No love for D'Arcy Thompson on growth and form? His parametric models for organisms were quite nice (if very simplistic)
Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters
91–100 of 155 posts
Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> By spelling out what computers are doing it becomes very obvious that there is nothing that can be aware of any experiences in computers as it is all simply a sequence of arithmetic operations. By spelling out what brains are doing it becomes very obvious that it's all simply a sequence of chemical reactions - and yet here we are, having experiences. Software will never have a human experience - but neither will a…
If an algorithmic process is an experience and a collection of experiences is intelligence then we get some pretty wild conclusions that I don't think most people would be attempting to claim as it'd make them sound like a lunatic (or a hippy). Consider the (algorithmic) mechanical process of screwing in a screw into a board. This screw has an "experience" and therefore intelligence. So... The screw is intelligent? V…
> If an algorithmic process is an experience and a collection of experiences is intelligence
Neither, what I'm saying is that the observable correlates of experience are the observable correlates of intelligence - saying that "humans are X therefore humans are Y, software is X but software is not Y" is special pleading. The most defensible positions here are illusionism about consciousness altogether (humans aren't Y) or a sort of soft panpsychism (X really does imply Y). Personally I favor the latter. Some sort of threshold model where the lights turn on at a certain point seems pretty sketchy to me, but I guess isn't ruled out. But GP, as I understand them, is claiming that biology doesn't even supervene on physics, which is a wild claim.
> Or, we must need a more refined definition of intelligence which more closely reflects what people actually are trying to convey when they use this word.
Well that's the thing, I don't think people are trying to convey any particular thing. I think they're trying to find some line - any line - which allows them to write off non-animal complex systems as philsophically uninteresting. Same deal as people a hundred years ago trying to find a way to strictly separate humans from nonhuman animals.
Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sure we can't see dark matter (it doesn't interact electromagnetically), but we can see its effects Even this is granting too much: "seeing it" and "seeing its effects" are the same thing . No one has ever "directly seen", in the sense that internet DM skepticism demands, anything other than a photon.
"Seeing" is indeed a poorly chosen word. The problem with dark matter is that there does not exist any second relationship from which to verify its existence, like in the case of normal matter, which takes part in a variety of interactions that lead to measurable effects, which can be compared. The amount and the location of dark matter is computed from the gravitational forces that explain the observed movements of…
All major DM candidates also have multiple interactions: that's the WI in WIMP, for instance. In fact I don't know that anyone is seriously proposing that dark matter is just bare mass with no other properties - aside from the practical problems, that would be a pretty radical departure from the last century of particle physics.
Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For the Occam razor, adding some random term to an equation is not really better than adding some invisible but well characterized stuff... You're being too kind. It's worse. Especially when (in my understanding anyway) that added term doesn't even explain all the things dark matter does.
Adding any finite number of parameters is strictly better than adding an infinity of parameters (i.e. an arbitrary distribution of dark matter chosen to match the observations).
The distribution has to be consistent forward and backwards in time. It's a lot less arbitrary than you're implying, and adding a hundred parameters (or similar finite number) to gravity is not better.
Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's how I feel about dark matter. Oh this galaxy is slower than this other similar one. The first one must have less dark matter then. What can't be fit by declaring the amount of dark matter that must be present fits the data? It's unfalsifiable, just because we haven't found it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Even worse than string/M-theory which at least has math.
It's easy to say "Epicycles! Epicycles!", but people are going to continue using their epicycles until a Copernicus comes along.
Well, the funny thing is Copernicus posits just about as many epicycles in his theory as previous geocentric theories. Only Kepler’s discovery of the equal area law and elliptical orbits successfully banishes epicycles.
Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with dark matter is that there's no (working) theory on how the dark matter is distributed. It's really easy to "explain" gravitational effects if you can postulate extra mass ad-hoc to fit the observations.
I dunno if this is the correct way of thinking about it, but I just imagine it as a particle that has mass but does not interact with other particles (except at big-bang like energy levels?). So essentially a galaxy would be full of these particles zipping around never colliding with anything. And over time, some/most of these particles would have stable orbits (as the ones in unstable orbits would have flown off by…
> I dunno if this is the correct way of thinking about it, but I just imagine it as a particle that has mass but does not interact with other particles (except at big-bang like energy levels?).
Not even anything that extreme. What's ruled out is interaction via electromagnetism (or if you want to get really nit-picky, electromagnetic interaction with a strength above some extremely low threshold).
Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easy to say "Epicycles! Epicycles!", but people are going to continue using their epicycles until a Copernicus comes along.
There will be no Copernicus if everybody just studies epicycles. E.g. there are massive resources put into the desperate WIMP hunt that could be used for finding new theories.
I don't see how those resources are fungible with each other.
Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> By spelling out what computers are doing it becomes very obvious that there is nothing that can be aware of any experiences in computers as it is all simply a sequence of arithmetic operations. By spelling out what brains are doing it becomes very obvious that it's all simply a sequence of chemical reactions - and yet here we are, having experiences. Software will never have a human experience - but neither will a…
This is a common retort. You can read my other comments if you want to understand why you're not really addressing my points because I have already addressed how reductionism does not apply to living organisms but it does apply to computers.
The comments where you demand an instruction set for the brain, or else you'll dismiss any argument saying its actions can be computed? Even after people explained that lots of computers don't even have instruction sets?
And where you decide to assume that non-computable physics happens in the brain based on no evidence?
What a waste of time. You "addressed" it in a completely meaningless way.
Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters
#99This is humorous (and well-written), but I think its more than that. I'm always making the joke (observation) that ML (AI) is just curve-fitting. Whether "just curve-fitting" is enough to produce something "intelligent" is, IMO, currently unanswered, largely due to differing viewpoints on the meaning of "intelligent". In this case they're demonstrating some very clean, easy-to-understand curve-fitting, but it's reall…
> Whether "just curve fitting" is enough to produce something "intelligent" is, IMO, currently unanswered Continual "curve fitting" to the real world can create intelligence. What is missing is not something inside the model. It's missing a mechanism to explore, search and expand its experience. Our current crop of LLMs ride on human experience, they have not largely participated in creating their own experiences. Th…
>It's missing a mechanism to explore, search and expand its experience.
Can't we create an agent system which can search the internet and choose what data to train itself with?
Re: Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
The dark matter theory is falsifiable. Sure we can't see dark matter (it doesn't interact electromagnetically), but we can see its effects, and it has to follow the laws of physics as we understand them today. It is actually a satisfying theory with regard to the Occam razor. We don't have to change our laws of physics to explain the abnormal rotations of galaxy, we just need "stuff" that we can't see and yet interac…
If we add an arbitrary amount of dark matter everywhere, to match the observed motions of the celestial bodies, that adds an infinity of parameters, and not even a enumerable one. This obviously can match almost anything and it has extremely low predictive power (many future observations may differ from predictions, which can be accounted by some dark matter whose distribution was previously unknown), so it is a much…
the reason this isn't true is that by the hypothesis of dark matter, it follows gravity but not electromagnetism. as such it only fits distributions recoverable from evolving gravity. e.g. if we require a certain distribution today, it fixes the distribution at all other points in time, and we can use light speed delay to look into the past to verify whether the distributions have evolved according to gravity.