^-- Up

A Minimally-biased Philosophy of Life: References

These references are to the only work with which I am intimately familiar: my own. I will be happy to also post references to other works if both the reference and the description are provided by a named source, but I have neither the time, the interest, nor the ability to both understand each work anyone suggests and to defend my interpretation of it. Sorry.

Paper Year Main point Weakness Similar work
95 Hypotheses on the Informational Structure of Life which are Multi-scale, Human-readable, Provacative, Plausible, Coherent, Actionable, and Falsifiable 2017 Proposes nine generic, testable information-processing mechanisms, ranging from self-replication to self-calbration, by which Life functions and grows. This theory ought to be self-evident. No equations, data, references, or experimental detail.
Elastic Nanocomputation in an Ideal Brain 2014 Explains continuous low-dimensional representations, and calculates the millions-fold advantages of continuous simulatrix over "neural" representations. First draft, few refs
Brain-like software architecture 2002 (unpublished) Modular architecture of compressor/predictors No 3-D priors Numenta
Unsupervised Pixel-prediction 1996 (NIPS) Hebbian system learns 2-D motion from structured input, and learns further features from prediction failures. Must learn the dimensionality of its compressed representation (i.e. 2) Rao & Ballard, Hawkins
Modeling thalamus as a predictive comparator 1993 (unpublished) Models thalamus as an I/O port subtracting predictions from new input. about single-neuron dynamics, not overall function
Simple Codes vs. Efficient Codes 1993 Contrasts the traditional assumption that neurons use slow and noisy rate-codes with the alternative that they use high-precision single-spike codes, and shows how the single-spike code is in fact consistent with experiment. Only addresses info density, not function Shadlen and Newsome