randomImmigrant

And biological machine is? Don’t get me wrong. Biology I is full of molecules that we call machines. But you’re making a broader claim, saying that biology is only this.

This needs you to answer some questions:

1. Why do the machine parts in biology show such flexible application? A gear cog won’t ever moonlight as a signaling chip, but in biology you often have molecules doing double and triple duty.

2. How is the biological machine able to build itself? What does self assembly imply for the machines function?

3. Where does this machine get its inner drive? No LLM has been found that starts outputting text unprompted. A car doesn’t decide to move to a shady parking spot. Why? Where in the machine to biological machine continuum does the ability to make internally driven decisions come in? Why does it come in for biology? A bacterium is able to make such agentic decisions unprompted. Why is no manufactured machine able to do this?

LLMs produce language. And you're right, if we restricted claims to that, no one would object. It might even be scientifically accurate, shock of shocks.

If you claim LLMs produce thought, it's equivalent to claiming light bulbs undergo fission. Pure wish fulfillment. Language is not the extent of thought, and calling a language producing machine necessarily a thinking machine is an old old mistake.

Odd. Why don't the details of how consciousness arises in one system inform your judgment of whether it can exist in a different system that only has partial structural overlap? Seems wildly convenient. Where else in science can you show me such a comparable situation in how you define properties?

Please define "simply biological machines". I'm not sure "biological machine" had a proper definition. What's machine like about biology exactly?

How much is the process of a human child in grade school working through a 3-digit x 3-digit multiplication problem (123 * 456) like a GRPO model with thinking tokens doing the same?

Very little, if you bother to give the biology of the child at least a cursory glance.

Let’s take a short peek:

1. Assuming this is normal grade school, and inflicts math upon children earlier in the day, this is somewhere between 7 and 10/11 am, let’s say? At this point, depending on the age, gender, and maturity of the child, every neuron in their brain involved in math is likely off their midday peak in cognitive function.

If we move the class to later, a different subset of students will be at the peak.

As far as I am aware, GRPO models do not have such internal temporal rhythms driving their behavior that will shape their performance.

2. How well a given child performs will depend on how hungry they are. But not deterministically. If you trivially think each child is like a computer, you may think the rich kid who had a breakfast buffet before coming to school will do better than the half-starved child of a janitor, but that child might mind the lesson with greater intensity. Or not. It’s not something you can pre-calculate with any certainty.

While chip to chip variability is certainly known, I’m yet to hear of a chip deciding to do math better and faster than its fellow chips to prove a point. Or to do significantly worse because it’s distracted by the bird on the window sill.

What you are noticing is that there are limited ways to solve a 3x3 digit multiplication. Humans, having standardized the process, have now found a way to record it and plug it into correctly translated signal so the same accurate result can be had without using our own minds in the moment.

But where I’d not remotely be shocked if a kid from an uncontacted tribe figured out 3 digit multiplication to keep track of his stone collection, I’d be highly shocked if an H100 that was dumped in the trash by accident somehow figured out anything at all. In fact, if it manage to move any of its electrons around on its own, it would be a certified miracle.

And then we could talk about there being real similarity even though the specific atomic composition is different.*

Yes we can say it has conscious experience. The content and depth of it, we cannot yet fully grok, and of course, what it feels like from inside the ant is something we never will know.

Well this requires you to buy the very bullshit argument that comparisons of two physically distinct systems just because they share outputs is meaningful.

If I call a lightbulb an artificial star, the onus is on me to show the behavior under the hood is star like, not just to point at the light and say “you must see it’s a a star since it’s emitting light!”.

Because the real thinking still cost the other human the same-ish energy it costs you to put words together, and because after all, the source is a human and not a machine, no, this is very different.

Being mislead may be the shared outcome. But why is different category of source of the mistake and the cost to producer of making the mistake not relevant in this discussion?

Where else in science do you brush aside all differences this way?

We do have entry and exit conditions. We can disrupt it and study the dynamics of the disruption. We have a good sense of the many mechanisms at play that undergird it.

What we lack is a full map of the exact process from sensation to consciousness across all modalities. And I’m afraid when it comes to interception, we can’t unless we observe every one of the 36 trillion or so cells in a human body, as well as the 36 trillion or so symbiotic and commensal microbes, continuously, all the time.

But I keep finding it astonishing that the claim that we know nothing about consciousness gets bandied about. We know a lot. We don’t have a grand unified theory. The lot we know is definitely split across many levels of evidence and hard to follow, let alone arrange. But this isn’t a black box. It’s a grey box, meeting an even more transparent box that is the LLM, where we do know what the guts are made of, and can interfere at every step in the chain of steps that constitute their dynamics.

Comparing the two, we know there’s a level of similarity in that information gets broken down via a neural network. That similarity was sought.

Since then though, neuroscientists have gone and shown that: 1. The other half of the cells in the brain, the glia, are at least as important as the neurons in cognition and consciousness 2. That interoceptive feedback and feelings are critical drivers of conscious experience 3. Evolutionarily, we know all cells can “learn”, and well before there were neurons or glia or brains, every cell evolved an internal clock that allows it to entrain to external solar and (depending on the species) lunar rhythms. 4. In the last few decades we’ve seen how synaptic activity is shaped and driven both by astrocytes and the circadian clock.

All this is showing us that the abstraction from the 1950s that current neural networks are built on were incomplete.

Whatever these components to do give rise to consciousness in biology (and we’re a long way from done solving this), we certainly wouldn’t imagine with all these modules and mechanisms missing, just maxing on one type of information flow in the brain would give you consciousness.

I’d urge you to not keep insisting consciousness is a total mystery. It’s not, and even your AI model of choice will be able to point you to all the mechanistic evidence we have that whatever it is, it isn’t just neural nets.

We know quite a lot about consciousness. You may not, but we know enough to know the informational dynamics in a brain are vastly different from an LLMs.

Exactly what kind of certainty are you looking for? Happy to provide it at a molecular, cellular, tissue or whole brain level.

“ Usually, it goes the other way around: an LLM sceptic says "LLMs are dumb because they can't do X" and soon someone has to remind them that also most of the population can't, in fact, do X.”

And it should not go this way, is the OPs point.

For an analogy, imagine someone looked at a bunch of lightbulbs and expresses dissatisfaction that they aren’t really stars. If someone replies by saying “not all stars are equally bright”, do you think that fact should carry any weight in the argument?

“ This makes the output extremely like human thinking when solving a problem.”

This sounds a little like someone saying a lightbulbs output is extremely like the output of stellar fusion. In one sense, yes. Bulbs are in fact designed to take over when our nearest star is beyond the horizon.

But that really doesn’t mean you call the bulbs mini stars.

Yes, you should have. While I can understand that not all high school biology teachers will drag you by the nose and make you see the wonder of biology, and textbooks are often awful, I’m confused why this means the author couldn’t go read on their own (as they eventually did).

I could write a similar screed, as a biologist, that I should have loved computer science, but find it a zoo of names that somehow manage to make even less sense than biology.

Yet natural curiousity kept me interested enough in comouters, and the day to day need to interact with them meant I had to have some understanding of these systems.

What is sad is, as a society, we don’t think of biology as being similarly useful in our daily interactions with the environment and other people.

But I urge anyone who’s annoyed by the biology text book and the list of names: please put in effort to look below. Neither biology nor the brain is a complete black box, and what we have learned over the past few decades is thick with beautiful structure and organization.

But also accept that biology is different. You can’t compact all of it to a few equations because unlike physics and basic elemental chemistry, biochemistry is still finding new rules and new efficiencies.

The rules of biology will never neatly compact to the point where individual molecules and cells and their identities are meaningless. That is the price of complexity that is under constant evolutionary pressure.

But we don’t need to remember every name, thankfully. At some point, you learn to classify by composition and function sufficiently that a wholly new protein just slots in, updates your mental model, and you move on better informed.

Cool. Believe away. But even in that belief, this is a lower order simulation than life, no? Or are we now supposed to buy this fly connectome was made by our simulators using the same tech that runs us?

Yes. Because it’s a simulation of a living thing. It’s still electrons moving around silicon. It deserves the respect your MacBook does. Which is not nothing. But certainly not what’s due to a life.

This seems a fine tradeoff to me, depending on the context. There are datasets and operations on them where speed being sacrificed for privacy/security seems appropriate.

Ideally, give me a dial, to ask for encrypted intelligence when I need it. Kind of like a private chat, but with deeper privacy protections.

Where did I assign intent? The brain is good at tracking the physics and chemistry of the world not because it was designed to, but because being able to is an evolutionary advantage. I’m not clear why that needs intent. Good fortune through a random process doesn’t meant there was a teleological purpose to that random process.

I have tried making the case before that LLM "agency" is a complete hoax. Let me try it again. Would appreciate thoughts from folks at HN:

Biological neurons have one property that was unknown till the late 90s/2000s: each neuron (and in fact, each cell in your body) is an autonomous circadian clock, tracking the 24-h day. They can be entrained to external timing signals, are usually in synchrony, but can be desynchronized. This clock, it has been shown, schedules the production and localization of critical components in the synapse, and is plugged in downstream, in the nucleus, in responding to synaptic signals. Disrupting the clock disrupts learning. The existence of the clock is why learning peaks and troughs during the day.

Critically, clock function has been shown to be involved in both memory storage AND subsequent successful retrieval.

LLMs, famously cannot keep track of time, and I suspect this is why. Its easy enough to look at a clock, but without an internal rhythm, LLMs have no internal timing synchronizing their various behaviors, and their memory systems do not thread through this timing system, leading to their unstable memory, identity and performance.

It is good to see the real game being clarified, and openly admitted to.

Nothing about this technology makes it special. What’s allowing for such conversations is entirely traceable to unsupported claims made by the very companies now looking to cement their control by excluding themselves from all regulation.

A rival to global governmental power. That is the deranged, power hungry goal that is driving the shape of its technology.

>How long can a cell survive without liquid water?

Depends on the cell, but it’s not instant death. By definition, a cell is a membrane with some water inside it.

Sure, move that cell to totally dry conditions and most will die. But not all, by any means. Bacterial endospores last millenia without water. Tardigrades can do years.

This isn’t quite the gotcha you think it is.

The metal use for multiple catalytic steps is distinct. The paper isn’t wrong about that at all. Trying to prove the closed loop metabolism of modern life is secretly open loop isn’t going to work because it isn’t open like that. An organism can survive without constant contact with any of its components. Sometimes not for very long, but nothing alive today is as dependent on something external as these proto cells were on reduced metal.

I believe there’s a reasonable explanation for this effectiveness: mathematics is created by brains. Brains have evolved to track and entrain to various physical phenomena, and the internal dynamics of the brain resonate with the dynamics of the world around that is perceptible through sensory channels.

It hardly seems odd that the mathematics created by the physics and chemistry of the brain is very good at describing the physics and chemistry of the world the brain’s physics and chemistry is evolved to track. It would be unreasonable if human math were somehow complete useless at describing the world. That would indeed be a mystery.

Presence of metallic catalysts is just an environmental factor.

No, it isn’t quite that. For it to count as “environment” the organism must be able to survive for at least a time without it.

The issue here is, the metal wasn’t a nutrient. That would be fine and exactly like it is for all life now.

Instead the metal was the anchor. If an organism needed to grow on it to enable half its metabolism, it is at the least very distinct from current life.

The only issue with the “two origins” claim is both lineages, bacteria and archea, come from this, and even with an open metabolic chain, you already had the nucleic acid function etc all sorted out, and common between both kingdoms.

So it’s a stretch to say there were two origins to life, but not that this proto life is distinct from modern life. That we need things from our environment is not the same as what they found about proto life in the vents.

There could be deep subsurface microbes that are exposed to both pure metal and anoxic conditions that are similar, but note, it’s not “metal or protein” for catalysis. Many protein catalysts have metals incorporated.

What proto life did, it seems, was completely depend on metal surfaces to speed up some reactions. But that’s messy. The same metal can’t distinguish different components, so there would be competition for these surfaces, even within the same “cell”. That’s not ideal.

Enzymes are much more specific. You can actually sequester different reactions. And once you have life that’s learned to do that, it will out compete any proto life like matter that may access such environments.

Anaerobic microbes have enzymes also. So don’t think that reducing conditions mean no enzymes. It’s merely that in reduced conditions, you have metal that’s not oxidized available for early life -like goo to make use of. Over time, once this life learns to make newer and newer enzymes, the need to be metal dependent went away.

Somewhat separately, you also had some of this lineage learn to photosynthesize, and that lead to bulk oxygen in the atmosphere, and that was initially catastrophic, then highly beneficial because oxygen based chemistry is way more energetic than anaerobic chemistry.

It would be wrong to think of either condition as “better” though. They’re different. They force different tradeoffs. And both demand fine balance and dependence on the environment, eventually.

No it’s not that simple. We don’t fall dead the moment we don’t get vitamin D. We can stay alive long enough to get more.

That wouldn’t have been the case in these early beings, that were simply not capable of doing anything without these metals.

Hardly. There are nucleic and amino acids pretty much in every star system, we now know. But not during the big bang. Theres a lot of intermediate stages before stars are young enough to have the mix of chemicals to give rise to these precursor chemicals to life.

Its stages, but it’s a bit hard to say “early stage was a single origin, then we count each bifurcated radiation as a separate start point”. Why not call it convergent evolution, which it would be, over a very long time period?

The difference is more on survival. A closed loop metabolism is indeed a good boundary marker. Viruses would fail this. But many have “closed but for a few critical dependencies”, and the argument here is that when life depended on metals like this, it’s more critical dependencies than closed loop.

Somewhere in there is a transition. But it’s poorly defined, and so the argument can be there was a bifurcation of sorts.

The ingredients and building blocks aren’t there in the same way. Because life formed, those early ingredients are now transformed, as is the environment. This blocks new life of the type that formed 4 billion years ago from forming again.

Indeed, all species branch out from that one universal common ancestor that was the first free living successful cell.

Put another way: forming life isn’t easy at all. And once it forms it changes conditions to suit its continuation, not to allow new life to form.

No, because conditions have changed markedly. For metals to act as catalysts, and replace some metabolic enzymes, they need to be in highly reduced conditions. This was true in early Earth, but about 2.5 billion years ago, we had the great oxygenation event, and over the next billion years free oxygen has gone up enough that you won’t find the reduced conditions where metal can take over the job of metabolic enzymes in much of Earth anymore.

That is, what sustains today’s life prevents new proto-life for forming. You need to have the fancy gadgets life has today to continue to survive and replicate on Earth.

Note though, it was other life forms that contributed to the great oxygenation event, too. This is all a continuous web.

The metabolic science is really cool. The conclusion that life arose twice requires you to buy that proto-cells that grew on these vents and needed those metallic surfaces to survive didn’t count as “life”. Then, free living cells, bacteria and archea, could maybe be argued as having independent paths as they plugged the gaps in their metabolism independently. Same DNA/RNA, same proteins. Same broad rules of metabolism. Just some alternate paths through chemical space to plug in the metabolic gaps and get free from metal surfaces.

To me, these are clearly not independent paths, but rather the branching of proto-life into two of the great kingdoms of life. It’s a stretch to call this two origins rather than a branching.

Then a couple billion years later, one of em ate the other, and rather than destroy it, they both started a symbiotic relationship, and we were off to the eukaryotic race. This is all the same web of life. Not two independent streams.

> The Connection Machine CM-2 (1987) has a non von Neumann architecture and mixes memory and processing .. so that's been done, 40 years ago.

Are you claiming that it therefore thinks? It’s a foray into a different type of computing, and certainly one we need to explore more. But if you’re claiming it is actually thinking, can you point to the data that indicates that?

> Anticipating the future in real time remote sensing signal processing pipelines has been about for at least [redacted] decades.

Yes the humans anticipate. I’m not sure you’re getting what it means for the anticipation to be built ground up in biology. Every single cell is cycling in anticipation of the coming day, in advance of it. This is the basal dynamics of life. Before you get to “thinking” in the human verbal sense, you have pre-verbal awareness that’s cell deep in every human body, which consists of anticipatory cycling that is seen learning, cell division, metabolism, and so on.

What you lack in engineered systems (so far) is that kind of deep anticipatory architecture that goes down to the molecular scale.

Maybe we do get to build that. Like I said, I don’t but that we can’t build artificial minds and artificial life.

What I’m saying is we’re nowhere close to there.