In some ways, a single cell is more like an entire artificial neural network.
Real neurons have some amazing properties that individual neurons in ANNs do not. It's still unclear how we can exploit those properties to improve AI.
A single cell is a living and breathing (respirating) ecosystem.
DNA, the molecule and associated enzymes, is a computer in and of itself. Every dimension - from its hydration to dimensional folding - is a computational manifold.
The cell itself is a system of distributed supercomputers, a machine assembly factory, a dizzying highway and information network, and a universe. Replete with defenses, power factories, intricate and robust signal processing, and self destruct mechanisms.
That's because like in abstract algorithmic descriptions, there is no distinction between code and data, in the physical world, there is no distinction between interpreted code and interpreter, it's just a chemical reaction between the two.
(That's true for computers as well, is the behaviour of an addition in the ALU or in the bit pattern to select the instruction? It's both, the ALU alone would exhibit all kind of operations (including unintended/not-meaningful ones), the bit pattern alone could trigger any kind of operation depending on the circuit it occurs in. But if both happen to occur at the same point in spacetime, the physical laws apply and the bit pattern emerges, that humans would call the addition.)
The DNA doesn't fold itself. There is an entire collection of proteins and enzymes that maintain it (example: histones and proteins that adjust histones). Some DNA sequences do affect that folding, but not in an "active" way.
There are a very small number of DNA enzymes produced in labs, but there are no endogenous DNA enzymes (that anybody has found so far). Instead, it seems like life is much more based on RNA enzymes and proteins (the core of the ribosome is an RNA machine, decorated by proteins that enhance its speed and reliability).
Cells are amazing. Even mitochondria are amazing, BUT let's not get carried away with the sci-fi nonsense. You're projecting computer science on to biology because "we're all programmers here" and to the HN crowd (myself included) we like to see the world through comp-sci metaphors. But that's just hyperbolic and inaccurate.
It's funny because the poster he shows (the Roche Biochemical Pathways)- I had that on my wall in college in 1992 and by the end of my biochemistry class, I could explain nearly all of it. The elucidation of the metabolic cycles and photosynthesis stand as one of the world's most impressive achievements (yet, with all that known, engineering biology remains devilishly complex).
Hyperbole? I'd disagree. Chemical reactions can be measured as sets of computations. The real problem comes with scale and scales of said computations.
I would agree, but I don't think they're that much more interesting than the neurons of many "biologically plausible"-type neuronal nets, which allow for inhibition/exhibition, etc, but are obviously still limited in variation between individuals.
Where I think the really interesting parts missing are those in real neural circuits do, especially since the connections are more heterogenous, and the dynamics are much more fluid and time-dependent, whereas typical at-scale computer neurons obviously operate at fixed time steps, and don't exactly have bursters etc.
I wrote a very large scale distributed simulations for real neurons (straight from imaging datasets) when I was working in a TMS lab, and a longtime side project I always wanted to get going was some kind of pipeline for spitting out neuromechanical/cable-theoretic RTL tailored to specific morphologies and networking them according to their connectomes. I don't even think I would see any performance improvements, it just feels fun.
I think the timing aspect is especially interesting here. We tend to focus on making individual artificial neurons more sophisticated, but a lot of the interesting behavior might come from how the whole circuit evolves over time
Absolutely! Just look at the gastric mill circuits that have been studied for decades. Single-digit neuron counts and still has incredibly complex functionality.
As I understand it, AI 'neurons' have nothing to do with IRL neurons other than a passing nod to the name loosely based on the idea that 'they are connected to each other'. A neural net is nothing other than an (very) approximate model loosely based on our understanding of IRL neurons. There are many many ways a real neuron could be resonding to it's environment to do what it does, whereas our artificial 'neurons' are just a mathematical function.
I would image then, trying to imbue our neural networks with the properties of real neurons is a futile ambition?
Not so much futile (well, perhaps it is considering there’s much we still don’t know about biological neurons) as slow - simulating all that in software won’t be fast.
I suspect the first ANN researchers called them neurons to get more funding.
In essence an ANN is just a complicated mathematical function that you can tweak to fit the training set. Originally the activation function of a neuron in an ANN resembled real neurons, but later it was found that other, very different, functions are much better, like RLE.
I agree- neural networks were called like that to be sexy. It's certainly what attracted me to them in the 1980s (because I was intersted in both computers and biology). I got in a lot of arguments in the early 2000s before I understood just how fundamentally different neural networks are from brains.
I asked ChatGPT to estimate memory requirements of a brain simulation, with neurons from a paper linked in OP post ("Single cortical neurons as deep artificial neural networks"). This paper uses neuron models that are supposed to simulate real ones. The answer was 8-50 PB, with 10^7 weights shared between neurons, or 3.4 EB if each neuron has its own 10^7 weights. So it's not out of the realm of possibility.
On the other hand it shows how utterly tiny and primitive state-of-the-art LLMs are compared to real-world brains. By the way our brain only runs on on a max clock speed of around 100-1000 Hz.
Yet LLMs can achive miraculous results with so little. It really begs the question, where is the limit? How smart would a artificial human brain be if it would clock in gigahertz and had the somehow orders of magnitudes more efficient reasoning and detail recall of LLMs?
I completely agree. I'm betting on physical learning systems via reservoir computing personally. Will be going back to school to study nanotechnology soon to pursue this formally in addition to some experiments Ill be funding and running on my own dime as well. Have you ever seen steel ball bearings submerged in castor oil? If you apply an electrical current to that what do you think will happen? The most fascinating thing occurs, the ball bearings self organize into a network that can even display properties of hebbian learning if set up correctly! I suspect experiments such as these will eventually even raise the bigger question of, what is life actually? Another way to think about the potential of this area of technology is to think of a biological synapse, its about 1 micron in size right? Well, how many "neural atoms" can we fit in that space? 1000x1000x1000!! Its marvelous how much space there is when you shrink things down. Ill even go so far as to speculate that to create genuine superintelligence, youll need this technology Ill be working on to mature and form into some.new form of stochastic processor/computer
The greater the clock speed, the greater the energy consumption, but I guess compute would scale linearly with frequency.
However LLMs are not really tiny compared to real brains, brains FLOP/s have been estimated to be around 1e15 to 1e21, while a single H100 SXM can already do 1e15 BF16 FLOP/s.
The brain also has about 1e15 synapses, each holding the equivalent of about 4.7 bits of information, which would be about 590 TB worth of parameters, equivalent to 294T BF16 parameters (would need 7.4k H100s to hold those, at 80GB per H100).
So in my opinion, it's more of a memory bandwidth problem than a computing power problem, as H100s have comparatively very little memory bandwidth per FLOP than the brain, which holds information directly inside the computing units (synapses).
And I also think that detail recall is a double-edged sword. Memorizing details can certainly be useful, but it can also compete with pattern generalization. If you can perfectly remember the training set (overfit) you don't need to learn to generalize.
AI "neurons" (ie. combination of weight layer and following activation layer) are only a very crude model of the real thing, but they do model what appears to be the core function of integrating the synaptic inputs and firing in non-linear fashion when this integrated input crosses some threshold. So, it's more than just connectionism, but a lot less than attempting to closely mimic biology.
Nobody knows how much would be gained by using a more biologically accurate model of a neuron. Much of the low level detail may be irrelevant, but the timing aspect of it, or some equivalent, might be helpful if we want to make ANNs capable of learning realtime pattern recognition and control.
> they do model what appears to be the core function of integrating the synaptic inputs and firing in non-linear fashion when this integrated input crosses some threshold
> what appears to be
> Nobody knows how much would be gained by using a more biologically accurate model of a neuron.
Philosophical:
The neuron is an integral part of it's environment... so using models of much more primitive biological neurons ( less "processing" distance between env and self ) might yield something, I believe, but not evolved ones, where they are part of tens of thousands of systems in systems with only a few of them layered like onions. It's a completely different definition of distance and the neural nets are not part of anything.
> Much of the low level detail may be irrelevant, but the timing aspect of it
Tens of thousands of asynchronous contiguous and non-linear events firing at just the right timing in 10s of thousands different places at timings that create something even crazier than perfect synchrony ... That lower level detail is likely responsible for the timing ... it's a bit like why osmotic pressure inside and outside is important and implicit to all the ratios relevant in the different spots of the body/organ/tissue ....
I'm unimpressed by AI and genAI to this day. But I think it's cool. ... it can all be achieved without calling it "AI" at all. Just a bunch of nodes and well sorted and tagged input ... it's social proof laundered awe mostly ... no chance against that marketing machine, so LLM = AI. Every time you "think" it can be more than a dictionary and wikipedia I realize how stupid I am for thinking that briefly when I read the reply to my prompt. Same goes for code. It's holy shit, wow, ah wait, there's that open source code and that free frontend design bit and all the other things, snippets, assets I had already bookmarked somewhere or sometime in the past ...
It's so crude that it might not even be the way neurons work. Like just a programmed activation function? Who programs it? We inherit the weights some how? Are they compressed in DNA? Doesn't seem likely because we share 90% with fruit flies etc. So not much space is left to store weights. I don't think it's the weights doing the work in biological neurons, but the architecture. Every cell might be doing the same thing but it's how you use them that counts. Maybe a biologist can comment on this.
I feel like it's also that these single cells are much more like deterministic computing machines (sure there are error bars in chemical processes, but that exists in semiconductors too), unlike the stochastic process that we know use to bruteforce behaviour.
I think it's the opposite: cells are highly stochastic, but the stochasticity is highly regulated (typically by "switches" with sinusoidal curves).
For a long time I've wanted to engineer a cell that can pulse like a fluorescent light by computing a taylor series approximation of a sine curve. But to do that you'd have to implement a reliable system and cells already can do this with fairly high accuracy using their internal existing systems.
Learned recently that lot of our initial knowledge of neural cells structure and functioning was derived from working with giant squid neurons which permitted work/observation of structures an order larger than their mammalian counterparts. What aspects of real neurons would you list as particularly "amazing" (I know they seek out connections and such) ?
No. They were observed in the 1800s, but the structure and mechanism were not elucidated until around 1970 https://www.nature.com/articles/245380a0 It was a big surprise to see elements that greatly resembled existing motors (stator, rotor, etc) and in fact was one of the things that inspired the concept of intelligent design (even though, we believe instead that it evolved spontaneously)
The problem with saying that God created life is that it doesn't actually explain anything because then you have to explain where a vastly more complex God came from. If the universe or life requires an explanation, adding an eternal God doesn't simplify the problem so we might as well cut out the middleman and view the physical world itself as the eternal starting point.
Have you seen Attack on titan. Watching that whole show, half the time you dont know why something is happening, except that it is cool. But once you know the whole story, you can piece things together no problem.
God (any god) is a comforting mythology to help explain the things in life that are hard to come to terms with, but it's a mythology, it's no different to believing in Harry Potter, or Dionysus.
Bringing the concept of God into a biology discussion is sort of embarrassing. "Intelligent design" is for the unimaginative mind. We must always be open to being wrong, evolution fits what we know now, but I'm sure in a century we'll have a better understanding and it'll be a more complete understanding, but what it won't need is a divine eternal.
The world's not flat, there is no god. Can we get back to science now.
"""the Shaper of Life is not itself a creature. Evolution is bodiless, like the Judeo-Christian deity. Omnipresent in Nature, immanent in the fall of every leaf. Vast as a planet's surface. Billions of years old. Itself unmade, arising naturally from the structure of physics. Doesn't that all sound like something that might have been said about God?
And yet the Maker has no mind, as well as no body. In some ways, its handiwork is incredibly poor design by human standards. It is internally divided. Most of all, it isn't nice.
In a way, Darwin discovered God—a God that failed to match the preconceptions of theology, and so passed unheralded. If Darwin had discovered that life was created by an intelligent agent—a bodiless mind that loves us, and will smite us with lightning if we dare say otherwise—people would have said "My gosh! That's God!"
But instead Darwin discovered a strange alien God—not comfortably "ineffable", but really genuinely different from us. Evolution is not a God, but if it were, it wouldn't be Jehovah. It would be H. P. Lovecraft's Azathoth, the blind idiot God burbling chaotically at the center of everything, surrounded by the thin monotonous piping of flutes."""
It would be logical to first explain all the phenomena of the universe down to the lowest quantum level, where it all breaks down into pure math for which no one currently has any non-contradicting theory, before even attempting to try explaining where the vastly more complex God came from.
It also could very well be the case that there's a limit not only to the complexity of things a human mind can grasp, but also to the simplicity thereof, and the concept of God may be located beyond the latter.
That depends entirely on your definition of the term God. In fact Christianity argues that anything non-transcendental[1] can in fact not be God, precisely because of the point you make. This was one of the distinctive properties of Christianity in the first centuries, which is why it was perceived (correctly) to be the enemy of all the entities the Romans called God, which resulted in the persecution.
(So to state it differently, Christianity says that the God which you are talking about, does indeed not exist.)
[1] Transcendental meaning that it is not only the origin of specific things, but of space, time and causality itself. God is not before the big bang, because the meaning of before is in fact something that only exists in the universe. God is as much before, after and next to the big bang as he is to now.
This is why to me it seems pretty logical, that modern atheism occurred in a christian dominated culture. It's not that the atheists invented a new idea. They simply "forgot"(more like didn't agree) what Christianity says a God is, returned to the definition of God from the Antiquity and "simply" rephrased the criticism Christianity already voiced for millennia.
The main thing you have to say is that life is too complicated to have formed by itself. I think that's actually the most reasonable scientific explanation (not from geology but from first-principle physics and chemistry.)
I think this is one of the hints the Programmer gave us that once we reach the needed level of sophistication we'll understand. Similar to the ending in the book "Contact".
While biology has inspired many inventions, the electric motor is not one of them. Electric motors were invented in the mid 19th century, before cells were known to be anything more than simple blobs of protoplasm, barely distinguishable under a microscope. It wasn't until high powered microscopes were invented that biologists had any clue to the previously unthinkable complexity of cellular life.
It would be mistake to assume that something which appears to be a single cell is a separate from its environment. Space connects all things and if Space happens to be awareness / consciousness then intelligence would be everywhere affecting all things.
No. It is the cells definition and construction, one it spends considerable effort maintaining and the moment it stops maintaining it, it loses life. There’s really no two ways about it. You need a buffer from the environment to be alive. Otherwise thermodynamics will take its course right away.
There are certainly theories to that effect. But whether you stretch it to consciousness or not, each cell actively defines its boundary, and this boundary can change over time, to accommodate experience, and to promote anticipation.
Cells are autopoetic. They write their own experience.
This is meaningless word salad. This predicts nothing, proves nothing, demonstrates nothing, observes nothing. It's just wishy washy words put together in a row.
When we found out how "Space and time are connected", that actually meant we found mathematically how that relation works. It's not just some vague thought to ponder about. You can use space and time being connected to solve real problems about the world, like "Where will this particle be in the future and why is it somewhere you wouldn't expect?"
You can use "Space and time are connected" to understand the world, like why Mercury exists how it does. In fact, space and time being connected is necessary to solve that quandary.
The point of science is to advance our ability to predict the future from the current, not write high school poetry.
I was guessing it wouldn’t be well received haha. However there is plausible theory in which space is filled with microscopic wormholes, forming neural network like structures in which information would be exchanged across seemingly separate objects. This could be mechanism for self organizing systems etc. or even evolution as space itself would be the platform providing feedback loops that facilitate growth and intelligence of organic systems.
It's about the complexity of a single cell - the number of mechanisms it has in place on how it works. He sets up the argument for Intelligent Design using the Cell.
It's always an argument from ignorance of the math (but not Argumentum ad Absurdum), with Intelligent Design arguments.
"It's so complicated and unlikely, that it must have a designer."
OK, I'll bite: how unlikely?
How many times must the constituent chemicals bump together before they join to form RNA, divided by the number of times they must have bumped together? I'll wait for you to do the math...
If the odds are once in a quadrillion seconds over a quadrillion square meters of Earth-surface conditions, that means it probably happened two or three times already on Earth. Anything more common than 10^-30 per second per square-meter of "Goldilocks" area is fairly certain to have happened already on Earth. Anything a few orders of magnitude less likely is still going to happen frequently throughout the universe.
The frequencies and opportunities, however, are both unknown. "It's really unlikely!" is a stupid statement. It's really unlikely that someone hit by lightning has won a big jackpot, but it's still likely to happen, over all our civilization. Odds times opportunity is the number that no one can even make a reasonable SWAG for. Knowing that the odds are low tells you absolutely nothing.
Is a single cell, storing state in the form of chemical modifications and using it to compare "now" with "a few seconds ago," the same computational primitive that a neuron uses, only slower and simpler? Curious
I would like yo argue thatbthis is not intelligence. A system regulated with a nutrient sensor that increases concentration of said nutrient and changes the turning direction of the flagella when the concetration lower bellow a threshold is not intelligent. It's a fully automatic mechanism, which is the opposite of what it is understood by itelligence.
Isn’t intelligence a fully automatic mechanism? You go down that rabbit hole enough and I always find it hard to find the differences. Same thing with LLMs, people say it’s just a word predictor. But that’s how I wrote this comment and how I think.
But surely word-prediction (like LLMs) work forwards from a starting position until it reaches its goal, and the goal needs to be well-defined ahead of time?
I think humans usually know what the solution looks like, or can rationalize what a solution might be, and can then work backwards too
I think there's a point as you increase the comolexity of the "information processing" system where you get emergent intelligence.
A mechanism that makes a rotor go one way or the other as a function of the time derivative of a variable would not qualify as such.
Now, if you have a trillion such mecanisms atuned and feeding one anothers inputs in a network... Well you just got yourself a brain and then we can start talking about intelligence.
Does anyone? With all the AGI/ASI hype, one would've assumed we would have a widely agreed-upon definition of intelligence. But everyone has a different one, and some seem to keep redrawing that line based on the current capabilities of frontier models.
Not much more, tbh, but the way we act to maximize our intakes are so much more sophisticated than a simple control regulator that I think we deserve to be called intelligent.
very simple organisms can't do that, at all. you really do need something with a lot of internal state and state-transition structure (ie, neurons) to do that.
I'm surprised Levin's stuff doesn't show up here more often. He's a computer scientist turned medical researcher, and routinely finds things that pose hard questions for physicalism in addition to being frontier advancements in cancer treatment, among other things. He's part of a company that wants to re-grow human limbs! They've already done it with frogs, and even wilder stuff!
Anyone who likes The Thought Emporium should watch his talk and branch out from there; you'll be amazed.
We are beings that can choose to avoid both nutrients and reproduction.
Your reductionist argument is as oversimplified as saying "Earth is just the cooled ejaculate of a supernova." True at some level, but only at a level without practical meaning for most purposes. It sounds cool and insightful. It isn't.
The irony of misspelling intelligence on that comment. And yes you can argue this is not "intelligence" but then you can extend the same argument to human beings (assuming that is what you understand as itelligence) and say they are not intelligent as well.
It is more than just "cool". Furthermore, I would probe and inquiry what you actually mean by a positive definition of intelligence so we can get the claim better instead of a negative defintion.
I'd say it's more to do with the scale of the system than with the underlying working systems. If you get a neuron that fires on a certain signal threshold and with that control an actuator, I wouldn't call that intelligence, just signal processing.
If you have a trillion neurons, some doing basinc control stuff like the one before, with others forming systems that tweak or reroute the others depending on other, emergent potentials, then you have intelligence.
If the brain activity stops being only external information driven and starts being internal information driven (this is, it can change how it regulates stuff o even the stuff it regulates, at different levels of consciousness) then we start talking about something more than information processing.
But "internal information driven" just means "holds state".
Your eyes are just a series of mechanisms by which photons are converted into electric signals via proteins that react to the impact of a photon. "Seeing" is mechanical. "Feeling" is mechanical. Receiving and sending the messages is "mechanical". At what point is intelligence separate?
I can't control _how_ my intelligence works, and neither can e-coli.
My "intelligence" is the sum total emergent self-referential molecularly-mechanical signal-processing network that holds state. My DNA holds the state of all of my ancestors on top of which my own environmental changes are laid. My neurons hold the sum-total of my experiences, allowing me to introspect.
Here's my test:
- I am intelligent. I have an internal representation of the world that shapes my behavior, and I react to my environment. I can choose to do "irrational" things.
- A mouse is "intelligent" but less than a human. It has a representation of the world that shapes its behavior, and it reacts to its environment. Mice can choose to do "irrational" things like care for their young, and form attachments with humans.
- A mosquito is "intelligent" but less than a mouse. It still has an internal experience of the world that shapes its behavior. It does not care for its young, nor does it form attachments (that we know of).
- Down, and down we go, one thing staying constant -- there is an internal representation of "the world" that guides an organism's behavior. It is an emergent quality of the interaction of mechanical sensory systems working at a molecular level where the goal is survival and reproduction if possible.
I think it depends on your definition for 'intelligence'. IIRC, Wikipedia lists 15 different definitions for 'intelligence'. One common ground is 'the ability to solve problems', which covers some aspects of how the term 'intelligence' is usually used, but not necessarily everything.
If your 'problem' as a cell is to feed yourself, it is a clever apparatus that solves that problem, and can be depicted as intelligent.
If you understand the 'fully automatic mechanism' completely, you agree that it solves a problem, but you deny that this is intelligent. However, the denial depends on your understanding of the mechanism. If you assume that the world is deterministic (that means, every effect has a definite cause, to put it simply), we cannot be something other than a 'fully automatic mechanism', however a very, very complicated one that we do not fully understand. Indeed, in a deterministic world nothing can be different from a 'fully automatic mechanism', and, by your implied definition of intelligence, nothing can be intelligent. This conclusion leaves the definition of intelligence as something 'other than fully automatic mechanism' rather useless, as it does not distinguish anything. (If you do assume that the world is not deterministic, a similar argument still holds, as long as you do not imply that a person can determine the outcome of the non-determinism, which sounds strange to me to imply.)
I think what you want for something to call 'intelligent', is that you don't immediately understand how the mechanism works and the assumption of some kind of thought process and/or planning. The first property unfortunately depends on what you might consider your own intelligence, which makes it difficult as an objective measure of intelligence so that you can argue about it in a forum. The second property (thinking/planning) might be present in the cell in a way that you don't see (eg. see storage of the current value of 'now') and, similary, it might not be present in us humans in the way self-perceive it.
More than once did I experience a seemingly 'intelligent system' that I found fasciniating, which, after I studied it, I did not think of as intelligent anymore (eg. my first impressions of Weizenbaum's Eliza), which for the aforementioned reasons I think is kind-of silly of me.
I agree with you in that it is very subjective to define intelligence.
I personally define it as more of an emergent property where you increase the complexity of the problem solving machine to the point where it begins to be more than just interconnected automatisms.
Maybe it could be said that processing information is not intelligence by itself. Intelligence, for me, requires the ability to adapt the way one processes information to the task at hand, either by changing it entirely of adapting and tuning to get more out of it.
A fixed mechanism that controls a variable can't be intelligent.
It doesn't make sense to say a system isn't intelligent without defining what you mean by intelligence.
e.g. One reasonable definition of intelligence is ability to use prior experience to fruitfully guide future behavior, and if you look at the spectrum of animal intelligence it seems most useful not to have some arbitrary cutoff or mechanism attached to that. A simple animal like an insect, or a bacterium, has effectively encoded the prior experience of the species, in a relatively stable environment, into its DNA.
Animals with more complex nervous systems have ability to learn as individuals in their own lifetime, and display intelligence according to what they have individually experienced, although they too will have been born with some species-level intelligence as to how to survive & thrive in their environment.
There is no clear line that differentiates an intelligent system from a non-intelligent system that just happens to do something in response to some external input, unless the definition of “intelligence” involves something specific to humans (including to other animals similar to humans, since we share many traits)—which is also why that is, arguably, the only meaningful definition.
Perhaps mean it was made with intelligence. When do you think we will be able to create a single cell (not an artificial genome)? Start with a soup with whatever level of sophistication and coerce it to go into a single (minimal) cell (or whatever process that creates the first viable cell). That process is so complicated that it's difficult to understand how it would happen even with directed intelligence, it's hard to grasp how this happened accidentally.
>> if you understand the signaling pathways of bacterial chemotaxis you can disrupt them;
You don't need to do that. You are pursuing a goal that is not assigned to you by nature. This goal is assigned by the business and a perceived "human benefit".
This end-less understanding and influencing of the things should stop. Even if you say there are medical benefits to such investigations, you are going against nature and trying to control a few things while ignoring the full context that turns against you.
> How does evolution not get stuck in a local optimum?
Neutral drift and very large population sizes. Anything that preserves diversity in the population long enough to find the right basin. Most artificial evolution systems cannot support population sizes large enough to preserve diversity long enough to locate any solutions that matter.
Right now, evolution is running a live experiment with something like 10^30 candidates in one population alone. The computational requirements for this are effectively zero. The environment is the computer.
I assume it does get stuck, and creatures go extinct as their environment changes around them and evolutionary mechanisms don't by chance produce a change that enables survival either quickly enough, or because the required changes are not possible from the current state of the organism.
Considering our eyes are wired inside-out (the nerve cables are on the same side light comes in, so they have to go through a hole in our eye, the blind-spot), I'd say that natural selection gets stuck in local optimums all the time. Cephalopods like octopuses have very similar eyes to us, but they evolved completely separately and their nerves are wired in "the right way".
So in our case the starting conditions just lined up the way it did and no single step (or series of steps) easily flipped our wiring, so we just rolled with it (and we get by quite well).
> How does evolution not get stuck in a local optimum?
Could be wrong, but my understanding is that it does? Plenty of things in nature are not really evolving much at all (as in, variations are not selected) even over longer periods of time. What can happen to it is getting removed by something that evolved from somewhere else (taking the evolutionary niche, or making it unsurvivable)
Gene duplication is actually quite common and contributes quite a bit to creating new "versions" of things.
Vertebrates for example had a at least 2 whole genome duplication events in the past giving us up to 4 copies of the same family of many genes. This enables mutations to alter one copy of a crucial gene to "invent" new functionality without killing the organism.
The most common version of this is probably duplication of G protein linked receptors for odor and taste. Mice and dogs have far more of these than we do.
Evolution does get stuck in a local optimum quite a bit. Think of how many vertebrates are now limited to 4 limbs compared to many insect or mollusk species.
Instead of having dexterous forelimbs around the mouth like crabs, elephants make due with prehensile noses.
Similarly, to get to running speeds while having opposable thumbs humans evolved to stand upright on the hindlimbs instead of simply becoming 6 limbed centaur like creatures. Humans can't outrun any major predators at short distances.
Evolution frequently does get stuck in a local optimum.
This is why some animals have barely changed in appearance for hundreds of millions of years, e.g. scorpions, while others have changed so much that nobody would guess the relationship between them and their ancestors, had we not discovered some intermediate steps in their evolution.
I posted a reply doubting the existence of dinosaurs (50073836). When I looked after about one hour, it was dead. Maybe it was killed immediately, like another similar one I had posted in August, possibly killed by a moderator (49312918).
Now I'm wondering whether HN uses some sort of language model to infer semantic similarity and thus kill content automatically. Frankly, whether this is automatic or by consensus of certain users, there's not much of a difference. It is dystopian, especially given the mountains of meaningless one-line comments that abound here (probably “too little substance to be worth killing”).
Once upon a time the Internet was the realm of free thought and free speech. I get it that spam etc needs to be fought and suppressed, but frankly, none of my comments that have been killed (quite a couple of them already) come close to that category. Rather, it seems the ruling HN mindset is about as narrow-minded (if not more so in certain respects) than your typical mainstream forum.
In this case I think it was automatic, due to the inclusion of a link to Canadian Research Casting International company's website, which I first posted in 49312918, which at one point was suddenly dead.
Don't know about you specifically, but people here clearly "flag" things they disagree with, which is part of why what could be an interesting discussion often ends up being a dull CJ style chorus between affirmative and know-it-all. As if there was no middle ground between that and a "flamewar".
I've read comments to the effect it would be easy to change to the better by administrative means, but apparently there's no will, so "smug-flagging" seems to be in line with the purpose of the site, and that's it.
« 70 million years ago, when dinosaurs still lived »
Do we know that for sure? Let's zoom in on Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen, who helped invent dinosaurs in 19th century England, preceding Research Casting International by roughly 150 years. This curious concoction should be read by taking into account all three sibling comments, dead or alive (50083123 etc).
The fact that 70 million years ago dinosaurs still lived, e.g. in the lands where the house of my grandparents was located (close to some places with Cretaceous fossil finds), is a fact that is known with a far greater certainty than e.g. the fact that your neighbor is not a serial killer.
Compared to the 19th century, now there is a huge amount of accumulated data about the history of the Earth, which is internally consistent and consistent with any scientific experiments that we are doing in the present.
While we know only a small part of what happened millions of years ago, many of the things that we know are much more certain than what we know about things that happen in the present, but which are hidden from us, so we do not have enough information about them.
From time to time some suppositions about the past have to be changed in the light of new evidence, but to falsify a thing supported by such a huge amount of diverse evidence, like the fact that 70 million years ago there were living dinosaurs, that would require an incredible amount of new evidence.
You do not have such evidence, so your comment is not useful. You could comment that anything you here in this world should be doubted, which is very true, but that does not mean that everything is equally doubtful. Some things have a great uncertainty, while other things have an overwhelming probability to be true.
Thank you for the reply, which I didn't expect; and sorry for the wording of my parent comment, the intent of which was only to check whether mere mention of Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen in connection with dinosaurs would be enough to trigger the HN comment kill software (which HN moderator dang referred to in a reply to me).
I agree with you with regard to governments and human history. As for natural history, I concede that at first glance, there is no reason to assume anyone would want to alter it, and doubts like mine seem absurd. And doubts they are – while I'm leaning towards the heretical view in as far as dinosaurs are concerned, I have not yet reached any kind of "personal certainty" in this matter. Which makes the topic all the more interesting to me.
The initial motivation that one may assume for "coming up with the dinosaurs" does not necessarily have to be of a political nature. It could have been as innocent as a hoax invented for fun, or as a form of intellectual art, or as a theoretical monument – science fiction, if you will, or science as a form of art. Later on, when the artefact had entered the edifice of science proper and become part of a serious scientific consensus, a certain if moderate political quality would have been gained in as much as Science (as a whole) had displaced Faith as the ruling ideology for the educated class, and consequently as an important pillar of power.
On the other hand, rather than having sophisticated creative jokesters at the origin of the story, such as would gather in places like the Royal Society (the English being known for their humour), we could have a simple misinterpretation as the foundations of the dinosaur edifice, without any ill or peculiar intent at all.
But I'm leaning more to the jokester scenario. These 19th century natural historians were collecting and assembling lots of bones into skeletons, and to the creative mind it must have been both tempting and the obvious thing to make up some new "extinct animals" from whatever bones are available. It would have been a lot of fun, you just need a bit of phantasy and maybe some "missing links". And think about the possibilities once you get hold of whale skeletons (cf. your comment 47374816) … and it turns out the golden age of whaling coincided with the invention of the dinosaurs.
Pascal said, « le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas », and the same applies to other traits of the human mind that don't fit the narrow rationalistic model that we think underpins our current-day science and its ancestors of the last couple centuries.
Are dinosaurs a "fundamental" fact? True, they precede later lifeforms, but nothing depends directly on their existence; and while they have been woven into the evolutionary graph, that framework itself, by admission of its own postulates, consists mostly of "missing data", which means that relationships of descent between species are fraught with uncertainty.
You're invoking the concept of scientific consistency. In science, everything has to be consistent. I don't know whether it actually is. For example, it seems science says that during the cretaceous, sea surface temperature was ~35°C and we had rain forests covering both poles; whereas today, still according to science, we need to be scared because a certain atmospheric trace gas is on the rise, part of which due to human activity, and that will bring us beyond a so-called tipping point, from which there is no recovery (a ludicrous claim thoroughly disproven by Earth's history, still according to science).
So what we have here is an example of how everything isn't consistent in science when questions of, let's say: political expediency, arise; and also a case where scientific integrity seems t...
« At most, some bad researchers may try to publish false data, if that can be useful for their careers, but that is usually discovered sooner or later, and it can never influence facts so fundamental like the existence of dinosaurs. »
I asked Chatty for the best book on the history of the discovery (or invention) of the dinosaurs in the first half of the 19th century†, and it came up with The Dawn of Dinosaurs by John R. Horner, published in 2005. The title struck me as odd (I would have preferred Dawn of the Dinosaurs), and it appears the book doesn't exist, Chatty had made it up.
But that turned my attention to Jack Horner, a very important figure in paleontology (at least in the USA), who has discovered various T-rex skeletons and dinosaur eggs and whatnot, and so I watched a couple minutes of a lecture he gave in 2001, which left a peculiar impression (I mean his personality), and then I read his Wiki page and was not disappointed to find my impressions totally confirmed by the article …
Can't fault him for liking young girls, that's human nature, and he had the money to be a customer of Jeffrey Epstein; but isn't it curious how he didn't allow dyslexia from stopping him to rise to the top of the field? And what does it say about a field (at least in the USA) if such characters somehow manage to rise to the top? Could it be there is a (well-funded) system that facilitates their ascent? Because they have just what it takes to fulfil the role?
That, of course, should not reflect negatively on whatever paleo findings were made on the lands of your grandparents.
† Chatty next suggested The Dinosaur Hunters by Deborah Cadbury (Terrible Lizard for the US edition), which I found on AA and which seems to do a proper dive into history as is essential to find the truth of the matter.
« … and it can never influence facts so fundamental like the existence of dinosaurs. »
The real reason for which is of course that … Dinosaurs are Too Big to Fail. :)
Discovery of a couple large aquatic lizards preceded the invention of the dinosaurs by a few decades. Most notably among these, we find mosasaurus, ichthyosaurus, and plesiosaurus, which looks dubious and which Cuvier thought was a hoax.
I read the German Wiki article on mosasaurus, and even though the creature looks straightforward by comparison, and I find no reason to doubt its existence in a configuration roughly similar to what's presented today, the science isn't settled at all in the matter, and there's considerable questioning and shuffling about of the various specimens and the corresponding taxonomy, which is because the evidence is scarce and sketchy, by the very nature of the fossil record.
Far greater and deeper questions arise when we turn to the dinosaurs. Fundamental things like their posture (wrt to their tail) have been "corrected" in the past decades, and it looks like a couple decades from now they'll actually have feathers to be more in line with how they've been inserted as the ancestors of birds. Other things such as the unlikely (and unviable) anatomy of many of the most famous dinosaurs don't look like they can ever be fixed.
With all the bona fide and even sympathy for such phantastic paleontological scenarios, I simply do not understand how this situation can be a base for any kind of "certainty". Curiosity and fascination, okay, I get it – but certainty?
Everyday I read something new about life on earth and my will to exist amongst the ecosystem grows stronger. The life that surrounds us is so vast that we cannot possibly fathom the extent to which it is working at.
It is an ambiguous term. I just meant that I have a greater desire to be attatched to nature and be more active in it's protection when I hear of the awe-inspiring almost miraculous nature of the life that surrounds us.
Speaking of single cells, here is a detailed model of the eukaryotic cell that includes animations showing Transcription and Translation (DNA -> RNA, mRNA -> protein): https://grimoire.bio/eukaryotic-cell
here's more captivating illustrations of cells and cellular mechanisms from David Goodsell (some of his pictures are used in the OP's article). i simply love his style and sense of color.
>Kinases and phosphatases work ceaselessly like ants in a nest, adding phosphate groups to proteins and removing them again. It seems a pointless exercise, especially when you consider that each cycle of addition and removal costs the cell one molecule of ATP—one unit of precious energy. Indeed, cyclic reactions of this kind were originally labeled “futile.” But the adjective is misleading. The addition of phosphate groups to proteins is the single most common reaction in cells and underpins a large proportion of the computations they perform. Far from being futile, this cyclic reaction provides the cell with an essential resource: a flexible and rapidly tunable device.
It says "most common reaction" not "plurality/majority of energy consumed," but it's still surprising.
...until you realize it's a game theory problem. If you can (effectively) think faster than other E coli, you reach the food faster and don't wander off as often.
It's a Prisoners' Dilemma: the E coli can't trust the other E coli not to 'defect' and put stupid amounts of points into faster food-seeking, so every E coli has to do it too.
This is testable, actually!
We should expect, if it's related to competition, that the metabolic impact of food-finding might be (somehow) dialed down when:
* food is abundant
* ambient E coli population density is low
* food is more homogenously distributed
and vice-versa. We should expect evolutionary pressure to reward such tweaking circuits that optimize the metabolic penalty of food-seeking cognition.
>Kinases and phosphatases work ceaselessly like ants in a nest, adding phosphate groups to proteins and removing them again. It seems a pointless exercise, especially when you consider that each cycle of addition and removal costs the cell one molecule of ATP—one unit of precious energy.
>Indeed, cyclic reactions of this kind were originally labeled “futile.” But the adjective is misleading. The addition of phosphate groups to proteins is the single most common reaction in cells and underpins a large proportion of the computations they perform. Far from being futile, this cyclic reaction provides the cell with an essential resource: a flexible and rapidly tunable device.
Surprising!
...until you realize it's probably a game theory problem. If you can (effectively) think faster than other E coli, you can reach the food faster.
It's a Prisoners' Dilemma: the E coli can't trust the other E coli not to 'defect' and put stupid amounts of RPG video game points into faster food-seeking, so every E coli has to do it too. This drags up the metabolic penalty.
We should expect the metabolic penalty is (somehow) dialed down when:
* food is abundant
* E coli population density is low
* food is homogenously distributed
and vice-versa. Evolutionary pressure should reward tweaking circuits that optimize this high penalty of food-seeking cognition.
146 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 16.7 ms ] threadThe baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39777229 - March 2024 (213 comments)
Real neurons have some amazing properties that individual neurons in ANNs do not. It's still unclear how we can exploit those properties to improve AI.
DNA, the molecule and associated enzymes, is a computer in and of itself. Every dimension - from its hydration to dimensional folding - is a computational manifold.
The cell itself is a system of distributed supercomputers, a machine assembly factory, a dizzying highway and information network, and a universe. Replete with defenses, power factories, intricate and robust signal processing, and self destruct mechanisms.
(That's true for computers as well, is the behaviour of an addition in the ALU or in the bit pattern to select the instruction? It's both, the ALU alone would exhibit all kind of operations (including unintended/not-meaningful ones), the bit pattern alone could trigger any kind of operation depending on the circuit it occurs in. But if both happen to occur at the same point in spacetime, the physical laws apply and the bit pattern emerges, that humans would call the addition.)
There are a very small number of DNA enzymes produced in labs, but there are no endogenous DNA enzymes (that anybody has found so far). Instead, it seems like life is much more based on RNA enzymes and proteins (the core of the ribosome is an RNA machine, decorated by proteins that enhance its speed and reliability).
https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/
I totally see the CheY as an intermediary layer that learned how the changes in attractant must affect mechanical activation.
Where I think the really interesting parts missing are those in real neural circuits do, especially since the connections are more heterogenous, and the dynamics are much more fluid and time-dependent, whereas typical at-scale computer neurons obviously operate at fixed time steps, and don't exactly have bursters etc.
I wrote a very large scale distributed simulations for real neurons (straight from imaging datasets) when I was working in a TMS lab, and a longtime side project I always wanted to get going was some kind of pipeline for spitting out neuromechanical/cable-theoretic RTL tailored to specific morphologies and networking them according to their connectomes. I don't even think I would see any performance improvements, it just feels fun.
I would image then, trying to imbue our neural networks with the properties of real neurons is a futile ambition?
In essence an ANN is just a complicated mathematical function that you can tweak to fit the training set. Originally the activation function of a neuron in an ANN resembled real neurons, but later it was found that other, very different, functions are much better, like RLE.
the neuron analogy has been there all along, since ANNs are entirely analogous to "BNNs" - for instance the NIPS conference.
the firing-rate-vs-activation-level difference isn't that big a deal.
Yet LLMs can achive miraculous results with so little. It really begs the question, where is the limit? How smart would a artificial human brain be if it would clock in gigahertz and had the somehow orders of magnitudes more efficient reasoning and detail recall of LLMs?
By lowering the clock speed, power and heat drop exponentially.
I'm just hoping we figure out something logistically better than laminating chips together.
However LLMs are not really tiny compared to real brains, brains FLOP/s have been estimated to be around 1e15 to 1e21, while a single H100 SXM can already do 1e15 BF16 FLOP/s.
The brain also has about 1e15 synapses, each holding the equivalent of about 4.7 bits of information, which would be about 590 TB worth of parameters, equivalent to 294T BF16 parameters (would need 7.4k H100s to hold those, at 80GB per H100).
So in my opinion, it's more of a memory bandwidth problem than a computing power problem, as H100s have comparatively very little memory bandwidth per FLOP than the brain, which holds information directly inside the computing units (synapses).
And I also think that detail recall is a double-edged sword. Memorizing details can certainly be useful, but it can also compete with pattern generalization. If you can perfectly remember the training set (overfit) you don't need to learn to generalize.
Nobody knows how much would be gained by using a more biologically accurate model of a neuron. Much of the low level detail may be irrelevant, but the timing aspect of it, or some equivalent, might be helpful if we want to make ANNs capable of learning realtime pattern recognition and control.
> what appears to be
> Nobody knows how much would be gained by using a more biologically accurate model of a neuron.
Philosophical:
The neuron is an integral part of it's environment... so using models of much more primitive biological neurons ( less "processing" distance between env and self ) might yield something, I believe, but not evolved ones, where they are part of tens of thousands of systems in systems with only a few of them layered like onions. It's a completely different definition of distance and the neural nets are not part of anything.
> Much of the low level detail may be irrelevant, but the timing aspect of it
Tens of thousands of asynchronous contiguous and non-linear events firing at just the right timing in 10s of thousands different places at timings that create something even crazier than perfect synchrony ... That lower level detail is likely responsible for the timing ... it's a bit like why osmotic pressure inside and outside is important and implicit to all the ratios relevant in the different spots of the body/organ/tissue ....
I'm unimpressed by AI and genAI to this day. But I think it's cool. ... it can all be achieved without calling it "AI" at all. Just a bunch of nodes and well sorted and tagged input ... it's social proof laundered awe mostly ... no chance against that marketing machine, so LLM = AI. Every time you "think" it can be more than a dictionary and wikipedia I realize how stupid I am for thinking that briefly when I read the reply to my prompt. Same goes for code. It's holy shit, wow, ah wait, there's that open source code and that free frontend design bit and all the other things, snippets, assets I had already bookmarked somewhere or sometime in the past ...
For a long time I've wanted to engineer a cell that can pulse like a fluorescent light by computing a taylor series approximation of a sine curve. But to do that you'd have to implement a reliable system and cells already can do this with fairly high accuracy using their internal existing systems.
Bringing the concept of God into a biology discussion is sort of embarrassing. "Intelligent design" is for the unimaginative mind. We must always be open to being wrong, evolution fits what we know now, but I'm sure in a century we'll have a better understanding and it'll be a more complete understanding, but what it won't need is a divine eternal.
The world's not flat, there is no god. Can we get back to science now.
An Alien God (as a way to view evolution) from 2007 on lesswrong, isn’t comforting:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLRogvJLPPg6Mrvg4/an-alien-g...
"""the Shaper of Life is not itself a creature. Evolution is bodiless, like the Judeo-Christian deity. Omnipresent in Nature, immanent in the fall of every leaf. Vast as a planet's surface. Billions of years old. Itself unmade, arising naturally from the structure of physics. Doesn't that all sound like something that might have been said about God?
And yet the Maker has no mind, as well as no body. In some ways, its handiwork is incredibly poor design by human standards. It is internally divided. Most of all, it isn't nice.
In a way, Darwin discovered God—a God that failed to match the preconceptions of theology, and so passed unheralded. If Darwin had discovered that life was created by an intelligent agent—a bodiless mind that loves us, and will smite us with lightning if we dare say otherwise—people would have said "My gosh! That's God!"
But instead Darwin discovered a strange alien God—not comfortably "ineffable", but really genuinely different from us. Evolution is not a God, but if it were, it wouldn't be Jehovah. It would be H. P. Lovecraft's Azathoth, the blind idiot God burbling chaotically at the center of everything, surrounded by the thin monotonous piping of flutes."""
It sounds like you actually refer to pantheism, which is very much different from Christianity.
It also could very well be the case that there's a limit not only to the complexity of things a human mind can grasp, but also to the simplicity thereof, and the concept of God may be located beyond the latter.
(So to state it differently, Christianity says that the God which you are talking about, does indeed not exist.)
[1] Transcendental meaning that it is not only the origin of specific things, but of space, time and causality itself. God is not before the big bang, because the meaning of before is in fact something that only exists in the universe. God is as much before, after and next to the big bang as he is to now.
This is why to me it seems pretty logical, that modern atheism occurred in a christian dominated culture. It's not that the atheists invented a new idea. They simply "forgot"(more like didn't agree) what Christianity says a God is, returned to the definition of God from the Antiquity and "simply" rephrased the criticism Christianity already voiced for millennia.
This assumes (your concept of) God is subject to time or/and causality, which makes it non-trancendental.
> God is transcendental by definition
Yes, but not by everyone's definition, which is the point.
I think this is one of the hints the Programmer gave us that once we reach the needed level of sophistication we'll understand. Similar to the ending in the book "Contact".
Cells are autopoetic. They write their own experience.
The name for this kind of random connection of disparate things, implying meaning, without providing any, should be "'if' abuse".
When we found out how "Space and time are connected", that actually meant we found mathematically how that relation works. It's not just some vague thought to ponder about. You can use space and time being connected to solve real problems about the world, like "Where will this particle be in the future and why is it somewhere you wouldn't expect?"
You can use "Space and time are connected" to understand the world, like why Mercury exists how it does. In fact, space and time being connected is necessary to solve that quandary.
The point of science is to advance our ability to predict the future from the current, not write high school poetry.
What would "Space is awareness" mean?
"It's so complicated and unlikely, that it must have a designer."
OK, I'll bite: how unlikely?
How many times must the constituent chemicals bump together before they join to form RNA, divided by the number of times they must have bumped together? I'll wait for you to do the math...
If the odds are once in a quadrillion seconds over a quadrillion square meters of Earth-surface conditions, that means it probably happened two or three times already on Earth. Anything more common than 10^-30 per second per square-meter of "Goldilocks" area is fairly certain to have happened already on Earth. Anything a few orders of magnitude less likely is still going to happen frequently throughout the universe.
The frequencies and opportunities, however, are both unknown. "It's really unlikely!" is a stupid statement. It's really unlikely that someone hit by lightning has won a big jackpot, but it's still likely to happen, over all our civilization. Odds times opportunity is the number that no one can even make a reasonable SWAG for. Knowing that the odds are low tells you absolutely nothing.
It is cool, but not intelligence.
I think humans usually know what the solution looks like, or can rationalize what a solution might be, and can then work backwards too
A mechanism that makes a rotor go one way or the other as a function of the time derivative of a variable would not qualify as such.
Now, if you have a trillion such mecanisms atuned and feeding one anothers inputs in a network... Well you just got yourself a brain and then we can start talking about intelligence.
very simple organisms can't do that, at all. you really do need something with a lot of internal state and state-transition structure (ie, neurons) to do that.
Anyone who likes The Thought Emporium should watch his talk and branch out from there; you'll be amazed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLWm0Qyj3jg
Your reductionist argument is as oversimplified as saying "Earth is just the cooled ejaculate of a supernova." True at some level, but only at a level without practical meaning for most purposes. It sounds cool and insightful. It isn't.
It is more than just "cool". Furthermore, I would probe and inquiry what you actually mean by a positive definition of intelligence so we can get the claim better instead of a negative defintion.
If you have a trillion neurons, some doing basinc control stuff like the one before, with others forming systems that tweak or reroute the others depending on other, emergent potentials, then you have intelligence.
If the brain activity stops being only external information driven and starts being internal information driven (this is, it can change how it regulates stuff o even the stuff it regulates, at different levels of consciousness) then we start talking about something more than information processing.
Your eyes are just a series of mechanisms by which photons are converted into electric signals via proteins that react to the impact of a photon. "Seeing" is mechanical. "Feeling" is mechanical. Receiving and sending the messages is "mechanical". At what point is intelligence separate?
I can't control _how_ my intelligence works, and neither can e-coli.
My "intelligence" is the sum total emergent self-referential molecularly-mechanical signal-processing network that holds state. My DNA holds the state of all of my ancestors on top of which my own environmental changes are laid. My neurons hold the sum-total of my experiences, allowing me to introspect.
Here's my test: - I am intelligent. I have an internal representation of the world that shapes my behavior, and I react to my environment. I can choose to do "irrational" things.
- A mouse is "intelligent" but less than a human. It has a representation of the world that shapes its behavior, and it reacts to its environment. Mice can choose to do "irrational" things like care for their young, and form attachments with humans.
- A mosquito is "intelligent" but less than a mouse. It still has an internal experience of the world that shapes its behavior. It does not care for its young, nor does it form attachments (that we know of).
- Down, and down we go, one thing staying constant -- there is an internal representation of "the world" that guides an organism's behavior. It is an emergent quality of the interaction of mechanical sensory systems working at a molecular level where the goal is survival and reproduction if possible.
I think its intelligence. ymmv
If your 'problem' as a cell is to feed yourself, it is a clever apparatus that solves that problem, and can be depicted as intelligent.
If you understand the 'fully automatic mechanism' completely, you agree that it solves a problem, but you deny that this is intelligent. However, the denial depends on your understanding of the mechanism. If you assume that the world is deterministic (that means, every effect has a definite cause, to put it simply), we cannot be something other than a 'fully automatic mechanism', however a very, very complicated one that we do not fully understand. Indeed, in a deterministic world nothing can be different from a 'fully automatic mechanism', and, by your implied definition of intelligence, nothing can be intelligent. This conclusion leaves the definition of intelligence as something 'other than fully automatic mechanism' rather useless, as it does not distinguish anything. (If you do assume that the world is not deterministic, a similar argument still holds, as long as you do not imply that a person can determine the outcome of the non-determinism, which sounds strange to me to imply.)
I think what you want for something to call 'intelligent', is that you don't immediately understand how the mechanism works and the assumption of some kind of thought process and/or planning. The first property unfortunately depends on what you might consider your own intelligence, which makes it difficult as an objective measure of intelligence so that you can argue about it in a forum. The second property (thinking/planning) might be present in the cell in a way that you don't see (eg. see storage of the current value of 'now') and, similary, it might not be present in us humans in the way self-perceive it.
More than once did I experience a seemingly 'intelligent system' that I found fasciniating, which, after I studied it, I did not think of as intelligent anymore (eg. my first impressions of Weizenbaum's Eliza), which for the aforementioned reasons I think is kind-of silly of me.
I personally define it as more of an emergent property where you increase the complexity of the problem solving machine to the point where it begins to be more than just interconnected automatisms.
Maybe it could be said that processing information is not intelligence by itself. Intelligence, for me, requires the ability to adapt the way one processes information to the task at hand, either by changing it entirely of adapting and tuning to get more out of it.
A fixed mechanism that controls a variable can't be intelligent.
e.g. One reasonable definition of intelligence is ability to use prior experience to fruitfully guide future behavior, and if you look at the spectrum of animal intelligence it seems most useful not to have some arbitrary cutoff or mechanism attached to that. A simple animal like an insect, or a bacterium, has effectively encoded the prior experience of the species, in a relatively stable environment, into its DNA.
Animals with more complex nervous systems have ability to learn as individuals in their own lifetime, and display intelligence according to what they have individually experienced, although they too will have been born with some species-level intelligence as to how to survive & thrive in their environment.
You don't need to do that. You are pursuing a goal that is not assigned to you by nature. This goal is assigned by the business and a perceived "human benefit".
This end-less understanding and influencing of the things should stop. Even if you say there are medical benefits to such investigations, you are going against nature and trying to control a few things while ignoring the full context that turns against you.
That argument was used to argue against the morality of homosexuality. You haven't elevated it in this application.
There must be plenty of “versions” which don’t do anything but generations later are crucial to a function.
How does evolution not get stuck in a local optimum?
Neutral drift and very large population sizes. Anything that preserves diversity in the population long enough to find the right basin. Most artificial evolution systems cannot support population sizes large enough to preserve diversity long enough to locate any solutions that matter.
Right now, evolution is running a live experiment with something like 10^30 candidates in one population alone. The computational requirements for this are effectively zero. The environment is the computer.
So in our case the starting conditions just lined up the way it did and no single step (or series of steps) easily flipped our wiring, so we just rolled with it (and we get by quite well).
Could be wrong, but my understanding is that it does? Plenty of things in nature are not really evolving much at all (as in, variations are not selected) even over longer periods of time. What can happen to it is getting removed by something that evolved from somewhere else (taking the evolutionary niche, or making it unsurvivable)
Vertebrates for example had a at least 2 whole genome duplication events in the past giving us up to 4 copies of the same family of many genes. This enables mutations to alter one copy of a crucial gene to "invent" new functionality without killing the organism.
The most common version of this is probably duplication of G protein linked receptors for odor and taste. Mice and dogs have far more of these than we do.
Evolution does get stuck in a local optimum quite a bit. Think of how many vertebrates are now limited to 4 limbs compared to many insect or mollusk species.
Instead of having dexterous forelimbs around the mouth like crabs, elephants make due with prehensile noses.
Similarly, to get to running speeds while having opposable thumbs humans evolved to stand upright on the hindlimbs instead of simply becoming 6 limbed centaur like creatures. Humans can't outrun any major predators at short distances.
This is why some animals have barely changed in appearance for hundreds of millions of years, e.g. scorpions, while others have changed so much that nobody would guess the relationship between them and their ancestors, had we not discovered some intermediate steps in their evolution.
Now I'm wondering whether HN uses some sort of language model to infer semantic similarity and thus kill content automatically. Frankly, whether this is automatic or by consensus of certain users, there's not much of a difference. It is dystopian, especially given the mountains of meaningless one-line comments that abound here (probably “too little substance to be worth killing”).
Once upon a time the Internet was the realm of free thought and free speech. I get it that spam etc needs to be fought and suppressed, but frankly, none of my comments that have been killed (quite a couple of them already) come close to that category. Rather, it seems the ruling HN mindset is about as narrow-minded (if not more so in certain respects) than your typical mainstream forum.
Don't know about you specifically, but people here clearly "flag" things they disagree with, which is part of why what could be an interesting discussion often ends up being a dull CJ style chorus between affirmative and know-it-all. As if there was no middle ground between that and a "flamewar".
I've read comments to the effect it would be easy to change to the better by administrative means, but apparently there's no will, so "smug-flagging" seems to be in line with the purpose of the site, and that's it.
Do we know that for sure? Let's zoom in on Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen, who helped invent dinosaurs in 19th century England, preceding Research Casting International by roughly 150 years. This curious concoction should be read by taking into account all three sibling comments, dead or alive (50083123 etc).
Compared to the 19th century, now there is a huge amount of accumulated data about the history of the Earth, which is internally consistent and consistent with any scientific experiments that we are doing in the present.
While we know only a small part of what happened millions of years ago, many of the things that we know are much more certain than what we know about things that happen in the present, but which are hidden from us, so we do not have enough information about them.
From time to time some suppositions about the past have to be changed in the light of new evidence, but to falsify a thing supported by such a huge amount of diverse evidence, like the fact that 70 million years ago there were living dinosaurs, that would require an incredible amount of new evidence.
You do not have such evidence, so your comment is not useful. You could comment that anything you here in this world should be doubted, which is very true, but that does not mean that everything is equally doubtful. Some things have a great uncertainty, while other things have an overwhelming probability to be true.
I agree with you with regard to governments and human history. As for natural history, I concede that at first glance, there is no reason to assume anyone would want to alter it, and doubts like mine seem absurd. And doubts they are – while I'm leaning towards the heretical view in as far as dinosaurs are concerned, I have not yet reached any kind of "personal certainty" in this matter. Which makes the topic all the more interesting to me.
The initial motivation that one may assume for "coming up with the dinosaurs" does not necessarily have to be of a political nature. It could have been as innocent as a hoax invented for fun, or as a form of intellectual art, or as a theoretical monument – science fiction, if you will, or science as a form of art. Later on, when the artefact had entered the edifice of science proper and become part of a serious scientific consensus, a certain if moderate political quality would have been gained in as much as Science (as a whole) had displaced Faith as the ruling ideology for the educated class, and consequently as an important pillar of power.
On the other hand, rather than having sophisticated creative jokesters at the origin of the story, such as would gather in places like the Royal Society (the English being known for their humour), we could have a simple misinterpretation as the foundations of the dinosaur edifice, without any ill or peculiar intent at all.
But I'm leaning more to the jokester scenario. These 19th century natural historians were collecting and assembling lots of bones into skeletons, and to the creative mind it must have been both tempting and the obvious thing to make up some new "extinct animals" from whatever bones are available. It would have been a lot of fun, you just need a bit of phantasy and maybe some "missing links". And think about the possibilities once you get hold of whale skeletons (cf. your comment 47374816) … and it turns out the golden age of whaling coincided with the invention of the dinosaurs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_whaling
Pascal said, « le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas », and the same applies to other traits of the human mind that don't fit the narrow rationalistic model that we think underpins our current-day science and its ancestors of the last couple centuries.
Are dinosaurs a "fundamental" fact? True, they precede later lifeforms, but nothing depends directly on their existence; and while they have been woven into the evolutionary graph, that framework itself, by admission of its own postulates, consists mostly of "missing data", which means that relationships of descent between species are fraught with uncertainty.
You're invoking the concept of scientific consistency. In science, everything has to be consistent. I don't know whether it actually is. For example, it seems science says that during the cretaceous, sea surface temperature was ~35°C and we had rain forests covering both poles; whereas today, still according to science, we need to be scared because a certain atmospheric trace gas is on the rise, part of which due to human activity, and that will bring us beyond a so-called tipping point, from which there is no recovery (a ludicrous claim thoroughly disproven by Earth's history, still according to science).
So what we have here is an example of how everything isn't consistent in science when questions of, let's say: political expediency, arise; and also a case where scientific integrity seems t...
I asked Chatty for the best book on the history of the discovery (or invention) of the dinosaurs in the first half of the 19th century†, and it came up with The Dawn of Dinosaurs by John R. Horner, published in 2005. The title struck me as odd (I would have preferred Dawn of the Dinosaurs), and it appears the book doesn't exist, Chatty had made it up.
But that turned my attention to Jack Horner, a very important figure in paleontology (at least in the USA), who has discovered various T-rex skeletons and dinosaur eggs and whatnot, and so I watched a couple minutes of a lecture he gave in 2001, which left a peculiar impression (I mean his personality), and then I read his Wiki page and was not disappointed to find my impressions totally confirmed by the article …
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Horner_(paleontologist)
Can't fault him for liking young girls, that's human nature, and he had the money to be a customer of Jeffrey Epstein; but isn't it curious how he didn't allow dyslexia from stopping him to rise to the top of the field? And what does it say about a field (at least in the USA) if such characters somehow manage to rise to the top? Could it be there is a (well-funded) system that facilitates their ascent? Because they have just what it takes to fulfil the role?
That, of course, should not reflect negatively on whatever paleo findings were made on the lands of your grandparents.
† Chatty next suggested The Dinosaur Hunters by Deborah Cadbury (Terrible Lizard for the US edition), which I found on AA and which seems to do a proper dive into history as is essential to find the truth of the matter.
The real reason for which is of course that … Dinosaurs are Too Big to Fail. :)
Discovery of a couple large aquatic lizards preceded the invention of the dinosaurs by a few decades. Most notably among these, we find mosasaurus, ichthyosaurus, and plesiosaurus, which looks dubious and which Cuvier thought was a hoax.
I read the German Wiki article on mosasaurus, and even though the creature looks straightforward by comparison, and I find no reason to doubt its existence in a configuration roughly similar to what's presented today, the science isn't settled at all in the matter, and there's considerable questioning and shuffling about of the various specimens and the corresponding taxonomy, which is because the evidence is scarce and sketchy, by the very nature of the fossil record.
Far greater and deeper questions arise when we turn to the dinosaurs. Fundamental things like their posture (wrt to their tail) have been "corrected" in the past decades, and it looks like a couple decades from now they'll actually have feathers to be more in line with how they've been inserted as the ancestors of birds. Other things such as the unlikely (and unviable) anatomy of many of the most famous dinosaurs don't look like they can ever be fixed.
With all the bona fide and even sympathy for such phantastic paleontological scenarios, I simply do not understand how this situation can be a base for any kind of "certainty". Curiosity and fascination, okay, I get it – but certainty?
What did you mean by this?
https://ccsb.scripps.edu/goodsell
i've read and can highly recommend his book The Machinery of Life for a patient and visual explanation of these baffling machines!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
Your other request is a bit harder...
It says "most common reaction" not "plurality/majority of energy consumed," but it's still surprising.
...until you realize it's a game theory problem. If you can (effectively) think faster than other E coli, you reach the food faster and don't wander off as often.
It's a Prisoners' Dilemma: the E coli can't trust the other E coli not to 'defect' and put stupid amounts of points into faster food-seeking, so every E coli has to do it too.
This is testable, actually!
We should expect, if it's related to competition, that the metabolic impact of food-finding might be (somehow) dialed down when:
* food is abundant
* ambient E coli population density is low
* food is more homogenously distributed
and vice-versa. We should expect evolutionary pressure to reward such tweaking circuits that optimize the metabolic penalty of food-seeking cognition.
...until you realize it's probably a game theory problem. If you can (effectively) think faster than other E coli, you can reach the food faster.
It's a Prisoners' Dilemma: the E coli can't trust the other E coli not to 'defect' and put stupid amounts of RPG video game points into faster food-seeking, so every E coli has to do it too. This drags up the metabolic penalty.
We should expect the metabolic penalty is (somehow) dialed down when:
and vice-versa. Evolutionary pressure should reward tweaking circuits that optimize this high penalty of food-seeking cognition....and then I read that social animals are noted for having unusually high intelligence. Maybe not such a joke after all!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociality