Since the human brain’s prefrontal cortex is part of the ne-cortex, will the Thousand Brains Project seek to create mechanisms akin to the prefrontal cortex? If not, are the mechanisms the project produces still biased as in earlier computer models towards secularism and are essential amoral, given this cortex’s role in ethics and spirituality?
Thank you for your question @markellingsen! Our understanding is that the neocortex has a functional, repeating unit, called the cortical column, (about a hundred thousand neurons in each column, and you have about 150,000 columns throughout your neocortex). The cortical columns are strikingly similar everywhere you look in the neocortex. The Thousand Brains Project aims to fully understand how these columns function, and how they work together to form human intelligence. Currently, we’re primarily focused on the sensory areas of the neocortex, but because the columns in the prefrontal cortex are going to be very similar to the columns everywhere else, as we progress through our roadmap, we should indeed have a good idea of what is happening in the prefrontal cortex over time.
This doesn’t exactly address your question about the cortex’s role in ethics and spirituality, but the above is our starting point.
3 Likes
Thanks so much for this helpful response! But I do need to explore with you whether this has long-term implications for the findings of project and/or whether it rules out certain questions. First I wonder whether the profound similarities of the sensory areas (columns) of the neo-cortex entail a supposition on the project’s part that there are no unique qualities and operations of the prefrontal cortex as neurobiological research has hypothesized. If that remains an open and valid question for the project, and you do find that the prefrontal cortex does play an administrative, ethical, and seven spiritual role in the brain, would an AI not embodying these operations be vulnerable to some of the same problems the existing AI models have (though to be sure your projections come a lot closer to workings of the human brain).