(Half-baked work-in-progress. There might be a “version 2” of this post at some point, with fewer mistakes, and more neuroscience details, and nice illustrations and pedagogy etc. But it's fun to chat and see if anyone has thoughts.)

1. Background

There's a neuroscience problem that's had me stumped since almost the very beginning of when I became interested in neuroscience at all (as a lens into AGI safety) back in 2019. But I think I might finally have “a foot in the door” towards a solution!

What is this problem? As described in my post Symbol Grounding and Human Social Instincts, I believe the following:

• (1) We can divide the brain into a “Learning Subsystem” (cortex, striatum, amygdala, cerebellum and a few other areas) on the one hand, and a “Steering Subsystem” (mostly hypothalamus and brainstem) on the other hand; and a human's “innate drives” (roughly equivalent to [...]

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Outline:

(00:22) 1. Background

(04:22) 2. New stuff

(04:25) 2.1 Ingredient 1: “Spatial attention”

(04:31) 2.1.1 What is “spatial attention” intuitively?

(05:38) 2.1.2 How does spatial attention work in the brain?

(08:37) 2.2 Empathetic simulation version 1

(11:35) 2.3 Ingredient 2: A brainstem “is-a-person” flag

(13:21) 2.4 Empathetic simulation version 2

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.