There's been a few times in my life when I've heard a sound while sleeping that my brain decided "wasn't right" and woke me up. Often the sound is very quiet - perhaps a mouse in my bedroom or an event outside the house. Generally there's a very bizarre process where I'll sort of wake up and then "hear" the sound, allowing me to process it consciously. It's obvious that I wasn't awake when the sound happened, but that there's some sort of constantly running sound-comparator listening to the world and triggering alerts when something that isn't easily matched to the known is heard.
The similarities with FPGAs/ASICs are really quite interesting.
And as some more anecdata when my second daughter was born my wife would get up for her, and I would get up for the eldest. Nearly immediately I would wake up when my eldest cried and she would wake up when the new baby cried, and we would both sleep right through the cries of the 'other' child. It was very weird at first, but when I went on a business trip and my wife was 'on call' for both of them she had not trouble waking up if either cried.
I used to joke that my ears were like a wake-on-packet NIC card :-)
Light too. A DirecTv box with super-bright blue LEDs (don't get me started) decided to turn itself on randomly in the middle of the night, and that definitely woke me up from a deep sleep (maybe my brain thought it was a fire?).
Now, granted, we do fall in and out of stages of deep and less-deep sleep throughout the night, however in my experience I have definitely been woken out of deep sleep by an usual sound or light (although it seems like it takes less from a less-deep sleep to wake you).
>The similarities with FPGAs/ASICs are really quite interesting.
FPGAs are essentially the exact same thing as neuronal systems, but in silicon.
You have voltage-gated transponders with a slight delay. These transponders can have their output connected to one or more neighbors in such a way as to form arbitrary circuits.
A neuron isn't quite as capable as a LUT, but en masse they can do basically the same things.
I think it's very likely that the first strong AIs will be built in reprogrammable logic of some kind (possibly FPGAs).
Often when I'm pushing myself by staying up and reading something interesting, I'll start hallucinating sounds. Often electrical or crashing, or other non-vocal sources.
I wonder if it is an attempt to keep me awake, or if it is some sort of partial dreaming.
The similarities with FPGAs/ASICs are really quite interesting.