How Nature Solves Problems Through Computation
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
And then we can go macro - a tribe can subdivide into gatherers, warriors, and crafters. A city can specialize further. A country even further. Imagine how different the life experience would be if humans existed as single entities alone in endless fields.
Then it gets even more fun to consider interactions with other lifeforms - dogs, plants, cows.
Man, what a cool field of research. I'm glad to hear people are studying this.
This experience cannot be gain in a lab setting – you yourself are the lab, meditation is the tool and quieting the mind is the process to experience this.
Actually, there's research that suggests that gut bacteria may have more control over our decision making then we are aware of. Really interesting stuff.
[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/gut-bacteria-ma...
"Fundamentally, intelligence can be thought of as an organism's ability to sense, process, and respond to information to its adaptive advantage, forming memories to anticipate and optimize advantage in future encounters. By this definition, an amoeba has a rudimentary intelligence. So does a grove of aspen trees. Intelligence, then, isn’t the sole prerogative of humans, or primates, or even mammals, but a ubiquitous feature of life on earth."[0]
[0]: https://www.santafe.edu/research/projects/evolution-of-compl...
But then what's an organism?
This is an information-theoretic view, and it allows us to speak of an "atom" of water, an "atom" of ice, and so on.
The property "alive" while not meaningless cannot be limited to a set of matter/energy configurations. There is no "atom" of life.
This would be moot except that you are alive. You are [part of] the life of the Universe. You can't actually fix a boundary between you and it. The Universe may not always have been alive, but when you became alive it did too.
They are agents, perhaps. but "not tethered to a single course of action given environmental circumstances." Examples: As an aggregate, humans flinch away from heat and pain. There are outliers but they are insignificant enough to not be relevant (people neurological disorders, etc). Furthermore, a human has no control over their birth circumstances and thus the culture they are raised in, as an aggregate this means that generally there is little "freedom" in your values and worldview. Again, there are outliers, but in aggregate this is true.
It would have been much harder for humans to arrive at the current apex without these other animals.
From the inside to outside we're part of a larger whole.
For example, is it better to have one strong, centralized government, or a looser confederation of states? Is there an optimal amount of power one should delegate to individuals?
I mean, if you honestly compare the human body to society, our bodies look like horrible totalitarian states with a caste system attached.
Cells have their reproduction strictly controlled; cells that break those rules are induced to commit suicide (apoptosis) or are attacked and killed off by the police (immune system); cells that evade these measures and continue to reproduce often end up killing the individual (cancer). Even though cells (mostly) share all the same DNA, they are induced to specialize at birth and mostly stay in their roles for their entire lifespan.
So in what important ways are societies different from our bodies, such that societies should maximize liberty of the individual? What does that say about how we should structure society -- should it be a strict geographical hierarchy, or something looser (e.g. corporations and other groups), and how much power should go to each level of organization?
This is required only because the controlling mechanism (the ruler/government) can be selfish and clueless in regards to what rules the subjects should follow for the well being of everyone. and also they are so detached from the problems of individuals....
Imagine a system where a ruler experience every pain and discomfort of every one of their subjects, real time (like in the body of a living thing). In such a system, I think individual liberty can be completely removed, because no one would not want to do anything outside of the rules anyway...
And now imagine that the rule is a masochist, which was to intensify such pain and discomfort!
Anyway, regarding your comment, I'm not sure if we can say anything about how we should structure larger bodies (like societies) if we don't know anything about the feelings of each of their parts.
The microcosm and the macrocosm are vastly different with one exhibiting quantum behaviors and the other mostly influenced by gravity.
The experience of yogi's or Buddhists of a removal of psychological barriers that separate subjective experience into a personal and extra-personal world are just that. Changes to subjective experience. That means a change in brain state. It doesn't imply some kind of magic that changes the observed world.
Because things seem alike in imagery or language doesn't even remotely mean they are alike in observation.
What you are saying isn't unlike someone equating the Bohr model of the atom with a solar system. They do look alike in illustrations, after all. The problem is that solar systems don't look like atoms and they are vastly different "things".
(A change in brain state is a change in the observed world.)
I often hear that, but I think that's a wrong assumption. I think people fall in and out of being conscious all the time, and often they are semi-conscious in a distracted way.
Consciousness is this holy singular grail, but I think it's actually a muddy mixture of state of minds, like thinking usually is.
* (not to be confused with multiple-personality disorder)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain#Case_studies_of_sp...
But where ever there is communication, abstractions are required to compose a coherent and persistent message. So DNA and proteins and even subatomic particles that entangle can be considered to be tapping into natures capacity to abstract, and to compute those abstractions.
And if you consider nothing exists in a void, and the innate connected-ness of an undivided and unabstracted universe as a whole, everything is coming and going; everything is itself a message and the subject of computation; and nature is engaged in a never ending conversation with none other than itself. If it's messages can be any size, and last however long, then you and I too are just one of its many messages.
(pardon the philosophy... stuck doing mundane work at midnight on a Friday... I had to write something)
> However, in broad brush, we might say this: You’re a pattern in spacetime. A mathematical pattern. Specifically, you’re a braid in spacetime—indeed, one of the most elaborate braids known.
[1]: https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2014/lens-of-computation-workshop
> What we are doing at C4 is taking messy, conceptually challenging problems and turning them into something rigorous. We’re very philosophically oriented, but we’re also very quantitative, particularly in thinking about how nature can overcome subjectivity in information processing through collective computation. We really think the answer to these questions requires combining insights from statistical physics, theoretical computer science, information theory, evolutionary biology and cognitive science.
Section 6.1 deals with swarm intelligence (ant colony optimization, cemetery organization, particle swarm optimization). 6.2 is on artificial immune systems.
A more biological+philosophical exploration on issues of collectivity will be found in the following book, which is already available for pre-order on Amazon, I see:
https://www.amazon.com/Landscapes-Collectivity-Sciences-Theo...
if you are interested in a computational perspective, the classic is (Hofmeyr and Forrest, 2000).
""" We were interested in whether we could induce the monkey society we were studying to change from its status quo of many small fights and a few large ones to having many large fights. We observed that fights in this monkey group range in size from two to 30 or so individuals, with small fights common and large fights very rare. By simulating the society using data we had collected on fight-joining decisions, we found that we could measure the number of monkeys whose propensity to join fights would have to increase to move the system closer to the critical point.
Also it should be noted that fighting is a very common part of monkey behavior. If you observe these groups in the wild individuals are almost constantly challenging and checking others to maintain or advance their position in the social hierarchy.
..."phenomenological rules"...
It is an interesting subject... but this interview is a little annoying since it is with a philosopher in scientists clothing.
And Ms. Flack, though her research interests extend beyond the realm of what is traditionally considered hard science, is most certainly a scientist - an evolutionary biologist specifically.
I assume you are linking to her LinkedIn profile to point out her "Doctor of Philosophy" degree? That's just the full, formal name for a PhD :P
If the space being considered is a probability space like you say, then there is no metric, there is a measure.
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Why am I so pedantic?
Because I feel that the liberal arts mindset of writing is not serious enough for subjects where there is a ground truth to uncover.
In the article you link, where is the empirical study that compares how this model predicts reality?
I wish that people who publish on SIAMS, or ASA, AMS, IEEE affiliated journals were the ones trending on HN, and getting interviewed by journalists. A pessimist would say those people are too busy with their work for publicity, and that an empty barrel echoes loudest.
Reminds me Saddam and Iraq :)
Thanks