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> Having a body which changes over time that interacts with a world that changes over time makes animal learning not statistical (call it, say, experimental).

> Having a body which changes over time that interacts with a world that changes over time makes animal learning not statistical (call it, say, experimental). The "experiment" of life is what defines the statical values! Experimentation is just learning what the statistical output of something is. If I hand you a few dice, you'd probably be able to guess the statistical probability of every number for given roll. Because you've learned that through years of observation building a mental model. If I hand you a weighted die, suddenly your mental model is gone, and you can re-learn experimentally by rolling it a bunch. How can you explain experimental learning except "statistically"? > they adopted (apparently irrational) theories of how the world worked (gods, etc) They can be wrong without being irrational. Building an airport doesn't make planes show up, but planes won't show up without an airport. If you're an island nation with little understanding of the global geopolitical environment of WWII, you'd have no idea why planes started showing up on your island, but they keep showing up, and only at an airport. It seems rational to assume they'd continue showing up to airports. > that animals fall into skinner-box irrational behaviour can be modelled as a kind of statistical learning, but it actually isnt What is it if not statistical? Also skinner boxes are, in a way, perfectly rational. There's no way to understand the environment, and if pushing a button feeds you, then rationally you should push the button when hungry. Humans like to think we're smart because we've invented deductive reasoning, and we quote "correlation is not causation" that we're not just earning to predict the world around us from past experiences.

mjburgess 3y ago
For dice the ensemble average is the time-average: if you roll the dice 1000 times the probability of getting a different result doesn't change. For almost everything in the world, action on it, changes it. There are vanishingly few areas where this isn't the case (most physics, most chemistry, etc.). Imagine trying to do statistics but every time you sampled from reality the distribution of your sample changes not due to randomness, but because reality has changed. Now, can you do statistics? No. It makes all the difference in the world to have a body and hold the thing you're studying. Statistics is trying to guess the shape of the ice cube from the puddle; animal learning is making ice cubes.

mjburgess 3y ago

For dice the ensemble average is the time-average: if you roll the dice 1000 times the probability of getting a different result doesn't change. For almost everything in the world, action on it, changes it. There are vanishingly few areas where this isn't the case (most physics, most chemistry, etc.). Imagine trying to do statistics but every time you sampled from reality the distribution of your sample changes not due to randomness, but because reality has changed. Now, can you do statistics? No. It makes all the difference in the world to have a body and hold the thing you're studying. Statistics is trying to guess the shape of the ice cube from the puddle; animal learning is making ice cubes.