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‘If a lion could speak, we could not understand him’. - Wittgenstein So even things we understand as fundamental truths of the universe are so deeply rooted i

‘If a lion could speak, we could not understand him’. - Wittgenstein So even things we understand as fundamental truths of the universe are so deeply rooted in human experience that it's possible another living entity could be so different than ourselves that the capacity to sympathize with one another about certain things may simply not exist. Would a lion understand a corsage? Would an alien know what 12 x 12 means? The universe is just one hella big ¯\_( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)_/¯

slver 5y ago
When we train neural networks, we don't tell them what to think and how to think about it. We mostly focus on overall structure, layers and we want useful outcomes. And yet we see lots of patterns that repeat ways in which we think. I think if a lion could speak, we'd understand him, because we're much closer to "a speaking lion" ourselves than we realize. Our intelligence didn't just happen at the last mile between ape and humans. Our intelligence has been emerging from the simplest animal there is throughout our entire evolutionary history. And even then we see birds, octopuses and so on use tools and solve problems very similarly to us, which have branched much earlier from us. There are many different types of minds that can evolve. But I believe the fundamentals will always be the same. They're fundamentals of information processing systems. And BTW, we know dolphins, parrots and so on can do basic math, like counting, and translating that count to another set of objects. So they understand numbers, that's what numbers are at their most basic. We marvel at how enormous the universe is, and how varied life in it can be, how different the minds of aliens may be. But in that seemingly humble pondering, there underlies something very arrogant. We think our mind is special. We think it's unique. And other minds will think extremely differently. I think we'll figure out sooner or later, that our mind is basically inevitable, the broad strokes will be replicated for every species throughout the universe. This doesn't mean it'll be immediately easy to figure out aliens and their culture. But those are the details, not the fundamentals.
- coder-3 5y ago
  The way I see the universe is that all this complexity is just the interplay of a finite few axioms (the fundamental laws of physics). Given enough time and scale, the seemingly unique complexity converges back into a few (relatively speaking) patterns. If that wasn't the case the universe would be pure chaos.
  - slver 5y ago
    Wouldn't it suck if you and I and the rest of the universe are the inevitable result of a tweet-long equation, and any change to the equation renders it unviable. So everything is just one formula, and me picking my nose right now came from that formula.
xyzzy123 5y ago
Related to this I have often wondered if childhood amnesia is (by a crude analogy) a "format problem". In this analogy, the lion is our younger selves. Perhaps our brain changes so much that we cannot understand (or access) what we were thinking or experiencing anymore. If we imagine that long term memories are encoded in a way that they can later be interpreted actively by the structures of the brain, we could expect that major developmental changes in brain function might impact the ability to interpret long term memory formed before the change. Physical trauma, the major reorganisations of infancy and language acquisition all prompt changes in organisation and processing that could be what renders earlier memories inaccessible. This (admittedly hand-wavey) idea seems to mesh well well with the observed details of the phenomenon. Frequently accessed memories may be re-encoded, leading to some continuity. Children themselves experience fairly continuous long-term memory. Types of memories where relevant processing might not have changed as much (smell, visual memory) might be more resilient. We would expect age of language acquisition to play a part. Etc.

slver 5y ago

When we train neural networks, we don't tell them what to think and how to think about it. We mostly focus on overall structure, layers and we want useful outcomes. And yet we see lots of patterns that repeat ways in which we think. I think if a lion could speak, we'd understand him, because we're much closer to "a speaking lion" ourselves than we realize. Our intelligence didn't just happen at the last mile between ape and humans. Our intelligence has been emerging from the simplest animal there is throughout our entire evolutionary history. And even then we see birds, octopuses and so on use tools and solve problems very similarly to us, which have branched much earlier from us. There are many different types of minds that can evolve. But I believe the fundamentals will always be the same. They're fundamentals of information processing systems. And BTW, we know dolphins, parrots and so on can do basic math, like counting, and translating that count to another set of objects. So they understand numbers, that's what numbers are at their most basic. We marvel at how enormous the universe is, and how varied life in it can be, how different the minds of aliens may be. But in that seemingly humble pondering, there underlies something very arrogant. We think our mind is special. We think it's unique. And other minds will think extremely differently. I think we'll figure out sooner or later, that our mind is basically inevitable, the broad strokes will be replicated for every species throughout the universe. This doesn't mean it'll be immediately easy to figure out aliens and their culture. But those are the details, not the fundamentals.

coder-3 5y ago
The way I see the universe is that all this complexity is just the interplay of a finite few axioms (the fundamental laws of physics). Given enough time and scale, the seemingly unique complexity converges back into a few (relatively speaking) patterns. If that wasn't the case the universe would be pure chaos.
- slver 5y ago
  Wouldn't it suck if you and I and the rest of the universe are the inevitable result of a tweet-long equation, and any change to the equation renders it unviable. So everything is just one formula, and me picking my nose right now came from that formula.

xyzzy123 5y ago

Related to this I have often wondered if childhood amnesia is (by a crude analogy) a "format problem". In this analogy, the lion is our younger selves. Perhaps our brain changes so much that we cannot understand (or access) what we were thinking or experiencing anymore. If we imagine that long term memories are encoded in a way that they can later be interpreted actively by the structures of the brain, we could expect that major developmental changes in brain function might impact the ability to interpret long term memory formed before the change. Physical trauma, the major reorganisations of infancy and language acquisition all prompt changes in organisation and processing that could be what renders earlier memories inaccessible. This (admittedly hand-wavey) idea seems to mesh well well with the observed details of the phenomenon. Frequently accessed memories may be re-encoded, leading to some continuity. Children themselves experience fairly continuous long-term memory. Types of memories where relevant processing might not have changed as much (smell, visual memory) might be more resilient. We would expect age of language acquisition to play a part. Etc.