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On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

cs.utexas.edu

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Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#51

Post by FullMtlAlcoholc »

jamesrcole wrote: post #25
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a threshold in information processing capabilities, yes. But could you describe these information processing capabilities? Since evolution does process information about iterative states, it's not the mere existence of feedback, so there must be some threshold in capabilities that requires crossing. Please describe them in a manner that includes or excludes as you see fit babies, cats, and bacteria but doesn't lea…

Describing how evolution works, and why it is completely blind, is not something for the size constraints of a HN comment. I'd recommend books like Dawkin's "The Blind Watchmaker" or "Climbing Mount Improbable", or Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" for good, readable descriptions.

I think it is a bit presumptuous to say that evolution is completely blind. Here is a paper that, based on deep learning, explores how evolution can be seen as learning from previous experience like a neural net.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/why-evolution-may-be-intelligent-b... [Summary]

http://eegjournalclub.weebly.com/uploads/2/6/5/0/26509069/wa... [Actual Paper]

I often wonder if there are "intelligences" at the stellar scale or above and if they existed, would we have the lobes to be aware of their existence.

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#52

Post by clock_tower »

defined wrote: post #41
clock_tower wrote: post #4

"But then Galileo made the troubling discovery that the heavier stone does not fall any faster than the lighter one." It does fall faster, if you drop both stones in the atmosphere; the heavier stone has more mass per unit of surface area, to better overcome a constant level of air resistance. Aristotle's physics were based on pretty accurate observation of the pre-industrial world, although they're surprisingly shor…

> It does fall faster, if you drop both stones in the atmosphere; the heavier stone has more mass per unit of surface area, to better overcome a constant level of air resistance. Not necessarily; for one thing, if the masses of the two stones are not significantly different, the difference in the effects of air resistance would be unmeasurable given the instruments of the day. For another, the shapes of the stones ar…

I see I shouldn't have let the article's reference to stones stand; the specific experimental apparatus used by both sides was lead balls -- Galileo rolled them down inclined planes, while his opponents dropped them from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

The article lost me when the author blithely claimed that it was Galileo who dropped two s from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The author clearly has no idea what happens when you do that; while Galileo was far too good at choosing the experimental setup that would give him the answer he wanted, while ignoring any such setup that would prove him wrong, to make such an obvious mistake.

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#53

Post by vectorpush »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #37
vectorpush wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree with your assessment that it's any blinder of a process than your own will is. I understand what you're saying, but the two concepts cannot be effectively compared. An organism's "will" is a label for the reactive tendencies we observe in physical systems that exhibit homeostasis, whereas evolution is the description of a physical process that is perpetually ongoing and has no physically discrete meaning…

Your commemt is no more insightful than "I understand how to draw a box around one of them". "You" as an entity are really just a process emergent from chemical reactions on some area, and your "will" is just the result of feedback between many regions of that process and outside stimuli. Biological evolution is a process happening in more dispersed reactions, but still has all manner of internal feedback mechanisms…

> You" as an entity are really just a process emergent from chemical reactions on some area, and your "will" is just the result of feedback between many regions of that process and outside stimuli.

Agreed.

> Biological evolution is a process happening in more dispersed reactions, but still has all manner of internal feedback mechanisms and responds to external stimuli.

Disagree. Evolution does not "respond to external stimuli", there is no "internal" or "external" as far as evolution is concerned, that's like saying "erosion responds to external stimuli"; "it" does not respond, "it" is a description of a process.

> I don't see how you've drawn a meaningful distinction between them, except to say that one os easy to observe in total (eg, you can draw a box around it) and is sort of like you, so you feel you can understand it.

I can't draw a box around it because it is not a thing with a position in space unlike "you" which is.

> Homeostasis and physical locality don't seem partocularly germane traits when discussing whether or not something has a will.

Of course it does, if words are to have any meaning at all. Whatever it is you're trying to describe that is common between an organism and the description of physical process is not called "will" by any useful definition of the word. It's like if I said "evolution has no guiding principles" and you replied "well neither do humans really because our 'guiding principles' are just the result of a deterministic evolutionary process", but that's not true because "guiding principles" is a human concept that applies to beings that reason about their environment, even if the foundation of that reasoning is determined by constituent factors.

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#54

Post by adrianratnapala »

Houshalter wrote: post #19
chickenfries wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your language metaphor works here, but I won't try to extend it for fear of misleading you with anthropomorphism :) Anthropomorphized code reads like someone reading off a gigantic checklist that keeps getting longer and longer. Each time a new problem comes up, we solve it by adding another "If A then B" except it's something like this if foo.bar.baz[0][1]['value'] if (foo.bar.baz[0][1]['value'] == 'undocume…

My favorite examples of overreliance on conditionals: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/285492834444771328/28... https://i.redd.it/6fh5xb20ttly.png http://i.imgur.com/GqcvMhp.png

Actually the first example looks perfectly reasonable to me. I would have used changes of "if () return" instead of a huge OR, but the result would have been the same.

The second example I can't judge. Probalby the variable name is bad, but not extraordinarily so. It's a lookup table, I can't tell if it is a good or bad idea without know what is being looked up.

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#55

Post by adrianratnapala »

clock_tower wrote: post #52
defined wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It does fall faster, if you drop both stones in the atmosphere; the heavier stone has more mass per unit of surface area, to better overcome a constant level of air resistance. Not necessarily; for one thing, if the masses of the two stones are not significantly different, the difference in the effects of air resistance would be unmeasurable given the instruments of the day. For another, the shapes of the stones ar…

I see I shouldn't have let the article's reference to stones stand; the specific experimental apparatus used by both sides was lead balls -- Galileo rolled them down inclined planes, while his opponents dropped them from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The article lost me when the author blithely claimed that it was Galileo who dropped two s from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The author clearly has no idea what happens when…

while Galileo was far too good at choosing the experimental setup that would give him the answer he wanted, while ignoring any such setup that would prove him wrong

By this you mean that he was good at designing experiments that were sensitive to the basic physics of what was going on, while being insensitive to confounding factors?

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#56

Post by adrianratnapala »

FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #9
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does a baby have a will? How about a cat? Bacterium? I'm actually curious why people believe one emergent system does (eg, people) but another doesn't (eg, evolution/biosphere). What lets you determine when a composite object or pattern in an automata has crossed that threshold?

> What lets you determine when a composite object or pattern in an automata has crossed that threshold? There isn't really a threshold beyond that pattern or object somehow communicating to you that it does indeed possess a will or some form of consciousness. The default assumption is to assume it doesn't until it shows it does instead of invoking an animist world view that imbues a spirit to every complex phenomenon…

We don't have to get caught up in definitions of consciousness.

What we see in the case of microbe cell division is goal-directed behaviour. The physical details of how it happens are very important to cell biologists, but the bigger point is that one way or another the thing will behave in ways that help it grow and divide.

In that light it seems perfectly fine to say that the cell wants to divide. Indeed it is the most correct explanation I can think of -- and then I can invoke evolution as an explanation of how it came to want this.

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#57

Post by clock_tower »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #55
clock_tower wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see I shouldn't have let the article's reference to stones stand; the specific experimental apparatus used by both sides was lead balls -- Galileo rolled them down inclined planes, while his opponents dropped them from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The article lost me when the author blithely claimed that it was Galileo who dropped two s from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The author clearly has no idea what happens when…

while Galileo was far too good at choosing the experimental setup that would give him the answer he wanted, while ignoring any such setup that would prove him wrong By this you mean that he was good at designing experiments that were sensitive to the basic physics of what was going on, while being insensitive to confounding factors?

Yes. But did he know that?

This is the Renaissance we're talking about; I wouldn't be at all surprised if he just picked the experiment he wanted and laughed off the rest, applying Petrarch's style of rhetoric in the sciences.

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#58

Post by chickenfries »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #54
Houshalter wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite examples of overreliance on conditionals: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/285492834444771328/28... https://i.redd.it/6fh5xb20ttly.png http://i.imgur.com/GqcvMhp.png

Actually the first example looks perfectly reasonable to me. I would have used changes of "if () return" instead of a huge OR, but the result would have been the same. The second example I can't judge. Probalby the variable name is bad, but not extraordinarily so. It's a lookup table, I can't tell if it is a good or bad idea without know what is being looked up.

I think in the second one, a simple list of values that correspond to true would be more reasonable than putting this in your source code, if you just need a look up table. The way the comments are structured though, I wonder if each row an option map, (annotated by the comments along the top)

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#59

Post by Houshalter »

chickenfries wrote: post #58
adrianratnapala wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the first example looks perfectly reasonable to me. I would have used changes of "if () return" instead of a huge OR, but the result would have been the same. The second example I can't judge. Probalby the variable name is bad, but not extraordinarily so. It's a lookup table, I can't tell if it is a good or bad idea without know what is being looked up.

I think in the second one, a simple list of values that correspond to true would be more reasonable than putting this in your source code, if you just need a look up table. The way the comments are structured though, I wonder if each row an option map, (annotated by the comments along the top)

The second example was a 15 line switch statement that they replaced with a lookup because they thought it would be faster.

Re: On anthropomorphism in science (1985)

#60

Post by Houshalter »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #54
Houshalter wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite examples of overreliance on conditionals: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/285492834444771328/28... https://i.redd.it/6fh5xb20ttly.png http://i.imgur.com/GqcvMhp.png

Actually the first example looks perfectly reasonable to me. I would have used changes of "if () return" instead of a huge OR, but the result would have been the same. The second example I can't judge. Probalby the variable name is bad, but not extraordinarily so. It's a lookup table, I can't tell if it is a good or bad idea without know what is being looked up.

Would could possibly be the advantage of hard coding divisibility checks against every prime number? There's so many problems with this. The simplest thing would be to just make an array of primes and iterate through it. There's also faster algorithms to check for primality.
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