Edge detection doesn’t explain line drawing

Post by incongruity » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 4:59 PM UTC

milesvp wrote: post #87

detourdog wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the universe we live right now is no different than a simulation. Subtle difference in belief but I think it might have a big implication.

There is one key difference between reality and simulation. In reality you have to spend energy to remove noise. In simulation you have to spend energy to add noise. Or perhaps more accurately, all objects interact in reality and energy needs to be spent to prevent interaction, while simulation requires energy to make objects interact. But it’s even worse than it sounds at first, because you need to spend energy not…

Post by kurtoid » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 5:21 PM UTC

hprotagonist wrote: post #8

cnity wrote: post #3

As someone (probably like many here) who graduated from a university which taught computer vision and peripheral neuroscience courses, with such titles as "Computational Neuroscience of Vision", I always felt that trying to understand the human brain as a kind of algorithm was a bit of an artefact of computer scientists as they approach biology. The truth is the visual cortex is vast, and not sufficient to explain th…

ah, someone who paid attention in lecture! (incidentally; there’s a fairly deep literature of historians of science that have carefully documented that we describe ourselves as analogous to the most sophisticated technology of the day: see “to lose one’s temper”, “to blow a gasket”, “i got my wires crossed”, “sorry, cache miss”, … as metaphors and idioms of mental state through the centuries that reflect the cool tec…

Post by pbhjpbhj » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 5:36 PM UTC

Kinrany wrote: post #37

simias wrote: post #9

Ten years or so ago I was working on a video chip that had an upscaler feature. While prototyping and simulating it, we first started by applying a mathematically-correct (i.e. information preserving) FIR filter to do the upscale. Then we compared the result with other solutions and found that ours looked worse. We asked our colleagues to blind-test it and they all picked third-party-scaled images over ours. At first…

The upscaled image stores more information than the original image, so it must be possible to keep all the information while still doing edge enhancement!

Post by kridsdale3 » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 5:48 PM UTC

mjburgess wrote: post #42

pavlov wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also the universe itself is often seen through the lens of contemporary technology. Are we living on an island that floats on a giant turtle’s back? Or are the heavens like giant clockworks? Or maybe it’s all a computer simulation? These cosmological speculations are separated by thousands of years, but they are all simply a reflection of what the person finds most awe-inspiring in their everyday life.

Reasoning by analogy is one of the ways we solve the framing problem. So, when explaining the universe we imagine it's an act of will by a conscious entity (ie., like how we invent). When explaining the mind we suppose it's like one of our inventions. Absent an analogy of some kind it's quite hard to determine what features are salient. Objects have an essentially infinite number of properties.

Post by kridsdale3 » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 5:51 PM UTC

viciousvoxel wrote: post #83

ben_w wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to lose one’s temper Huh, never thought about that one before. Linguistic stuff like this is fun to find; these days I mostly spot it via learning German as a second language, so the artifice in artificial intelligence becomes “Künstliches Intelligenz” where “Kunst” is artist and “Kunststoff” is plastic, and in Middle Low German “kunst” is knowledge and ability. > coined Deliberate choice to exemplify your point, o…

Just an interesting connection, in English, "plastic" comes from Greek, via Latin (and Medieval Italian) "to mold". We see this meaning show up in phrases like "neural plasticity," which refers to the brain's capacity to learn, (re)grow, and make new connections (e.g. knowledge and abilities).