3 ms·

> sift through material from around the body in order to scan for infection. Without lymphatics, fluid would build up in body tissues, and there would be no way

by jcims 6y ago

> sift through material from around the body in order to scan for infection. Without lymphatics, fluid would build up in body tissues, and there would be no way to alert the adaptive immune system to invading pathogens sift/scan/alert/invade I always find it interesting how much agency we assign these systems when we describe them. Listen to some of the descriptions of our genetic machinery, you’ll hear the same thing. I understand much of it is to help the audience understand, but even when you dive deep into a topic it doesn’t seem to go away entirely.

mjburgess 6y ago
We're apes. Our basic assumption is that everything is also an ape. Including electrons, and lymph. It's very hard for us to find any other kind of explanation intuitive.
- harperlee 6y ago
  Nothing to add apart from the feeling that you have shown complete mastery of how to explain something.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  We routinely use terms like "dependency injection" for programming, "drop the beat" for music, "oscillating" for a set of political views and how they develop throuh time, or even "transcribing" for DNA-related activities in the cell, if you want a biological one. None of those have to do with apes or their everyday lives. Or try explaining "political correctness" to an ape... We are perfectly fine abstracting high-order things that have nothing to do with apes, and using those terms and abstractions IF they are useful. We are also perfectly fine to not bother with it if existing terms offer the best possible utility. So no, our basic assumption is not that everything is an ape. I'm not sure where this fascination with undermining the great intellectual feats human brains are capable of is coming from?
  - mjburgess 6y ago
    > our basic assumption is not that everything is an ape. > great intellectual feats I think it is, exactly, a feat of the imagination to arrive an an explanation which does not require this premise. But it is not our default presumption. Hence 100,000 years of superstition, and 500 years of rare scientific moments. Concepts seeming abstract, is in some sense, a bit of an illusion. Concepts are, in my view, always psychomotor. They succeed in "abstracting" from our bodies, sure, by metaphor. But the genealogy of that metaphor is the psychomotor system of an ape. Consider your words: injection, drop, beat, oscillate... these are about how our bodies behave in (with, towards) our environment; and become "abstracted". I think there is something quite fundamentally apeish when we think of a song dropping a beat, in the sense that our relatedness to the song is actually facilitated by an apeish psychomotor state of "dropping something". Yes, we can reduce our engagement with some phenomenon to a purely cognitive model (pieces and their relations); but that is very hard, and typically is only useful is narrowly solving known problems. Innovation (, creativity, etc.), including the scientific, relies quite heavily on our being able to impart to alien things some intuitive apishness which we then, at best, abstract away. Many of course cannot perform this final abstraction. Which is why we speak of "The Economy" and other such apelike characters of the imagination.
    - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
      If you turn your argument around, almost every example can be used to support a different hypothesis: our terms and thinking is based on abstraction, a certain feat of processing information. Other earlier Great Apes and even other animals are simply less able to implement this abstraction, and because of this they only use the abstraction for computation of their simple lives like motor skills or "psychomotor states". Since we have more brainpower, we are able to implement a higher percentage of abstractability. Thus, the core aspect is the program of "abstractability" (or it would be more common to use the word consciousness or awareness). We implement it to a higher degree than other apes, but since we both implement parts of it, of course we are going to share some aspects of it in our lives. > Concepts are, in my view, always psychomotor Even this seems much more accurate to view the other way around: both psychomotor skills and concepts require computation and abstractability. Concepts are always based on abstraction. But psychomotor skills are also based on abstraction. And again, what does "political correctness" have to do with a psychomotor engine of an ape that can jump between trees, hold a balance and throw things at a distance? You would need to use some serious imagination to convince people that the most occam's razored hypothesis of that concept is based primarily(!) on mechanical skills? But I guess hey, we won't know for sure until we make AGI so who knows ;)
Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
Is there any problem with it? That's just how the language works. In many of the contexts and on many of the logical levels the body does indeed have agency: the linguistic expression embedded in agency terms and all related expressions are just the most accurate and compressed and useful descriptions of phenomena we are studying. They have all the useful connotations and sub-meanings that help the process of expanding knowledge forward. All I see in those terms is best possible ways to explain the actual found relationships between parts of the immune system, instead of some description of meaningless facts or chemical reactions. If you insist on being on some imaginary laplace daemon lowest level of interaction with the world, maybe theoretically you could escape the agency component (but even then you have problems with questions like "what makes all particles interact with each other at all"), but nobody lives on that level anyway. Just because in some distant theory it is possible to reduce everything to interaction of some miriad of particles with exactly known states and rules, it doesn't mean that you (or other human or society) can effictively and practically compute anything of value on that level of abstraction. Nobody interacts with life on that level. No useful discussions are had on that level in most of the scientific pursuits. This is a matter of using the language effectively, not a matter of superstition. I don't see scientists cargo culting the immune system or organs of the body. Think about it like this: if I'm programming in Python, I'm going to think about variables, scopes and closures, not about high and low voltage levels or number of silicon atoms in my processor. A closure is not an illusion just because there is no transistor that specifically makes it work, a closure is still the most useful term on it's own level of abstraction. (Recommended reading: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, also known as GEB, a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter)
- jcims 6y ago
  >Is there any problem with it? No problem at all. Re-reading it there was much more snark than I intended (which was 0)
Dylan16807 6y ago
When talking about the immune system there's tons of agency.
qqn 6y ago
This reminds me of a point my physiology instructor worked hard to hammer home in the senior year of my bio degree: do not assign agency to unconscious processes. I forget the rationale for this but find myself reflecting on it often.
gamman 6y ago
There is an essay[1] from last month, which argues for assigning agency to biological systems and not just for illustration for the general public but for research. For me, a layman, it had some convincing arguments, at least in abstract. [1] - https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-organisms-as-agents-with-agendas https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-o...
f154hfds 6y ago
I find this semantic critique interesting but I have to disagree with you. Underlying the critique is a hidden arrogance. Agency language is strongly tied to our ability to understand the mechanism by which phenomena occurred. For example, take 4 different chess bots: 1. The bot moves in a 100% predictable way to you (say it checks each piece in order to find a possible move, the first it finds that's legal it moves) 2. The bot moves randomly 3. The bot uses minimax + library (traditional chess engine) 4. The bot is running via reinforcement learning When we discuss the moves the bot made, in which of the above scenarios would we say it 'chose' to move in a particular way? These different examples call out different forms of 'agency'. In cases 3 and 4 (maybe even 2?) most people - including the creator of the bot - would say the bot chose to move pawn to c4. As effect gets sufficiently far removed from cause it's natural to ascribe agency to the mechanism. In a very real sense in case 4 the creator designed the bot but has no idea why it moves in certain ways - they can analyze the weights of course - but why did it 'choose' those weights over others during training? If we knew that we wouldn't need the costly training in the first place. So back to your distaste of agency language when describing a phenomena. We're talking about _incredibly_ complex machinery. There is no guarantee that these mechanisms are a 1. or even a 3. type bot. They could be a 5. or 6. (whatever that even means). Thus even if we knew _everything_ about the last order mechanism, we would still ascribe agency to the effect.
- jcims 6y ago
  >So back to your distaste of agency language when describing a phenomena. Sorry rereading my note I can see why this seemed like a critique. I really mean 'interesting' in its standard denotation.

by jcims 6y ago

mjburgess 6y ago

We're apes. Our basic assumption is that everything is also an ape. Including electrons, and lymph. It's very hard for us to find any other kind of explanation intuitive.

harperlee 6y ago
Nothing to add apart from the feeling that you have shown complete mastery of how to explain something.
Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
We routinely use terms like "dependency injection" for programming, "drop the beat" for music, "oscillating" for a set of political views and how they develop throuh time, or even "transcribing" for DNA-related activities in the cell, if you want a biological one. None of those have to do with apes or their everyday lives. Or try explaining "political correctness" to an ape... We are perfectly fine abstracting high-order things that have nothing to do with apes, and using those terms and abstractions IF they are useful. We are also perfectly fine to not bother with it if existing terms offer the best possible utility. So no, our basic assumption is not that everything is an ape. I'm not sure where this fascination with undermining the great intellectual feats human brains are capable of is coming from?
- mjburgess 6y ago
  > our basic assumption is not that everything is an ape. > great intellectual feats I think it is, exactly, a feat of the imagination to arrive an an explanation which does not require this premise. But it is not our default presumption. Hence 100,000 years of superstition, and 500 years of rare scientific moments. Concepts seeming abstract, is in some sense, a bit of an illusion. Concepts are, in my view, always psychomotor. They succeed in "abstracting" from our bodies, sure, by metaphor. But the genealogy of that metaphor is the psychomotor system of an ape. Consider your words: injection, drop, beat, oscillate... these are about how our bodies behave in (with, towards) our environment; and become "abstracted". I think there is something quite fundamentally apeish when we think of a song dropping a beat, in the sense that our relatedness to the song is actually facilitated by an apeish psychomotor state of "dropping something". Yes, we can reduce our engagement with some phenomenon to a purely cognitive model (pieces and their relations); but that is very hard, and typically is only useful is narrowly solving known problems. Innovation (, creativity, etc.), including the scientific, relies quite heavily on our being able to impart to alien things some intuitive apishness which we then, at best, abstract away. Many of course cannot perform this final abstraction. Which is why we speak of "The Economy" and other such apelike characters of the imagination.
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    If you turn your argument around, almost every example can be used to support a different hypothesis: our terms and thinking is based on abstraction, a certain feat of processing information. Other earlier Great Apes and even other animals are simply less able to implement this abstraction, and because of this they only use the abstraction for computation of their simple lives like motor skills or "psychomotor states". Since we have more brainpower, we are able to implement a higher percentage of abstractability. Thus, the core aspect is the program of "abstractability" (or it would be more common to use the word consciousness or awareness). We implement it to a higher degree than other apes, but since we both implement parts of it, of course we are going to share some aspects of it in our lives. > Concepts are, in my view, always psychomotor Even this seems much more accurate to view the other way around: both psychomotor skills and concepts require computation and abstractability. Concepts are always based on abstraction. But psychomotor skills are also based on abstraction. And again, what does "political correctness" have to do with a psychomotor engine of an ape that can jump between trees, hold a balance and throw things at a distance? You would need to use some serious imagination to convince people that the most occam's razored hypothesis of that concept is based primarily(!) on mechanical skills? But I guess hey, we won't know for sure until we make AGI so who knows ;)

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago

Is there any problem with it? That's just how the language works. In many of the contexts and on many of the logical levels the body does indeed have agency: the linguistic expression embedded in agency terms and all related expressions are just the most accurate and compressed and useful descriptions of phenomena we are studying. They have all the useful connotations and sub-meanings that help the process of expanding knowledge forward. All I see in those terms is best possible ways to explain the actual found relationships between parts of the immune system, instead of some description of meaningless facts or chemical reactions. If you insist on being on some imaginary laplace daemon lowest level of interaction with the world, maybe theoretically you could escape the agency component (but even then you have problems with questions like "what makes all particles interact with each other at all"), but nobody lives on that level anyway. Just because in some distant theory it is possible to reduce everything to interaction of some miriad of particles with exactly known states and rules, it doesn't mean that you (or other human or society) can effictively and practically compute anything of value on that level of abstraction. Nobody interacts with life on that level. No useful discussions are had on that level in most of the scientific pursuits. This is a matter of using the language effectively, not a matter of superstition. I don't see scientists cargo culting the immune system or organs of the body. Think about it like this: if I'm programming in Python, I'm going to think about variables, scopes and closures, not about high and low voltage levels or number of silicon atoms in my processor. A closure is not an illusion just because there is no transistor that specifically makes it work, a closure is still the most useful term on it's own level of abstraction. (Recommended reading: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, also known as GEB, a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter)

jcims 6y ago
>Is there any problem with it? No problem at all. Re-reading it there was much more snark than I intended (which was 0)

Dylan16807 6y ago

When talking about the immune system there's tons of agency.

qqn 6y ago

This reminds me of a point my physiology instructor worked hard to hammer home in the senior year of my bio degree: do not assign agency to unconscious processes. I forget the rationale for this but find myself reflecting on it often.

gamman 6y ago

There is an essay[1] from last month, which argues for assigning agency to biological systems and not just for illustration for the general public but for research. For me, a layman, it had some convincing arguments, at least in abstract. [1] - https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-organisms-as-agents-with-agendas https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-o...

f154hfds 6y ago

I find this semantic critique interesting but I have to disagree with you. Underlying the critique is a hidden arrogance. Agency language is strongly tied to our ability to understand the mechanism by which phenomena occurred. For example, take 4 different chess bots: 1. The bot moves in a 100% predictable way to you (say it checks each piece in order to find a possible move, the first it finds that's legal it moves) 2. The bot moves randomly 3. The bot uses minimax + library (traditional chess engine) 4. The bot is running via reinforcement learning When we discuss the moves the bot made, in which of the above scenarios would we say it 'chose' to move in a particular way? These different examples call out different forms of 'agency'. In cases 3 and 4 (maybe even 2?) most people - including the creator of the bot - would say the bot chose to move pawn to c4. As effect gets sufficiently far removed from cause it's natural to ascribe agency to the mechanism. In a very real sense in case 4 the creator designed the bot but has no idea why it moves in certain ways - they can analyze the weights of course - but why did it 'choose' those weights over others during training? If we knew that we wouldn't need the costly training in the first place. So back to your distaste of agency language when describing a phenomena. We're talking about _incredibly_ complex machinery. There is no guarantee that these mechanisms are a 1. or even a 3. type bot. They could be a 5. or 6. (whatever that even means). Thus even if we knew _everything_ about the last order mechanism, we would still ascribe agency to the effect.

jcims 6y ago
>So back to your distaste of agency language when describing a phenomena. Sorry rereading my note I can see why this seemed like a critique. I really mean 'interesting' in its standard denotation.