Speaker
Hokin Deng is is an independent researcher and founder of Growing AI Like A Child (GrowAI). He was formerly a founding Member of Technical Staff at Myolab.ai, a VC-backed human embodiment intelligence startup. Before that, he worked at Harvard University on single-cell cognition, and previously was a neural engineer at Johns Hopkins Hospital and an affiliated research scientist at Meta Reality Labs for neural wristband. He studied neuroscience and philosophy at JHU.
Abstract
We motivate this talk by an intriguing question in evolution: why has nature always used the same biological substrate to reason about space and to remember the past? In humans, it’s hippocampus. In insects, it’s mushroom bodies. In fish, it’s dorsolateral telencephalon. In reptiles and frogs, it’s medial pallium. The teacher of evolution seems to use these functional analogs to hint at something fundamental about the intelligence of space and memory. Charles Sherrington notoriously suggested that human intelligence is made of an integrated hierarchy of reflexes. But Edward Tolman soon pointed out his theory failed to explain many exceptional behaviors, started with the abilities of space and memory, where a “cognitive map” is needed.
Here, I built on the century-long debate between two giants in the science of intelligence, Charles Sherrington and Edward Tolman, to argue that a fundamental leap-forward in natural intelligence is the emergence of hippocampus, and their functional analogs on various evolutionary trees, which endows an “internal model” of the external world. Space and time are the first two dimensions of physical world where could not be directly perceived by biological lives via direct sensorimotor engagements. Thus, evolution drives the birth of a neural organ that’s capable of latent representation, which this organ is borrowed wholesale as biological lives evolve to learn about objects, concepts, narratives, and ideas.