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The major problem with this argument that it relies on a very important (yet questionable) assumption: the reward hypothesis, the idea that the maximization of
by cyber_kinetist 5y ago
The major problem with this argument that it relies on a very important (yet questionable) assumption: the reward hypothesis, the idea that the maximization of the expected sum of a single signal variable describes the organism’s behavior (http://incompleteideas.net/rlai.cs.ualberta.ca/RLAI/rewardhypothesis.html http://incompleteideas.net/rlai.cs.ualberta.ca/RLAI/rewardhy...). First we need to be careful defining what an “organism” actually is (because we are actually made out of billions of systems interacting with each other at the same time), but it is also hard to believe that all those interlocked systems move towards a single purpose of maximizing one variable, whether it be by chance or by coordination. The other problem is that the researchers might all be performing the error of defining the reward function based on our own narrow views and try to shoehorn it on other species as a process of pattern-matching. The third is that, as shown in the bacteria example, the organism and the environment are not independent from each other, and what we call “intelligent behavior” is not an inherent aspect of a creature’s “algorithm” and cannot be studied independently in isolation from the environment. (These can all be extended as a critique of evolutionism as a useful scientific theory; the problem is not that it’s wrong, but that it becomes more of a tautological statement as you bury yourself deeper into it, so its usefulness as a theory needs to be questioned.)
A bit more tangential, but the article really falls apart when the author starts talking about examples related to humans, using the careerism of current middle class society as an example (The notion of a “career” is actually pretty recent from an anthropological perspective! Those anecdotes about hierarchical milestones and pushing ourselves for career advancement has more to do with the culture and ideology of today’s world than any other weird evolutionary/neurological reason!)
- andi999 5y agoSo you think your CNS and liver might disagree about the amount of alcohol to drink on the weekend? Part of me agrees with that assessment.
- lanstin 5y agoPretty sure even different subsystems of my CNS will push in different directions on that one. One just waits for the networks to settle and see what your choice is this time. Possibly biasing the outcomes with thoughts like, "what a week" or "I was looking forward to meditating"
- purplerabbit 5y agonot going to get into the latter part of your comment, but in response to the former part, I haven't found a way to disprove the hypothesis that organisms' behaviors are all described by the attempt at maximizing the single variable of "number of possible future states" ala https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_for_intelligence https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_...
- cyber_kinetist 5y agoI’m reading the paper that Alex Wissner wrote (and was probably talking about in that TED talk): https://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevLett_110-168702.pdf https://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevLett_110-168702.p... … and I’m not convinced. It’s basically claiming that maximization of entropy over all possible paths in a time horizon leads to emergent cooperative behavior in some kinds of simple toy puzzles, but then claiming it as the center of human cognitive behavior is a far stretch.
- purplerabbit 5y agoAwesome you actually took a look at it :D It's far from being _proved_, but the more I've thought about it the more it seems to intuitively line up with other systems of behavior optimization But yes, its actual application to, say, social psychology has not been rigorously (or even partially) established. I have a fantasy that a grad student or two will go down this rabbit hole to see if it can be used to build models that hold water. But so far I haven't seen anything.