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Comment by nickpeterson | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the issue? Decisions are just a state machine getting different inputs. It's the same for trees and humans.

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The article says the organism tries several approaches in succession to escape the unpleasant carmine. This still isn't super advanced behavior, but it's interesting considering the organism is single-celled.

> the organism tries several approaches in succession to escape the unpleasant carmine

This implies memory. Venus fly traps use calcium gradients for short-term memory [1]. It would be interesting to learn how this organism remembers.

[1] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-venus-flytraps-store...

> This implies memory.

Shouldn't be too surprising.

"In genetics, a promoter is a sequence of DNA to which proteins bind that initiate transcription of a single RNA from the DNA downstream of it. This RNA may encode a protein, or can have a function in and of itself, such as tRNA, mRNA, or rRNA. Promoters are located near the transcription start sites of genes, upstream on the DNA (towards the 5' region of the sense strand)."

In programming terminology, the promoter region listens for events, and is followed by a handler body. So protein concentrations can be used for state.

Regarding the calcium gradients you mentioned, I wonder... I think they are more about inter-cellular communication. Cells can use calcium to make electricity. Calcium is also used by neurons to send electric pulses.

I actually find it fascinating that neurons are not unique in using electricity to communicate - that an analog exists in the plant world.

What does it remember? The approach tried previously?

Probably stress level, and the approach that follows, follows from that.

Yes, but it’s a richer state machine than previously thought, and we aren’t aware of the mechanisms it’s using for internal state

I think this is the key. "Just a state-machine" is a gross over-simplification. Imagine a tiny fruit-fly brain, vastly smaller than a human brain. Remarkably we can slice that brain into over 4000 pieces and try and rebuilt the connectome, which is a huge challenge in and of itself. Describing what's going on there as "state-machine" miss-represents a computer-science definition of "state-machine", and doesn't remotely reflect the biological complexity going on.

Whether it's more complex than a state machine can model (doubtful[0]) and whether it "doesn't remotely reflect the biological complexity" may be true but the guy's point still stands, it's a mechanism that can be modelled.

[0] you'd have to inject non-determinism as well.

non-determinism can also be modeled as a state-machine (and in fact, you can prove non-deterministic state machines can always be represented by deterministic state machines).

Ugh, you're right and I used completely the wrong terminology. I meant some degree of randomness (I think the posh term is stochastic-something), noise, jitter etc. Not NFA/DFA stuff. Good catch and thanks.

They get to do more than a state machine, because they can do analog computation.

You can simulate that with a state machine, but only with one that is much more complicated. Nature doesn't exactly prefer simplicity, but it's very bad at discovering solutions that need a big jump in complexity compared to a previous generation.

Maybe. We don't know that. You take it on faith, apparently, but that doesn't prove anything.

If you believe in a soul, and if you believe that a single celled organism (SCO) has a soul, then you can indeed delegate decision making to a non-corporeal entity. Not saying that's wrong but I struggle to accept that.

Or you might believe that a single celled organism can reasonably be understood as a state machine responding to inputs, but that a human -- or a tree, or a cat -- is not merely a scaled-up version of this same model.

We are far from knowing whether this is the case. So you can believe one extreme or the other (or something in between), but either way it's an article of faith, not an established fact.

Please clarify because I don't know - are you invoking the existence of a soul in the decision making process?

If so, you're bringing in something that's purely a matter of faith as no evidence has ever been found of a soul (AFAIK).

If no soul then be it single-celled or human, we're back in the mechanistic world and one is, somehow, just a more elaborate version of the other.

We have no more evidence that what we experience as consciousness and decision-making arises from the operation of a purely mechanistic state machine than we have for the existence of a soul.

Some people believe that when the machine becomes sufficiently complex, consciousness will emerge. Others don't. Either way, it's a matter of faith.

So the answer is yes, you're invoking the existence of a soul. It is not honest to duck a simple but pivotal and explicit question.

> We have no more evidence...arises from the operation of a purely mechanistic state machine than we have for the existence of a soul.

Evidence of a soul: 0%. Evidence of atoms: 99.999999999999999999% or higher.

I'm not invoking the existence (or non-existence) of anything. I'm just noting that we are far from understanding what consciousness is, let alone how it works.

(Who said anything about atoms? I didn't.)

> we are far from understanding what consciousness is, let alone how it works

Couldn't agree more, but that wasn't your original assertion, to wit first para of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24962220

> Who said anything about atoms? I didn't.

You: "...from the operation of a purely mechanistic state machine" So what's a 'purely mechanistic state machine' going to be made of if not atoms.

Energy

A link to the HN guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Note this one in particular:

  Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation 
  of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier 
  to criticize. Assume good faith.

Also, don't forget: when you assume, you make an ass of u and me.

I appreciate the intervention, and I really must learn to let things drop, that said I've been trying to work out what the heck he's saying. I haven't knowingly responded to a weaker argument.

> I'm just noting that we are far from understanding what consciousness is, let alone how it works.

The fact that we don't know what consciousness is doesn't mean we can't make reasonable guesses. Now, given that we understand both macroscopic and microscopic physics pretty well these days, there is only so much room for guessing and some guesses are much more reasonable than others.

Appreciate the attempt at engagement, but precision is not seen as helpful for "that kind" of discussion.

Ultimately, "you do you" is as much resolution as can reasonably be expected, down such a rabbithole.

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