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More broadly, the whole idea that evolution (by selection) is a subset of some overarching physical process that aims to maximise entropy as fast as possible is ridiculous to anyone who looks at real organisms. Yes, plants have gotten a bit more efficient at using energy and converting inorganic inputs into more plant over hundreds of millions of years. Yes, animals have evolved eyes and ears and stuff to more efficiently find food to digest and poop out. No, these things are absolutely not happening at anything approaching a rate that is 'as fast as possible'. Evolution of organisms is incredibly slow, undirected, laborious, and generally crap. If you compare results of artificial selection in the lab to actual evolution in the field and the fossil record, it's surprising that the evolution of these sensors, and new body plans, etc. took as long as it has. It looks more like people who have never been outdoors before having their mind blown by some awesome animals before rushing back indoors to write up a theory that gives some direction to the origin of said mindblowing animals without ever looking at how the diversity of life arose and what organisms actually do. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 16:22
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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SurgicalOntologist posted:Yes, Swenson is a crackpot. His websites are an embarrassment. I didn't realize the link I gave was to another of them, ugh. FWIW, he hasn't been involved for a long time, and the scientists who are are well-respected in their fields. For example, Kondepudi, who's textbook on thermodynamics you may have used in undergrad. A few posts back I wrote a post originally mostly agreeing with you because I recognized the Rayleigh-Bénard convection cell and the story in the image and didn't look much further at the crackpot link that Blowfish pointed oit. If you are talking about the work that people like Pripogine have been working on then yes, that's all extremely valuable and goes a way towards answering some of the remarks I've been making.
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Feb 27, 2016 16:25
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The Belgian posted:A few posts back I wrote a post originally mostly agreeing with you because I recognized the Rayleigh-Bénard convection cell and the story in the image and didn't look much further at the crackpot link that Blowfish pointed oit. If you are talking about the work that people like Pripogine have been working on then yes, that's all extremely valuable and goes a way towards answering some of the remarks I've been making. Well, thanks for saying so. Yes, Kondepudi is a student of Prigogine. quoted so you can't back out of it this time  And for some more scholarship by a renowned scientist/theorist and probably-not-a-crackpot that supports the view I've argued for, read some Robert Rosen.  
SurgicalOntologist fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 16:48
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Norma: Do you think we're lucky - or just a terrible accident? Ed: Sweetheart I think we're so lucky Norma: I think...we're one great, big, giant, smash-up.
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Feb 27, 2016 17:03
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Ok this journal SurgicalOntologist linked has some bad articles. I'm a biologist so I won't go into the physics too much, but just look at the biological aspects and guiding principles of this stuff  On Intelligence From First Principles: Guidelines for Inquiry Into the Hypothesis of Physical Intelligence (PI) abstract posted:Gibson's (1966, 1979/1986) ecological approach to perception, action, and cognition is patently non-representational and non-computational. In the place of these commonly assumed neural endowments, ecological psychology seeks to expose the laws that underlie intelligent capabilities. It is argued that this is the goal for understanding the directed behavior of not just humans, not just animals, and not just the living. We argue that an approach to intelligence that is physically grounded is completely consistent with—and is even a natural consequence of—the central tenets of ecological psychology. We identify two dozen guidelines for seeking intelligence in first principles. we've had the argument about reductionism, but trying to go the other way is something else entirely... ok let's read the actual paper stuff from the intro posted:The opening admonition provides an efficient summary of the strategy of ecological psychology. It stands as a call for the organism–environment system rather than simply the organism (or, even more narrowly, the brain or nervous activity) as the proper unit of analysis more intro stuff posted:The change of focus from inside-the-head to outside-the-head means that the particulars of sensory machinery, nervous systems, and brains are incidental; they do not impose their character on the information that coordinates organism and environment "We think looking at brains as biological computers and never doing anything else is a bit simplistic. Therefore, thou shalt never look at a brain, and thou shalt never think about information processing."  Sope And Goal of Ecological Psychology posted:Ecological psychology may be viewed as a psychology for all organisms, the 96 phyla that comprise the five kingdoms—Bacteria, Protoctista, Animalia, Fungi, and Plantae (Margulis & Schwartz, 1982/1998).  unironically citing 30 and 15 year old general trees of life. While publishing in the exact time period when the tree of life got completely rebuilt every six months (right now, the situation is only just starting to calm down as sequencing and molecular phylogenetics are maturing).ibid posted:Agency, scientifically explained, is the goal of ecological psychology: the manifest capability of all organisms to exhibit some degree of autonomy and control in their encounters There is generalising, and there is generalising to the point of being trivially correct without saying anything meaningful. I'm not sure which side of the line this will end up on. Perhaps, there is merit in the idea of going from something you could consider physical computation to some more complex form of intelligence, but I'm not sure this is what the authors have in mind. Note: unlike the earlier grandstanding in the paper might seem to suggest, computation does not require brainsssssssss, and the people publishing this stuff have a really weird and super-generalised idea of intelligence (see: candle flame, and another paper in the same journal issue which tries to boil down physical intelligence to anything where ~information~ is involved, down to the point where particles "choose" the path of least resistance) Heterodoxy of the Ecological Perspective posted:Thirty years ago, in a special issue of the journal Cognition, we described the heterodox nature of the ecological approach to agency and intelligence (in the guise of “cognition”) in the following terms. tl;dr: "I reject your reality and substitute my own." Anyone who does this is joining a loving cult, and can be safely ignored by actual scientists who care about things like evidence and reality  .quote:Interestingly, in 2009 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) seemed tempted to a similar pursuit in announcing a funding opportunity for a program in physical intelligence: “The vision of the Physical Intelligence program is to develop a physically grounded understanding of intelligence …” with the ultimate goal being “the engineering of systems that spontaneously evolve intelligent behavior” (DARPA, 2009, p. 4). Clearly, the past 50 years of ecological psychology are well suited to guiding this endeavor. Unfortunately, DARPA's more immediate needs have taken its formal physical intelligence program in a different direction. From our perspective, however, ecological psychology really has no other option. Good on DARPA for cutting off the funding of whackos I guess. While actual intelligent people who SurgicalOntologist is now citing after having linked to a blatant crackpot page twice may have said actual intelligent things worth investigating regarding how life and intelligence fit into the physical universe, the field has clearly ended up with a disproportionate number and influence of complete nutjobs who cite those intelligent things to pretend they know what they're talking about.
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Feb 27, 2016 17:16
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blowfish posted:Fodor doubles down on this by claiming that reductionism requires there to be, in fact, a physical law of economic transactions, and presents a thought experiment boiling down to the same point for the relationship of psychology and neurosciences. Thus, it turns out Fodor's objection is that events which are broadly similar from a human perspective specifically and which can individually be reduced to physical events do not form a distinct category of physical events. Your argument here seems to be that the regularities in nature discovered by the non-physics sciences are not actually in nature after all, but are imposed on the world by the human mind. The problem with this argument is that the statistical tools psychologists and meteorologists, for example, use to identify effects in their respective fields are the same tools used by physicists. Researchers in higher-order sciences are not merely finding superficially similar features of distinct physical types, they are finding real patterns and regularities that obtain among those features. Which suggests that maybe they are not so superficial after all.
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Feb 27, 2016 17:42
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Juffo-Wup posted:Your argument here seems to be that the regularities in nature discovered by the non-physics sciences are not actually in nature after all, but are imposed on the world by the human mind. The problem with this argument is that the statistical tools psychologists and meteorologists, for example, use to identify effects in their respective fields are the same tools used by physicists. Perhaps complex systems inherently organise in particular ways, or at least certain categories of systems relevant to us organise in particular ways, but that is still "similar" and not "same as". I would argue "superficially similar", but that is the point where it gets subjective. Furthermore, you need to elaborate on the use of statistical tools. At the most basic, it's completely expected that statistical tests do the exact same thing whether you let them test for a superficial similarity or the imperfect detection of an inherent property, the difference is in the question you ask. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 17:45
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EDIT: For clarity, this post is in reply to the conversation with Juffo-Wop, not the other one I think a relevant concept here is the following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universality_%28dynamical_systems%29 In a very hand-waving and super-speculative way, e.g. economics might be gotten from physics via the renormalisation group (see my link) with the economically similar features of all systems being the relevant operators and all esle the irrelevant operators. People are already pretty convinced that the renormalisation group is 'why' we can describe the say the properties of the air in a room that are relevant to us can de described with a few parameters: temperature, pressure; instead of the properties of all the particles present. The Belgian fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 17:59
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blowfish posted:"We think looking at brains as biological computers and never doing anything else is a bit simplistic. Therefore, thou shalt never look at a brain, and thou shalt never think about information processing." Non-computational theory of mind =/= never looking at brains. blowfish posted:tl;dr: "I reject your reality and substitute my own." Okay, the thing about fact is concerning. I'm curious what Turvey would say about it now. The rest of it is defensible, though. The idea is that all science has non-falsifiable starting assumptions, usually ignored. Turvey and Carello take a different tack, explicitly stating their assumptions as such and embracing them. In particular, direct realism. The starting point for ecological psychology is to assume direct realism is correct (there are philosophical arguments, but not really scientific ones), and see what it would look like to build a science based on that. How far can we go? Now, jettisoning facts is not in the interest of good science, but when it comes to psychology, it is usually possible to deconstruct factual statements, strip them of their unspoken assumptions, and reconstruct them in an alternative framework (without losing the fact itself). That's as far as I'm willing to go, at least. Turvey and Carello are also the most extreme of the bunch and the majority of the field would not put it in such strong terms. For a complementarist approach, see for example Language as a system of replicable constraints. A lot of this assumes in the audience a knowledge of the debate in philosophy of psychology about computationalism and realism. This perspective isn't emerging fully formed here but it is presented all at once in its strongest form. Not that I expect you to read it, but Tony Chemero's book Radical Embodied Cognitive Science gives a gentle introduction. Here's a summary. Relevant quote: quote:Is Radical Embodied Cognitive Science the Right Way to Do Psychology? Turvey and Carello are certainly partisans (they would not deny it), and their work should definitely be interpreted in that light, with an extra dose of skepticism. However, it is not bunk science (or philosophy), despite the fact that they got the number of phyla wrong.
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Feb 27, 2016 18:15
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blowfish posted:Perhaps complex systems inherently organise in particular ways, or at least certain categories of systems relevant to us organise in particular ways, but that is still "similar" and not "same as". I would argue "superficially similar", but that is the point where it gets subjective. Well of course science is subjective in that sense. "You're only finding laws that obtain among features that you yourself are interested in!" Yes, but what is science but an attempt to systematize the best human understanding of the universe? That science as done by humans is characterized and motivated by the human perspective does not strike me as a gigantic problem. As for statistical tools: in the sciences, including physics, when we look for successful theory we look for complete explanations and accurate predictions. If a theory predicts an effect and observation detects that effect to whatever standard of statistical significance, then that tends to confirm the theory. This is as much the case in physics as in any other science. What is the difference between inherent features and superficial features? How can we distinguish between them? (Also, I am not sure what distinction you are drawing between similarity and sameness, but I don't think anything substantive hangs on it either.) The Belgian posted:EDIT: For clarity, this post is in reply to the conversation with Juffo-Wop, not the other one I'm not sufficiently fluent in the jargon (this is why I have been avoiding for the most part the other discussion in this thread) to offer a substantive response here, but my sense is that we are dangerously close to confusing the model with the phenomenon it models. Edit - Though I can offer this response at least: your hypothetical here is an empirical question. Until someone can explain/predict economic events with statistical mechanics, there's no particular reason to think the reduction will be successful. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 18:26
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The Belgian posted:As I said in the edit, there's an advantage once you have a perceptor but there's not before you do. You can't just get the first perceptor by cycling through the state space as that would take absurdly long times as I've given several examples of. This is not so. You are considering far too large of a state space; there are inherent physical properties of nucleic acids that lend themselves to developing both self-replication and perception. The template nature of a single-stranded nucleic acid allows for easy copying - that much is, of course, obvious. You must, however, consider the roles that RNA can play in the cell/in viral processes/etc. today, and extrapolate backwards to understand how a population of free-living RNA strands is exceedingly likely to develop some sort of perceptive ability. The most relevant is probably tRNA. tRNAs have nucleotide sequences that bind amino acids. These are not particularly complicated sequences and in modern tRNAs they are at the end of a hairpin loop structure, which is a common secondary structure formed easily by chance. No specific sequence is required; many possible states can create a loop and binding site of some sort. All of this is important because it is a state that is beyond trivial to form by accident simply due to the specific properties of RNA, given a long but reasonable (that is, 500 million to 1 billion years, not universe lifetimes) span of time. This structure, however, is inherently perceptive. Almost any sort of binding site is, because almost always, the act of binding changes the conformation of the rest of the molecule. A change in conformation leads to a change in behavior. This is a perception-action cycle, one which doesn't necessarily provide an advantage yet, because the action is poorly correlated with the perception. The perceptual capability remains, however, and now evolution can work on the rest. Different instances of the loop will change in their own way and create a wide library of binding affinities and potential substrates - that is, many different perceptual tools, ones which can, together, perceive concentrations and the composition of the environment. Any form of life larger than a free-living nucleic acid didn't have to make this jump, which I agree would be absurd for a bacterium or other system of many, many, many molecules to randomly form and then make use of. If you're saying that the formation of a population of free-living nucleic acids is absurdly unlikely in the first place, well, that doesn't appear to be the case given the chemical environment of the early Earth. Once they do arise, their ability to form complicated, versatile, functional structures out of the same few subunits while still being simple enough to sustain population sizes dwarfing those of modern prokaryotes for a given area makes the initial huge state space much easier to meaningfully cycle through. Edit: By the way, this: SurgicalOntologist posted:For a complementarist approach, see for example Language as a system of replicable constraints. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 18:45
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Juffo-Wup posted:
Could you say a bit more about why you see it as confusing model and the thing being modelled? For universality, one of the more ambitious examples given is about how the same model seems to work for a bus system and some quantum thing. I think it's very clear nobody thinks the bus system is the same as the quantum thing, but the same model can be used if you substitute the properties of the quantum thing being modelled with properties of the bus system (where these are different properties that fit into the same places in the model). The other part of what I mentioned is the renormalisation group, which starts from a model for e.g. the atoms in a gas, coarse grains it and then gives you a model for a few parameter which descibes the whole gas on a macro scale correctly. It seems sensible that if a model does a good job modelling a thing one one scale, it should yield models that do a decent job descrebing the thing at a coarser scale? quote:Edit - Though I can offer this response at least: your hypothetical here is an empirical question. Until someone can explain/predict economic events with statistical mechanics, there's no particular reason to think the reduction will be successful. I've also seen the phrase reduce FIELD to physics which throws me of and seems the wrong way to go about it. You don't want to know about every atom in a financiel transaction? It seems to me that you want to do the opposite: reduce physics to FIELD by e.g. using RG to get rid of all the irrelevant parameters? The Belgian fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 18:47
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The Belgian posted:Could you say a bit more about why you see it as confusing model and the thing being modelled? For universality, one of the more ambitious examples given is about how the same model seems to work for a bus system and some quantum thing. I think it's very clear nobody thinks the bus system is the same as the quantum thing, but the same model can be used if you substitute the properties of the quantum thing being modelled with properties of the bus system (where these are different properties that fit into the same places in the model). My initial sense was that the statistical mechanics model only relates to a small range of the events that a mature science might try to cover, so there's no reduction in any strong sense, because we don't end up with a sparser ontology by the end of the process. But I guess that wasn't the point in the first place from what you're saying now. So, okay, I guess.
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Feb 27, 2016 18:55
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Juffo-Wup posted:My initial sense was that the statistical mechanics model only relates to a small range of the events that a mature science might try to cover, so there's no reduction in any strong sense, because we don't end up with a sparser ontology by the end of the process. Well, you lose stuff but you also gain stuff, I suppose? There's no notion of financial transaction if you're talking about atoms, that 'emerges' when you coarse-grain. Then in the financial model you of course lose notions like speed of an atom. So there's not so much a sparser ontology as a different ontology?
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Feb 27, 2016 19:03
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The Belgian posted:Well, you lose stuff but you also gain stuff, I suppose? There's no notion of financial transaction if you're talking about atoms, that 'emerges' when you coarse-grain. Then in the financial model you of course lose notions like speed of an atom. So there's not so much a sparser ontology as a different ontology? Yes, I'm sympathetic to this. I tend to appreciate pluralism in the sciences. Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that. My epistemology is generally reliabilist so ultimately explanatory/predictive success is what I care about, and I see no particular issue with trying to understand a single phenomenon from multiple different angles. It is the privileging of one particular angle that I'm resistant to.
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Feb 27, 2016 19:10
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SurgicalOntologist posted:Okay, the thing about fact is concerning. I'm curious what Turvey would say about it now. quote:The rest of it is defensible, though. The idea is that all science has non-falsifiable starting assumptions, usually ignored. Turvey and Carello take a different tack, explicitly stating their assumptions as such and embracing them. In particular, direct realism. The starting point for ecological psychology is to assume direct realism is correct (there are philosophical arguments, but not really scientific ones), and see what it would look like to build a science based on that. How far can we go? Now, jettisoning facts is not in the interest of good science, but when it comes to psychology, it is usually possible to deconstruct factual statements, strip them of their unspoken assumptions, and reconstruct them in an alternative framework (without losing the fact itself). That's as far as I'm willing to go, at least. I don't even think looking at whether some direct perception without involving representation in the brain is inherently pointless and some of the more moderate people you quoted may actually be doing something useful, but when I look at the stuff he writes, I see someone who at first reasonably went "existing models of perception are incomplete and the dominant lines of thought risk ignoring potentially important mechanisms" and then decided "so I will do the complete opposite, burn everything down, and steadfastly ignore everything that is currently considered mainstream, reality be damned". Basically, fundamentalist hipsterism in science 
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Feb 27, 2016 20:53
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Juffo-Wup posted:Well of course science is subjective in that sense. "You're only finding laws that obtain among features that you yourself are interested in!" Yes, but what is science but an attempt to systematize the best human understanding of the universe? That science as done by humans is characterized and motivated by the human perspective does not strike me as a gigantic problem. quote:What is the difference between inherent features and superficial features? How can we distinguish between them? quote:Edit - Though I can offer this response at least: your hypothetical here is an empirical question. Until someone can explain/predict economic events with statistical mechanics, there's no particular reason to think the reduction will be successful. I kind of agree with this, though I would argue that there is no particular reason to think the reduction will not eventually become successful either. Essentially, the question of whether reductionism can fold all sciences into physics in all likelihood can't be conclusively answered yet. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 21:14
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blowfish posted:It's I'm not sure why you consider them superficially way considering they're similar in all the ways relevant for what you're doing. Superficially similar is something that I'd use for say gold and pyrite. But that's just arguing about words of course, not terribly important.
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Feb 27, 2016 21:51
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SurgicalOntologist posted:Non-equilbrium thermodynamics gives us reasons for self-organization. Transition state theory does not. The fact that you keep conflating these, and brushing off dissipative structures. tells me that you've made little effort to understand the point I'm making. Transition state theory is probably one of the most important concepts required to understand self-assembly in biology. You are just talking nonsense here. I don't see how the model you proposed adds anything interesting to the physical understanding of life, so yeah, I'm brushing it off. The Belgian posted:The rubber band does not move into all possible micro states. If it did that, you would see it be relaxed for a while, suddenly fully strech for a brief instance, then relax again,... You'd have the Poincaré recurrence from the text I linked. The rubber band moves into all possible states. The fact that you are unlikely to encounter it in a fully stretched state at room temperature, is only due to the boltzmann factor(not considering the entropic argument here). The boltzmann factor also explains why you can find the rubber band exclusively in the one stretched state, at very low temperatures. Can I ask you, if you ever had any formal education in statistical mechanics? quote:The rubber band will only move through a very small number of all possible micro states and yes, it does so whitout preference. The rubber band will move through an enormous amount of micro states and at high temperatures it can access most of its phase space. quote:The path through micro state space then with practical certainty lead the rubber band to the relaxed macro state. The same isn't true for perceptors. If you have some amino acids or whatever, only a few of their macro states will be 'perceptor'. The vast majority will be 'biological goop' and there'll be about as many 'sugar->cyanide converter' as 'perceptor', so you really need more to egt the drive to perceptor. Again, nothing drives perceptors. Are there more possible organisms with perception, than without perception? Yes? Then the organisms without perception are your stretched rubber band analogy, all the organisms with perception are your relaxed rubber band analogy. The very first state between fully stretched and fully relaxed is your analogy of the very first perception-capable organism. There is nothing special about that one state and nothing drives the rubber band towards it. Preemptively: Yes some biological process are extremely complex and have a low reaction rate. Yes, most biological processes are non-equilibrium processes. This has absolutely nothing to do with this argument. GABA ghoul fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 22:29
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blowfish posted:It's Well, be careful that that you don't get yourself into a situation where you define inherent/superficial and similar/same just in terms of a distinction between physical and higher order sciences, and then expect the former distinctions to do substantive work concerning the latter. That would beg the question.
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Feb 27, 2016 22:31
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waitwhatno posted:The rubber band moves into all possible states. The fact that you are unlikely to encounter it in a fully stretched state at room temperature, is only due to the boltzmann factor(not considering the entropic argument here). The boltzmann factor also explains why you can find the rubber band exclusively in the one stretched state, at very low temperatures. I'm in theoretical physics. If you'd read that Kac ring text I link you'd know that even very simple systems only move through a very small part of their state space in relevant times. EDIT: I looked it up and I passed my nonequilibrium stat mech course summa cum laude. EDIT2: I guess now I should ask you about your formal education in stat mech too? The Belgian fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 22:38
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clearly my posting qualifications r better than ur posting qualifications~~~ 
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Feb 27, 2016 23:15
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blowfish posted:clearly my posting qualifications r better than ur posting qualifications~~~ Well, he asked me (EDIT: in a somewhat attacking manner). I'd have been perfectly happy to not say anything if he didn't ask. The Belgian fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 23:17
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Statistics are mainly a tool for answering relatively simple questions, such as yes or no. Increases or decreases? Sometimes it tries to answer more complex ones, but you can see that the more the parameters, the less reliable and precise it gets. You even have serious problems when dealing with 5 or 10 parameters simultaneously. Actually what you actually do in that case is choosing the less wrong model… On the other hand, i don't agree with the widely cited phrase: " there are lies, more lies and statistics"..I think that they are an amazing tool but one has to be aware of its limitations. For instance, you cannot use statistical mechanics to accurately model things as complex as neuronal inter-connections....
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Feb 28, 2016 16:15
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minasole posted:Statistics are mainly a tool for answering relatively simple questions, such as yes or no. Increases or decreases? Sometimes it tries to answer more complex ones, but you can see that the more the parameters, the less reliable and precise it gets. You even have serious problems when dealing with 5 or 10 parameters simultaneously. Actually what you actually do in that case is choosing the less wrong model… Statistical mechanics != statistics (though they are related, of course) People have done a lot of work using statistical mechanics in biology with great succes. This isn't really an area that I've been looking at recently and I don't know what work has been done for neurons specifically, but a bit of googling brings up lots of stuff for neurons: http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-5468/focus/extra.special2 http://cogprints.org/88/ http://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.1729.pdf
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Feb 28, 2016 17:22
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To answer the OP: yes, and anyone who tells you that they know otherwise is lying/misinformed. To the rest of the thread: arguments that rely on human (mammal evolved to dig for tubers on the plains of africa) sense of intuition/logic are probably or almost certainly flawed. Humans are designed to see cause > effect. Much of quantum spooky voodoo ignores such presuppositions and it is shown to be probable that for the basest of things cause just is and might not need effect at all. Nothing wrong with reductionism, the fault is in the organisms trying to parse the result.
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Feb 28, 2016 17:31
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Rakosi posted:Humans are designed to see cause > effect. Much of quantum spooky voodoo ignores such presuppositions and it is shown to be probable that for the basest of things cause just is and might not need effect at all. Could you tell us some more about what you mean by this?
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Feb 28, 2016 17:38
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The Belgian posted:Could you tell us some more about what you mean by this? A specific example of what I wrote is that the positive energy of, say, a star (heat, etc) is exactly cancelled out by it's negative energy (gravity, and some quantum fields) to the effect that the net energy of the universe is exactly 0. So things can spontaneously exist without violating the conservation of energy, and that the idea that 'non-existence' is any kind of default state might just be illogical human meatbag thought with no basis in quantum reality.
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Feb 28, 2016 17:52
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Rakosi posted:A specific example of what I wrote is that the positive energy of, say, a star (heat, etc) is exactly cancelled out by it's negative energy (gravity, and some quantum fields) to the effect that the net energy of the universe is exactly 0.
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Feb 28, 2016 17:56
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Rakosi posted:To answer the OP: yes, and anyone who tells you that they know otherwise is lying/misinformed. "Human science has a fundamental epistemic flaw: because it is universally mediated by the particularly human perspective we can never be sure that it gets at the real truth. That's how we know that the human science called 'chemistry' gives us the real truth about the phenomenon humans call 'life.'" Can you see what's wrong with this or do I need to explain it further?
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Feb 28, 2016 17:58
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There's no reason to think the cosmos strictly obeys the thermodynamics as we intuitively understand them. We're still clueless about dark matter, dark energy, and other exotic stuff. Our own perception of cut down tree - burn wood - produce heat and consume wood is only part of the story. The combustion products go into the carbon cycle and become new wood. Some matter/energy is lost - but it's not quite like the mechanical steam-engine logic of basic thermo. Cosmic scales, materials, and processes are just at the fringes of our perception.
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Feb 28, 2016 18:03
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The Belgian posted:Could you provide a proof or a link to a paper or something because I don't recall ever hearing this? There's lots of stuff about it out on google, but this video touches on it better than I did https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46sKeycH3bE, though you only really need to listen up to min 10:00 to get the bit i was referencing.
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Feb 28, 2016 18:07
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Rakosi posted:There's lots of stuff about it out on google, but this video touches on it better than I did https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46sKeycH3bE, though you only really need to listen up to min 10:00 to get the bit i was referencing. Krauss does two very bad things here: 1. Present untested theory as fact 2. Use terminology in an unclear and overly broad manner, meaning that things are almost guaranteed to be misinterpreted by laymen But that aside, I didn't hear him claim that our actual physical stars have 0 net energy, his claim is that the universe has 0 net energy. He really should be aware of the many issues related to energy in general relativity, but maybe he answers those in his book. Overall the claims I've heard by Krauss are sloppy and other people have written more detailed explanations of waht's bad: http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.6091
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Feb 28, 2016 19:01
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The Belgian posted:Krauss does two very bad things here: I dunno, he seems to hedge everything in 'maybe' and 'possibly', and when he really likes an idea, personally, he'll stretch to a 'probably'. And his terminology was pretty easy to understand by a layman; me. He didn't say anything about stars, but he made the analogy of tossing a coin to demonstrate the same zero net energy effect that the universe has. I just swapped the coin for a star in what I wrote, the point was that it is supposed to be universally applicable. This is a theory (you're right it is just a theory, though you are a bit wrong if you say it is untested) that almost got Einstein killed when it was posited to him once when he was crossing a road with a colleague, who suggested creation doesn't violate the conservation of energy; he stopped in his tracks and nearly got hit by a car. My point anyway is that this theory is at least as provable as otherwise (though I personally favor it), so therefore it seemed congruent in a discussion that was going down a reductionist rabbit hole. IE, Human common sense might not, and certainly need not, apply.
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Feb 28, 2016 19:11
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Rakosi posted:My point anyway is that this theory is at least as provable as otherwise (though I personally favor it), so therefore it seemed congruent in a discussion that was going down a reductionist rabbit hole. IE, Human common sense might not, and certainly need not, apply. Who was appealing to human common sense? What is that, exactly? What is a reductionist rabbit hole and who do you think was going down it?
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Feb 28, 2016 19:18
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Rakosi posted:I dunno, he seems to hedge everything in 'maybe' and 'possibly', and when he really likes an idea, personally, he'll stretch to a 'probably'. And his terminology was pretty easy to understand by a layman; me. He didn't say anything about stars, but he made the analogy of tossing a coin to demonstrate the same zero net energy effect that the universe has. I just swapped the coin for a star in what I wrote, the point was that it is supposed to be universally applicable. This is a theory (you're right it is just a theory, though you are a bit wrong if you say it is untested) that almost got Einstein killed when it was posited to him once when he was crossing a road with a colleague, who suggested creation doesn't violate the conservation of energy; he stopped in his tracks and nearly got hit by a car. The problem is that he makes things sound like you understand them, but you actually don't. An example of a bad thing he does: He equates dark energy with a form of 'nothing' which certainly isn't a common view. Hiw whole notion of nothingness seems very bad and more like 'things that are there but you can't see with human eyes', not 'nothing'.
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Feb 28, 2016 20:25
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Brains are not computational systems.
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Feb 28, 2016 22:05
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Friendly Humour posted:Brains are not computational systems. [citation needed]
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Feb 28, 2016 22:16
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Well you certainly are a turding machine
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Feb 28, 2016 22:22
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Friendly Humour posted:Brains are not computational systems. Well, minds certainly aren't.
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Feb 28, 2016 22:23
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