Comment by indigochill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by indigochill | Hacker News Reader

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> Anyway, cells can hold (super) primitive models of the world and maintain internal balance in the face of anticipated events.

I'm not even a cocktail biologist, but my understanding is cells effectively operate via a web of complex chemical reactions, so the notion of a cell holding primitive models might be analogous to the way a CPU executes an assembly instruction: not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired it's (nearly - barring solar radiation, I suppose, which incidentally also goes for cells) inevitable that it will react to a stimulus in a predefined way (even though the way cells react to stimuli is far more advanced than a CPU).

In a similar way, "anticipating events" could involve an analogue to computer memory: the processes that have run so far have lead to certain state being saved to memory that will now influence how the system reacts to stimuli in a way that's different from how it reacted before (e.g. sum a value with the value stored in a register).

> not because it “thinks” but because the way it’s wired it’s inevitable that it will react to a human stimulus in a predefined way

This CPU analogy of yours doesn’t comport very well with the article we’re commenting on, which detailed some specific experiments that show cells are not reacting in a predefined way that is due to their ‘wiring’, contrary to previous and maybe incomplete understanding of how cells work. I don’t know if the RAM analogy helps since the surprise is that non-brain cells do have memory and do cooperate with other non-brain cells to solve certain problems, and these collections of non-brain cells can apparently remember solutions to problems over time. So yes, memory can help with anticipating events, but that really supports the idea that cells are dynamic and doing some non-trivial processing vs the possibly outdated notion that they’re hard-wired and deterministic.

> not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” ― Edsger W. Dijkstra

If we are talking about which kind of complex systems (our brain, a cell, a computer, an LLM, a beehive, etc.) think and how we should note that there is nothing magical[0] in our brain that makes our thinking special and so other blobs of atoms that are not our brain can likely do things analogous to what our brain does.

This to say that explaining in reductionist terms how supposedly something thinks is not a proof that it is not really thinking. Otherwise a sufficiently intelligent alien could prove that you are not really thinking (just a bunch of ions dancing)

[0] and if there is something magical then we do understand how it works and where else it is magicing stuff.

CPUs are anticipating all the time how the future will evolve. They have caches (to be specific, expiration strategies), branch predictors, and speculative execution. Albeit for a very different purpose: to enhance processing speed, not to react to external events.

That web of complex reactions is sufficient. See Anticipatory Systems (Rosen) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticipatory_Systems

> not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired it's (nearly - barring solar radiation, I suppose, which incidentally also goes for cells) inevitable that it will react to a stimulus in a predefined way (even though the way cells react to stimuli is far more advanced than a CPU)

I think these are likely different only by way of their level of complexity. We simply substitute a word like "think" when the reactions to stimuli are far too complex and numerous for us to track fully. But ultimately said "thinking" is made up to many, many cells following those same stimulus/reaction patterns.

> not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired

What if it is wired to think?

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