randomImmigrant

5 ms·

1.
by randomImmigrant 5d ago
Substrates of consciousness… I think they don’t have it here because they can’t come up with an answer a bunch of AI models will find. Certainly a Millenium problem for biology if there ever was one.
2.
by randomImmigrant 5d ago
I think it helps Levin is saying something very different. He’s also much more readable for a computer science crowd since his organizing principles are computation adjacent at least, though he, thankfully, isn’t a computational functionali
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by randomImmigrant 5d ago
Eh. Some of these are genuinely interesting problems. Others like cryopreservation and Protein amplification chain reaction are scientifically close to nonsensical. Rodriques is CEO of Edison scientific, which is going all in on agentic bio
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by randomImmigrant 7d ago
Terrible headline, cool research. The brain is a composit of cells from two lineages that separate very early in development and reflect a deeper spatial and functional separation deep in the history of metazoan (read: animal) evolution.
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by randomImmigrant 7d ago
Kind of my point?
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by randomImmigrant 8d ago
I’m a materialist. I believe rabbits are conscious. And I can belive there’s a kind of consciousness for a group of humans like a nation state. However, the United States isn’t just a group of humans. It’s also a group of bison. Wild horses
7.
by randomImmigrant 9d ago
Our cells perceive each other, communicate with each other, synchronize with each other. The concept of self rides atop that. Stop the cells communicating and you stop perceiving yourself or the environment.
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by randomImmigrant 9d ago
Haddock is a bilatarian species though :P But yes, the I suppose a call to study ocean creatures can be more compelling with that’s name.
9.
Ctenophores: Wonders of Biology(quantamagazine.org)
3 points by randomImmigrant 9d ago|2 comments
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by randomImmigrant 9d ago
Indeed. Thanks for the great explanation. Honestly, the complexity would be very annoying if it wasn’t also invigorating and fascinating. The interconnections between genes has led to proposals of “omnigenic” models, the idea that all genes
11.
by randomImmigrant 9d ago
>For around 8 hours a day, neither do you. Not sure if this has anything to do with the subject at all. You mean sleep? Actually the answer is pretty complicated. Your body clock is very much on during sleep. It responds to temperature c
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by randomImmigrant 9d ago
Nope. Every cell is an autonomous circadian oscillator. Not just every neuron, but every cell. Red blood cells don’t have a nucleus, but they do have a metabolic clock. You and I are clusters of about 36 trillion cells that are all able to
13.
by randomImmigrant 9d ago
> A cognitive system (assuming these models and the brain are both examples of this) needs to proceed from state A to state B as it processes information Is that all it needs to do? A rock, in response to a sound signal (make it as info
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by randomImmigrant 10d ago
And who’s to manage context? And who’s building the scaffolding? Yes, AI can be used for both, but you do realize that all this being self-contained and regulated internally is what makes biological agents successful agents, right? If you b
15.
by randomImmigrant 10d ago
Hmm let me try then. AI agents do not experience real time. This is understandable given their design, but it’s also something we have good empirical evidence for. They cannot, especially over the long horizon, track how much real time has
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by randomImmigrant 10d ago
If AI is conscious, then Pluto is a planet, the Sun is a galaxy, and a black hole is a star. I’m glad to see someone in a position of any power in the AI world state baldly that AI isn’t conscious. There are times when it feels like we’ve r
17.
by randomImmigrant 10d ago
I think bearish on LLMs for automation, and bullish for LLM+human experts in specific fields, is about the right expectation for current architectures. Apart from issues with task generalization, or perhaps related to it, is the fact that L
18.
by randomImmigrant 14d ago
Can someone with direct AI experience respond: Does RSI necessarily need to be pointed towards “AGI”, whatever that is? Or can you have a recursive self improvement loop where the objective is to create models that are more legible to human
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by randomImmigrant 16d ago
Should Hacker News be renamed Hacker America?
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by randomImmigrant 17d ago
In short, after after training AI on an extraordinarily amount of human cognitive output, we are now facing the possibility that our ability to train by working on hard problems will be slowly stripped away at least in some domains. It’s li
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by randomImmigrant 18d ago
You know, I pooh poohed his theories. Still do in sum. But there’s a there there that’s building. Damn Deepak Chopra and his ilk of idiots for making any conversation of quantum mechanics and biology tinged with pseudoscience. Hopefully we’
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by randomImmigrant 20d ago
Ok great, thanks. Now you’ve brought up facial recognition, and that’s actually a great example to show where the analogy breaks, and the idea of a few sparse cells encoding specific faces has been conclusively disproved: https:/&#x2F
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Genome Duplication Is an Evolutionary Gamble(quantamagazine.org)
3 points by randomImmigrant 22d ago|0 comments
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by randomImmigrant 22d ago
> Calling a horse's reins as analogous to a cars steering wheel doesn't mean that the person making the analogy can't tell a horse from a car When a person says “I crashed the car because my steering wheel tore, like reign
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by randomImmigrant 22d ago
Sliding past the mistakes pointed out, shifting goalposts and trying to recover I see. Let’s say I’m a complete moron and don’t know what a sparse embedding is. Pretty please, can you define it for me and then tell me, in detail, where in w
26.
by randomImmigrant 23d ago
I’m not sure what you think I’m arguing against but saying that it matches with one of the cognitive models du jour is… odd. The problem with the hopfield model is it simplifies the brain too much. The base unit is “the neuron”. Ok… but wha
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by randomImmigrant 23d ago
> If someone's hippocampus is destroyed, they lose the ability to form new (episodic) memories, and may lose some more recent old ones, but they certainly do not lose older ones. This is basic knowledge. Yes, like basic reading with
28.
by randomImmigrant 23d ago
Yes I’ve come across reservoir computing. As a neuroscientist, it made me sit up and take notice. I’d say that I feel there’s homology in language. What reservoir computing says about the efficiency benefits of having a fixed but tunable dy
29.
by randomImmigrant 23d ago
Ooh thanks for the hijack! It’s so much easier to talk to someone who isn’t stuck in a picture of the brain from the 1980s. Yes, I fall more towards the camp that a lot of our cognitive models, built from times when we didn’t have the resol
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by randomImmigrant 24d ago
> None of that changes whether there is a physical capacity, which I think was the larger point? Capacity in what sense? Are we saying it’s X MB of data the brain can store? That claim is steeped in assumptions. On the other hand, no one

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