NNNs and communication protocols
So, in the discussions about what makes one identically-sized neural network smarter than another, there are a few obvious candidates – like the number and variety of interconnects – and then there are some more subtle ones, like routing protocols in use and means to handle collisions.
Many of my hypothetical readers may know the frustration of having a idea on the tip of your mind, or tongue, and feeling like you must act on it or say what it is or risk losing it forever. One can assume this behavior is even more of a issue for individual neural subnets. One thing that I have to imagine is a architectural choice that we make very early in life is whether to use collisions, token passing, or some variant (like aloha) of the two. It seems likely that different subnet busses use different protocols, and that what is appropriate for one subnet bus (point of confluence) isn’t appropriate for another.
Clearly some subnets do have the ability to hold messages and retry them later – thus how we’re able to set a mental note to revisit a topic and then experience a trigger to revisit it later. However, there is often the feeling with a new idea that we might lose it if we don’t do something to make it somewhat more concrete. I suspect this is because
A) Not all traffic is considered worthy of retries
B) Probably a very large number of messages get dropped that we are never aware of because they never protrude into our conscious experience
There are some subnets for which retrying message delivery would only hamper us – for example, there’s no point in revisiting the lion/no lion question either after it’s become proven there’s a lion or it’s become proven that there’s not. Most things having to do with the RTOS aspects of our mind are either interesting right now or they’re not interesting at all.
However, for the subnets for which the messages are of lasting interest, there is the question of how ideas are sequenced. I generally experience having one idea at a time, although I know my mind is capable of generating several at a time – my assumption is that they’re rated by priority and the highest priority message wins access to my conscious experience. It seems like a interesting experiment to try and have several at the same time, but I’m not entirely sure how I’d go about it. Anyway, I assume that many ideas light up many subnets at the same time, and all of them signal, and only one of them makes it to my conscious experience.
Back to the original topic, I assume that our more intelligent individuals are people who made better choices – or got better dice thrown – in terms of which subnets operate in which mode. I wonder how many modes are available to operate from.