basal ganglia
Article
basal ganglia is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 26, 2021 and January 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “submit “evidence” to your basal ganglia, the brain structure that chooses actions”; “how do decision centers in the brain (eg basal ganglia) weight plans”. It most often appears alongside AGI, AI boxing problem, AI Safety.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: March 26, 2021
- Last seen: January 19, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- AGI (1 shared issues)
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- AI boxing problem (1 shared issues)
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- AI Safety (1 shared issues)
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- AlphaFold (1 shared issues)
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- AlphaGo (1 shared issues)
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- AlphaWorldConquest (1 shared issues)
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- Astralcodexten Com (1 shared issues)
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- Baumeister and Tierney (1 shared issues)
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- Bayes (1 shared issues)
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- Bryan Caplan (1 shared issues)
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- Cambridge (1 shared issues)
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- cat (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
These all submit "evidence" to your basal ganglia, the brain structure that chooses actions. Using the same evidence-processing structures that you would use to resolve ambiguous sense-data into a perception, or resolve conflicting evidence into a belief, it resolves its conflicting evidence about the highest-value thing to do, comes up with some hypothesized highest-value next task, and does it.
I've previously quoted Stephan Guyenet on the motivational system of lampreys (a simple fish used as a model organism). Guyenet describes various brain regions making "bids" to the basal ganglia, using dopamine as the "currency" - whichever brain region makes the highest bid gets to determine the lamprey's next action. "If there's a predator nearby", he writes "the flee-predator region will put in a very strong bid to the striatum".
Inline links: motivational system of lampreys
The economic metaphor here is cute, but the predictive coding community uses a different one: they describe it as representing the "confidence" or "level of evidence" for a specific calculation. So an alternate way to think about lampreys is that the flee-predator region is saying "I have VERY VERY strong evidence that fleeing a predator would be the best thing to do right now." Other regions submit their own evidence for their preferred tasks, and the basal ganglia weighs the evidence using Bayes and flees the predator.
Inline links: predictive coding
I think I might have jumped in my chair or something when reading this part, because it’s a plausible solution to a question I’ve agonized over for a long time: how do people decide whether to follow their base impulses vs. their rationally-though-out values? Or to be more reductionist about it, how do decision centers in the brain (eg basal ganglia) weight plans generated by reinforcement learning vs. plans generated by complex predictive models of what will happen? Or to be less reductionist about it, what is willpower? When a heroin addict debates whether to spend his last dollar on more heroin vs. food for his infant child, what is his brain doing? Clearly some kind of reward-based conditioning has a voice here, since sometimes he chooses the heroin, whose only advantage is being very good at producing (apparent) neural reward. But equally clearly, something that isn’t just reward-based conditioning is going on here, since sometimes he chooses the child. So how does he decide?
Inline links: agonized over for a long time