Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

The problem with the "plenty of space down there" remark is that practical computers have to have their input states programmable, ie., there must exist some causal deterministic process to set the state of the input.

It's not clear that organic solutions at that level can do programmable computational work, nor that their work is at all deterministic.

At best, it would seem the organic direction for computing will be about building robots rather than CPUs.

View on HN

Oh, but the "organic" solutions do highly deterministic, extremely programmable computational work: 99.99999+% of newborns have 2 hands, 2 legs, and 1 head, and they all started development from a single cell [1]. It's just that the "organic" solutions are written in a 4+ billion year-old highly redundant, distributed, resilient, evolved language whereas our CPUs are not on the same phylogenetic tree.

The quotation marks around organic are just there to point out that there is something wrong with the dichotomy organic (various pro/eu-karyotes from bacteria to humans)/inorganic (from thermostats to CPUs).

[1] Michael Levin: Anatomical decision-making by cellular collectives https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-9rLlFgcm0

> extremely programmable computational work: 99.99999+% of newborns have 2 hands, 2 legs, and 1 head, and they all started development from a single cell [1].

Just on the risks of early miscarriage from wrong number of chromosomes I'd say your numbers are way off.

> Miscarriage is the most common complication of early pregnancy.[21] Among women who know they are pregnant, the miscarriage rate is roughly 10% to 20%, while rates among all fertilisation is around 30% to 50%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage

So 30-50% failure rate.

You are nitpicking, nevertheless, newborn, noun, a baby that was born recently [1], hence the 99.99999+% figure is applied for the full term pregnancies, once the fetus is decoupled from the mother and has been born as a, well, newborn. And furthermore, the point is not that they live or die, but that they have 2 hands, 2 legs, and 1 head after developing from one single cell through deterministic computation in the morphospace.

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/newborn#...

I'm not nitpicking - I'm saying the reason most babies are born with 2 legs hands and a head is because genetic defects die off before birth (plus the screening we have for early termination nowadays) - and the failure rate starting from a single cell is huge.

The genetic defects failure rate is irrelevant, TSMC also throws away bad batches [1], mistakes happen, life is complex and multifaceted, etc. The issue is if biology is a deterministic computational platform, and the argument I was making, using the hyperbolic figure of 99.99999%, I will grant you this, is that not only biology is a deterministic computational platform, but it is better than the one we can achieve currently in our CPUs: no CPU is able to regenerate a melt down core, axolotls can grow back a limb as if it was never gone.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13905/tsmc-chip-yields-hit-by...

But at that point your argument is almost tautological - all children born alive are fit to survive ? Being born with such huge asymmetry (missing limbs) and still surviving is low probably (impossible without a head).

I'd say a more convincing argument for deterministic machinery is identical twins - I don't know how much variation there is to put in numbers.

"But at that point your argument is almost tautological"

Yes, that is the point: biodevelopment is deterministic and computational. Watch the Michael Levin video linked above: they cut the head of a planarian worm, it grows back a head; they cut the tail, it grows back a tail; they cut the tail and the head and change the bioelectric gradients, it grows back two heads or two tails.

Don't forget that the infant mortality rate (post birth) is 0.5%.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/infant-health.htm

Number of infant deaths: 19,582

Deaths per 100,000 live births: 541.9

Leading causes of infant deaths:

– Congenital malformations, deformations and chromosomal abnormalities

– Disorders related to short gestation and low birthweight: not elsewhere classified

– Sudden infant death syndrome

> 99.99999+% of newborns have 2 hands, 2 legs, and 1 head

This number is far too high. The rate of conjoined twins (violating "1 head") is about 1 in 50,000 [1], and the rate of "limb reduction defects" (violating "2 hands and 2 legs") is about 1 in 1,900 [2].

Those correspond to 99.998% and 99.94% respectively. 3-4 nines is still impressive for such a complex system, but let's not claim it's 7+ nines.

[1] https://www.chop.edu/conditions-diseases/conjoined-twins [2] https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/ul-limbreductiondefe...

"The occurrence of conjoined twins is rare. Its actual prevalence is unknown, but it is estimated to range from 1:50,000 to 1:200,000" [1]. 1 in 200,000 would raise it to 99.9995%. But as pointed again and again in the other comments, the pointless, hyperbolic figure is irrelevant. When cutting the planarian worm head, the regeneration is always, 100% a head, if no change in the bioelectrical gradients. The argument was about the deterministic computation done by biology in the morphospace.

[1] Importance of Angiographic Study in Preoperative Planning of Conjoined Twins Case Report, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S180759322...

> pointless, hyperbolic figure is irrelevant

Then why not simply give the correct, still impressive, figure, as I suggested?

> the regeneration is always, 100% a head, if no change in the bioelectrical gradients

This is also a meaningless statement. It's correct 100% of the time, except when something goes wrong and it's not.

Can you quantify the likelihood of something going wrong with the "bioelectrical gradient"? I'm not familiar with this organism but I suspect it's several nines, but less than 7.

In general, probabilities less than a certain amount stop being meaningful, because it's more likely that the model used generate the probability fails to reflect reality. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AJ9dX59QXokZb35fk/when-not-t...

The figure you suggested is also wrong, as per the article I linked, and I can no longer edit the original comment.

The change in the bioelectrical gradient is a human intervention over the organism. Watch the video I linked above. There is 0% chance of "something going wrong with the bioelectrical gradients", it's at the experimenter's will. If you are not familiar then why do you suspect? Your statement is not even meaningless.

> I can no longer edit the original comment

Okay, great, we're getting somewhere. So you concede that the true number of human birth defects is on the order of 4-5 nines.

We know this because we've observed a huge sample size of human births. Meanwhile, the experiment you reference only observed a small set of planarian worm amputations. So we can't conclude there are even 4-5 nines of reliability there, let alone "100%".

Otherwise, we could simply observe a few hundred human births, observe no defects, and conclude that human births are also "100%" reliable.

In our original debate, we were both slightly wrong about the number of nines of reliability in human births. However, you are now infinitely wrong by claiming an infinite number of nines of reliability in planarian worm amputations. I don't know whether the actual number of nines is 5, or 10, or 20, but I can be certain that it's not infinity, because that would violate the laws of probability.

Concede? Debate? Since you linked to pseudo-philosophical mindholes such as LessWrong I suppose it's only natural you would see it as a debate. I will no longer reply since your worldview is irreconcilable with learning and understanding beyond "I am right/less wrong, you are (infinitely) wrong".

Again, you have no idea what you are talking about, as you admitted you are not familiar with the planarian worm organism and regeneration research, and it's not a problem, we are all ignorant about various things, that's why we learn: too bad your learning appetite has been a casualty to the illusion of LessWrong "rationalism". Nevertheless, it is really funny to see you being "rational" and speculating upon things you have no understanding and no desire to learn about. I really laughed reading your now deleted comment starting with "Zero is not a probability."

Just to make it clear for anyone else who might read this: it is impossible to throw a ball in the air and see it flying in the air forever. There is 0% chance of that ever happening. There are no "laws of probability" to be violated in this "experiment". Just the same, when you amputate a planarian worm head, regardless if you did it once, never, or 100,000 times before, it will always 100% regenerate a head, if you, the experimenter, haven't altered the bioelectrical gradients of the worm [1]. The planarian worm regeneration is still being researched and it is revealing biology as a deterministic computation in the morphospace with abilities far exceeding what we currently can muster with our CPUs.

[1] Planarian regeneration as a model of anatomical homeostasis: Recent progress in biophysical and computational approaches, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10849...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com