5 ms·

So is this an exact digital replica of a worm?

by c7DJTLrn 3y ago

bombolo 3y ago
How can we exactly replicate something if we don't even know all the laws of physics?
- nightsd01 3y ago
  The same way we can simulate the movements of the planets - it will never be exact, but the better we understand it, the more precisely we can simulate it
  - bombolo 3y ago
    Well the question asked if it was exact. I pointed out why it can't be.
- highduc 3y ago
  clearly depends on needed resolution and our ability to recreate the material structure. you don't have to understand much about wood to build a chair.
- Leo_Germond 3y ago
  This is a fundamentally flawed way of questionning, "knowing all the laws of physics" is probably impossible to achieve, but we still produce accurate predictions for a lot of phenomena. You can see that we do in fact "replicate" (predict would be a more proper term) things despite not knowing all the laws of physics: weather, movement of the stars, cooking time for a browned piece of bread...
  - bombolo 3y ago
    I was replying to someone asking if it was "exact"… and no it isn't… You listing a bunch of simulations, that are notoriously not 100% correct proves my point, thanks.
    - Leo_Germond 3y ago
      You're welcome, but your point was not very clear.
- ben_w 3y ago
  My cellular biochemistry does a pretty good job of replicating itself with absolutely no understanding whatsoever of how to resolve the contradictions between general relativity and quantum mechanics. When it comes to brains, I don't know if anyone knows what might be the simplest sufficient model that would usefully replicate them, even if you specify "usefully" well enough to know if this is about fundamentals of intelligence or about the impact of drugs on cognition, which are two completely different standards. For example, perceptrons are a toy model, but modern AI can do more in (breadth XOR single-skill performance in various domains) than any single human, even with much smaller parameter counts than we have synapses; but the broad-skilled ones also mess up in inhuman ways, like being equally good at advanced calculus as basic arithmetic, or being a poet at the level of stereotypical teenager but in every language simultaneously. If anyone's made a neutral network that can get high on simulated caffeine — and I'm not saying it hasn't been done — it's not reached any of the places I follow discussions on this kind of thing. (Google didn't help, results were about software named Caffeine and non-artificial neurones).
  - bombolo 3y ago
    This makes no sense. Cells duplicate, but can you make a cell without splitting one in 2?
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Why does it matter how it works? The 3.2 billion base pair model that is my genome doesn't understand the physics or the chemistry.
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        That's entirely wrong. The interactions of proteins and amino acids and ions IS, at a fundamental level, the evaluation of physics over time.
        ben_w 3y ago
        I'm not saying it isn't physics, I'm saying it doesn't know what the physics is. We're physics too, but we don't know how it all fits together. If a sub-part of us that knows less than we do can make a copy of us, despite not knowing how it all works, that's an existence proof that we don't need to understand how it all works to make a copy of us.
- Legend2440 3y ago
  Abstraction. You don't need to know what's going on at the quantum level because higher-level simulations can capture all the properties you care about.
- dekhn 3y ago
  If the "something" never exploits a particular law, then in principle you could simulate it if you knew all the laws that actually applied (imagine a hypothetical biological organism that never exploited or experienced quantum entanglement). But strictly speaking, as we understand it, it's not possible to replicate something exactly without recapitulating the exact laws and running a deterministic simulation, which is not practical. I don't think anybody is really attempting to exactly replicate things, but rather to create a physical model which can be calcualted and contains enough similarity or transferrability to be able to make accurate generalized predictions about the behavior of the simulated system. How and why that works with modern math methods is still somewhat mysterious. The most useful thing written about that so far is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...
chromanoid 3y ago
This is the goal. > Our main goal is to build the world's first virtual organism - an in-silico implementation of a living creature - for the purpose of achieving an understanding of the events and mechanisms of living cells. This blog post is interesting: "Whole Brain Emulation: No Progress on C. elegans After 10 Years" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-brain-emulation-no-progress-on-c-elegans-after-10 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-brai... As other mentioned in the comments of the post, it is certainly also a matter of funding, but still I think it is very interesting how we still struggle to simulate a 302 cell worm, while some people expect an artificial superintelligence in the next ten years.
- circuit10 3y ago
  Replicating something exactly is a lot harder than making something that does the same thing in a different way. We can build planes that travel far faster than a bird could but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for us to exactly replicate how a bird flies, so I don’t think this says anything about how far away we are from a superintelligence
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    This. Submarines don't swim like fish, airplanes don't fly like birds and cars don't run like gepards. Edit: I am surprised at the downvotes. In general, we learn from the nature, but aping it usually proved too difficult and often unpractical at the same time. Do we really want to replicate worm intelligence for practical purposes, or do we want something different? I would say that a machine which can, say, analyze chemical compounds for their potential biological functions, is a very practical form of "intelligence" and yet very far from any biological intelligence that was ever produced in vivo. Worms cannot do that and even humans struggle with such tasks.
    - szundi 3y ago
      And for some reason it is because somehow life is not able the produce rotating axles?
comfypotato 3y ago
Nematode specifically, which is a very little worm.

So is this an exact digital replica of a worm?

bombolo 3y ago

How can we exactly replicate something if we don't even know all the laws of physics?

nightsd01 3y ago
The same way we can simulate the movements of the planets - it will never be exact, but the better we understand it, the more precisely we can simulate it
- bombolo 3y ago
  Well the question asked if it was exact. I pointed out why it can't be.
highduc 3y ago
clearly depends on needed resolution and our ability to recreate the material structure. you don't have to understand much about wood to build a chair.
Leo_Germond 3y ago
This is a fundamentally flawed way of questionning, "knowing all the laws of physics" is probably impossible to achieve, but we still produce accurate predictions for a lot of phenomena. You can see that we do in fact "replicate" (predict would be a more proper term) things despite not knowing all the laws of physics: weather, movement of the stars, cooking time for a browned piece of bread...
- bombolo 3y ago
  I was replying to someone asking if it was "exact"… and no it isn't… You listing a bunch of simulations, that are notoriously not 100% correct proves my point, thanks.
  - Leo_Germond 3y ago
    You're welcome, but your point was not very clear.
ben_w 3y ago
My cellular biochemistry does a pretty good job of replicating itself with absolutely no understanding whatsoever of how to resolve the contradictions between general relativity and quantum mechanics. When it comes to brains, I don't know if anyone knows what might be the simplest sufficient model that would usefully replicate them, even if you specify "usefully" well enough to know if this is about fundamentals of intelligence or about the impact of drugs on cognition, which are two completely different standards. For example, perceptrons are a toy model, but modern AI can do more in (breadth XOR single-skill performance in various domains) than any single human, even with much smaller parameter counts than we have synapses; but the broad-skilled ones also mess up in inhuman ways, like being equally good at advanced calculus as basic arithmetic, or being a poet at the level of stereotypical teenager but in every language simultaneously. If anyone's made a neutral network that can get high on simulated caffeine — and I'm not saying it hasn't been done — it's not reached any of the places I follow discussions on this kind of thing. (Google didn't help, results were about software named Caffeine and non-artificial neurones).
- bombolo 3y ago
  This makes no sense. Cells duplicate, but can you make a cell without splitting one in 2?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Why does it matter how it works? The 3.2 billion base pair model that is my genome doesn't understand the physics or the chemistry.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      That's entirely wrong. The interactions of proteins and amino acids and ions IS, at a fundamental level, the evaluation of physics over time.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        I'm not saying it isn't physics, I'm saying it doesn't know what the physics is. We're physics too, but we don't know how it all fits together. If a sub-part of us that knows less than we do can make a copy of us, despite not knowing how it all works, that's an existence proof that we don't need to understand how it all works to make a copy of us.
Legend2440 3y ago
Abstraction. You don't need to know what's going on at the quantum level because higher-level simulations can capture all the properties you care about.
dekhn 3y ago
If the "something" never exploits a particular law, then in principle you could simulate it if you knew all the laws that actually applied (imagine a hypothetical biological organism that never exploited or experienced quantum entanglement). But strictly speaking, as we understand it, it's not possible to replicate something exactly without recapitulating the exact laws and running a deterministic simulation, which is not practical. I don't think anybody is really attempting to exactly replicate things, but rather to create a physical model which can be calcualted and contains enough similarity or transferrability to be able to make accurate generalized predictions about the behavior of the simulated system. How and why that works with modern math methods is still somewhat mysterious. The most useful thing written about that so far is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...

chromanoid 3y ago

This is the goal. > Our main goal is to build the world's first virtual organism - an in-silico implementation of a living creature - for the purpose of achieving an understanding of the events and mechanisms of living cells. This blog post is interesting: "Whole Brain Emulation: No Progress on C. elegans After 10 Years" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-brain-emulation-no-progress-on-c-elegans-after-10 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-brai... As other mentioned in the comments of the post, it is certainly also a matter of funding, but still I think it is very interesting how we still struggle to simulate a 302 cell worm, while some people expect an artificial superintelligence in the next ten years.

circuit10 3y ago
Replicating something exactly is a lot harder than making something that does the same thing in a different way. We can build planes that travel far faster than a bird could but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for us to exactly replicate how a bird flies, so I don’t think this says anything about how far away we are from a superintelligence
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  This. Submarines don't swim like fish, airplanes don't fly like birds and cars don't run like gepards. Edit: I am surprised at the downvotes. In general, we learn from the nature, but aping it usually proved too difficult and often unpractical at the same time. Do we really want to replicate worm intelligence for practical purposes, or do we want something different? I would say that a machine which can, say, analyze chemical compounds for their potential biological functions, is a very practical form of "intelligence" and yet very far from any biological intelligence that was ever produced in vivo. Worms cannot do that and even humans struggle with such tasks.
  - szundi 3y ago
    And for some reason it is because somehow life is not able the produce rotating axles?

comfypotato 3y ago

Nematode specifically, which is a very little worm.