6 ms·

Cognition All the Way Down

100 points by myth_drannon 6y ago

jgilias 6y ago
There's something called the Living Systems theory that postulates that there are significant parallels between subsystems, workings, failure modes and so on, between different levels of living systems. Where the levels are cells -> organs -> organisms -> groups of organisms -> organizations -> nations -> supra national institutions. The theory is not new actually. So, it could be viewed as cognition all the way down and up. At least as a tool of analysis.
- patcon 6y ago
  I've followed this thinking for awhile. I understand it as Complexity Science thinking, as espoused by the Santa Fe Institute. It's always struck me as the style of thinking that biomimicry is but a small subset of. It feels like a way of thinking that elevates analogy between domains up to the level of partial knowledge. And I understand it as being more about generalized properties of networks -- seeing networks that "rhyme", even in totally different domains and strata. Operating within these frameworks feels like looking at one of those 3D Magic Eye images. "Oh, if I cross my eyes a bit, I can see that death is simply a repeatedly discovered pattern that emerged in virtually all living networks, and death is just a process of collapsing/compressing a complex network agent into a lower dimensional representation that will be referential to other agents. And so how does this repeatedly successful pattern bear on how I should build a government? Or my organization? etc etc" EDIT: I also find myself curious whether this truth is why we have this predisposition to see beauty in allegory and metaphor and poetics. Maybe our deep history and evolution knows that these things constitute a fuzzy sort of real knowledge. Maybe our biology knows better than us that networks share structure at various levels, and connecting them through linguistic bridges has always served us and made our collective will more powerful.
  - jgilias 6y ago
    I also believe this kind of thinking can have very real practical applications. As a trivial example, say you look at a criminal organization and treat it as a living system. Then you can identify what kind of failure modes there exist in living systems in general and how these can be forced, and then use these insights to incapacitate the organization. Granted, I'd expect that most of these forced failures, say destroying or overloading their communications channels, will already be known to practicioners of the field. However, there may be some methods that are overlooked due to how sciences dealing with other kinds of living systems are seen as completely unrelated fields living in their own silos.
  - ganzuul 6y ago
    What does death as a representation mean?
  - beaconstudios 6y ago
    this all ties into things like systems dynamics and cybernetics, which look at feedback loops as the fundamental structure in a system. I've been looking for the kinds of communities/fields that recognise the properties you've described and study/discuss them more in-depth, as it's something I've noticed a few years ago and am deeply interested in. It seems the peak of investigation into system properties was in the 50s, and despite the idea (or at least the meme) of cybernetics being embedded into everything futuristic/high-tech, I haven't found much actual interest/community around these ideas outside of maybe academia (which I'm not involved in, or sure how I would even access).
- dustingetz 6y ago
  step 1 to macro-cognition is to get a lightspeed coms network linking every human to every other human in real-time ... complete!
loa_in_ 6y ago
Amazing article, that starts a little bit simplistic, but actually goes into the not so pop sci details
Geee 6y ago
I find it extremely fascinating - that the workings of our body and mind are actually encoded in the DNA. The secrets of AGI & consciousness are right there, and we know they are, but we just aren't able to read it so that we could replicate them. I've been wondering if there's some sort of computational method to extract the algorithms without having to simulate the biology.
- DennisP 6y ago
  That sounds like it'd be about as hard, as extracting the output of a complicated program without running it.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  > I've been wondering if there's some sort of computational method to extract the algorithms without having to simulate the biology. That doesn't seem plausible to me. DNA, just like a compiled program, is a set of instructions for a specific computer. I don't believe you can extract the meaning of a program without understanding the computer that is supposed to run it (except perhaps by statistical analysis of its results when being run, which is generally how we are studying it today). Now, if we did have a deep understanding of cellular machinery, of the way cells organize into organs and organisms, and of the functionality of each of these organs, including the brain, and the way they collaborate to produce cognition, THEN we could perhaps decompile the DNA into a high-level algorithm, where we could say something like 'these are instructions for programming a stem cell to specialize into a cell which feeds cells that react when this chemical is encountered in concentrations greater than X over a time period of Y'. But this is likely the opposite approach to what you were asking - you would need to have an almost complete understanding of the biochemistry of the entire body, and of the way it gives rise to intelligence, at which point the DNA itself may not be so important anymore in the hunt for AGI.
  - patcon 6y ago
    > I don't believe you can extract the meaning of a program without understanding the computer that is supposed to run it (except perhaps by statistical analysis of its results when being run, which is generally how we are studying it today). This made me think of what forces of life are maybe engaging in within this universe: We can't know the structure of the machine running this simulation, but if we probe the results of the running simulation enough, we can understand everything of the system running it. In the Einstein sense, maybe that's how we know God? :)
Kednicma 6y ago
Two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24766148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24766148 Unsure how Aeon is doing this; some sort of URL trickery?
lioeters 6y ago
Hoh, "teleophobia", what a word for the aversion to ascribing will and purpose to living things. > You think we shouldn’t anthropomorphise people? The mechanistic/behaviorist way of looking at the world is fundamental to science as a discipline, and I suspect this originated from the crisis of religion - the split between matter and spirit, in terms of concepts. Consciousness and cognition have an uncomfortable resemblance to what we used to call "spirit". It reminds me of the "uncanny valley", how some machines are starting to behave awfully close to living creatures; and machine learning ("artificial intelligence") producing results that seem as if there's an awareness, a mind of its own. We know that they are just mechanisms, all matter and no spirit, but our guts sense a kinship - we have an emotional reaction to life or things that act like they're alive, like they're thinking. We look at an ant, moving around in the world, sensing and feeling, looking back at us with its eyes - and most of us would "anthropomorphise" it, to relate to it as "one of us". Our subjective experience tells us that we're not just objects, but something more, special, magical even. But, having rid of magic, science must understand and explain convincingly the mystery of life and mind, the very strange material existence of ourselves. Looking at how slime moulds crawl through mazes to find food, I get an uncanny feeling that it's alive and has a primitive mind. Or those sped-up films of plants reaching out their vines and tendrils, holding onto things and climbing toward the light - it has something in common with us at a fundamental level. Science offers explanations for these phenomena, yes - but it seems there are still missing pieces, concepts, models, to tell the full story. Self-organization of matter, swarm behaviors, distributed intelligence, information and computation..
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCvwyScn9jU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCvwyScn9jU briefly describes apparent learning by association in plants. For more, look up monica gagliano
- ganzuul 6y ago
  The problem of consciousness is divided into an easy and hard part. The hard part only requires an observer, but we can not observe the observer without a mind. This wrongly conflates the discussion. A mind without an observer would indeed be uncanny valley stuff. I always ask people who claim consciousness does not exist if they are indeed undead, or merely confused by the terminology.
yyyk 6y ago
The authors are surely right that we are working on a too low level, and vulgar behaviourism has been slowly going out of fashion anyway. However, they haven't yet convinced their approach is useful. I note that their approach can't (yet?) begin to answer their own worm question (which head will the worm have?) either, and their analogies to software and hardware seem simplistic. As an article this is worthwhile, and their proposal may well turn out to be a useful research direction, but it's not there yet. Hopefully there'll be a part 2. P.S. There's no need to convince us that multicell organisms are compatible with PD as the article tries to do - so what if they weren't?
ganzuul 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_biology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_biology
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

100 points by myth_drannon 6y ago

There's something called the Living Systems theory that postulates that there are significant parallels between subsystems, workings, failure modes and so on, between different levels of living systems. Where the levels are cells -> organs -> organisms -> groups of organisms -> organizations -> nations -> supra national institutions. The theory is not new actually. So, it could be viewed as cognition all the way down and up. At least as a tool of analysis.

patcon 6y ago
I've followed this thinking for awhile. I understand it as Complexity Science thinking, as espoused by the Santa Fe Institute. It's always struck me as the style of thinking that biomimicry is but a small subset of. It feels like a way of thinking that elevates analogy between domains up to the level of partial knowledge. And I understand it as being more about generalized properties of networks -- seeing networks that "rhyme", even in totally different domains and strata. Operating within these frameworks feels like looking at one of those 3D Magic Eye images. "Oh, if I cross my eyes a bit, I can see that death is simply a repeatedly discovered pattern that emerged in virtually all living networks, and death is just a process of collapsing/compressing a complex network agent into a lower dimensional representation that will be referential to other agents. And so how does this repeatedly successful pattern bear on how I should build a government? Or my organization? etc etc" EDIT: I also find myself curious whether this truth is why we have this predisposition to see beauty in allegory and metaphor and poetics. Maybe our deep history and evolution knows that these things constitute a fuzzy sort of real knowledge. Maybe our biology knows better than us that networks share structure at various levels, and connecting them through linguistic bridges has always served us and made our collective will more powerful.
- jgilias 6y ago
  I also believe this kind of thinking can have very real practical applications. As a trivial example, say you look at a criminal organization and treat it as a living system. Then you can identify what kind of failure modes there exist in living systems in general and how these can be forced, and then use these insights to incapacitate the organization. Granted, I'd expect that most of these forced failures, say destroying or overloading their communications channels, will already be known to practicioners of the field. However, there may be some methods that are overlooked due to how sciences dealing with other kinds of living systems are seen as completely unrelated fields living in their own silos.
- ganzuul 6y ago
  What does death as a representation mean?
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  this all ties into things like systems dynamics and cybernetics, which look at feedback loops as the fundamental structure in a system. I've been looking for the kinds of communities/fields that recognise the properties you've described and study/discuss them more in-depth, as it's something I've noticed a few years ago and am deeply interested in. It seems the peak of investigation into system properties was in the 50s, and despite the idea (or at least the meme) of cybernetics being embedded into everything futuristic/high-tech, I haven't found much actual interest/community around these ideas outside of maybe academia (which I'm not involved in, or sure how I would even access).
dustingetz 6y ago
step 1 to macro-cognition is to get a lightspeed coms network linking every human to every other human in real-time ... complete!

loa_in_ 6y ago

Amazing article, that starts a little bit simplistic, but actually goes into the not so pop sci details

Geee 6y ago

I find it extremely fascinating - that the workings of our body and mind are actually encoded in the DNA. The secrets of AGI & consciousness are right there, and we know they are, but we just aren't able to read it so that we could replicate them. I've been wondering if there's some sort of computational method to extract the algorithms without having to simulate the biology.

DennisP 6y ago
That sounds like it'd be about as hard, as extracting the output of a complicated program without running it.
tsimionescu 6y ago
> I've been wondering if there's some sort of computational method to extract the algorithms without having to simulate the biology. That doesn't seem plausible to me. DNA, just like a compiled program, is a set of instructions for a specific computer. I don't believe you can extract the meaning of a program without understanding the computer that is supposed to run it (except perhaps by statistical analysis of its results when being run, which is generally how we are studying it today). Now, if we did have a deep understanding of cellular machinery, of the way cells organize into organs and organisms, and of the functionality of each of these organs, including the brain, and the way they collaborate to produce cognition, THEN we could perhaps decompile the DNA into a high-level algorithm, where we could say something like 'these are instructions for programming a stem cell to specialize into a cell which feeds cells that react when this chemical is encountered in concentrations greater than X over a time period of Y'. But this is likely the opposite approach to what you were asking - you would need to have an almost complete understanding of the biochemistry of the entire body, and of the way it gives rise to intelligence, at which point the DNA itself may not be so important anymore in the hunt for AGI.
- patcon 6y ago
  > I don't believe you can extract the meaning of a program without understanding the computer that is supposed to run it (except perhaps by statistical analysis of its results when being run, which is generally how we are studying it today). This made me think of what forces of life are maybe engaging in within this universe: We can't know the structure of the machine running this simulation, but if we probe the results of the running simulation enough, we can understand everything of the system running it. In the Einstein sense, maybe that's how we know God? :)

Kednicma 6y ago

Two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24766148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24766148 Unsure how Aeon is doing this; some sort of URL trickery?

lioeters 6y ago

Hoh, "teleophobia", what a word for the aversion to ascribing will and purpose to living things. > You think we shouldn’t anthropomorphise people? The mechanistic/behaviorist way of looking at the world is fundamental to science as a discipline, and I suspect this originated from the crisis of religion - the split between matter and spirit, in terms of concepts. Consciousness and cognition have an uncomfortable resemblance to what we used to call "spirit". It reminds me of the "uncanny valley", how some machines are starting to behave awfully close to living creatures; and machine learning ("artificial intelligence") producing results that seem as if there's an awareness, a mind of its own. We know that they are just mechanisms, all matter and no spirit, but our guts sense a kinship - we have an emotional reaction to life or things that act like they're alive, like they're thinking. We look at an ant, moving around in the world, sensing and feeling, looking back at us with its eyes - and most of us would "anthropomorphise" it, to relate to it as "one of us". Our subjective experience tells us that we're not just objects, but something more, special, magical even. But, having rid of magic, science must understand and explain convincingly the mystery of life and mind, the very strange material existence of ourselves. Looking at how slime moulds crawl through mazes to find food, I get an uncanny feeling that it's alive and has a primitive mind. Or those sped-up films of plants reaching out their vines and tendrils, holding onto things and climbing toward the light - it has something in common with us at a fundamental level. Science offers explanations for these phenomena, yes - but it seems there are still missing pieces, concepts, models, to tell the full story. Self-organization of matter, swarm behaviors, distributed intelligence, information and computation..

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCvwyScn9jU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCvwyScn9jU briefly describes apparent learning by association in plants. For more, look up monica gagliano
ganzuul 6y ago
The problem of consciousness is divided into an easy and hard part. The hard part only requires an observer, but we can not observe the observer without a mind. This wrongly conflates the discussion. A mind without an observer would indeed be uncanny valley stuff. I always ask people who claim consciousness does not exist if they are indeed undead, or merely confused by the terminology.

yyyk 6y ago

The authors are surely right that we are working on a too low level, and vulgar behaviourism has been slowly going out of fashion anyway. However, they haven't yet convinced their approach is useful. I note that their approach can't (yet?) begin to answer their own worm question (which head will the worm have?) either, and their analogies to software and hardware seem simplistic. As an article this is worthwhile, and their proposal may well turn out to be a useful research direction, but it's not there yet. Hopefully there'll be a part 2. P.S. There's no need to convince us that multicell organisms are compatible with PD as the article tries to do - so what if they weren't?

ganzuul 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_biology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_biology

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]