[HN Gopher] Box jellyfish demonstrate learning ability
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Box jellyfish demonstrate learning ability
Author : mhb
Score : 40 points
Date : 2023-09-23 18:28 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20230923200015/https://www.nytime...
|
| https://archive.ph/vGJjh
| esafak wrote:
| I think centralizing learning into a brain is smarter, if you
| pardon the pun. Retrieval becomes faster, which is adaptive, and
| the body can protect it more easily if it is concentrated in one
| area, which enables internal specialization. If you can't protect
| the organ, the adaptive response is to make it redundant, rather
| than specialized.
| serf wrote:
| >I think centralizing learning into a brain is smarter, if you
| pardon the pun.
|
| even we humans don't really do that entirely. the gestalt of
| different nervous systems that interconnect between themselves
| and our brain appear to be responsible for a significant
| portion of the constellation of traits associated with
| learning.
| runjake wrote:
| While box jellyfish are fairly simple creatures when compared to
| mammals, I'm waiting for the inevitable study "announcing" that
| animals have their own thoughts, dreams and emotions.
|
| Something people who've been around animals will respond with
| "duh".
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Not all animals are equal. While some have their own thoughts
| and dreams, most don't.
| ben_w wrote:
| Edit: I clearly wasn't clear, this comment is focussing on the
| question as applied specifically to box jellyfish, not animals
| in general.
|
| Emotions (at least the physiological part, not the qualia)
| wouldn't surprise me at all even for the simplest of neural
| structures. Might even be a pre-neural thing, given plants have
| a transmissible chemical signal to make other nearby plants
| more bitter in response to being eaten.
|
| Dreams and thoughts?
|
| I won't say "no", but I will say that if you can prove it, then
| we probably have to start caring about the welfare of even very
| small AI such as OCR systems made by second year university
| students encountering MNIST and python for the first time.
| justrealist wrote:
| Not commenting on the ethical implications, but it's fairly
| obvious that dogs dream. We could tell our dog was chasing
| squirrels in his sleep by the running and yelping.
| [deleted]
| interstice wrote:
| Most mammals clearly dream, they even do the twitchy thing in
| their sleep. Has no one done eeg studies or is that not
| considered proof?
| interstice wrote:
| Just looked this up, all mammals and some birds experience
| REM sleep
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Great, as if box jellyfish aren't bad enough, now it turns out
| they can think, too.
| [deleted]
| bsima wrote:
| Why is this shocking? Evolution itself is a learning system
| aranchelk wrote:
| Evolution is a process that blindly accumulates beneficial
| mutations, that seems somewhat different from learning.
|
| It's easy to prove that just because a process is driven by a
| characteristic doesn't necessarily mean the output of that
| process would also. Example: when I grocery shop while hungry,
| that hunger may cause me to make irrational decisions, but the
| collection of items I buy aren't themselves hungry.
| argiopetech wrote:
| Learning is the mostly blind accumulation of knowledge that
| will hopefully be beneficial (and not detrimental to the
| excess of that benefit, which is not a given) in the future.
| Targeted study is the exception, even for humans.
|
| This is also a somewhat better description of evolution than
| yours because benefit in excess of detriment is not a
| guarantee and the process is not blind (because animals breed
| selectively).
| [deleted]
| adolph wrote:
| I wonder how the mechanisms of learn and infer in box jellys can
| inform designs of low energy narrow focus ML, like a toaster that
| associates a specific person with a specific toastiness rather
| than operating by time.
| matrss wrote:
| Honestly, it would be enough if toasters could operate by
| "toastiness", instead of time, at all. We had that decades ago
| and then just stopped, I guess?
|
| I have watched too much Technology Connections...
|
| /rant
| dang wrote:
| [stub for offtopicness]
| cushpush wrote:
| Brainless != distributed brain
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've made the title less brainless above.
| Bootvis wrote:
| This has great possibilities for new and creative insults but
| surely something is doing the learning and that can be
| classified as a brain.
| [deleted]
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