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].
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
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.