randomImmigrant

Because “Europe” hasn’t been one thing for any length of time.

And what even does “become so dominant” mean? You do know evolution isn’t some straight accumulative equation, right? Dominance means all things done are good?

Dominance over what time scale? Sustainable over what timescale?

The sad fact is, for any society, short term dominance causes long term instability. That multiplies a lot when you spend hundreds of years accumulating land and control and wealth. It’s sure sweet while the going lasts. Then what happens when there’s pushback?

We can’t fully answer that question yet. We’re living through that post colonial era of Europe.

My hope is Europe thrives. I doubt it will if it goes back to its old extractive practices. Thankfully, most governments in Europe seem to have moved past that mentality.

What about the simple fact that biology is a dynamic substrate running actively and always on, whereas silicon is passive substrate that can be indefinitely off and can never self start? Sure you can imagine nanotechnology that has similar flexibility, but when you do, you’ll find that carbon is particularly better than silicon when it comes to possible configurations.

It’s not a reach to argue consciousness is a property of the dynamic substrate since clamping specific dynamics does in fact seem to ablate consciousness. Most famously with death.

On the flip side, a hibernating organism, while having very slow dynamics, has shown to still be aware of certain seasonal signals, and thus is able to self start its next conscious period.

None of this is mystical or magical. Nothing but the physics of active matter. Which current silicon is completely not.

Relax. I don’t think the OP means there’s some genetic flaw in Europeans that makes them ecologically imbalanced by nature.

They’re saying that a lot of indigenous culture and practice was more sustainable. This may be for various reasons, and isn’t true only of American indigenous people but almost certainly people in Japan, India, Australia, etc., where urban civilization that depended on large scale agriculture didn’t take hold.

This is, if you see it, only evidence that there’s no inevitable path for progress and development for our species. We have the ability to look back, see how different parts of the world handled their engagement with their environment, when and where that degraded, and make changes, proving that none of this is inherent to any part of our species, but rather cultural and social structures that emerged for a bundle of reasons.

Yes... when these things are done, we can talk. Which is why I said "I believe machines could be made that think". They can be. We just haven't done it yet.

This is neuroscience. I don't give a damn about Christianity. And nothing here says humans are special. Only that biology broadly is different than computing.

Made some updates to my post but glad you brought up simulation: today when we simulate the brain, at whatever resolution, we do so in digital systems that have the Von Neumann bottleneck. Processing and memory are separated. In humans and all of biology, these things overlap instead. And that’s where simulations ultimately fail. They are out of step with real time in a way biology is not, because biology is attuned to the environment, and down to the molecular level, is actually enacting a physical process distributed across many cells that track the periodicities in various external signals, then anticipate them.

I believe machines could be made that think. But not purely digital ones. The brain most certainly isn’t a thinking machine precisely because it doesn’t have the luxury of unlimited time. Its design is not based on executing best algorithms, but rather finding good enough solutions among many time constrained but interlinked signal cascades.

The brain and body instead construct time, a cohesive internal one,from the ground up, with nesting oscillators driving the sequence of all functions and behaviors, over long and short time closes.

What we call “thinking” is a filtered layer of it, a slice that the attention spotlight is focussed on, and in humans this process can be turned to cognition over multilayered abstractions, and using language or other symbolic communications to communicate some of the dynamics of this process, and even evoke them in others.

Turing machines, and modern digital computers with their Von Neumann bottleneck, and LLMs are outside of time. They do not experience time. They can check the clock. They can count steps. But they are not active and agentic in time. Till we change that we won’t make machines that “think”. We can certainly make machines that simulate thinking, and that’s often good enough. But make the problem a real time one, with several conflicting verbal streams to parse and respond to serially and LLMs on their own fail catastrophically.

I think so long as the memory-processing divide remains, the simulation has to break apart processes for thinking in a way that’s alright for some cases, but not for others. And this is why we have the jaggedness of LLM intelligence I believe. They do not have internal timekeeping like almost all biological agents do.

You mean apart from all the biological evidence? I explained some of that in another thread in this topic.

It's very obvious actually, because it isn't just nerves in the brain. There's an equal number of glial cells, which form a continuous network, or syncitium. Their activity is in the form of calcium waves, which are both responsive to and shape neuronal oscillations.

What biologists find frustrating is folks looking at one kind of dancer in the field and ignoring the rest of the spectacle, and calling it done.

Yep. They also don't experience time. They can count compute steps. They can look at the wall clock and tell you the time. But give them a task at 11:59 PM, and if they get it done by 12 AM, they won't know just a minute has passed.

Now, humans can count time fairly accurately if they focus, but we often lose focus. However, we have an internal subjective time that tracks the solar day excellently, and this LLMs lack entirely.

Timeless, disembodied abstractions. Impressive ones, but they are far from actual experience and thus limited.

It's pretty meaningful actually. Because biological neurons don't sit alone. There's a third player in every synapse: the astrocyte. And astrocytes form a large syncitium, a collection of cells that are "open" to each other through gap junctions. This syncitium has gotten more extensive over evolution, and human astrocytes (which are larger and more complex) when transplanted in mice, make the mice smarter at maze tasks etc.

So every neural network is actually entertained in an astrocytic syncitium. Every synapse is being "listened to" and modulated by it's astrocytic end foot (which forms the third arm of what we now call the tripartite synapse).

If neurons are about breaking down signals, the astrocytes are the slow, steady integrators that (potentially) can serve as the global workspace that scientists have been theorizing but not yet found.

So there actually is a problem with modern neural networks, in so far as comparisons with human brains go: they're missing the design spec for literally half of it.

Which is fine. Connectionist models come from a time when the height of neuroscience said neurons were the bees knees and glia were just support staff. Today, astrocytes, and other glia, are forcefully back in the conversation. And they don't seem to do anything like neural networks.

Of course it's meaningful! It would be highly meaningful if submarines could actually swim. And we are building submersible bots that swim, they just tend to be small and made of biological matter.

The problem with calling what AI does "reasoning" is both that there may be alternate paths to artificial reasoning we may be closing off by declaring victory, and the simple fact that you shouldn't call a thing something else, to avoid confusion.

Whatever AI is doing needs to be studied. Why muddy that study by pretending AI is your thinking buddy?

Preach. The way out is to find truly basic problems that you’re attacking at a fundamental level.

That rarely gets funded. And even more rarely handed off to grad students. In a sense the failure of a bunch of grad students is priced in to the way science is done.

Which makes it so perverse their lives and careers depend on success as newcomers.

Or… you could go outside?

But the analysis rests on 0 ventilation, which doesn’t work at all.

I think the main thing to keep in mind is plants really aren’t industrial carbon sinks. They were never evolved to be. Their biological functions are about growing and thriving, and the soil they grow in are net carbon producers.

In a broad open system, they are net carbon sinks over the long term. But any analysis in a closed system is bound to fail, you don’t even need numbers to know intuitively this won’t work.

Crack open a window. Run a fan. Have plants because they have many benefits. Reducing CO2 around you meaningfully isn’t one of them.

No the argument isn’t wrong. It isn’t proof of a particular civilization, but it’s not wrong about the detection threshold for such things.

You can’t compare fossilization, which is very dependent on certain properties of biological tissue, and extrapolate from that to all matter.

Top line difference is speed. The impact of speed is deeper and gets felt over time.

Traditional research publications are no angels. They gatekeep research, and also allow financial incentives to drive them to publish junk with their stamp on it.

But a flood of papers doesn’t actually mean more knowledge. In bypassing this route entirely, AI has swiftly lost the ability to engage with itself as a field. And the cost of that is only beginning to be felt.

What the blogificafion of AI research has done is allowed all kinds of claims and terminology related to AI to be introduced and taken up in a manner replicating social media dynamics. And that is simply not healthy. We’re fast reaching a place where any claim can be backed up with a set of numbers from a number of experiments run in some gamified environment or the other, with little concern for if it all adds up to anything. It’s a vicious loop, because this same junk then goes in to train the next models which help spit out the next set of models AND blogs/papers. The net effect is not dissimilar to setting termites loose in a library.

That’s not the Silurian hypothesis the astrophysicists put out. That’s the author extending it to fit those myths.

Actually correct. We have very very few fossils compared to the millions of species that have evolved and gone extinct over 4 billion years.

The fossils we do have are of highly successful species in that geography. It’s a matter of chance, leaving behind a fossil, after all.

And unlike biological matter that can fossilize, industrial structures etc do not. All our manufactured stuff has very short life once it reaches the crust and starts getting compacted.

The more time you add, the better the odds we’d find this evidence lost.

And if this wasn’t a global, but more localized pre-human civilization, the evidence would be thinner still.

Which is why this isn’t a scientific hypothesis really. It’s more showing you the limits of scientific inquiry into the deep history of Earth.

No. The idea is they could have lived and thrived for a few thousand years a few million years ago, then gone extinct.

What the research shows and what Stephenson is alluding to also points to the way the design of digital technology has flattened human-computer interaction by prioritizing speed.

It is not impossible to design digital products that achieve the same balance of fountain pen on paper. But having used the iPad for journaling with a good toothed screen protector, I think we are still far from it. Even with the barrel rolling and pressure sensitivity, an actual pen just writers so much more expressively.

Yes, the nomenclature in math is atrocious. It isn’t much better in physics or biology however. As a species, we suck at naming and classification, and keep starting new trends atop old ones. There is certainly need for the many abstractions of math to be as complex and well specified as they are. There’s no reason for their nomenclature to be so bad. The end result is a substantial portion of the population, which can certainly hold and manipulate abstractions, fails to even contend with pure math. I do think visualization tools will help in the future, to demystify some of this. But as with all sciences, the need for personal glory/mentor deification often conflicts with broader explainability.

Why is it hard to argue lifespan has been a major factor?

You speak of “prerequisite brain structures to support recursive grammars”… would they arise in short lived species, given we know these are complex brain regions that take time to develop, need experience to become fully useful, and are energetically expensive to maintain and run? How do you do that if you live a relatively short time?

On the flip side, precisely in longer lived species like whales and elephants, your statements begin to fail. Elephants (when left in the wild) do accumulate knowledge of huge stretches of a continent and pass on that knowledge horizontally and also down to their progeny.

Whales and dolphins also show initial signs of such linguistic competence.

What these species don’t have is our opposable thumbs, etc. Things that aren’t directly responsible for language and would have evolved without it (as opposable thumbs have in other species), that nevertheless added to what language can do.

That should give you a sense of how language in humans is only as complex as the humans and their society is.

As for writing, I’m really not clear that it’s better than leaving smell traces, when it comes to information density, and speed of sharing. Where it does better is in surviving across generations, and that is indeed an advantage, that our language can go through a short lived medium (sound) AND a longer lived medium which doesn’t tax our memories as much.

Note that writing is a much later invention though, than language. And very tied to our opposable thumbs which can make fine marks and do so repeatably enough that we could associate repeated sounds with repeatable symbols and generate this writing based transmission system. Take that away and we’d remain an oral culture. We’d have do what Sanskrit users did before they found stable ways to write, and create ways to improve memorization. That too has survived generations. Just takes a lot more of each person learning, compared to writing.

But scale of knowledge acquisition is mediated by, at minimum, lifespan, and what knowledge there is to verbalize and pass on, no? It’s not like we got the language then built our hands based on the knowledge shared by another person with hands.

Instead, these co-evolved. Our language is shaped by that, and we shouldn’t give it too much causal power when it’s only a slice of the system.

We are also very unclear on what birds can communicate. They’re social migratory species with 4 color vision and magnetoreception. Their sensory context is deeper and richer in some ways, and whatever communication they layer atop it will be shaped by that. What seems like squeaks and chirps can hold information that another bird, but not humans, can decode. We’re getting better at layering all this context and then interpreting bird song and sounds.

But we’re at the beginning of this exercise, not a place where we can make a firm conclusion.

Simple. Energetics. Gaseous exchange has many energetic benefits that you give up if you have a mostly inert atmosphere.

If all your reactive chemistry comes from water/minerals, you’re also a heck of a lot more tethered, as both these cycle slower than the atmosphere.

A dynamic atmosphere is a huge component of the energetic efficiency of life on earth. And while it’s totally plausible other chemistries can match this, what’s implausible is for no chemistry to match it.

And when it comes to complex life on earth, it literally didn’t happen till oxygen percentages got sufficiently high in the atmosphere, a two billion year long process set off by Cyanobacteria. You can’t get big bodies if you can’t get this kind of energy.

We really don’t know this for certain at all. We do know crows can communicate information about the face of a person they dislike to their murder, including to new generations. It seems a bit of a stretch to say their cultural transmission is quite that narrow.

In general, pre-writing human oral culture seems to have dynamics much in common with such abilities in other animals. Barring error correction mechanisms, oral knowledge can degrade in transmission, limiting its reach and success.

This isn’t to say human language doesn’t have its distinctive features that are very useful. But the language came from a different brain, and is suited to the particularity of our brains. We should hesitate to place solely on language something that’s also driven by us having more things to say.

Are we conveniently assuming that only humans will be able to read and tweak their genomes, and do synthetic biology?

An odd assumption if we’re generously granting FTL or even regular space travel to aliens.

Everything from the lack of radio communication to the commonness of biological precursors like nucleic acids and amino acids in space points to multicellularity being the relatively rare thing, at least in our part of the galaxy.

We don’t hear from them or see them because if they’re out there, they’re still microbes eating each other. That one case of the two forming a symbiotic relationship, which leads to more endosymbiosis… that’s where I suspect our real rareness lies.

Note: terrestrial chemistry is no different from chemistry that can occur anywhere, given the right molecules and conditions, and even then it’s a matter of degree.

Nitrogen being replaced by helium would actually be fine but for the niggling issue that we need nitrates. There are no heliates (?) to compensate. The name doesn’t even make sense… helium is the sole gas to have an ium end like metals- chemically it’s that meaningless what you call it as an ion…it shines elsewhere though.

For biology, it’s a necessary condition that the environment react with it and it reacts to the environment. Over time the two become deeply intertwined through the process of evolution.

It’s hard to see how that kind of evolution will occur if a lot of the environment is nonreactive.

Survival may be plausible though. There’s been some research showing some bacteria can survive in high helium environments. That’s a far cry from proving something like a bacterium can evolve in a helium environment that’s non-reactive though.