HTMs were a great theory but I never saw them function at more than 1 layer of hierarchy. So the “H” part was lacking.
Anyway since we know that any part of neocortex can be reached from any other within 3 hops, and there is more feedback connectivity than feedforward connectivity in nearly every part of neocortex, it should be called a heterarchy.
Hierarchy is a handy metaphor/mental crutch from understanding primate social organization, not necessarily how the brain works.
There are ample known facts and published theories about neuroscience that have never brought together into a coherent framework. Everyone has their pet theories and focuses just on them in isolation. Let me know when some funder is genuinely interested in putting all the pieces together instead of grandstanding on a single idea.
In most B2B cases you really don’t want to self host authentication. Really.
There are plenty of identity providers out there who will worry about hashing passwords, resetting them, 2FA, etc. Most client businesses already have identities via one of those for all their employees (read: users of your APIs or apps).
Unfortunately nearly all of the open source solutions out there do exactly what you said, they start with (required) self-hosting authentication. Not helpful.
IMHO (from the viewpoint of a neuroscientist) the biological inspiration is quite measured and restrained in his work…
The problem he was proposing we solve is computing with heterogenous “machines”. This doesn’t preclude the regimented organization you are favoring, above.
At Alan Kay’s Viewpoints Research Institute, the problem was phrased in a more concrete form and a solution was provided — “Call by Meaning”[0].
The most succinct way I have found to state the problem is:
“For example, getting the length of a string object varies significantly from one language to another... size(), count, strlen(), len(), .length, .length(), etc. How can one communicate with a computer -- or how can two computers communicate with each other -- at scale, without a common language?” [1]
The call-by-meaning solution is to refer to functions (processes, etc) not by their name, but by what they do. VPRI provided an example implementation in JavaScript[0]. I re-implemented this -- a bit more cleanly, IMHO -- in Objective C[1].
There exists the Universal (Function) Approximation Theorem for neural networks — which states that they can represent/encode any function to a desired level of accuracy[0].
However there does not exist a theorem stating that those approximations can be learned (or how).
If you think about it, for embodied agents symbol grounding isn’t really the “problem”.
Rather, embodied agents start with reference and indices. The hard problem is actually ungrounding — which takes work — to eventually get to things that approach what people typically think of “symbols”.
In an anthropological framework, social capital can be built up and exchanged for other forms of capital (including economic capital). There are even brokers who have the role of facilitating these transactions[0].
In my experience, businesses are especially concerned with authorization — enabling product sales to customers.
They would rather not deal with identity and authentication — usernames and passwords — at all. These are already quite nicely handled to various degrees by Cogntio, Auth0, Azure Active Directory, and others.
To address minimalist authorization needs, the portfolio of companies I worked with collaborated to create The Usher[1]. The Usher is an open source authorization server in NodeJS. Worth a peek if you, too, want to focus on authorization separate from authentication.
> Most implementations are focused on oAuth to establish identity, but the test of your application's security begins after authentication. The major portion is authorization i.e., verifying access to operations and data accessed with those operations.
Agreed. Authentication is quite a solved problem, the major focus for our portfolio of B2B companies is on authorization. They spend significant time on designing scopes which reflect and impact their business.
It is surprising that nearly every solution out there aims to handle both authentication and authorization. We choose to strictly separate these and delegate identity to established third parties or our customers[0].
We recently open sourced The Usher[1], our solution to part of the authorization problem. It is a minimalist server that issues access tokens based on roles and permissions looked up in a database (keyed by the identity token’s `sub` claim). Perhaps folks in this thread will find it useful!
A few of us maintain scripts for building the latest GNUstep from source under Linux (desktop, PinePhone, and Raspberry Pi) here: https://github.com/plaurent/gnustep-build
Yes. I was surprised that the OA gets as close as mentioning “golden apple” but misses that the Latin “aurantium” (from pomum aurantium) would sound awfully close to “orange”.
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Anyway since we know that any part of neocortex can be reached from any other within 3 hops, and there is more feedback connectivity than feedforward connectivity in nearly every part of neocortex, it should be called a heterarchy.
Hierarchy is a handy metaphor/mental crutch from understanding primate social organization, not necessarily how the brain works.