4 ms·

Some trees can avoid shading each other. See (1). Your progression of thought makes a lot of sense. The question of whether any of this is deliberate, or a beh

Some trees can avoid shading each other. See (1). Your progression of thought makes a lot of sense. The question of whether any of this is deliberate, or a behavior encoded into genes and/or physical and chemical processes that can not be avoided. That being said, some people make an argument that our consciousness is also a chain chemical reaction with lots of feedback loops, and that our consciousness is just an illusionary byproduct. I know that I presented multiple examples and all or not on the same level, no matter along which axis you evaluate them. The point is that deciding whether anyone/anything communicates is not an easy question to answer. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_shyness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_shyness

phyzome 8y ago
I suppose I would avoid any involvement of the terms "deliberate" or "intentional" in this discussion, for the reasons you mention. (Does the tree have free will in attracting herbivore predators? Do you have free will in deciding to go to work?) Another thing to chew on: Does communication involve a level of indirection? What if your chemical signal directly modifies a behavior pathway in the target, rather than starting a cascade that dispatches to that mechanism?
- nikki93 8y ago
  I think what you’re looking for is that languages are more language when they are interpreted by something that looks more like a VM, and interpreters are more VMy when they have constructs that look like “if” and “load from memory” (letting you choose how to act on observing current data, based on past experience). If it’s easier to study the language as a what you term “direct,” it seems less languagey, or whatever. I personally think this distinction is distracting because you can always create a (large) bijection between encodings and their output when interpreted and then it looks “direct”, without actually writing the VM (just a huge lookup table). I feel like smart languages just look nicer to use because they compress better (length to output blowup is exponential), and we think that seems more like human communication.

phyzome 8y ago

I suppose I would avoid any involvement of the terms "deliberate" or "intentional" in this discussion, for the reasons you mention. (Does the tree have free will in attracting herbivore predators? Do you have free will in deciding to go to work?) Another thing to chew on: Does communication involve a level of indirection? What if your chemical signal directly modifies a behavior pathway in the target, rather than starting a cascade that dispatches to that mechanism?

nikki93 8y ago
I think what you’re looking for is that languages are more language when they are interpreted by something that looks more like a VM, and interpreters are more VMy when they have constructs that look like “if” and “load from memory” (letting you choose how to act on observing current data, based on past experience). If it’s easier to study the language as a what you term “direct,” it seems less languagey, or whatever. I personally think this distinction is distracting because you can always create a (large) bijection between encodings and their output when interpreted and then it looks “direct”, without actually writing the VM (just a huge lookup table). I feel like smart languages just look nicer to use because they compress better (length to output blowup is exponential), and we think that seems more like human communication.