Electrochemical potential enables dormant spores to integrate enviro signals
science.org
science.org
And, to be fair, I think the actual research was more about modeling how it works. Not claiming that they count, per se.
That is, just because you can model something mathematically, does not mean that the thing being modeled is the same as doing the math. Falling is not the same as calculating an equation, as it were.
This feels like a false dichotomy. The two calculations demonstrate essentially the same function, but one is performed using physical dynamics (the accumulation of something on one side of a boundary) implemented in an analog computer (overcoming an activation potential) and the other using an abstracted representation (program) implemented in a digital computer (transformations via mathematical analysis).
That said, I don't think I get the point you are driving to. Saying I have 1 apple and you give me another, is very akin to 1 + 1 = 2. Yet, calculating 1 + 1 = 2 in a computer is not "the same" as getting another apple in person. (And that is ignoring all of the data that is thrown away by "1 apple." How many grams/atoms/etc.?)
I grant there is a fun view of reality being a simulation. But even then, there is a difference between simulating something, with all that implies in regards to data you have thrown out, and the thing you are simulating within that simulation. They may be equivalent in some consideration, but I find it a huge stretch to claim they are the same.
Your comment prepared me for the experience, but the ball did not drop in my case until taeric's comment (which incidentally missed your point).
To taeric: Anything IS an analog computer of itself. Doing it for real completely bypasses the need to simulate.
This is a subjective, normative claim. As such it doesn't hold much water.
For purposes of human life, only a device easy to control is a computer.
Conceivably, I could build a slalom course for balls to roll down hills such that it "computes" a function by giving the answer as the number of balls in a particular bin at the bottom of the hill, given some input configuration of balls at the top of the hill. You could conceivably do this with any well-behaved function over the integers, given the appropriate slalom course. How is setting the slalom course different from writing a computer program?
I am claiming the difference is only in representation and physical implementation (balls in an analog slalom course vs binary numerical program in an electromechanical digital computer).
Physical processes are used to compute things all the time. Have you ever studied an internal combustion engine? Sensors and circuits are physical components that are used to implement feedback loops that determine ("compute") a set point or steady-state phenomenon within the engine. The function of the engine is to run, and it does so with analog computations, free of digital interface.
Do you then say that the engine has not actually computed an appropriate setting given its (physical, analog) programming? If not, then what has it done? One may answer that it has simply fulfilled its physical inevitability via deterministic processes -- but this explanation applies equally to the digital computer as it is still a physical machine performing physical processes to reach an end state.
I've gone through this enough times with myself that I can't see it another way, but if you have an alternative view feel free to share.
And this, in large, rests on your perception ignoring everything else about what happened in the process. When eating my food, did I slowly subtract all of the grams from the input of food that I was given? In a perception of the event? Yes. Would you say that I was slowly counting away at the grams of food? I was never even cognizant of the number of grams, so that is an odd take. Even if an outsider could have been aware of how many grams something is and that I would stand up on finishing. It does not make sense to call that counting, as you are advocating in this thread.
Regarding the brain as a computer. This is an interesting one, as it is classically accepted and appeals heavily to the way we built up the idea of a modern computer. My take is that, if it is a calculator in that sense, it is only calculating on the simulation that it is building of and for itself. And that it is its own self interpretation that allows this view.
In statistical learning theory we colloquially refer to this as "averaging over the noise" which is, functionally, a very useful feature for a computing system to have.
> Would you say that I was slowly counting away at the grams of food?
No, I would say that the process of digestion slowly converted molecules of food into molecules of other stuff + heat. But that isn't even the relevant quantity in this instance, instead the relevant quantity is available energy for use in other parts of your body. In this framework both can be said to have been "computed" (there is a lot of information content in physical reality, so there is plenty to spare to represent both quantities through the same process), but I regard it as a failure of imagination to merely assume that I mean to say that counting integers is the same as collecting a quantity of something.
> I was never even cognizant of the number of grams, so that is an odd take.
Why do you need to be cognizant (aware) of something for it to have occurred? That presents as egocentric hubris to me. You will certainly experience something (having more energy to do other stuff) but you shouldn't expect that a priori and any subsequent experience is only incidental. Phenomenological experience is purely receptive, ie, only works with what it can receive.
> It does not make sense to call that counting, as you are advocating in this thread.
I am not calling it "counting", I am calling it "computing". I have been clear and consistent on that. Probably your definition of "computation" conflates the two, but the two are only synonymous in cases of digital computing.
> My take is that, if it is a calculator in that sense, it is only calculating on the simulation that it is building of and for itself.
This is what I mean by "abstract representation". The brain builds up a model of the world, dividing it into self and other. But there are more fundamental operations underpinning that process, and by now it is common parlance in the neurosciences to regard functional neuronal sub-circuits as "computing" things, even though we have no direct access to their inputs nor outputs. "We" as in "self-aware, sentient, cognitive beings with a functional world model" experience the representations which are built up on those more fundamental computations, and simulate the outside world, and that's the closest thing to "digital" computation that can be said to occur in our minds because of the relatively abstract nature of the representations.
If you are merely arguing that we can all be symbolically described, and that a woman's body is computing the baby, I'm fine with that and agree. If you are then arguing that this symbol of a baby is akin to a computation that you can represent somewhere else, and that another process that computes the same symbols is the same. I'm also still fine. I'd still reject that the body is counting or computing in the other representation's terms. But, again, that does not seem to be what you thought we were discussing.
Interesting. The other reply to this, along with its subthread, assumes that "calculating" means "calculated using a digital computer".
Does anyone know what I do in my head when I calculate 4 + 4 is 8? Does anyone know what they do in their own head to calculate 4 + 4? Is that process the same as 2 + 2? as 38 + 153?
I wonder about distribution of the sizes of those pulses.
If all the pulses are basically the same size, then a trigger over the total is indistinguishable from "counting" the number of pulses.
Otherwise, yeah it's not really like "counting" at all.
This is more like measurement than counting, imho. Something of an osmotic thermostat, ionostat perhaps.
From the guidelines:
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
Lots of stuff in biology integrates continuous signals. Discrete counting of discrete events is quite rare.
In many senses you can compute with things that count discretely: Peano Arithmetic is undecidable. Yet unbounded dense linear orders (i.e. the theory of the rationals) are decidable, so you can't embed "program X halts" into them.
Full disclosure: an important part of my job is fitting git commit messages to the 50 character rule.