[HN Gopher] A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter
___________________________________________________________________
A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter
Author : Hooke
Score : 200 points
Date : 2025-02-26 07:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.noemamag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.noemamag.com)
| gregwebs wrote:
| I don't see the word "consciousness" in the article. I thought
| that was the thing to figure out to understand the emergence of
| the mind.
| sctb wrote:
| My general understanding is that "mind" is an objective
| concept; people have minds that cognize and think and learn and
| so on. Some minds are apparently more capable of those things
| than others. When speaking about intelligence, it makes sense
| to associate that with the mind.
|
| Consciousness, on the other hand, is (even) less well-defined
| and is usually considered to be subjective. Being subjective,
| it tends to resist all of the usual objective approaches of
| description and analysis. Hard problem and all that.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| The mind concept here then could apply to computers as well
| since after all those can also be configured to learn things
| and behave in certain intelligent ways
| mirekrusin wrote:
| I don't understand why people have problem with simply
| stating that it is emergent phenomenon and that's it.
|
| Similarly to how computer is computer and half sized computer
| is half of its bigger friend - you can keep halving it until
| there is no "computer" left in it.
|
| Or pencil - you have pencil that you call pencil; what about
| pencil half size of it? and so on until you hit single atom.
| You had pencil, now you don't, where on this line there was
| pencil and then there wasn't?
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Pencil is just an idea, minds objectively have qualia
| (measured internally).
|
| Edit: you can't measure "pencilness," but you can't help
| but know whether or not you're in pain.
| heyjamesknight wrote:
| You can measure "pencilness" a number of ways depending
| on how you operationalize the term. It could be a measure
| of how well it achieves the function of a pencil, how
| well it matches the collective understanding of the form
| of a pencil, how closely it materially relates to an
| existing reference pencil.
|
| These are all proxy measures, but all of science is done
| by proxy.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Well sure, but you're putting "pencilness" onto the
| collection of heterogeneous matter, same with any other
| level of analysis. Consciousness isn't debatable by the
| thing doing it, it's an irrepressible fact of existence
| to the conscious thing. Science needs a falsifiable
| hypothesis for the "why" of the material->consciousness
| transition, and constructing such a hypothesis is
| difficult for a lot of reasons. Saying "it emerges from
| neuron connections" just doesn't capture the issue. Why
| should neuron connections produce this observer thing
| when we seem to see machines do similar things without
| it? Is a sufficiently large recurrent neural network
| conscious by the same process? If not or if so, then why?
| What precisely produces the phenomenon. Emergence is an
| observation, not a hypothesis for why that observation
| occurred. It could just be a trick of the light.
| heyjamesknight wrote:
| Agreed, I was just commenting that one _can_ measure
| "penciliness". I see a lot of pedantic arguments against
| measurement by proxy, as if every single measurement we
| do wasn't by proxy.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Actually yeah I see your point. I'll concede on that.
| heyjamesknight wrote:
| Because that's the same as giving up and saying "we don't
| understand."
|
| What is mind emerging _into_? When a video game experience
| _emerges_ from the combination of processing, display,
| sound, and controller input, it emerges into a level of
| organization that a mind can participate in. It emerges
| into a system of organization emanating downward from the
| mind experiencing it. It can 't just "emerge" into
| existence on its own. If a game falls in the woods, its not
| a game.
|
| If you call the mind an emergent phenomenon but can't
| describe the context into which it emerges, you've added
| nothing to our understanding.
| layer8 wrote:
| Emergence has no "into", IMO:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
| heyjamesknight wrote:
| All of those examples are emergence "into". The snowflake
| emerges into the mathematical patterns emanating
| downward. The termite cathedral emerges into the
| architectural context of the observer. Without emanating
| structure, there is no "emergence"--just a proliferation
| of chaos and error.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Not to butt in, but if the emergent phenomena only exists
| in the mind of the observer, and the mind is a material
| phenomenon, the where in the observer-snowflake system is
| there anything not fully decomposable to atoms, particle
| motion, so on?
| heyjamesknight wrote:
| The mind is not a material phenomenon, in the same way
| that a video game is not a computational one.
|
| The emergent experience exists at the level into which it
| emerges. It's constructed at a lower level of
| organization, but not decomposable to them in a way
| that's meaningful without their recomposition--that's
| what makes the phenomenon emergent. The qualitative
| experience of a film does not meaningfully break down to
| the bits in the video stream, the compressed sound waves
| carrying the dialog, the photons hitting your eyes' rods
| and cones, or the biochemical signals in your brain.
|
| The mind is not _in_ the brain, but _on_ the brain.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| But we have to classify it as an "appears to" rather than
| an "is," don't we? It's perfectly fine to do categorize
| out emergent phenomena that have practical utility, eg
| its useful to see the snowflake over its constituent
| parts, or the film over the bits, but what underlies the
| choice to see it as a film rather than an improbably
| corrupted png? When talking about the mind, then, why is
| it we choose to see the mind at all, and how does this
| constitute more than a convenient framing device, ie how
| can it explain qualia?
| heyjamesknight wrote:
| Because our entire perception system functions as a
| mediation between the teleological affordances an object
| presents at a given level of organization/analysis and
| how those affordances relate to our motivational system's
| current objective and directed action. The emergence only
| "is" at a certain level of analysis and its emergence at
| that level is dependent entirely on the perception of an
| observer.
|
| If a car is hurtling towards you, you don't perceive its
| handle. But if you're trying to go somewhere, you have to
| open the door. "Threat", "vehicle", or "handle" aren't
| just convenient framing device, but an accurate depiction
| of the object within your perceptual/motivation systems
| based on the current level of organization and analysis
| you're participating in.
|
| We choose to see the mind because we are minds.
| Consciousness _is_. There is something which it is like
| to be. Denying our emergent experience of it, or reducing
| it to a "convenient framing device" tosses out the most
| fundamental empirical experience we have: to exist.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| I completely agree with you, I'm just being more
| reductive when I say it's a practical categorization
| rather than essential reality. Certainly it's also
| reasonable to say there's no essential reality, just
| subjective levels of analysis, so everything is practical
| categorization. The issue is that we've gotten nowhere in
| explaining why we seem to exist.
|
| A video game is relatively easy, at least seemingly, to
| reduce down to its underlying principles. The content
| dissolves the more closely I look at the game. The issue
| here isn't whether the game still exists (it does, in the
| place I'm no longer looking), the issue is in seeing why
| the game arises from its component parts, and not
| something else. Easy-ish for the game, it follows
| directly from what we know about physics and such, but
| hard for the mind. Why do neurons together produce pain
| that exists, rather than pain as a purpose-driven
| internal signal to help organize the escape from a
| predator? Emergence doesn't tell us why one or the other,
| just that whatever it is must emerge from constituent
| parts.
| heyjamesknight wrote:
| I don't think its a question of whether there is an
| essential reality or not, but rather whether we have
| access to essential reality. Donald Hoffman makes a
| strong game theoretical argument for how natural
| selection chooses _effective_ presentations of reality
| rather than necessarily accurate ones [1]. Based on your
| level of interest in this conversation I 'd expect you
| would really enjoy that book!
|
| The game is certainly easier than the mind--I like it as
| an example because most of us have a hands-on knowledge
| of what the qualitative experience of "playing a game" is
| like. But the game still only emerges because the game
| developer, computer manufacturer, and player jointly give
| it a emanating system into which it can emerge. On its
| own, the raw game data doesn't really mean anything at
| all--if the bitstream of Diablo IV washed up on the
| beach, there's nowhere in that data encoding the
| experience of killing Diablo for the first time. One
| wouldn't even recognize it as something that could be
| decoded into such an experience [2].
|
| I agree with you that the "why" is tough. Why have a
| conscious experience? Why have a sense of self at all?
| Why experience emotions rather than have them be--like
| you described--a purpose-driven internal signal? And then
| you get into theories like Internal Family Systems, which
| has empirical support at least within a prescriptive
| context if not necessarily a descriptive one [3].
|
| The whole thing is a mess. A great, big, beautiful mess.
|
| [1: https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Reality-
| Evolution-Truth/...] [2:
| https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2021/02/21/Three-Layers-
| of-I...]
| corimaith wrote:
| Sounds similar to Plato's Theory of Forms.
| heyjamesknight wrote:
| Close! Emergence/emanation is particular to Neoplatonism.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoplatonism
| ryandvm wrote:
| I agree with GP. Consciousness isn't so hard to explain
| if you don't enshroud it with mysticism.
|
| Consciousness is the emergent, graduated phenomenon of an
| information processing system when that information
| processing system has achieved significant complexity to
| model itself with relation to the various systemic
| inputs.
|
| It's not binary, it's a gradient. I have more developed
| consciousness than my dog, which has more developed
| consciousness than a rat, and then a fish, then an
| insect, etc.
|
| Somewhat disturbingly it also goes the other way, AIs may
| achieve a more profound conscious experience than humans
| - same for aliens. What does it mean for inferior forms
| of consciousness that have always placed themselves on a
| pedestal in relation to the rest of the animal kingdom
| simply because they have the most developed
| consciousness?
| heyjamesknight wrote:
| Welp, that does it. Pack it up, Cognitive Scientists:
| we've solved the hard problem of consciousness right here
| on HN.
|
| What you're describing is what's been proposed by Giulio
| Tonini as "Integrated Information Theory" (IIT) [1]. I
| quite like the framework and the math behind it is
| beautiful. Unfortunately, it hasn't been supported well
| empirically.
|
| Re: AI, IIT actually gives basis for AI not being
| conscious. Not to mention that all conscious systems we
| can currently observe are dynamic/continuous, not
| discrete. The difference there is qualitative--there's no
| reason to assume that because a dynamic system is
| conscious that a discrete system approximating it is
| conscious too.
|
| [1: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.44]
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's a nice idea but there's no evidence for it. Not only
| is there no evidence, but nobody has any idea what such
| evidence would even look like. We can't even
| _conceptualize_ an experiment that would support or
| refute this theory.
| heyjamesknight wrote:
| That's not true, the authors of IIT [1] propose a number
| of experiments that would support or deny the underlying
| theory. To my knowledge, those experiments haven't shown
| much support. But there are aspects of it that are
| absolutely empirically falsifiable.
|
| [1: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.44]
| wat10000 wrote:
| I don't buy it. It might support the part of the theory
| that talks about how brains work. But the statement that
| this is qualia is different, and can't be proven or
| disproven. Let's say I believe that some person is
| actually a P-zombie, someone with no conscious experience
| but who behaves exactly like a normal person. Would these
| experiments be able to tell me if my belief is correct? I
| don't see how.
| heyjamesknight wrote:
| You're welcome to read the paper. Tonini's work is well-
| known within CogSci and its not quackery by any stretch.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I skimmed it. There's one mention of "qualia" and I
| didn't spot anything to connect their theory with the
| actual experience of consciousness besides them saying
| they think so.
| heyjamesknight wrote:
| Better let Nature know their Peer Review committee
| screwed up then!
| chasd00 wrote:
| You're modded down for some reason but I haven't thought
| of consciousness as a model that eventually becomes
| sophisticated enough to model itself. That could be an
| explanation for self awareness. ...haven't thought of
| that.
| notfed wrote:
| See Scott Aaronson's rebuttal to IIT:
| https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799
| LiquidHelium wrote:
| It depends on what you mean by consciousness, if we are
| talking about the intelligence or self awareness or
| thoughts then I don't see any problem with it being
| emergent. But if we are talking about conscious
| experience/qualia (not something that thinks or interacts,
| but something that just experiences) then I think it's
| incoherent for it to be emergent. That there is a
| consciousness that is experiencing something is the only
| thing we can know as 100% true, and the world itself is
| something we can never know is 100% true: we could be a
| brain in a vat, we could be dreaming, in the matrix, a
| demon making us hallucinate everything etc. It seems a bit
| silly to say the 100% true thing is an illusion or is
| dependent because something that we don't know is true
| tells us it is.
| Symmetry wrote:
| There's a whole scientific study of consciousness that
| actually comes out of behaviorism. The thought is, if I have
| a conscious experience I can then exhibit the behavior of
| talking about it. From this developed a whole paradigm of
| investigation including stuff like the research of subliminal
| images.
|
| Stanislas Dehaene's book _Consciousness and the Brain_ does a
| great job of describing this, though it 's 10 years old now.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Trouble is that you can also exhibit the behavior of
| talking about it just by being exposed to the idea, even if
| you don't have the experience. If you were never exposed to
| the idea and you started talking about it, then I'd be
| convinced you had the experience, but nobody is actually
| like that. The fact that the idea exists at all proves to
| me that at least one human somewhere had conscious
| experience, and I know there's at least one more (me), but
| that's it.
| Symmetry wrote:
| I was evidently unclear. I mean, if an image of a
| parakeet is flashed up on a screen for 100ms and you can
| say "I saw a parakeet" you were conscious of the image.
| If the image is flashed for 50 ms and you can't you
| weren't conscious of the image. In this paradigm being
| conscious is being conscious of particular things.
| wat10000 wrote:
| That seems like a fairly simple machine could be
| conscious, which is not usually how the word is used.
| Typically consciousness means that there is some ill-
| defined entity that has a subjective experience, what the
| philosophers call qualia.
| baddash wrote:
| mind = container of values
|
| consciousness = meta-attention
| card_zero wrote:
| I read it all, for a certain value of "read". It's very long, and
| heavy on examples and fascinating facts, but skimps on getting to
| the point. I enjoyed the line about plant biologists suffering
| from brain envy. The article gets better from about halfway
| through as skeptical views begin to be introduced, but eventually
| it lets go of that and turns back into lot of hand-wavy awe about
| mycorrhizal networks, and I missed what the "new proposal" is. If
| it's only saying that intelligence is an emergent property of
| connections, and could therefore emerge in swarms or societies,
| we've had that idea since at least Hofstadter and his sentient
| ant nests.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| 'Get to the point' is my primary response to the article..
| hikarudo wrote:
| > we've had that idea since at least Hofstadter and his
| sentient ant nests.
|
| A similar idea is present in Herbert Simon's 'The sciences of
| the artificial', where he describes a sentient city.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| The whole proposal can be distilled to Connections => Mind. We've
| been struggling with the causal effect, even the definition, of
| what the `=>` means in humans. Seems a long shot that the study
| of, and breathy coverage, of plant signals will illuminate much.
| Maybe it will, but I'm not holding my breath.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| Can we retitle this as there is nothing new here besides long
| musings
| mandmandam wrote:
| There is, if you read it.
|
| > Which brings us to the most striking idea -- that some types
| of electrical oscillations could mediate an experience of self.
|
| > In 2021, Hanson found that similar electrical activity --
| spontaneous low-frequency oscillations -- is evident across
| many different organisms, from E. coli to humans. She concluded
| that across a diverse range of creatures, the oscillations may
| have a shared function: constructing a single organismal whole
| from many parts.
|
| That's fascinating stuff which deserves the title (and the long
| context). 2021 is pretty damn new as far as theories of mind
| go.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| This would be a mechanism for how in sci fi they scan a
| nebula and say "signs of intelligence" or something like
| that. "Our scanners have picked up the telltale
| oscillations".
| mandmandam wrote:
| Exactly! And even a possible mechanism for the Universal
| Translator (as long as you don't Darmok your Tanagras too
| hard).
| card_zero wrote:
| Oh _that 's_ the key point. I barely noticed it. OK, well,
| this is very literally about the first steps in how _brains_
| evolved. It 's akin to theories of abiogenesis like the one
| involving clay crystals "reproducing". But it's steep to say
| this is about _minds,_ which only works if we accept the
| various parts of the article that urge us to stop being so
| egotistical and anthropocentric as to expect that a mind
| should be capable of doing something clever.
| mandmandam wrote:
| I think you missed more than the key point.
|
| > this is very literally about the first steps in how
| brains evolved
|
| Well, no; they even highlighted this section:
|
| > "Intelligence, according to some, is a biological
| function that evolved not with humans or brains but way
| back in some form to the earliest organisms, a fundamental
| biological function like respiration."
|
| It would definitely connect to how brains evolved, but the
| article and the main idea are a lot broader than that.
|
| > It's akin to theories of abiogenesis like the one
| involving clay crystals "reproducing"
|
| Well no; unless the clay crystals are producing interesting
| electrical oscillations.
|
| > it's steep to say this is about minds, which only works
| if we accept the various parts of the article that urge us
| to stop being so egotistical and anthropocentric as to
| expect that a mind should be capable of doing something
| clever.
|
| It's not clever to live for 2,000 years? And, are only
| clever people worthy of the label of having a mind? ...
| Because I know an awful lot of people with no interest in
| doing anything particularly clever.
|
| And yes, your comment is anthropocentric... Definitively
| so. Whether something has a "mind" depends on the
| definition used, and if you define that as "what humans
| call clever", then yeah you're being anthropocentric.
| card_zero wrote:
| Sure, we disagree on that, anthropocentrism, which is why
| you think the part you say they highlighted is
| significant. I think it's hot air.
|
| (I meant very loosely akin, because it's another example
| of some complex phenomenon emerging from matter.)
| rzz3 wrote:
| The right way to include all of this context would be to
| start with the lead and then back it up with the context. I
| can't read stuff written like this.
| mandmandam wrote:
| I agree that they buried the lede, but I'll defend the
| article anyway because the subject matter is still worth
| the effort imo.
| simonh wrote:
| Is there any reason why we should associate oscillations with
| any such thing though? Lots of systems oscillate. It could
| well be that oscillations are a common emergent property of
| many systems, including consciousness, rather than
| consciousness being emergent from oscillations.
|
| It seems to me that a key characteristic of consciousness is
| it's informational character. It is representational of a
| cognitive state, it's interpretive, introspective. It seems
| to me that for any system to be conscious it must at a
| minimum be generating and interpreting representational
| structures. I'm sure that's nowhere even close to being a
| sufficient criterion, but I don't see how it can't be a
| necessary one.
|
| I think that's key to subjectivity, because different systems
| can have radically different ways to represent and interpret
| even the same phenomenon they have representations of. The
| details of the representational structure, and it's network
| of associations with other representational structures in the
| system, are intrinsically tied to details of the system
| processing and interpreting the representation.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| Is this not the same thing as IIT?
| someothherguyy wrote:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7934974/
|
| Hanson, Alison. "Spontaneous electrical low-frequency
| oscillations: a possible role in Hydra and all living
| systems." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
| 376.1820 (2021): 20190763.
|
| Discussion of some of it here with M. Levin:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZPhqwrSC24
| bloomingkales wrote:
| If I were to say this is just a coincidence, how would you
| respond?
|
| If it's not:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01676.
| ..
|
| If everything is pulsing with electricity and they are
| syncing to something global ...
|
| From the paper:
|
| _Examples of biological systems that have been modeled using
| PCOs include cardiac pacemakers [2], crickets that chirp in
| unison [3], and rhythmic flashing of fireflies [4]_
| mandmandam wrote:
| > If I were to say this is just a coincidence, how would
| you respond?
|
| I'd say you probably don't know enough to say that with
| such certainty, and should probably avoid jumping to
| conclusions lest you be Dunning-Krugered.
|
| I would then encourage you to ask ChatGPT something like:
| "How are SELFOS (Spontaneous electrical low-frequency
| oscillations) different to PCOs (pulse-coupled
| oscillators)".
|
| Tl;dr - SELFOs and PCOs aren't the same.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| _I 'd say you probably don't know enough to say that with
| such certainty, and should probably avoid jumping to
| conclusions lest you be Dunning-Krugered._
|
| I'll absolutely take that.
| xg15 wrote:
| Maybe the definition of what "intelligence" is could be sharpened
| by having a look at LLMs and "traditional" computer programs and
| asking what exactly the difference between the two is.
|
| Almost all the traditional criteria of intelligence - reasoning,
| planning, decisionmaking, memory etc - are exhibited pretty
| trivially by standard computer programs. Nevertheless no one
| would think of them as "intelligent" in the sense that humans or
| animals are.
|
| On the other hand, we now have LLMs, that sent the entire tech
| world into a multi-year frenzy, precisely because they appear to
| possess that human-like intelligence.
|
| And that is even though they perform _worse_ than classical
| programs in some of the "intelligence" measures: For the first
| time, we have to worry that a computer program is "bad at math".
| They cannot reflect on past decisions and are physically unable
| to store long-term memories. And yet, we're much more likely to
| believe that an LLM is "intelligent" than a classical program.
|
| This makes me think that our formal decisions of "intelligence"
| (the ones that would also qualify fungal networks, swarms, cells,
| societies, etc) and what we intuitively look out for, are really
| two different things.
| andoando wrote:
| I wouldn't say that's true at all for traditional computer
| programs. They're doing explicitly what they are designed to
| do, there is no adaptation/learning.
| ben_w wrote:
| Code vs. data.
|
| The code needed create, train, and perform inference on a
| Transformer is quite short. How short depends on how you
| count the `import` statements in
| https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py and
| https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/sample.py
| etc.
|
| Spreadsheets performing linear regression etc., -- Do they
| learn? Sure!
|
| If you accept that Transformers adapt and learn then you must
| accept that a spreadsheet also does, because someone
| implemented GPT-2 in Excel:
| https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need
|
| Do polymorphic computer viruses adapt? Border Gateway
| Protocol? Exponential backoff? Autocomplete? And that's aside
| from any algorithmic search results or "social" feeds, which
| are nothing but that.
| andoando wrote:
| I am confused, a spreadsheet running the code for what a
| neural network does, sure. But a traditional computer
| program isn't just excel.
| szvsw wrote:
| Any matrix multiplication can be trivially unwrapped into
| a bunch of for loops with basic arithmetic. In fact, that
| is exactly what any GPU kernel ultimately does in some
| sense.
|
| What differentiates a "traditional computer program" from
| a single matmul? How about a bunch of matmuls? How about
| a bunch of matmuls with some non-linear arithmetic thrown
| in between them? And if we are adding in sampling from a
| distribution but set temperature to zero and use random
| seeds so that it is fully deterministic?
| Nevermark wrote:
| A structured program analyzing data as a graph, and
| optimizing access, is interacting with phenomenon, updating
| its working knowledge of the phenomenon, and can produce
| results that are very non-intuitive.
|
| Likewise, any symbolic mathematical system that accumulates
| theorems that speed up future work as it solves current
| tasks, seems like a high intelligence type of activity.
|
| Deep learning is "just" structured arithmetic.
|
| I think different kinds of intelligence can look quite
| different, and they will all be "structured" or "tropic" at
| their implementation levels.
|
| --
|
| Stepping away from the means, I see at least four
| "intelligence" dimensions:
|
| 1. Span: The span of novel situations for which it can create
| successful responses.
|
| 2. Efficiency: The efficiency of problem solving.
|
| I.e. When vast lookup tables, exhaustive combination
| searches, and indiscriminate logging of past experience can
| be matched instead by more efficient Boolean logic,
| arithmetic, pattern recognition and logging, we consider the
| latter more intelligent.
|
| 3. Abstraction: The degree to which solving previous
| different novel situations improves the success or efficiency
| in solving new problems. I.e. generalizable, composable
| learning.
|
| 4. Social education: Ability to communicate and absorb
| learned information from other entities.
|
| Plants, and I expect all surviving life forms, are very high
| in intelligence types 1 and 2.
|
| Adaptive nervous systems and especially brains excel at 3.
|
| Many animals, but most profoundly humans (whose languages for
| communicating are themselves actively adapted for compounding
| effects), excel at 4.
|
| Today's humans are _effectively_ more intelligent than 10,000
| year ago humans, not because of 1-3, but because of 4.
| Learning as a child to read /write, do arithmetic, understand
| zero and negative numbers, and countless other information
| processing activities and patterns, from others, profoundly
| impacts our intellectual abilities.
|
| Deep learning, as with the human species, non-trivially
| spans, and continues to improve, on all 4 types of
| intelligence.
| szvsw wrote:
| How do you define adaptation and learning? What about say, an
| autoscaler which is programmed to just track the the load for
| every hour over the last week, and use the average of the
| last 7 days at 8am to pre-emptively auto-scale? Is that
| learning and adapting?
|
| Alternatively, neural networks are also just doing explicitly
| what they are designed to do... sure there is a larger
| computational graph with lots of operations, but it's all
| deterministic... backprop is not really much different on a
| procedural level than the simple fitting algorithm that I
| outlined above, in as much as it is just a specific well-
| defined algorithm or sequence of steps designed to compute
| some parameters from data.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| What if we define adaptation and learning as the ability to
| concentrate. Our single cell ancestors would have to
| _concentrate_ and deliberately store the first memory.
| Otherwise it would have just taken in the world with its
| sensors but never do anything with it.
|
| Adapting and learning means it chose to concentrate on
| packing the world into retrievable storage.
|
| When do we not adapt and learn? When we ignore our inputs
| and do nothing with it (don't store it, don't retrieve it).
|
| In the example you gave, those classical programs cannot
| concentrate, it's a one and done.
| szvsw wrote:
| > When do we not adapt and learn? When we ignore our
| inputs and do nothing with it (don't store it, don't
| retrieve it).
|
| In the example I mentioned, the program clearly is taking
| inputs (load), storing them, querying for previous values
| that satisfy certain conditions (the value at a certain
| timestamp for each of the last 7 days), running
| computation (computing a mean), and operationalizing the
| result (pre-emptively scaling) to achieve a goal
| (avoiding having insufficient capacity) that affects the
| world (whoever interacting with the system will have
| different experiences because of the actions taken by the
| system). That seems like it satisfies your criterion to
| me.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| C'mon now, you and I know both know your program is
| discontinuous. A few null or unknown inputs that you
| didn't even consider will break it. You'll have to keep
| going in there and adding more if/else statements. Your
| program couldn't survive a 100 years without you
| debugging it.
| szvsw wrote:
| > your program is discontinuous
|
| Not sure I follow your usage of discontinuous: clearly
| the load inputs are continuous variables (albeit
| discretely sampled in time and magnitude, but I don't see
| the significance of either of those sampling frequencies,
| each of which can be chosen to be effectively arbitrarily
| small). Also don't understand the relevance of continuity
| at all since you didn't reference it in the post I
| replied to.
|
| > A few null or unknown inputs that you didn't even
| consider will break it.
|
| Null handling should be assumed to be a trivial problem
| here (ie just use the last 7 valid values for the time
| step of interest), and I'm not sure what "unknown" values
| would be here, can you give an example? I think it's safe
| to assume that the inputs have already been normalized to
| some meaningful scale as an implementation detail of the
| load sensors. Even if the telemetry scheme changes
| because the instrumentation changes or the infrastructure
| changes, so long as the instrumentation produces values
| at the same scale and the actuators can still respond to
| the outputs, the core kernel of sense/compute/actuate can
| still be left unchanged.
|
| I'm assuming that you are citing the failure to respond
| to null or unknown conditions as a lack of adaptation
| capabilities, especially as you are referencing its
| inability to last 100 years - though good luck finding
| any piece of software that can last 100 years, especially
| more robust machine learning algorithms that have to deal
| with problems like data distribution drift, hardware
| changes, etc etc - same goes with wetware (besides
| turtles?). I'm strawmanning you a little bit on the
| appeal to time though, since I assume your main point was
| to just emphasize that "it won't deal with changing
| conditions/new scenarios well" which I think is somewhat
| fair. On the other hand, I think it is safe to say that
| what I described does at least _respond_ to the world and
| in turn _affect_ it in a kind of cybernetic feedback
| loop, which includes adapting to the shifting conditions
| to meet some desired state. So maybe it would be helpful
| if you could define more precisely what you mean by
| adaptation? Not trying to be snarky, just trying to
| genuinely push you to try to make a clear definition of
| what you mean by adaptation.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| _Also don't understand the relevance of continuity at all
| since you didn't reference it in the post I replied to._
|
| A calculator is discontinuous graph/program because there
| is no point to plot when you divide by 0 (undefined).
| This is true for your classical program. Over time it
| won't know how to adapt its f(x) function to handle
| something as crazy as dividing by zero (it can never do
| it, but unless you put in an error output for that input,
| the program will never do so on its own).
|
| The belief is these AI programs will be able to make that
| adaptation. All the changes you bring up that your
| program can apparently handle are still under your
| conceptual control (you can map in your mind if this
| happens, then that happens). You can prove this to
| yourself when you read your own statement "inputs have
| already been normalized" - sure, in a world you control.
|
| I'm suggesting a world where your telemetry monitoring
| function can change into a Reddit function if need be, so
| yeah, kinda batshit. Why would it need to do that?
| Remember, we can't imagine why, that's the whole point.
|
| That's how a program could possibly live a hundred years
| in a world that is constantly changing. Your program can
| only exist in a very static and predefined world.
|
| There are some that will tell you that you are an ever-
| changing function. I try to stay out of that _simulation_
| :)
| empath75 wrote:
| You can construct a "computer" that learns and adapts with
| some matchboxes and buttons.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_and_.
| ..
|
| I wouldn't say that's more "intelligent" than, I don't know,
| a workplace scheduling system.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| intelligence is a property of the species and the property of
| the individual, even unintelligent individuals (except for very
| pronounced extremes) still have the species property of
| intelligence.
|
| The species property of intelligence encompasses stupidity.
| thelamest wrote:
| >This makes me think that our formal [definitions] of
| "intelligence" [...] and what we intuitively look out for, are
| really two different things.
|
| Just two? You can name so many more terms in this concept
| cloud, e.g.: personhood, moral agency, consciousness, self-
| awareness, processing power, wit, autonomy, feeling-and-
| experiencing capacity, and so on... We don't seem to agree on
| what's separate from what, and yes, it would be useful.
| energy123 wrote:
| But the discussion is not about intelligence, human or
| otherwise.
| naasking wrote:
| The article mentions intelligence a lot actually. It's also
| conjecture that consciousness and intelligence are unrelated.
| Qualia could be functional, and emerge naturally from the
| development of ever more sophisticated intelligence.
| raindeer2 wrote:
| The difference between traditional software and LLMs is the
| generality of their intelligence, and there are formal
| definitions of general intelligence such as
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI
|
| AIXI is a definition of the optimal agent and is hence
| uncomputable but LLMs are approximations which are approaching
| AIXI. I recommend Fridman's interview with Hutter.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| The only proof of intelligence that humans accept are where
| they are utterly dominated by the more intelligent "thing."
|
| In my experience it comes down to speed of processing and
| response
|
| Nobody views trees as intelligent because despite having
| extremely complex interdependencies with their ecology,
| including fungus and all kinds of other organisms, they don't
| move quickly or appear to respond to input (even though they
| do, just slowly).
|
| Meanwhile the mantis shrimp because of it speed, superhuman
| vision and flexibility is considered extremely intelligent.
|
| The only thing that humans will accept as more intelligent than
| them is (something) that they cannot control and can dominate
| them.
|
| This is why AI is "the things we haven't done yet" - once a
| technology is pervasive and integrated it is "just computing."
| bloomingkales wrote:
| _Nobody views trees as intelligent_
|
| Because we _take freely_ from trees. They must be stupid or
| something because they give things freely. It 's kind of why
| many employers view labor as stupid. They give their labor
| for very little. Humans dabble in arrogance.
| empath75 wrote:
| We need to break the concept of "intelligence" down into more
| well defined components, probably.
| giorgioz wrote:
| I've been thinking as well that from some perspective a human
| being isn't actually a single life but rather itself a multitude
| of separate tiny-life forms that cooperate to survive (the
| cells). The voice in our head is the emerging consciouness that
| act as a captain, it's useful for the captain to think of itself
| as one being. Now this said, I feel the article is jumping a bit
| too much on the Animism hippie bandwagon:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism
|
| Of course, there is some intelligence in any life form behaviour,
| but if you want to say that a tomato plant is intelligent than
| you need to use another word or set of words for more advanced
| life forms. Putting in the same bag a tomato plant and a dolphin
| clearly makes the word intelligence so vague it loses almost
| every practical meaning.
|
| To clarify also the part where it talks about earth being an
| organism. I've thought of this as well, the whole universe could
| be a life form, each planet and star in it a cell in its body.
| It's a possibility. Or maybe even our whole universe is just a
| cell in someone's body.
|
| It's possible, but I fear there is little science in the people
| of that article and just old fashion Animism and protect "the
| mother earth" natural spiritual thinking that has existed for
| thousands of years. Those people see the world as if they are
| druids in a fantasy novel. I see myself more as a wizard. We
| might have different opinions. I will take them seriously when
| they can LITERALLY speak with animals daily in useful manners and
| tell vines to move. Until then is just (a) Fantasy. I can summon
| electricity and fireballs (with technology), if they want to say
| they are druids they better step up their enchantments. Telling
| "sit" to a dog and then writing long articles on how dogs are so
| intelligent doesn't cut it for me.
| truculent wrote:
| While it shares some similarities with animism, it's a
| fundamentally materialist viewpoint, which puts it at odds with
| animism. Materialism is so rooted within our culture that I
| think it can be hard to fully grok alternative viewpoints.
| dimal wrote:
| The term I've seen used the most is "basal cognition". It's
| used to describe agentic problem solving behavior seen at lower
| scales and in different problem spaces where we normally have
| trouble imagining intelligence. Michael Levin's paper,
| "Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-
| Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and
| Minds"[0] is a good, readable explanation of the concept. He
| does a ton of YouTube talks explaining it as well.[1] Very
| watchable, and pretty mind-blowing. It's not wishy washy
| animism. He and his lab are doing rigorous experiments and
| finding some very unusual things.
|
| [0] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-
| neuroscience/ar...
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/StqX-LH0IN8?si=NhwMdWxBLZrghUom
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Trees giving you the very thing you need to live every minute
| wasn't enough of a compromise for you? They've quite negotiable
| with us.
|
| Gotta watch The Happening again.
| giorgioz wrote:
| To be clear, trees did not "give" us oxygen. Trees evolved
| from bushes which evolved from algaes, which evolved from
| some mono-cell life forms which are a common ancestors to us
| as well. They were shaped by natural selection, it was indeed
| awesome for them to get out of the water and start consuming
| carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They did not give us oxygen
| though, there was no high level consciousness of gifting life
| to others as your sentence is implying. This said, trees are
| awesome and we should definitely not cut them or burn them
| for no reason or pure sadism. We should though also consider
| them as a parte of the environment where live. If we need
| them and there is plenty and there aren't other constraints
| we can use them to build things. Having too much carbon
| dioxide built up in the atmosphere is a constraint very
| important to value. We don't want to literally destroy our
| home. I can keep this thoughts rationally in my brain without
| having to come up with metaphors where the giant rock we
| happened to be on is a "mother" nurturing us. The earth is
| not our "mother", we evolved here because simply all other
| rocks did not have the right conditions to sustain life. The
| universe is mostly a harsh and cold place, we should
| save/improve/increase the places that can be home. I feel
| though the people that start to lean into Animism are just
| not very scientific, they mean well, but they won't learn all
| the technology tools that could help me preserve our home
| planet more effectively.
|
| Ending on a positive note, many scientists both love nature
| and are rationally scientific (rather than romantic). All the
| awesome work being done with using LLM to speak with whales
| and recognize better dogs emotions and pain levels is very
| inspiring.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| It's not that we're unscientific, it's just that we're
| putting science aside unless it corroborates things. It's
| totally a terrible process, there's no evidence.
|
| Some people over time cannot put down the fact that there's
| just way too many coincidences. If you just pile up what it
| took for you to be here (let's include your one in a
| million chance of out swimming the other sperm along with a
| perfect planet, possibly perfect parents, list goes on), I
| think you'd at least agree it's one miracle after another.
|
| I can sit here and measure the anger on your face based on
| the metric of how red your face is but I'll never know why
| you are angry. You can tell me, but even then, is it true?
| That's the issue with science, that measuring and
| collecting observations won't reveal the true nature. So it
| must be put aside, at least to investigate the other
| possibility.
|
| I don't see how people aren't open minded about there being
| more than a clinical understanding of this experience.
|
| From my other comment:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167
| 6...
|
| Is it so hard to believe there is a global frequency?
| timewizard wrote:
| You perceive one voice and give it a position of authority.
|
| What if it isn't?
|
| What if it's many voices and they compete for control?
| Jordan_Pelt wrote:
| I'm probably a crackpot, but I'm convinced it's the other way
| around--matter emerges from mind. The only refutation I'm
| familiar with is Samuel Johnson kicking a rock, which I don't
| find very persuasive.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| The interesting thing about mind (as far as I'm concerned) isn't
| intelligence, but consciousness.
|
| Intelligence isn't well defined. According to our current
| understanding of physics, everything is cause and effect, which
| throws free will out the window, so what do we even mean by
| intelligence? Is it just when chains of cause and effect become
| so complex we can't understand them any more? And if so, why does
| consciousness even exist at all?
|
| The only consistent theory of consciousness I'm aware of is
| panpsychism, which seems very unsatisfying.
|
| I guess the other option is to divorce consciousness from
| physical master entirely, but then we have kind of opened
| ourselves up to almost any kind of woo.
|
| It really is a hard problem.
| messe wrote:
| > The only consistent theory of consciousness I'm aware of is
| panpsychism, which seems very unsatisfying.
|
| Integrated Information Theory seems _interesting_ , at least,
| but far from flawless. Like panpsychism though, I don't think
| it's falsifiable.
| skissane wrote:
| > Integrated Information Theory
|
| To me, it seems like a bit of a trick - take a philosophical
| question, propose an answer, stuff some mathematics into the
| answer, maybe even a few minor empirical predictions, make
| people think those added bits make the answer more likely to
| be correct and more respectable than competing answers which
| don't do that - I don't think that actually works though
|
| > Like panpsychism though, I don't think it's falsifiable.
|
| Well, I don't think any theory in this area is falsifiable.
| Either you give up demanding falsifiability or embrace
| agnosticism (we don't know and we maybe never will)
|
| Maybe give up on falsifiability, since presenting it as an
| absolute must-have is self-defeating (the idea that
| falsifiability is a must-have is itself unfalsifiable)
| skissane wrote:
| > According to our current understanding of physics, everything
| is cause and effect,
|
| We don't know whether the apparent indeterminism of QM
| ultimately reduces to determinism or not. It depends on which
| interpretation of QM you prefer, and none of them has any
| strong empirical support
|
| > which throws free will out the window,
|
| As well as assuming deterministic QM, you also assume
| incompatibilism. Reject incompatibilism and you can still have
| free will even if physical reality turns out to be 100%
| deterministic
|
| > so what do we even mean by intelligence?
|
| People disagree greatly as to what "intelligence" means, but
| this is the first time I've seen anyone suggest that the issue
| turns on free will. Usually people present "definition of
| intelligence" and "does free will exist?" as questions having a
| significant degree of orthogonality
|
| > Is it just when chains of cause and effect become so complex
| we can't understand them any more?
|
| Mediaeval philosophers commonly viewed intelligence or
| intellect as a power, the power to engage in conceptual
| thought. A "power" is a casual concept - it is the possibility
| of causing something - but possibility, not necessity. It is
| orthogonal to the question of free will, so long as our
| position on free will enables us to meaningfully speak of
| "things we could have done but never actually did", "thoughts
| we could have thought but never actually thought"...
|
| It was our dog's birthday the other day. She's a smart dog, but
| she's never going to understand the concept of a birthday...
| she enjoyed some special treats but she'll never understand why
| she got them on that occasion. She has intelligence, but not
| the specifically conceptual sort of intelligence mediaeval
| philosophers were talking about. And free will doesn't enter
| into that
|
| > And if so, why does consciousness even exist at all?
|
| I think intelligence and consciousness are distinct issues.
| Consciousness is having subjective experiences; intelligence is
| having thought processes of a certain kind. One entity might
| have consciousness without intelligence, another might have
| intelligence without consciousness.
|
| > The only consistent theory of consciousness I'm aware of is
| panpsychism, which seems very unsatisfying.
|
| I don't think the competitors to panpsychism are necessarily
| inconsistent. Of course, if you reject panpsychism, you need a
| non-trivial criterion to decide what is conscious - and people
| will ask you to justify that criterion - and maybe all you can
| say is that it is axiomatic - and I get why proposing axioms
| can feel unsatisfying, but it isn't strictly speaking
| inconsistent, assuming your axioms are consistent with each
| other. By the Munchausen trilemma, every quest for
| justification must end in either infinite regress, circularity,
| or axioms - and if axioms feel unsatisfying, infinite regress
| and circularity are just as unsatisfying - so maybe we are just
| doomed to feel unsatisfied.
|
| > I guess the other option is to divorce consciousness from
| physical master entirely, but then we have kind of opened
| ourselves up to almost any kind of woo.
|
| I don't know what you mean by "divorce... entirely"-do dualists
| (of whatever kind) do that? Do idealists? From my own idealist
| viewpoint, I reject the claim that idealism necessarily entails
| "almost any kind of woo", and I think the thought that it does
| relies on misunderstanding or misrepresenting idealism, or else
| confusing certain versions of it which maybe _do_ do that with
| other versions which don't
| red75prime wrote:
| I'm happy with "Consciousness is a platonic form of self-
| reflective information processing thanks to all simplifications
| this processing has to do to reflect the messy physical
| processes underlying the information processing."
| skissane wrote:
| Articles like this annoy me: it seems to want to comment on
| philosophy of mind, but shows zero awareness of the classic
| debates in that discipline - materialism vs idealism vs dualism
| vs neutral monism, and the competing versions of each of those,
| e.g. substance dualism vs hylemorphic dualism, eliminativist vs
| reductionist/emergentist materialism, property dualism,
| epiphenomenalism, panpsychism, Chalmers' distinctions between
| different idealisms, such as realist vs anti-realist and micro-
| idealism vs macro-idealism...
|
| Add to that the typical journalistic fault of forcing one to read
| through paragraph after paragraph of narrative before actually
| explaining what the thesis they are presenting is. I'd much
| prefer to read a journal article where they state their central
| thesis upfront
| protocolture wrote:
| I bailed 10 words in and came to the comments to see if the
| article was worth reading. Thanks for confirming its a skip.
| felizuno wrote:
| So many adjectives... and "radical" in the title is a doozy
| considering this article is essentially a stoner summary of
| LeDoux's "Deep History of Ourselves" with the science
| replaced with thesaurus suggestions.
| rramadass wrote:
| The gp is wrong. They are just being supercilious with a word
| salad of their own which is best ignored.
|
| The article is pretty good making you rethink all your
| preexisting concepts of Mind/Intelligence based on what we
| know from Biology today. It is not an article on various
| theories of Mind but on how scientific research (conveyed
| through pointers from various researchers) is advancing
| rapidly on so many fronts that we are forced to confront our
| very fundamental beliefs.
|
| Absolutely worth reading at least a couple of times.
| metalmangler wrote:
| I held out a bit longer, and then skimmed, but started to
| become offended by the whole ,thing, but couldnt be bothered
| to be that annoyed by so many different things. That said I
| am very much into bieng outside in the company of many
| animals, working with them, and just bieng in wild
| environments, but language fails, when it comes to describing
| how species interact, and in the end, we cant describe our
| own mental proceseses in a clear, intellible by all, way.
| There is yet to be a genius of the mind, where the definition
| of genius is,:an idea that once explained, everyone else goes
| "of course" My main issue is that these sort of philisophical
| projects, reek, of money and hidden agenda's, and shade very
| quickly into, policy decisions, and quasi religious
| beurocratic powers.
| mcswell wrote:
| As a linguist, article like this also annoy me by the claims
| that "X [whales, dolphins, parrots, crows...] uses language."
| We have known since 1957 that there is a hierarchy of
| "grammars", with finite state "languages" being near the
| bottom, and transformational grammars at the top. Human
| languages are certainly at a minimum at the context free phrase
| structure grammar level. My point is that by using the word
| "language" loosely, almost anything (DNA codons, for example)
| can be considered to be a language. But few if any other
| animals can get past the finite state level--and perhaps none
| gets even that far.
|
| And an article or book that uses the word "communicate" is even
| more annoying, since "communicate" seems to mean virtually
| anything.
|
| End of my rant...
| ggm wrote:
| This. it nicely encapsulates why AI aficionados use words
| like "hallucinate" which become secret clues to belief around
| the G part of AGI. If it's just a coding mistake, how can the
| machine be "alive" but if I can re-purpose "hallucinate" as a
| term of art, I can also make you, dear reader, embue the AI
| with more and more traits of meaning which go to "it's alive"
|
| It's language Jim, but more as Chomsky said. or maybe
| Chimpsky.
|
| I 100% agree with your rant. This time fly likes your arrow.
| crooked-v wrote:
| The correct term isn't "hallucinate", it's "bullshit". I
| mean that in the casual sense of "a bullshitter" - every
| LLM is a moderately knowleable bullshitter that never stops
| talking (In a literal sense - even the end of responses is
| just a magic string from the LLM that cues the containing
| system to stop the LLM, and if not stopped like that it
| would just keep going after the "end".) The remarkable
| thing is that we ever get correct responses out of them.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| You could probably s/LLM/human/ in your comment.
| Essentially all intelligent life is a pachinko machine
| that takes a bunch of sensory inputs, bounces electricity
| around a number of neurons, and eventually lands them as
| actions, which further affect sensory inputs. In between
| there may be thoughts in there, like 'I've no more to
| say', or 'Shut your mouth before they figure you out'.
| The question is, how is it that humans are _not_ a
| deterministic computer? And if the answer is that
| actually they _are_ , then what differs between LLMs and
| actual intelligence?
| whycome wrote:
| There's something meta about your comment and my
| reaction. Metaphor. The pachinko metaphor seems so apt it
| made me pause and probably internalize it in some way.
| It's now added to my brains dataset specifically about
| LLMs. It's an interesting moment to be hyper aware of in
| the context that you're also describing (definition of
| intelligence). Far out.
| wnmurphy wrote:
| > Essentially all intelligent life is a pachinko machine
| that takes a bunch of sensory inputs, bounces electricity
| around a number of neurons, and eventually lands them as
| actions, which further affect sensory inputs.
|
| This metaphor of the pachinko machine (or Plinko game) is
| exactly how I explain LLMs/ML to laypersons. The process
| of training is the act of discovering through trial and
| error the right settings for each peg on the board, in
| order to consistently get the ball to land in the right
| spot-ish.
| wruza wrote:
| It's survival in reality. Bullshit doesn't survive (at
| least on the lower levels of existense, corporate and
| cultural bs easily does) and that's why people are so
| angry at it. We hate absurdity because using absurd
| results yields failures and loses time or resources that
| were important to stay fed and warm.
|
| People also can lose your time or resources (first line
| support, women's shopping, etc) and the reaction is the
| same.
|
| I don't know why there's still no LLM with a constant
| reality feedback loop yet. Maybe there's a set of
| technical issues that prevents it. But until this
| happens, _pre_ trained AI will bullshit itself and
| everyone cause there's nothing that could hit it on the
| head.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Well in some ways it does, some insect species use
| various strategies to fool other insect species, such as
| a special type of caterpillar that does so against ant
| colonies, to live at their expense.
| foolswisdom wrote:
| A la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit.
| taneq wrote:
| > This time fly likes your arrow.
|
| And fruit flies like bananas. :)
| umanwizard wrote:
| I'm a linguistics layman, but can't you make an even stronger
| claim about human language? Apparently there are certain
| constructs in Swiss German that are not context-free.
| skissane wrote:
| From another viewpoint, all human language is only at the
| finite-state level - a finite state automaton can recognise
| a language from any level in the Chomsky hierarchy provided
| you constrain all sentences to a finite maximum length,
| which of course you can - no human utterance will ever be
| longer than a googolplex symbols, since there aren't enough
| atoms in the observable universe to encode such an
| utterance
|
| Really the way people use the Chomsky hierarchy in practice
| (both in linguistics and computer science) is "let's agree
| to ignore the finitude of language" - a move borrowed from
| classical mathematics
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| This is why the classical notion of competence and
| performance in linguistics is important. We describe
| programming languages as being Turing-complete even if
| every computer is always in practice finite because, in
| principle, it could be run on a computer with more memory
| or whatever. Likwise, it seems that language is bounded
| by language external facts about memory not intrinsic
| facts about how language is processed.
| scotty79 wrote:
| It's philosophy. It doesn't concern itself with facts or
| knowledge.
| teekert wrote:
| As a scientist, articles like this also annoy me. Because it,
| right off the bat, assumes that there are no degrees in
| consciousness. Just because we don't experience those
| degrees, and animals can't convey what they feel through
| language, we assume it is "emergent", or "suddenly there". I
| think we are too caught up in believing that consciousness
| must be something really special or some magic discontinuity
| of spacetime.
|
| I don't believe it is. Somewhere inside our brain there is
| some perception of self related to the outside world. So we
| can project self into the future using information from the
| now and make better choices and survive better ("Information
| is that which allows you [who is in possession of that
| information] to make predictions with accuracy better than
| chance"- Chris Adami). Why do we need all these difficult
| words?
|
| I bet animals also have some image of self inside there
| somewhere, and make decisions based on simulated scenarios.
| Perhaps to a lesser degree, perhaps because of a lack of
| language they experience it in a different way? Not being
| able to label any of the steps in the process... Who knows?
|
| Perhaps when we get to simulate a whole brain we can get some
| idea. But then there is the ethics. We do attribute great
| value to organisms that have this image of self.
| IsTom wrote:
| > assumes that there are no degrees in consciousness
|
| And I don't get why, it seems to me quite self evident that
| you yourself can experience reduced-consciousness states,
| be it being half-asleep or quite drunk.
| ffwd wrote:
| The problem for me is that we haven't conceptualized what
| we mean by "reduced" consciousness. Reduced in what way?
|
| If we create an analogy with audio - audio can have 2
| properties: frequencies and volume. Frequencies are the
| content of the audio and volume is how "present" the
| sound is.
|
| Well the same could be applied to consciousness. When we
| say reduced consciousness do we mean that the mind
| experiences less content (frequencies) or do we mean that
| all the frequencies are there but at a reduced volume?
| IsTom wrote:
| Personal experience would tell me "both" - less complex
| thoughts with less intensity and with worse SNR.
| wruza wrote:
| _Reduced in what way?_
|
| In any.
|
| C. is a complex thing, and these can fail to lower level
| in myriads of ways. You have to align millions* of things
| to make it work. The biological (in our case) nature of
| it allows for some slack rather than immediate breakdown,
| so there are thousands of parameters to play with.
|
| * numbers arbitrary
| taneq wrote:
| And these aren't even generally low-functioning or
| undesirable! The much-sought-after 'state of flow' is
| defined in part by a lack of self-aware consciousness.
| garden_hermit wrote:
| tbf, many materialists dislike the "degrees of
| consciousness" idea because a theory that posits
| "consciousness is on a spectrum" is one that starts to
| resemble panpsychism, which they consider magical woo.
| readyplayeremma wrote:
| The article's real contribution is in highlighting evidence
| of complex behavior in living systems that often get
| excluded from definitions of "intelligence". In doing so,
| it invites deeper philosophical reflection, even if it
| doesn't mount that reflection itself.
| vidarh wrote:
| Add to this that a lot of people presume that _peoples_
| experience is the same.
|
| E.g. I have aphantasia - I don't picture things in my
| "inner eye". Through discussions with people about that, a
| lot of people described own differences from the perceived
| norm, and it is clear a not insignificant numbers also have
| other differences, such as not thinking consciously in
| words.
|
| A lot of people then tend to express disbelief, and
| question the whole thing on the basis of a belief that if
| people's inner life does not match theirs, people couldn't
| possibly be conscious or reason.
|
| People make far too many assumptions about the universality
| of their own experience of consciousness.
| torginus wrote:
| I'm curious about aphantasia - if I asked you to draw a
| floorplan of your home/office etc. would you not be able
| to do it?
|
| If you could wouldn't that involve you imagining what the
| building looks like from the inside and how the rooms are
| connected together?
|
| Or would do it some other way?
|
| (I'm assuming you could do it, since if you couldn't I
| think that would be a majorly debiliating condition
| rather than just some amusing fact)
| vidarh wrote:
| Yes, in fact my ability to draw from memory places I've
| seen is, if anything, from experience, substantially
| above average. However, when I draw from memory, my
| drawings do tend to be more stylized.
|
| I can "imagine" what a building looks like, but I can't
| _see_ it. Even our language makes this hard to describe,
| and the reason why I didn 't realise that this isn't how
| other people do it, because most of our language for
| remember how something looks uses terms that implies we
| see them, so I just assumed until a few years ago (and I
| turn 50 this year) that that was just a metaphor to
| everyone else too.
|
| How do you imagine (there's that word again...) blind
| people remember places they can't see?
|
| To me, the notion that I'd need to "see" what the
| building looks like to draw it is bizarre because I know
| where everything is in relation to each other, and their
| shapes, so why would I need to see it?
|
| EDIT: increasingly, and in part drive by split-brain
| experiments, I tend to think that a whole lot of what we
| see as our conscious decision-making, are instead shallow
| retroactive attempts by parts of the brain at
| rationalising decisions largely already taken
| autonomously into a cohesive self/ego.
| teekert wrote:
| You have probably heard this before but this is really
| bizarre and fascinating to someone like me who writes
| difficult words correctly because I see them (visualize
| the word) in my head and judge if they look right. It is
| like it all has to be visual for it to make any sense.
|
| As a molecular biologist I often deal with minute
| quantities of substances in small containers, but I just
| picture them there, the molecules, what happens to them
| as I dilute a sample or add some enzyme. Reading a book
| is like watching it play out.
|
| I have a colleague who is also much more text oriented. I
| really wondered how she can function without seeing all
| the departments in an overview and the connections
| between them, and how governance structures overlap with
| those departments, etc. For me it's a lot to hold in,
| overwhelming at times. But she's absolutely great in
| these types of things, just masterful, very structured as
| well. Her mind must be very alien to me, I always wonder
| what her experience of life looks like (or not "looks
| like", apparently... But how it _is_ to her...)
| jarkami wrote:
| I am largely in the same boat -- I've taken to telling
| people that I think very well _spatially_ (that is my
| primary method of thought) but not at all visually. I am
| much better than most people seem to be when it comes to
| tasks involving space, direction, and so on -- basically
| abstractions of reality, not images of it. But if you
| want me to actually visualize an apple in my head? Yeah,
| I can 't do that at all. Not even a "stylized" apple.
|
| If you wanted me to draw an abstract floorplan of my
| house, or the layout of my town, I can do that easily. I
| can navigate an extended road trip unassisted by simply
| looking at a map ahead of time and mentally storing an
| abstraction of where I need to go. But if you wanted,
| say, an _image_ of my house, or the main intersection in
| the middle of town, or anything like that -- I 'm no
| good. I can't "see" it, and I would not be able to draw
| anything remotely accurate.
|
| To circle back around too your "imagine" vs. "see"
| problem -- my response to the often-referenced "imagine a
| ball rolling on a table" exercise often elicits some
| confusion from people. I can _imagine_ a ball rolling on
| a table just fine. What color is the ball, though? It has
| no color. What size is it? It has no size. It is just "a
| ball", in the abstract -- its only property is shape
| (spherical), which is ultimately all that is necessary
| for _imagining_ rather than _seeing_. If you wanted me to
| visualize a large red ball on a green table, though, that
| 's beyond me.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| When I close my eyes (and especially if I rub them when
| they are closed) I see a grey/brown empty space with
| letters and numbers inscribed everywhere within the
| field, although the letters and numbers are oriented
| randomly and not from any script or language I'm familiar
| with.
|
| Also fifty. Realized this when I was about seven and it
| hasn't materially changed since. I have no problem
| drawing things like blueprints of my house but when it
| comes to more curvy objects I'm a terrible artist.
| whymeogod wrote:
| > We do attribute great value to organisms that have this
| image of self.
|
| My impression is we attribute great value to organisms that
| can effectively push back against us.
|
| respect based on force.
|
| Not saying I want things to be that way.
| wordpad25 wrote:
| Does that mean LLMs can already be considered conscious at
| some level since they are able to reason and self reflect?
| gizajob wrote:
| Yes, it's such a waffle. Instead of the unnecessary title "A
| Radical New Proposal For How Mind Emerges From Matter" - a
| more appropriate one would be "On plant intelligence (and
| possible consciousness)" given the entirety of the article is
| devoted to plant intelligence. We don't have anything
| radical, nor is it very deeply related to the mind/matter
| problem. If an author can't get something simple like that
| correct, then they don't deserve our time. Shame one has to
| get paragraphs deep into the article to find out we have a
| spiel about plants, not about mind.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| Here lies the promised land: the possibility of a precise and
| concise nomenklatura that assigns each thing a unique name,
| perfectly matching its unique position in the world, derived
| from the complete determination of the laws governing what it
| is and how it interacts with others. The laws of what is
| shall dictate how things ought to be named. What a motivating
| carrot--let's keep following these prescriptions, for surely,
| in the end, the harmony of their totality will prove they
| were objective descriptions all along. Above all, let's not
| trust our own linguistic ability to distinguish between the
| subtle nuances hidden within the same word, or at least,
| let's distrust the presence of this ability in our fellow
| speakers. That should be enough to justify our intervention
| in the name of universality itself.
|
| Imagine this: language is an innate ability that all speakers
| have mastered, yet none are experts in--unless they are also
| linguists. And what, according to experts, is the source of
| such mastery? A rigid set of rules capturing the state of a
| language (langue) at a given time, in a specific geographical
| area, social class, etc., from which all valid sentences
| (syntactically and beyond) can supposedly be derived. Yet
| this framework never truly explains--or at best relegates to
| the background--our ability to understand (or recognize that
| we have not understood) and to correct (or request
| clarification) when ill-formed sentences are thrown at us
| like wrenches into a machine. Parsers work this way: they
| reject errors, bringing communication to an end. They do not
| ask for clarification, they do not correct their
| interlocutors, let alone engage in arguments about usage,
| which, under the effect of rational justification, hardens
| into "rules."
|
| Giving in to the temptation of an objective description of
| language as an external reality--especially when aided by
| formal languages--makes us lose sight of this fundamental
| origin. In the end, we construct yet another norm, one that
| obscures our ability to account for normativity itself,
| starting with out own.
|
| Perhaps this initial concealment is its very origin.
| globnomulous wrote:
| Is there a philosopher or philosophical school that identifies
| intelligence as a being's capacity to deploy a capability
| towards some end with intention? If so, what is this called? Or
| who is associated with it?
|
| Edit: I'd expect this thinker/school also to argue that the
| being needs to be able to experience its intention as an
| intention (as opposed to a dumb, inarticulate urge); in other
| words, intelligence would require an agent to be aware of
| itself as an intelligent agent.
|
| Edit 2: I strongly recommend Peter Watts' _Blindsight_ to
| anybody who 's on the market for sci fi that deals with these
| issues.
| jcgl wrote:
| This is _not_ about defining intelligence. But it's about
| supposing intentionality as a tool for explaining the
| behavior of a thing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Agree. This last couple years of AI has been a wellspring of
| people/articles re-inventing philosophy, like all these
| subjects haven't been debated and studied for a few hundred
| years. At least acknowledge them, even if we aren't going to
| try and build on what has come before.
| dsjoerg wrote:
| Yes.
|
| The article is really about conceptual framing -- how clinging
| to outdated or vague definitions prevents progress in
| understanding biological and cognitive processes.
|
| People keep forcing everything into the vague, overloaded
| concept of "intelligence" instead of just using the right terms
| for the phenomena they're studying. If we simply describe
| behaviors in terms of adaptation, computation, or decision-
| making, the whole debate evaporates
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/67c07325-3140-8007-8177-c56a89b257...
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Wait. If words fail to capture the truth, why do we keep making
| more words about it?
| NoGravitas wrote:
| So, I think you' are wrong about this: the article is
| discussing a change in perspective that would largely make the
| classic debates in philosophy of mind irrelevant in the same
| way that heliocentrism made classic debates within the
| geocentric paradigm (about epicycles, and such) irrelevant.
| Highly worthwhile, if insufficiently in-depth.
| photonthug wrote:
| It seems like this might be missing or just talking past
| parents point. Sure, new paradigms might always make old
| lines of research irrelevant. But otoh, something like
| idealism vs materialism vs dualism can't just be dismissed
| because the categories are exhaustive! So new paradigms might
| shed light on it but can't just cancel out the question. So
| yes, to parents point some stuff is fundamental, and if
| you're not acquainted with the fundamentals then it's hard to
| discuss the deep issues coherently. It's possible I guess
| that a plant biologist or a journalist or a ML engineer for
| that matter is going to crack the problem wide open with new
| lines of inquiry that are completely ignorant about
| historical debates in theory of mind, but in that case it
| will still probably take someone else to explain what /how
| that actually happened.
| SilasX wrote:
| I agree in spirit, that it's possible for a field to be so
| lost that a new paradigm fundamentally obviates it and frees
| you from having to recapitulate the entire thicket. But
| still, a minimal test for whether you've _actually_ obviated
| them would be whether you can double back and _show_ how the
| new paradigm resolves /makes them look naive and confused.
| And so I'd expect an author to do that for at least one such
| school of thought as part of their exposition.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Just read an interesting sci-fi novel grappling with this
| question very directly - Blindsight by Peter Watts, if anyone is
| interested.
| red75prime wrote:
| The problem with sci-fi and this matter is that the author can
| portray anything that suits his/her ideas. Can Rorschach exist
| as described? Who knows.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Watts also believes in the Ganzfeld effect, as per _Starfish_
| , yeah so his beliefs in the mind should definitely be taken
| with a grain of salt.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I found it fascinating how this discussion dovetails with the
| discussion around free will.
|
| In both cases, defining the actual thing under discussion is
| hard. If you can accurately predict a decision in advance, is
| that "free will"? If an organism reacts to a stimulus in an
| appropriate manner, is that "intelligence"?
|
| In both cases, we're complex chemical organisms doing all of this
| with complex chemistry. If we rule out souls and spirits and
| similar, then it's just chemistry.
|
| If we're following a predefined set of chemical rules in response
| to a set of stimuli, then how is that "free willed" or
| "intelligent"? The arbitrary line between tropism and
| intelligence seems very arbitrary.
|
| But on the other had, we are made of meat. We experience free
| will and intelligence. We think, and make decisions, seemingly
| unrestricted by the method we use to do that. We are clearly
| intelligent, and clearly make decisions that we are apparently
| free to make.
| anon291 wrote:
| One's observations of one's own agency is really the only thing
| one can be assured of. And this is where these arguments that
| seek to reduce intelligence to purely mechanistic processes
| breaks down. For sure, everything the article is saying is
| true, and indeed, the system could be classified as
| intelligent, but this is a wholly different question from
| 'agency' or 'free will'. Even exceptionally dumb people have
| free will, and exceptionally intelligent computers (ChatGPT,
| DeepSeek, et al) have no free agency.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| > Even exceptionally dumb people have free will
|
| "Free will" does not exist because the world is
| deterministic. In other words, if you have made a decision,
| you couldn't have made any other decision, so there wasn't
| any choice in the first place. A persons IQ has nothing to do
| with this.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| One may object that at the quantum level, the world really
| is nondeterministic. Epicurus also argued this over 2000
| years ago - that sometimes atoms "swerved" unpredictably in
| their movements, accounting for free will. Of course, the
| counterpoint to this argument is that randomness is not
| free will any more than determinism is; neither offers any
| space for agency as something that's causal rather than
| just experienced.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Is there evidence that quantum mechanics is not
| deterministic?
| anon291 wrote:
| Yes, the entirety of the math behind it which says that
| various quantities are unknowable except as a
| distribution of probabilities. Various experiments have
| shown these formulas to be 'real', as in, the alternative
| deterministic version is untenable unless you make new
| and equally disturbing assumptions.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Sorry if I'm being ignorant, but let's say you measured a
| qubit and it collapsed to a certain state. Now,
| hypothetically, if you rewind the time and re-measure it,
| would it collapse to a different state? I think it
| wouldn't, and in this sense it is deterministic.
| ianburrell wrote:
| You would see a different state. Quantum mechanics is
| random. It is possible that there is hidden state that
| determines the outcome, but there is Bell's Theorem that
| limits local hidden state and it has been tested by
| experiment.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| I define deterministic as only having one possible
| outcome, predictable or not.
|
| Here is a proof that quantum mechanics is deterministic:
|
| Let there be a time `t`.
|
| Let there be a qubit `q`.
|
| At the time of `t`, we measured the qubit `q`, and the
| qubit `q` collapsed to the state of `a`.
|
| At the time of `t`, we measured the qubit `q`, and the
| qubit `q` collapsed to the state of `b`.
|
| `a` equals `b`.
|
| Quantum mechanics is deterministic.
| infinitifall wrote:
| You haven't defined this property you call "agency". How then
| can you definitely determine whether you posses it or that
| someone else doesn't? The only thing I can be assured of is
| my own existence.
| anon291 wrote:
| Well agency is the feeling I have of being able to impact
| the world. I cannot know if you have it but I have
| extrapolated that based on my impression of you. For all I
| know, I'm the only one to exist.
| LiquidHelium wrote:
| This is an argument for anecdote so feel free to ignore me
| but if you meditate for long enough or take certain
| substances you can experience that the conscious experience
| we are having doesn't actually control things in the way we
| think it does - you don't actually think your thoughts, you
| just observe them, like we don't control the sounds we hear -
| and same with everything else we do. The "only thing one can
| be assured of" is the experience, not the control of the
| experience.
|
| This is completely contradicted by the fact I could talk
| about that experience, which does imply some control from the
| observer to the physical world. Which makes the whole thing
| paradoxical. The only way I can square it is with my
| religious beliefs.
| Miraltar wrote:
| I feel like what you are describing is like letting go of
| the wheel while driving. Then the car does its own thing
| but that doesn't mean you don't have control. It's just
| that you decided (or sometimes were forced) to let go. I
| agree that we're never fully in control but I don't think
| we're simple observers either.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| > One's observations of one's own agency is really the only
| thing one can be assured of.
|
| Can one? One of the most disturbing short stories I've ever
| read is "Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death" by Alice
| Sheldon (writing as James Tiptree). It is the first-person
| narrative of an unusually self-aware member of a non-
| technological intelligent species trying to make a life
| different from "the plan", the species' instincts, in the
| face of an oncoming slow-motion multigenerational
| catastrophe. His efforts end up, all for contextually
| rational and agentive reasons, reiterating his species
| instinctual lifecycle.
|
| My takeaway from that, from other readings, and from self
| reflection, is that we are puppets that may or may not become
| aware of our strings; but if we cut them, we die.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Intelligence is the ability of a system to make observations and
| adjust itself based on them (like our brain is changing while
| learning or our environment is changing with technological
| progress). It's definitely not binary state. If we put the
| internal complexity of the system on one axis and external
| complexity (what can be observed and meaningfully processed) on
| another axis, there's a circle on the plane representing what
| humans perceive as being intelligent. It intersects with a few
| other species so we do think now that they are intelligent.
| Everything else outside that circle is either too primitive or
| too complex for us, so we do not see e.g. plants as intelligent,
| but we also may not recognize aliens as intelligent because their
| existence is too complex for us to even notice it. Humans
| unlocked evolutionary path not based on DNA, so we evolve much
| quicker now through science and culture. Our circle is thus
| expanding and we start realizing how more primitive systems think
| and create new intelligent systems.
| tweaqslug wrote:
| The article went straight from mind to intelligence before the
| first paragraph; admitting defeat before making a move.
| Intelligence is still riding the wave of an evolutionary hype
| cycle. Mind, on the other hand, is some supremely useful stuff.
| scotty79 wrote:
| New proposal for how digestion emerges from the stomach.
| myflash13 wrote:
| Here's an interesting thought experiment. Take any definition of
| consciousness or intelligence that is not based on biological
| components. For example "reacts to stimuli, exhibits anger". You
| can apply that definition to other entities like the United
| States. Does the United States react to stimuli (i.e. invasion)
| and exhibit anger? Yes (e.g. Pearl Harbor). Therefore the United
| States is conscious?
|
| If a person argues that an LLM is conscious or intelligent based
| on how it responds, is the United States conscious or
| intelligent?
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I think the US is conscious.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| > Therefore the United States is conscious?
|
| Assuming the United States react to stimuli and exhibit anger,
| and assuming that the definition of being conscious is reacting
| to stimuli and exhibiting anger, yes, the United States are
| conscious.
| svantana wrote:
| This is one of the themes of the classic 1979 book "Godel,
| Escher, Bach".
| cjfd wrote:
| One part of consciousness is the 'stream of consciousness'.
| I.e., a single-threaded, if you will, sequence of observations
| and/or language that is extracted from all the parallel
| processing that is happening in the brain. The US does not have
| that. If there were one single news broadcast that all people
| were listening to all the time and were basing their action on,
| one might start considering that the US is conscious.
|
| Also, considering who the current president is, the US is quite
| the opposite of intelligent.
| timewizard wrote:
| If I break a bone. It heals itself. Are my bones intelligent?
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > "reacts to stimuli, exhibits anger".
|
| Nitroglycerin comes to mind.
| skissane wrote:
| There's a great philosophy paper making this argument:
| Schwitzgebel, Eric. "If Materialism Is True, the United States
| Is Probably Conscious." Philosophical Studies: An International
| Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, vol. 172, no.
| 7, 2015, pp. 1697-721.
| https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious...
|
| Discussed previously on HN:
|
| July 2015 (210 comments):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9905847
|
| Feb 2021 (78 comments):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217834
|
| Dec 2023 (1 comment):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38814769
| nilslindemann wrote:
| Mind emerges from matter? I thought it was the other way around.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Reminds me of concepts like a Metasystem Transition
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasystem_transition or Global
| Brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain
| ilaksh wrote:
| Maybe the increased status management, self pattern persistence,
| or general problem solving abilities of intelligence comes from
| processes that integrate data from multiple colony members and
| use the integration, broadcast and storage of information over a
| series of immediate steps and long time frames to synthesize
| concepts and plans at a higher level than individuals can manage.
|
| But the intelligent work is in the connections, exchange, and
| integration of information.
|
| I think that security for human groups should be thought of in
| this context. Many strong communication links or maybe a holistic
| network are required for preventing sub-colonies from becoming
| "other".
| causality0 wrote:
| _And they believe that if we can bring ourselves to dramatically
| reconsider what we think we know about it, we will end up with a
| much better concept of how to restabilize the balance between
| human and nonhuman life amid an ecological omnicrisis that
| threatens to permanently alter the trajectory of every living
| thing on Earth._
|
| Do we really have to resort to total bullshit claims like this in
| order to make people care about this subject? Knowing what is and
| is not intelligent has fuck-all to do with not destroying the
| environment we as a species rely on for survival. The people and
| forces at work care not one whit. You could prove that chickens
| can write symphonies and it would make no difference.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| What is the god damned problem with writers today?
|
| > From a snarl of roots that grip dry, shallow soil, the knobbly
| trunk of an ancient olive tree twisted into a surprisingly lush
| crown of dense, silvery-green leaves. Far above, the
| retrofuturistic pattern of a geodesic dome framed the blue sky
| outside. Dan Ryan considered the tree: "It's probably close to
| 1,800 years old."
|
| Why do articles always have to start this way? These writers are
| writing the blandest and most boring cliches imaginable and
| everybody hates it, yet they keep doing it. Is it so fucking
| important for their egos to be perceived as some kind of
| antiquated stereotypical writer that they have to continue to
| humiliate themselves and their readers with this, just to impress
| who?
|
| No wonder everybody is watching short form stuff on TikTok, that
| gets to the point.
|
| No wonder people are listening to three hour podcasts, where the
| people who are being interviewed can talk uninterrupted, instead
| of having their quotes salted and peppered between some musings
| from the writer.
|
| Where are the writers that make articles for normally intelligent
| people to read, that aren't filled with fluff, but aren't filled
| with equations either? Are these all making YouTube videos now?
| keernan wrote:
| Meet the Electrome. It Can Turn You Into an Assassin. In "We Are
| Electric," Sally Adee explores the body's capacity for
| electricity; the results can be shocking.
|
| NYT 2023 https://archive.ph/DpMMr
| whymeogod wrote:
| Makes me wonder what it would be like to be a bat
|
| https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf
| keernan wrote:
| When I finished reading this article, several of its resource
| articles, and the HN comments, I returned to my HN feed, and a
| few HN posts down, I come across: DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical
| Space Structures. What an interesting intersection.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43185769
| standardly wrote:
| Someone hasn't read Julian Jaynes...
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