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I don't think either of those examples is in the same category as consciousness, or actually lets stick to "modeling of human and animal behavior", because I do
by francasso 5y ago
I don't think either of those examples is in the same category as consciousness, or actually lets stick to "modeling of human and animal behavior", because I don't know what you mean by consciousness since we all have a feeling for what it is but there is no good precise definition, or framework in which you could give one.
In both examples you made we do in fact have good mathematical descriptions that allow us to describe the system and the way it works, and moreover we can infer/predict non obvious things about it. Do you know of anything similar that can be applied to human/animal behavior?
- roywiggins 5y agoMy point is more that, even when you know the underlying mechanisms perfectly and with infinite precision, there are systems for which you can't make any statistical claims about its behavior. Even the Game of Life can encode a Turing machine, which makes its medium-term evolution impossible to predict ahead of time. That doesn't mean there's anything we are missing in our understanding of the rules of the Game of Life. Emergent behavior can be totally opaque, even when we have perfect understanding of the elements of the system. Just because the behavior is totally inscrutable doesn't mean there's anything we are missing about the underlying mechanisms. There's no hidden principle of Turing machines that would let us predict them reliably either- their underlying mechanisms are totally understood, the behavior is still essentially unknowable. Perhaps living systems are like that. It seems quite likely, since their underlying mechanisms are actually much more complicated than toy models like the Game of Life, that they can manifest totally opaque behavior without requiring any new physics at all.