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Comment by Garlef | Hacker News Reader

> My naïve hunch tells me that this could be related to rationality in some way, that weakening the ion pump signals could make it easier for cells to learn and make alternate computations, creating humans strong rationality that is capable of overriding our natural urges.

That's quite a conclusion you're jumping to...

"rationality" is a word denoting a very complex concept obtaining its meaning only through a specific historic background including a lot of assumptions that are not as universal as you might think.

I would always be very careful when trying to bridge between

1) A physical phenomenon.

2) Concepts derived through a complex cultural discourse.

These are two very separate worlds.

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> That's quite a conclusion you're jumping to...

It isn't a conclusion, it is a hypothesis. Human rationality is what makes us unique among animals, so anything that sets our brain apart from animals could be related to it and therefore warrants further study to see if it is relevant to human intelligence.

> "rationality" is a word denoting a very complex concept obtaining its meaning only through a specific historic background including a lot of assumptions that are not as universal as you might think.

> I would always be very careful when trying to bridge between

In what way am I not careful here? It would be great if we could make a connection so we should explore any potential connection further, why are you against that?

Is your point that this is a hard problem to solve and therefore we shouldn't look for solutions? The link I posited here is very far out, yes, but it is still possible that there is a link and if there actually is one it would be a huge discovery.

> Human rationality is what makes us unique among animals

Are you sure? It seems to us that reasoning, to some degree, is a distributed gift - in fact, all brains are there to take decisions.

See for example https://www.uh.edu/news-events/stories/2017/november/1101201...

The levels to which humans can learn rationality is in a completely different league from animals, so yes I'll say I'm pretty sure about that. It is like the difference between merge sort and bogo sort, sure they solve the same problem but bogo sorting doesn't work for anything but datasets with a few elements. Animals reasoning chains breaks down extremely quickly, they can do a few steps, but humans can do hundreds or thousands of steps and the reasoning can still be solid and useful even after that many steps.

That is a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. And it is probably related to a synergy of functions.

Quantitative differences becomes qualitative differences when they get large enough. For example, the difference between merge sort and bogo sort are qualitative, you can't sort anything with 50 or more elements using bogo sort while you can sort billions of elements with merge sort.

Nothing of the sort of "rationality" exists in the history of early humans or their ancestors.

I'm not even sure what is this rationality that you're talking about. Because the main narrative of early humans evolves through giant leaps of irrationality.

Even today, most humans are irrational.

> Even today, most humans are irrational.

Compared to what? Compared to animals basically every human has genius level rationality.

The ability to develop and spread farming methods, how to create advanced tools, language, writing etc, is what I mean when I talk about capability for rational thought. Every healthy human has that, no animal is even comparable.

I will admit what I am about to say is more philosophical, and it might not be directly to your point, but hear me out.

There might be an innate rationality in other animals that you are dismissing or overlooking. We all know that when a bird eats a berry it sends the seeds out like a like Johnny Appleseed. Do they use their rational thought to do that? No. But they do not need to.

Or how about the birds who can navigate thousands of miles using the magnetic field of the earth? I do not know many humans who could do that.

Or what about a Killer Whale that can communicate to others 10 miles away without the use of any technology?

Compared to humans, every animal has genius level innate rationality that can compare to no humans.

As humans we are so obsessed with with out own type of greatness but we really need to step back and humble ourselves on the greatness of other (and I will not call them lesser) species.

IMHO, maybe humans have dumbed down and inhibited, and now we need all this technology to survive because we lack the innate ability to do it on our own.

yeah.. my first hypothesis i was jumping to was that reducing the ion channels reduces specialization and can work on improving distributed(across) neurons decisions/calls... It would be interesting to see a cognitive behavioural task both primates and humans can do and see if the blood flow/electromagnetic activity is more spread across the brain vs more localized in parts of the brain.

Quite, but I don't think GP is jumping to a conclusion. More like proposing an interesting hypothesis.

To say it less politely: To me it seems more like stoner talk.

"Quantum entanglement, ... blablabla, ... collective subconscious, ... blablabla, ... everything is connected, man!"

It seems like early modernism, where they discovered something called radiation existed, and immediately decided it must have superpowered positive effects (curing all diseases) rather than being bad or useless.

I don't think you understand how science works. The aim isn't to be correct, the aim is to find potential areas of progress. Is my hypothesis here most likely incorrect? Yes, of course it is, but that doesn't matter since if it is correct it would be huge and therefore it is worth exploring.

But thanks for your comment, now I understand better how luddites thinks. So in the future when I make comments like above I'll say "this hypothesis is unlikely to be true but...", so that even luddites can understand it.

> I don't think you understand how science works

I have some understanding of how science works. The purpose remains to find plausible explanations to phenomena, explanations that show some solidity.

The same value - linked to grounds - remains valid for statements in general. This is why we refine them, in the internal "lab", where they are tried under duress of criticism. Which is scientific process.

And how is "weakening the electric signals between cells makes it easier for cells to alter the message and therefore might give rise to stronger forms of learning" not a plausible link? It costs more energy to ignore a stronger signal, making it harder for cells to learn to change input signals. Humans having weaker signals could therefore be related to our ability to learn, while animals could have stronger signals making them worse at learning but better at following instincts.

Of course I could be wrong, but can you really say there is no way my hypothesis could be right?

The learning part might be right.

I'm put off by the "rationality" part.

At least to me rationality is the same thing as ability to learn complex things and have those new learnings override your intuitive responses. If you have some other definition of rationality then maybe that is why you thought my post was strange.

> rationality is the same thing as ability to learn complex things

I think this covers only a part of what the word means. There's a strong connection to (and to some even identity with) the term "reason".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason

"Reason" as a concept is deeply rooted in the enlightenment era and comes with a lot of metaphysical and historical baggage.

" It costs more energy to ignore a stronger signal," - wait, what, why? Do you have any citation for that? IMHO that has absolutely no basis in how neurons work, it does not cost a cell energy to ignore signals.

"making it harder for cells to learn to change input signals." this sentence is not even wrong; it essentially presumes that the default behavior is to "not change input signals", which is definitely not how neurons work.

"Humans having weaker signals could therefore be related to our ability to learn" - perhaps, but you provide no argument about the direction of causality there (if it's related, perhaps the weaker signals are caused by a different level of learning), nor for elevation of "could be" from mere possibility to why it's likely to be the case.

I'm not saying that there is no way that your hypothesis could be right, but you do need to pass a certain (quite high) bar of clearly stating your assumptions and demonstrating that all of the assumptions are reasonable before your hypothesis would be worth reviewing and evaluating, and there is very a big gap between "possible" and "plausible".

> how science works... hypothesis

This is precisely what I would criticise:

It's not actually a hypothesis in terms of being a testable statement:

How would you even operationalize "rationality"?

Of course it is testable, psychology tests way more vague concepts all the time. It isn't as testable as concepts in physics or even biology, no, but it is still testable.

What would an experiment look like? Lets say we have a drug which gives you animal level of receptors. Inject that into babies and see if they stop developing human level thinking, and try to find out why. Of course we can't run such experiments with our current morals, but it isn't impossible to do.

Another thing you can do is look at the level of these in different humans and see if it correlates to achievements on school tests etc, see if some learning disabilities might be correlated to it etc.

Or an even cooler thing would be to see if reducing animal levels of receptors would make it easier to teach them stuff. That would probably even pass our moral test.

The poster could have meant "maybe a reduction in the density of ion channels does much more than change the mechanism: it also forces the function to adapt in different directions (say, towards the basis for more distinctive abilities)".

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