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> Do you think it's fair to say a crow learns how to crack a nut via compression and abstraction? Well, yes. Do you know another way? Edit: oh I forgot your s

> Do you think it's fair to say a crow learns how to crack a nut via compression and abstraction? Well, yes. Do you know another way? Edit: oh I forgot your second part (I’m Ugh). You say a crow alone does not learn this. How do you propose the first crow learned? At some point a single crow learns. I know it propagates fast through a group, but that’s propagation. A different problem.

voidhorse 3y ago
Well, we'll agree to disagree then. When we talk about abstractions, I think we typically mean to point to, predominantly, linguistic representations. I'm confident a crow could crack a nut but I am not confident it could produce a representation of how to crack a nut. Because of the latter point, I'm reluctant to claim a crow is capable of abstraction. I might be wrong of course...at this point it sort of feels like we've already taken "compression and abstraction" to mean "whatever it is the brain is doing" eschewing details.
- SanderNL 3y ago
  This makes me think of Wittgensteins language games. I’m used to the word abstraction in a different context and it’s not linguistic to me at all. I’m not the greatest communicator so that doesn’t help either. The definition “disassociated from any specific instance” would be my take in this context. “Learning” would mean something like generating a sufficiently abstracted model that is useful over a wide variety of inputs. Aka you don’t store every instance of every type of nut, you store “nutness”. This is where the compression metaphor is quite obvious. You reduce the astronomically complex world of nuts down to “nutness”, in a way that still makes sense to you. Not dissimilar, I think, to how MP3 or JPEG drops significant amounts of information but still remains useful to us. Only thing I would argue is that it’s lossy not lossless. Lossless would imply the world can be reduced without dropping information and I don’t think it can to any significant degree. Anyway not trying to persuade you or anything. Your input does make me think and that’s not a bad thing, right? Thanks for indulging me.

voidhorse 3y ago

Well, we'll agree to disagree then. When we talk about abstractions, I think we typically mean to point to, predominantly, linguistic representations. I'm confident a crow could crack a nut but I am not confident it could produce a representation of how to crack a nut. Because of the latter point, I'm reluctant to claim a crow is capable of abstraction. I might be wrong of course...at this point it sort of feels like we've already taken "compression and abstraction" to mean "whatever it is the brain is doing" eschewing details.

SanderNL 3y ago
This makes me think of Wittgensteins language games. I’m used to the word abstraction in a different context and it’s not linguistic to me at all. I’m not the greatest communicator so that doesn’t help either. The definition “disassociated from any specific instance” would be my take in this context. “Learning” would mean something like generating a sufficiently abstracted model that is useful over a wide variety of inputs. Aka you don’t store every instance of every type of nut, you store “nutness”. This is where the compression metaphor is quite obvious. You reduce the astronomically complex world of nuts down to “nutness”, in a way that still makes sense to you. Not dissimilar, I think, to how MP3 or JPEG drops significant amounts of information but still remains useful to us. Only thing I would argue is that it’s lossy not lossless. Lossless would imply the world can be reduced without dropping information and I don’t think it can to any significant degree. Anyway not trying to persuade you or anything. Your input does make me think and that’s not a bad thing, right? Thanks for indulging me.