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How Nature Solves Problems Through Computation
- komali2 9y agoI absolutely love this way of thinking. We assume that an "individual" is a single human being, because it's convenient and I guess because that's how our sentience works. But realistically, the body itself is an extraordinarily complicated mass of "human" cells often at odds (see a cake, one part of the brain say "eat it," another says "dude no you'll get fat"), and thats without considering the masses of "non-human" entities, such as gut bacteria, skin bacteria, etc. And then we can go macro - a tribe can subdivide into gatherers, warriors, and crafters. A city can specialize further. A country even further. Imagine how different the life experience would be if humans existed as single entities alone in endless fields. Then it gets even more fun to consider interactions with other lifeforms - dogs, plants, cows. Man, what a cool field of research. I'm glad to hear people are studying this.
- bane 9y agoI think it's also worth thinking of humans as a kind of "menagerie" species. There are entire other species of animals who exist either on the input or output streams of human civilization: from cows to roaches. It would have been much harder for humans to arrive at the current apex without these other animals. From the inside to outside we're part of a larger whole.
- pjmlp 9y agoAnd some of them with some kind of intelligence we still do not fully understand (apes, dolphins, ravens, octopus, ...)
- fredley 9y agoYou may enjoy the game Everything. While the gameplay is straightforward, it's a very beautiful game, and is narrated by recordings of the philosopher Alan Watts.
- didibus 9y agoTotally. I've always been surprised that we don't consider how our bodies resemble much more a planet, then anything else. We're just cells to the earth, and who's to say mother earth isn't conscious. Our cells exhibit intelligence, they make their own decision and carry out actions independently, yet to our mutual harmonious benefit in general, but not always. Nature is much more then we make it be.
- kr4 9y agoNot just mother earth. Yogis have discovered in Samadhi (meditation trans) since ages that the universe itself is a giant body with us are like cells in it. Macrocosm is same as microcosm. http://omswami.com/2015/06/the-greatest-secret.html http://omswami.com/2015/06/the-greatest-secret.html This experience cannot be gain in a lab setting – you yourself are the lab, meditation is the tool and quieting the mind is the process to experience this.
- lamlam 9y ago> and thats without considering the masses of "non-human" entities, such as gut bacteria Actually, there's research that suggests that gut bacteria may have more control over our decision making then we are aware of. Really interesting stuff. [1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/gut-bacteria-may-be-controlling-your-appetite-180957389/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/gut-bacteria-ma...
- tomdre 9y agoThere's a nice TED book "Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes" by Rob Knight
- WhoBeI 9y agoHa! Yes. In 1.56 she convinced me their research is interesting, approachable and important. I also liked this from the projects page: "Fundamentally, intelligence can be thought of as an organism's ability to sense, process, and respond to information to its adaptive advantage, forming memories to anticipate and optimize advantage in future encounters. By this definition, an amoeba has a rudimentary intelligence. So does a grove of aspen trees. Intelligence, then, isn’t the sole prerogative of humans, or primates, or even mammals, but a ubiquitous feature of life on earth."[0] [0]: https://www.santafe.edu/research/projects/evolution-of-complexity-on-earth https://www.santafe.edu/research/projects/evolution-of-compl...
- naasking 9y ago> Fundamentally, intelligence can be thought of as an organism's ability to sense, process, and respond to information to its adaptive advantage, forming memories to anticipate and optimize advantage in future encounters. By this definition, an amoeba has a rudimentary intelligence. So does a grove of aspen trees But then what's an organism?
- lgas 9y agoAn entity which has intelligence.
- contravariant 9y agoSomething that is alive.
- will_pseudonym 9y ago"We are a way for the universe to know itself." - Carl Sagan
- throwaway91111 9y agoI suppose, but this surprise seems grounded in the idea that a computation requires an individual. For instance, a physical description of computation might work if you defined it as a process that filters meaningful signals from entropic systems and expels the entropy from the system.
- smallnamespace 9y agoIt would be great if we could get the point where we could look at the 'power spectrum' of a system and all its subsystems and make accurate predictions about how well it will perform in various scenarios. For example, is it better to have one strong, centralized government, or a looser confederation of states? Is there an optimal amount of power one should delegate to individuals? I mean, if you honestly compare the human body to society, our bodies look like horrible totalitarian states with a caste system attached. Cells have their reproduction strictly controlled; cells that break those rules are induced to commit suicide (apoptosis) or are attacked and killed off by the police (immune system); cells that evade these measures and continue to reproduce often end up killing the individual (cancer). Even though cells (mostly) share all the same DNA, they are induced to specialize at birth and mostly stay in their roles for their entire lifespan. So in what important ways are societies different from our bodies, such that societies should maximize liberty of the individual? What does that say about how we should structure society -- should it be a strict geographical hierarchy, or something looser (e.g. corporations and other groups), and how much power should go to each level of organization?
- openfuture 9y agoYou could think of meditation as the dictator listening to what everyone has to say / letting them do their job. When the guy at the top doesn't listen then it makes sense for some group to make their own thing and grow to compete with the host government (cancer).
- taneq 9y ago...did you really just say that not meditating causes cancer? O.o
- vbuwivbiu 9y agoThere's been much work on this in graph and information-theory. To the point of centralization: it's a trade-off between efficiency and robustness (for one thing). Most living systems show evidence of this trade-off, having a mixture of centralization and distributed processing. For example, the body has a distributed blood supply (all cells share the same network) but has a central heart. Cells themselves have mixed centralized components (the nucleus, various organelles) and distributed aspects (the cyctoplasm, parallel transcription of DNA and production of proteins etc). The brain does distributed parallel processing but has centralized components (the amygdala, the pituitary gland, the cerebellum)
- kr4 9y agoMacrocosm is the same as microcosm. Universe is the living body with trillions of beings as its cells. Revealed countless times to yogis in Samadhi (meditation trans) since antiquity [0]. 0: http://blacklotusapp.org/ http://blacklotusapp.org/
- youdontknowtho 9y agoI'm sorry, I personally find a great deal of peace in Buddhist writings, but let's not start taking artistic philosophical language and equating it with scientific observation. The microcosm and the macrocosm are vastly different with one exhibiting quantum behaviors and the other mostly influenced by gravity. The experience of yogi's or Buddhists of a removal of psychological barriers that separate subjective experience into a personal and extra-personal world are just that. Changes to subjective experience. That means a change in brain state. It doesn't imply some kind of magic that changes the observed world. Because things seem alike in imagery or language doesn't even remotely mean they are alike in observation. What you are saying isn't unlike someone equating the Bohr model of the atom with a solar system. They do look alike in illustrations, after all. The problem is that solar systems don't look like atoms and they are vastly different "things".
- carapace 9y agoRobert Anton Wilson in his book "Quantum Psychology" makes a strong case that we observe quantum effects at the macro-scale all the time. He's not a physicist but his understanding of Quantum Mechanics is not "hand-wavey". (A change in brain state is a change in the observed world.)
- cel1ne 9y ago> We assume that an "individual" is a single human being, because it's convenient and I guess because that's how our sentience works. I often hear that, but I think that's a wrong assumption. I think people fall in and out of being conscious all the time, and often they are semi-conscious in a distracted way. Consciousness is this holy singular grail, but I think it's actually a muddy mixture of state of minds, like thinking usually is.
- vbuwivbiu 9y agoand, as Scott Aaronson points out, why assume the brain only hosts a single consciousness* ? Maybe there are multiple consciousnesses hosted by each person's brain, and "you" are one of them at any given time - you'd have no idea the others are conscious. * (not to be confused with multiple-personality disorder)
- alansammarone 9y agoAny normal person is able to remember, in any given moment, the "experience" (in a very broad sense - meaning cognitive and emotional processes) it had in its recent past (modulo memory limitations caused by various factors). Wouldn't that imply that there is a single consciousness inside each brain? i.e a single "state machine"?
- chongli 9y agoBladerunner did a fantastic job of challenging this idea. If your memories can't be trusted then who are you, really?
- vbuwivbiu 9y agoa thread of experience = a consciousness yes, but you'd have no consciousness of any other such threads of experience that may be instantiated by your brain
- monort 9y agoMultiple consciousnesses can have the same experience in parallel. Experiments with a split brain patients shows that they probably have two personalities concurrently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain#Case_studies_of_split-brain_patients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain#Case_studies_of_sp...
- unabst 9y ago"Individual" and "single human being" are abstractions. So are "cells" and "skin" and everything else. If you remove abstraction, you remove language, but an undivided landscape of activity of nature remains. Language is just a layer and for our convenience. But where ever there is communication, abstractions are required to compose a coherent and persistent message. So DNA and proteins and even subatomic particles that entangle can be considered to be tapping into natures capacity to abstract, and to compute those abstractions. And if you consider nothing exists in a void, and the innate connected-ness of an undivided and unabstracted universe as a whole, everything is coming and going; everything is itself a message and the subject of computation; and nature is engaged in a never ending conversation with none other than itself. If it's messages can be any size, and last however long, then you and I too are just one of its many messages. (pardon the philosophy... stuck doing mundane work at midnight on a Friday... I had to write something)
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- ldd 9y agoLook into pantheism if you ever have the time.
- enkid 9y agoIt's abstractions all the way down. There is no inherent concept, including atoms, photons, matter, or energy. It's just how an intellectual system can process what it experiences.
- 21 9y agoQuote from an article along the lines: > However, in broad brush, we might say this: You’re a pattern in spacetime. A mathematical pattern. Specifically, you’re a braid in spacetime—indeed, one of the most elaborate braids known. http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10323222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10323222
- nikki93 9y agoConsider the dual nature of CSP and Actor models and how it reflects wave particle duality of information packet movement in a field.
- j2kun 9y agoThe last few years have seen a number of very interesting developments along the lines of understanding the natural world through the so-called "lens of computation." Some interesting talks can be found here [1] as well as an essay here [2], on the topics of economics, social interaction, biology, and physics. [1]: https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2014/lens-of-computation-workshop https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2014/lens-of-computation-workshop [2]: http://theory.cs.berkeley.edu/computational-lens.html http://theory.cs.berkeley.edu/computational-lens.html
- beefman 9y agoGenerally that phrase refers to the asymptotic analysis of algorithms, which I think has relatively little to teach us about natural systems of the kind mentioned here. I have tremendous respect for TCS and those who study it, and I attended the second "lens" conference in Berkeley in 2011. But it does seem a bit like a field looking for justification. And I don't think it's impossible that academic competition drives more of our brightest to spend more time on it (asymptotic analysis) than is optimal.
- j2kun 9y agoWhy would you think it has little to teach? The author even says that it's useful and influential. > What we are doing at C4 is taking messy, conceptually challenging problems and turning them into something rigorous. We’re very philosophically oriented, but we’re also very quantitative, particularly in thinking about how nature can overcome subjectivity in information processing through collective computation. We really think the answer to these questions requires combining insights from statistical physics, theoretical computer science, information theory, evolutionary biology and cognitive science.
- jchanimal 9y agothey got data by inducing monkey fights. """ We were interested in whether we could induce the monkey society we were studying to change from its status quo of many small fights and a few large ones to having many large fights. We observed that fights in this monkey group range in size from two to 30 or so individuals, with small fights common and large fights very rare. By simulating the society using data we had collected on fight-joining decisions, we found that we could measure the number of monkeys whose propensity to join fights would have to increase to move the system closer to the critical point.
- openasocket 9y agoThat sounds like they were just simulating the society based on data they had gathered about their fights. So not inducing monkey fights, just observing the monkeys fighting naturally and extrapolating from there. Though earlier in the article they allude to removing a few members of the society and showing the fights increased. Also it should be noted that fighting is a very common part of monkey behavior. If you observe these groups in the wild individuals are almost constantly challenging and checking others to maintain or advance their position in the social hierarchy.
- mlechha 9y agoIt was a simulation from the data they already had. It's near impossible to do that with a real monkey colony.
- debbiedowner 9y agoWhy is a "social coordinate space" not Euclidean, and why is it worth mentioning? ..."phenomenological rules"... It is an interesting subject... but this interview is a little annoying since it is with a philosopher in scientists clothing. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-c-flack-76b454133/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-c-flack-76b454133/
- dasimon 9y agoA prior paper contributed to by Ms. Flack (https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1406/1406.7720.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1406/1406.7720.pdf) presents a framework for modeling the dynamics between individuals - I would assume that is the abstract "social coordinate space" to which she's referring, which places individuals within "Markovian, probabilistic, 'social' circuits" rather than into some Euclidean space. And Ms. Flack, though her research interests extend beyond the realm of what is traditionally considered hard science, is most certainly a scientist - an evolutionary biologist specifically. I assume you are linking to her LinkedIn profile to point out her "Doctor of Philosophy" degree? That's just the full, formal name for a PhD :P
- debbiedowner 9y agoJust to get the full quote from original article: “their metric space is a social coordinate space. It’s not Euclidean.” If the space being considered is a probability space like you say, then there is no metric, there is a measure. --- Why am I so pedantic? Because I feel that the liberal arts mindset of writing is not serious enough for subjects where there is a ground truth to uncover. In the article you link, where is the empirical study that compares how this model predicts reality? I wish that people who publish on SIAMS, or ASA, AMS, IEEE affiliated journals were the ones trending on HN, and getting interviewed by journalists. A pessimist would say those people are too busy with their work for publicity, and that an empty barrel echoes loudest.
- ehudla 9y agoWhile this field is advancing rapidly, and sophisticated approaches are being constantly developed, for those who want a gentle introduction, I venture to recommend our book: https://www.amazon.com/Biological-Computation-Chapman-Mathematical-Computational/dp/1420087959/ https://www.amazon.com/Biological-Computation-Chapman-Mathem... Section 6.1 deals with swarm intelligence (ant colony optimization, cemetery organization, particle swarm optimization). 6.2 is on artificial immune systems. A more biological+philosophical exploration on issues of collectivity will be found in the following book, which is already available for pre-order on Amazon, I see: https://www.amazon.com/Landscapes-Collectivity-Sciences-Theoretical-Biology/dp/0262036851/ https://www.amazon.com/Landscapes-Collectivity-Sciences-Theo...
- shishy 9y agoAre there any academic research papers that you would recommend in this field?
- ehudla 9y agoToo many... What topics specifically interest you? I might have suggestions, if it's topics I am familiar with.
- shishy 9y agoMy background is in tumor immunology research, so I'd be especially interested in how this is applied to the immune system if you are aware of any good papers there.
- ehudla 9y agoThe Landscapes of Collectivity book has two chapters about collective aspects of the immune system. if you are interested in a computational perspective, the classic is (Hofmeyr and Forrest, 2000).
- known 9y ago"But when Flack removed some of the police, the whole group became fractured and chaotic" Reminds me Saddam and Iraq :)
- known 9y agoI believe UNSC does the same;
- fithisux 9y agoCan someone suggest FOSS code for experimentation? Any free tutorials, notes, books. Thanks