the occult concept of egregores from a ceremonial magic perspective.
"Web of Debt" by Ellen Hodgson Brown - This book discusses egregores in the context of economic systems and the power of collective beliefs shaping institutions.
"The Egregore Effect" by Jack Willis - Explores egregores as self-reinforcing memetic constructs that shape group behavior.
"The Cult of Information" by Theodore Roszak - While not directly about egregores, it discusses how ideologies and worldviews can take on a life of their own within organizations.
"The Organizational Hologram" by David Bohm - Applies concepts from quantum physics to understanding the undivided wholeness of organizations
I have a record player and bookshelf speakers in my office. I like to pick a record and then play it while working. Every 20 mins, the record has to be flipped or changed, which is a perfect time for a short break.
Thanks! That's something we are considering, given how many people mentioned it and offered help. Right now, the help we need is writing a paper detailing all aspects of the system and comparing it with similar systems. We have a group in Slack: if you want to contribute, that would be great!
I've played with creating some chest x-ray images using diffusion.
I almost gave my ER friend a heart attack after I sent him X-rays with flipped hearts and even missing organs. He was very confused (these was early in the year when GebAI wasn't so mainstream)
Agreed. I think this is a good argument towards development of open LLMs.
If you're old enough, similar arguments existed about "open / free internet" and we're seeing some of the consequences of having it be controlled by mega corps.
That's naive. There are open LLMs already. The problem is not the LLMs but that data they are being trained on is going to be increasingly spammy, scammy garbage.
The LLMs don't have any sort of magical way of filtering that out. So if you train an LLM on spam, hoaxes and similar garbage you will get recommendations to drink bleach as a cure for covid. And that applies regardless of whether the bot is trained by a megacorp or someone in their garage using open source network and tools.
Sad to hear about that. It's one of my dreams, after finally purchasing a home, to add a nice wood fire oven in the backyard. I'm guessing you don't have the pictures anymore? Would love to see them.
If this is the case, the finding sounds trivial. I thought it was literally a theorem that hubs emerge from networks if you minimize distance or wiring cost.
Maybe, I think the research here is from a brain perspective, AI and Brain Science are having an interesting time, with learnings from both feeding in, so this article is focused on the physicality of networks in the brain, and looking at whether by increasing the alignment between the way a neural network works and the way brains work they can develop a 'digital brain', for me this is distinct from machine intelligence, this is emulating brain activity to provide cognitive and psychological insight in meat space.
Topology is hard for me, visualising multi-dimensional topological manifolds even more so, however, I am intrigued by the opportunities, we use graphs and other forms of visualisation to reveal topology, and it would seem reasonable that behaviours of NN that are 'transferrable' e.g.. trained on one set of data and able to operate on another category of data, may be a 'shape', a complicated one, but perhaps one that would once revealed would aid in the understanding of what happens under the hood.
There must be some difficulty in studying biological brain intelligence to distinguish between features that contribute to intelligence and those which are simply path dependencies from millions of years of nervous system evolution.
Over that time, brain function was mostly concerned with aiding the organism to find food, grow, reproduce, and avoid being eaten, rather than language, logic, mathematics, arts, and so forth. Its rather astonishing that humans are somehow now able to do the latter, using brains evolved to do the former.
We appear to have a capacity for substantially greater sophsitication in those domains, but none are unique to us except when we artificially define them to be. Remember that words like "language", "logic", "art", etc are cultural inventions with a fuzzy and fluid relationship to whatever real-word "stuff" they refer to, not natural kinds that themselves have sharp and perennial definitions.
Unless you choose to define the word as that which only humans can acheive, a spider's web elegently reflects "mathematics" just as much as some beautiful proof in set theory; a conflicted bird debating itself over which stem to use in its nest reflects artistic attention just as as a painter choosing their next color; a cat chirping or mewing or yowling reflects language just as me writing this comment.
The sophistication doesn't go as far, by our eye at least, in any of these animal examples, and so we don't expect the spider to confirm Fermat's Last Theorem or the bird to feature their nest in a gallery (actually...) or a cat to compose formal poetry, but the essential bits that we extend with our sophistication are all ancient and widespread throughout nature.
It's still astonishing that any life can do so many of the things it but I guess that's apparently what billions of years of "pretraining" on unfathomably efficient machines gets you.
Incidentally, it's wild to see people believe that a stream of fmults pushing through a trillion transistors would get you even close to the sophistication of any of life's intelligence. For current-AI-skeptical materialists, it's usually not a doubt about whether silicon and software might conceivably be intelligent, but it can just seem absurd to believe the grossly crude and narrow innovations of recent years are even close. You need to have a very shallow, narrow, almost willfully blinded, appreciation of the "intelligence" exhibited throughout all biological life to think that you unlocked the silicon version of it all in a pretty-good chatbot running on Azure.
It isn't just humans that can do math. Ants to geolocation [0] by counting their steps in relation to the distance they walked from their nest. They do this with just a small amount of neurons.
Well, humans can do any math that human brains can comprehend. That doesn't mean "any math" any more than if a chicken we're to claim that chickens can do any math (because they cannot comprehend human math).
Why would there be a difference at all here? Finding food and avoiding being eaten requires a great deal of intelligence, is surely the basis of human logic, and is the foundation for language. It’s all one interconnect network and every bit of it is a piece of the greater intelligence.
I think the the emergent behavior is still the most plausible. There really is not much difference between our brain and a chimpanzees, it is definitely not accounted for genetically to be that much more intelligent.
