The Best of LessWrong

I wrote this relatively early in my journey of self-studying neuroscience. Rereading this now, I guess I'm only slightly embarrassed to have my name associated with it, which isn’t as bad as I expected going in. Some shifts I’ve made since writing it (some of which are already flagged in the text): * New terminology part 1: Instead of “blank slate” I now say “learning-from-scratch”, as defined and discussed here. * New terminology part 2: “neocortex vs subcortex” → “learning subsystem vs steering subsystem”, with the former including the whole telencephalon and cerebellum, and the latter including the hypothalamus and brainstem. I distinguish them by "learning-from-scratch vs not-learning-from-scratch". See here. * Speaking of which, I now put much more emphasis on "learning-from-scratch" over "cortical uniformity" when talking about the neocortex etc.—I care about learning-from-scratch more, I talk about it more, etc. I see the learning-from-scratch hypothesis as absolutely central to a big picture of the brain (and AGI safety!), whereas cortical uniformity is much less so. I do still think cortical uniformity is correct (at least in the weak sense that someone with a complete understanding of one part of the cortex would be well on their way to a complete understanding of any other part of the cortex), for what it’s worth. * I would probably drop the mention of “planning by probabilistic inference”. Well, I guess something kinda like planning by probabilistic inference is part of the story, but generally I see the brain thing as mostly different. * Come to think of it, every time the word “reward” shows up in this post, it’s safe to assume I described it wrong in at least some respect. * The diagram with neocortex and subcortex is misleading for various reasons, see notes added to the text nearby. * I’m not sure I was using the term “analysis-by-synthesis” correctly. I think that term is kinda specific to sound processing. And the vision analog is “vision