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If you want to compare humans moving through decision space to bacteria tumbling through physical space I suppose it's one way to think about how humans act but

If you want to compare humans moving through decision space to bacteria tumbling through physical space I suppose it's one way to think about how humans act but honestly that's a lot of text for a trivial kind of system that you can apply to almost anything. You can probably look at cars in traffic like this as well. It's so vague and general of an idea that it's almost a truism. I don't think it provides anything meaningful in regards to figuring out the actual complexity of human behavior both individually or collectively. And I think this kind of over-generalization that is a little bit vapid has been a trend because there's simply not been a lot of theoretical progress when it comes to the functioning of the human mind. When people use this kind of thinking to apply it to artificial intelligence I always think, why not just ditch intelligence and build a physics simulator? Clearly intelligence is somewhere in the subspace of simulating the physical world, so why bother? It doesn't add much to understanding anything in particular.

iroh2727 5y ago
If you make it to the psychology section, that's where the explanatory power becomes apparent (or at least is speculated on). Though, yes, it is a lot of text to get there (I'm relieved that some people made it that far). If you do make it that far, there is a payoff, though. This "trivial kind of system" isn't merely an analogy but the actual algorithm that we use, and the "implementation details" of this algorithm manifest in unintuitive ways that have a lot to say about how psychology is understood in general. Though, given your skepticism, more research will likely have to be done before this is satisfactorily proven to you. This breakthrough (which I'd say is primarily K&A's breakthrough that I merely am speculating on top of), is actually a great example of theoretical progress. I typically consider myself an anti-reductionist, but this is a lesson in how studying simple systems (in this case, chemotaxis), can lead to better understanding of complex systems (because, well, it turns out at least in this case that these complex systems are actually the same simple systems at the top level—the complexity gets added in "layers" much like the evolution of brains).

iroh2727 5y ago

If you make it to the psychology section, that's where the explanatory power becomes apparent (or at least is speculated on). Though, yes, it is a lot of text to get there (I'm relieved that some people made it that far). If you do make it that far, there is a payoff, though. This "trivial kind of system" isn't merely an analogy but the actual algorithm that we use, and the "implementation details" of this algorithm manifest in unintuitive ways that have a lot to say about how psychology is understood in general. Though, given your skepticism, more research will likely have to be done before this is satisfactorily proven to you. This breakthrough (which I'd say is primarily K&A's breakthrough that I merely am speculating on top of), is actually a great example of theoretical progress. I typically consider myself an anti-reductionist, but this is a lesson in how studying simple systems (in this case, chemotaxis), can lead to better understanding of complex systems (because, well, it turns out at least in this case that these complex systems are actually the same simple systems at the top level—the complexity gets added in "layers" much like the evolution of brains).