If it’s fractally wrong, you should be able to summarize the wrongness with one simple equation that captures and reproduces the wrongness at each level
Yes. Even to this reductionist, “neural activity” is insufficient to describe to consciousness in the same way that “it’s physics” is insufficient to describe how a car works.
I could put a bunch of metal and rubber and gasoline in a pile and light it on fire — all the necessary ingredients for a car — but it wouldn’t create a working automobile. The arrangement of the objects and processes matters.
In the same way, if you put a bunch of brain cells together in a Petri dish, but their connections or firings were disordered, I wouldn’t expect consciousness. “Neural activity” is thus insufficient on its own, but this I doesn’t mean reductionism is incorrect. It just means you didn’t correctly reduce the problem to the correct constituent parts. You left some out.
Reductionism is a theoretical framework. It is neither right nor wrong, Sometimes a theory based on reductionism is wrong, but reductionism it self is never wrong.
Reductionism usually includes interactions of the lower parts (unless you are an atomist; in which case go back to ancient Greece), I never denied this. However even with the interactions, reductionism is still a lacking framework to describe consciousness. If it wasn’t so lacking it would be more popular among the people who actually study the mind.
It seems just obvious that it's at least a sampling problem. Assuming an average protein length of 400 amino acids and 20 possible amino acids, that's about 10^520 different possibilities for sequences, which is a mind-bogglingly large number.
We haven't even begun to explore the biological universe.
Sure - though because of the functional overlap of amino acids already discussed the functional/structural space could be a lot smaller ( though still massive ) - ie is choosing D or E at a particular position "different" in most situations?
And if you take it up a level of abstraction and say there are 4 ( ish ) basic types of secondary structure ( helix, turn, sheet, disordered ). Then you could argue the structural space is even smaller still.
Or put it another way if you can have sequences with 30% identity or lower with the same fold - that's a awful lot of different unique combinations that collapse into a single structural space.
And on the flip side - what we don't know is what percentage of sequence space don't actually result in a functional fold - ie results in instability and multiple stable or unstable conformations.
So it could be we are close to all the possible folds ( where fold is a single stable form - obviously there are quite a lot of disordered states - but I'm not including those in a 'fold' even if evolution uses unstructured states as well) already.
> If you're shipping consistently and high quality nobody is going to care if you're occasionally reading through a book chapter or watching a lecture online.
I don't think it's necessarily correct to think of sleep in terms of "it is necessary for animals or they will die". It might be more useful to think of it as "it was so useful that animals who slept outcompeted all the animals who didn't".
Meaning: it might just provide a big advantage.
I don't want to overextend and assume that any advantage extends to LLMs. That rest-and-recuperate advantage might also extend to LLM-based AIs. Or maybe not, and the rest-and-recuperate is mainly useful for biology-based organisms. But there is some logic to it.
> The function of sleep in animals is largely obscure.
In my understanding, it's well-understood that sleep is used to consolidate and store long-term memories (amongst other functions, like cell and muscle repair). They've found this memory-consolidation-during-sleep even in relatively simple animals like bees.
Sleep-like states exist in animals with nervous systems with a complexity above that found in flatworms, even snails sleep. Sleep therefore appears to be an essential characteristic of more complex biological nervous systems, i.e. biological computers, should you care to stretch the analogy. The more complex the nervous system, the greater the requirement for sleep.
What is described in the OP is therefore not a specific characteristic of sleep. It may however be a "useful" rhetorical device.
I do however object to the extensive use of such rhetorical tricks in the conversations that surround LLMs. For example, why does a consumer-grade LLM display "thinking" while it is actually sending data from my computer to some datacentre, processing it, and sending the result back? Equally, why does it output human-emotive phrases such as "sorry" when such computation is revealed to be incorrect?
Such rhetorical tricks, and more, likely underlie to a large degree the popularity of LLMs, despite their actual performance being clearly below what the rhetoric implies.
> I don't think it's necessarily correct to think of sleep in terms of "it is necessary for animals or they will die". It might be more useful to think of it as "it was so useful that animals who slept outcompeted all the animals who didn't".
You're talking about different things: biological necessity and evolutionary benefit.
You can find out about the former by preventing an animal from sleeping (but otherwise provide all other needed things), and seeing if it will eventually die.
> You can find out about the former by preventing an animal from sleeping (but otherwise provide all other needed things), and seeing if it will eventually die.
That is actually almost impossible to do. The rat study was as close as we’ve ever come, and it’s still debated whether the rats died due to lack of sleep or some other mechanism, since the autopsy couldn’t confirm a cause of death. (It could have been due to the way the experiment ran, for example, not the lack of sleep.)
If I remember correctly, fatal insomnia shares most symptoms with other prion diseases (in which there might be no lack of sleep involved), so it's probably the brain damage that causes death, not insomnia itself.
Much of Europe is close to the ocean, high in latitude, or mountainous, and climates there are more temperate. You don’t need AC there; AC is a luxury.
Southeast or central US has considerably higher wet bulb temperatures than Europe does in summer. Without HVAC, there’s a good chunk of the year where it’s too hot to get much done.
Aye, but it’s also possible for people to find their own purpose and meaning. Some find it in religion, some in art, some in love or nature.
It will be a transition, for sure - there would no longer be meaning in “winning the game” in a capitalistic or scientific sense. Anything you want to produce or learn, the AI could already produce or has already learned. Now you have to do it just for the love of the process.
I have a musician friend who likes to say that good artists overwhelmingly make art for their own benefit. Not to advance the world or blow people’s minds, but because something inside of them needs to come out, and art is how they express it. And that part of us isn’t going to go away.
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