How newborn brain works is absolutely fascinating for me. I just don't understand how is it possible.

Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information.

Human body, including brain, gets built using this information only. So our "preconfigured" neural networks are also built using this information only.

And apparently it's enough to encode complex behaviour. That's not just visible things. Brain processes a humongous amount of information, it basically supports living processes for entire body, processing miriads of sensors, adjusting all kinds of knobs for body to function properly.

I just don't understand how is it possible just from a purely bit size approach. For me, it's a mystery.

It somewhat makes sense if you think of it in terms of a really complicated 1.5GB metaprogram with a huge pile of conditionals that are triggered by the programs it itself writes (proteins). The final you is made up of an incomprehensible huge number of copies of the metaprogram, running different configurations, and spitting out programs to each other which then do more stuff. Our human brains can't really conceive of a configurable metaprogram that writes programs by interacting with itself in different configurations that it itself sets up.

Nature recently posted an interesting video [1] about what causes developing hearts to have their first beat. The gist is that eventually random electrical noise triggers a propagating wave which is then continued and repeated by the cellular automation nature of heart tissue. You don't need as much software if your system is composed of emergent properties.

[1]: https://youtu.be/SIMS2h5QsZU

As a person who knows next to nothing about how the brain or the genes that configure it work, I tend to think of this in terms of 80s video games like River Raid. The level data for these games, if stored naively, would fill the computer's available memory many times over. So they just store a pseudorandom number generator seed along with a few other parameters. Coupled with a few rules to make the level playable, it can generate a seemingly impossible number of levels with very little stored data.

Maybe the genes just encode a few crucial rules and the rest just emerge from that.

Oh, and I know even less about how the universe works. But I tend to think of it in the same terms: Emergent phenomena stemming from simple rules à la Game of Life.

> gets built using this information only

No they don't. There is plenty of external stimuli that also serves as input, e.g. the process of raising a child and complex thoughts that may only be transferred from grown human to grown human.

Try raising a human in a barren cell without human contact or as part of a pack of wolfs and you'll see how much a human brain is built from "DNA only".

The even crazier thing is that DNA does not encode any of that. Behaviour and morphology is not directly encoded in there, you'll only find recipes for proteins. The zigote will divide into billions of cells that share that same recipe book. Depending on the electric and chemical signals surrounding cells are sending, individual cells get their "personalities" or function. This cell colony forms an organism which emerges from the sum of morphology and behaviour of all cells. But you'll find no recipe for an arm in DNA, it is the result of the work of the collective intelligence that is your body.

Have you looked into the amazing things people do with procedural generation with only a tiny bit (kilobytes, often) of source code? My intuition is that this is vaguely analogous.

Here's an example from 2003, where the entire source code, from music to visuals, fits in 64 kb: https://youtu.be/HtJvSvQnep0

Here's a good gallery of such demos: https://64k-scene.github.io

I don't think human DNA generally codes for the behavior derectly. Rather, DNA can code for how the brain learns from incoming data streams.

If the brain naturally tunes into some sources or patterns of input rather than others, it may learn very quickly from the preferred sources. And as long as those sources carry signals that are fairly invariant over time, it may seem like those signals are instinctual.

For instance, it may appear that humans learn to build relationships with kin (both parents and children) and friends, to build revenue streams (or gather food in more primitive societies) and reproduce.

Instead, the brain may come preloaded to generate brain chemicals when detecting certain stimuli. Like oxytocin near caregivers (as children) or small fluffy things (as adults). When exposed to parents/babies, this triggers. But it can also trigger around toys, pets, adopted children, etc.

Friendship-seeking can be, in part, related to seretonin-production in certain social situations. But may be hijacked by social media.

Revenue-seeking behavior can come from dopamin-stimulus from certain goal-optimzing situations. But may also be triggered by video games.

And the best known part: Reproductive behavior may primarily come from sexual arousal, and hijacked by porn or birth control.

Each of the above may be coded by a limited number of bytes of DNA, and it's really the learning algorithm combined with the data stream of natural environments that causes specific behaviors.

I think it's a wrong way to look at it. In addition to DNA information content, one should count also the complexity of the proteins and higher-level structures in the gametes.

To me, it feels similarly impossible/spooky to how image models work.

Consider a model like SDXL:

- each image is 512x512, plenty of detail

- max prompt length is 77 tokens, or a solid paragraph

- each image has a seed value between 0 and 9,999,999, with each seed giving a completely different take on the prompt

I can't begin to calculate the upper limit on the number of possible human-readable prompts that can fit in 77 tokens, but multiply even an (extremely conservative) estimate of a million possible prompts by 10 million seeds and it's clear that this model "contains", at minimum, literally tens of trillions of possible meaningful images -- all in a model file that's under 7 GB.

I suspect it works similarly to the biological side -- evolutionary pressure encoding complex patterns into hyper-efficient "programs" that aren't easily interpretable, but eerily effective despite their compact size.

It’s like one computer with program (DNA) and helper programs (RNA) creates second generation of computer and programs (proteins, lipids, carbohydrates) that essentially create their own version of computer system in which they govern things like enzymes, hormones etc

But keep in mind that humans are not created in vacuum. After those two levels of computer create third level that is brain, actual programming of brain is done by other living humans.

So actual „humanity” is what persists in living population and would reset when population is culled and newborn must live and learn on their own.

Even if such newborn would live long enough to have access to things like books, computers, even sound and video records… those would be completely useless to them because they won’t even know language and skills required to use those.

> 1.5 GB information

Well, nature has a big advantage over us in that it doesn't need to "make sense" of that code :). So it can, for example, do crazy reusage optimization patterns. A "subroutine" that is used in one place could also be part of a "data piece" of another part. A "header" part can also double down as a "validator" of another part. Doesn't need to make sense, it just needs to work. The only limits are the laws of physics. I would not even call it compression at this point. It's more like heavily optimized spaghetti code.

> Human body, including brain, gets built using [DNA] information only

I think there is a good chance there are other substantial information transfers from one generation to the next. The total genome of all that gut bacteria is orders of magnitude larger for example.

Well technically yeah but consider that it takes ~9 months for the product to function without constant life support, at least a few years until majority of the basic functions work and ~15 years until it is fully functional.

Talk about compile time.

I'll probably get downvoted for this, but recent (last ~100 years) evidence and phenomena suggest that consciousness might be fundamental to reality, and thus there could be some other information transfer we would currently consider "woo" going on here. This is hard (if not impossible) to prove, of course, but quantum mechanics has totally bewildered many aspects of the materialist ("reductionist") model of the universe. There is a large and increasing number of physicists and other reputed scientists/researchers who are adopting some variation of the consciousness-as-fundamental stance.

The longer I think about it, the worse it gets.

It’s not foolproof, but I can easily transmit a huge amount of information to someone by saying “Titanic prow king of the world scene.” In seven words, which could be fewer if I were really trying, the recipient has a moving image and sound in their head (as long as they’re the right age group- every example I could think of made me feel old).

"Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information"

If compressed, then there is room for more. (but afaik much is rather unused)

And for me I cannot say, that life is not a mystery to me, but this specific part I have less trouble with imagining it. As little code can create complex worlds and simulate them. (a minecraft wasm build for example is just 14 mb, but fully working)

> I just don't understand how is it possible just from a purely bit size approach.

It's ~750MB (3 billion base pairs). But anyway, that's a size of a decent Linux distribution with tons of software.

I think you're underestimating the role epigenetic information plays. 1.5 GiB encodes every protein used to build us, sure, but which genes get switched on when and how are sensitive to factors not encoded for in DNA, including the environment of the cell and the fundamental chemistry of biology. Epigenetic information is hard to capture but can profoundly affect how an organism develops; cloned cats, for instance, may show a vastly different fur color and pattern from the original, to cite just a highly visible example.

Actually the DNA is very inefficient with many areas that appear to do nothing. 1.5GB is a ton of "source code".

There is no significant evolutionary pressure to erase unnecessary parts.

> For me, it's a mystery.

For me, it's one of the last true mysteries! We've figured out damned near everything else, nothing has this level of "unknown" to it.

It's simply mind-blowing to me how such a tiny block of data can encode such high-level behaviours so indirectly!

Genes code for proteins, not synapse weights!

Those proteins influence cell division, specialisation, and growth through a complex interplay of thousands of distinct signal chemicals.

Then those cells assemble into a brain, apparently "randomly" with only crude, coarse patterns that are at best statistical in nature. Some cells are longer, some shorter, some with more interconnects, some with less, but no two perfectly alike.

Then, then, somehow... waves hands... magically this encodes that "wide hips are sexually attractive" in a way that turns up fully a decade later, well into the "pre-training" phase!!!

What... the... %#%@!

How does that work!? How does any of that work?

Y'all work in AI, ML, or adjacent to it. You know how hard it is to train a model to learn to detect anything even with thousands of examples!

PS: Human DNA contains only 750 MB (62 billion bits) of information, of which maybe 0.1% to 1% directly code for brain structure and the like. Let's be generous and say 10%. That is just 75 MB that somehow makes us scared of snakes and spiders, afraid of heights, attracted to the opposite sex, capable of speech, enjoy dancing, understand on instinct what is a "bad" or "good" smell, etc, etc...

Makes one curious about epigenetics!

"Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information."

Human DNA is tightly integrated with its environment. Instead of stand-alone, think compressed, source code of a high-level language running in an interpreter and with a standard library with 10-100x more functionality.

There's also how networks have combinational effects, some things in the body use temporal encodings, and who knows what else. We can't really estimate the information content of all of this put together since we don't even understand it. It is amazing, though.

Remember the body had 9 months to "learn" a bunch of stuff already.

Recursion

You can make a brainfuck runtime in less than a kilobyte and it can run any program known to man.

This is why I’m so insistent that LLMs aren’t the best way (if they are a way at all) to getting to human level intelligence. The maximum amount of energy and input data required for training and inference is many orders of magnitude less than we are currently using.

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