8 ms·

I gave this a chance (seeing there were equations), but after reading the whole thing I still don't understand what they're talking about. It just doesn't make

• gus_massa 11y ago
  I'd like to add an example. From the article: > However, recent studies of perceptual evolution, using evolutionary games and genetic algorithms, reveal that natural selection often drives true perceptions to extinction when they compete with perceptions tuned to fitness rather than truth: Perception guides adaptive behavior; it does not estimate a preexisting physical truth. Moreover, shifting from evolutionary biology to quantum physics, there is reason to disbelieve in preexisting physical truths: Certain interpretations of quantum theory deny that dynamical properties of physical objects have definite values when unobserved. The properties that "don't have a definite value" are much smaller than the properties that a cow or a human can sense. The properties of big objects can be estimated so correctly with classic mechanics that you can safely ignore the quantum mechanics effects. More precisely, you can hide the quantum mechanics details as average macroscopic properties. For example, the color of an orange is determined by quantum mechanics details of the molecules in the orange skin, but to simulate a cow or a human it's enough to mark all oranges as macroscopically orange and forget about quantum mechanics.
• orasis 11y ago
  Let's start with this question: What makes an object an object? Find an object in the room, say a chair. What imbues the chair with "chairness"? Why is it considered separate from the floor? If you investigate this you will find that all objects are mind created. There is no essense or Platonic form of an object inherent to the object. The object cannot be said to have inherent existence apart from the mind perceiving it. This concept is called "Emptiness" in Buddhism and training the mind to recognize the truth of emptiness frees the mind of all sorts of pathology (except maybe sounding weird when trying to explain this to people)
  • kleer001 11y ago
    > Why is it considered separate from the floor? Because it can be easily moved. That is the property all objects share. There are a few exceptions, but they are illustrative. Consider a rusted on bolt. Can it be moved? Not without a lot of effort. However a fresh new loose bolt of the same kind demonstrates movable-objectness. What about a chair bolted to the floor? It was once loose, it's an object. What about a chair welded to the floor? Same thing. What about a chair that's constructed of the floor its self, like a large lump or bend up from steel or molded? I would submit that that's the floor acting like a chair, and not an object chair, but a chair like part of the floor. An even more technical definition would be along the lines of "Objects are the static locus of continuity within a sharp boundary." And by static I mean to include floppy objects like plants or leather. And by sharp boundary I mean in relative space to the observer and their understanding of their environment. From the ground a cloud looks like it has a relatively sharp boundary, sure, it's complex, but the difference in the color and shading from the sky gives it away. If you're IN the cloud it just looks like fog. Is fog an object? Sure, it's in high contrast to the regular state of the air. Is air an object? Sure, it's in high contrast to the ground, and from a certain perspective interstellar space. Does liver fit this definition? If it's separated from the organism, sure. If it's still in a living body, it's an organ, not an object. >all objects are mind created. I would go even further and say that "All patterns are mind events." Phurpa drop! (A phurpa is a triple sided ritual dagger which in Buddhism symbolizes the slaying or destruction of foe or obstructions.)
    • soneca 11y ago
      I would consider a wall an object. Why a plant and not a dog? Myself I would consider any physical body without life an object.
    • drdeca 11y ago
      If you apply the same force as you would to a cup handle it order to pick up the cup, to a single atom of the surface of the cup, couldn't that remove the atom? "Can be removed using a specific level of force" is then not sufficient for determining whether a collection of particles form an object. Perhaps if one instead uses some amount of force applied on the collection of particles which depends on the mass of the collection? That seems like it could be tricky, because I don't think I would generally consider fluids to be objects (in the sense we are speaking of), but I would not be too surprised if some fluid could be removed from a glass with a given level of force depending on the mass of a portion of the liquid, applied evenly over the portion, while keeping the portion of the liquid contiguous. Which would seem to indicate that and portion of the liquid is an object. However, maybe that is actually a solution, by adding the additional restriction that no part of an object is an object? (In a particular sense of object). Or alternatively, the intersection of any two objects is empty? So, the section of the liquid is not an object, because a smaller part would then also be an object, and therefore, the individual molecules would be the objects. That seems plausible to me...
• Animats 11y ago
  Same here. As soon as I read "shifting from evolutionary biology to quantum physics", I knew there was going to be a problem. The line "Perception guides adaptive behavior; it does not estimate a preexisting physical truth." is reasonable enough. Evolution may have generated visual recognizers that are task-oriented rather than object oriented ("predator", rather than "fur in bushes"). It's more important to have recognition of likely predators from partial information than correct recognition of a range of animals and other moving objects. That's a useful idea, and suggests that training deep ANNs on predator/non-predator data sets, without trying to distinguish the predators, is a worthwhile line of research. It would be interesting to see what visual model of "predator" emerged. The "Markovian kernel" concept is not too useful. It's a table of probabilities with one row for each state of the world (which, of course, would be combinatorially huge) and a column for each possible consciousness state. This might be conceptually similar to Searle's "Chinese Room", where understanding is faked by pure lookup. But Searle and these guys go off in different directions. The paper goes on, but not to anywhere useful.