Information Is Physics

Nor created.

https://www.amazon.com/When-Computers-Human-David-Grier/dp/0...

I know that others will hold to the idea that they are and could be, but to me that renders us as zombies, and that isn't satisfactory in the sense that while a zombie that acts like a real person would be evolutionary fit, I see no reason why the zombie should believe it has free will, or could, and yet I do.

Well ... yes, yes they did.

Pretty fascinating, if light, overview of what's involved in neutron detection. A case of understanding theoretical models (causal knowledge), materials, purity and processing, conversion processes (neutrino interaction -> light -> photodetector), statistics, and ultimately, a view of what was happenning inside the solar core eight minutes ago, events which won't manifest on the solar surface for another 100,000 years.

In the quoted example, "direct evidence" from that paper was not necessary to confirm that the other calculations and models match. The achievement presented in that paper was to measure the specific neutrino flux, but there were many other measurements before that matched the developed models and weren't less convincing.

It's always good to read more than only journalist's interpretation. Here's from the paper itself:

Eve before "solar neutrinos from secondary processes have been observed, proving the nuclear origin of the Sun’s energy and contributing to the discovery of neutrino oscillations."

Only "those from proton–proton fusion have hitherto eluded direct detection."

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13702

The paper itself stated that the reactions in the Sun were already proved.

But even then, there are questions. Are math and logic made of physical stuff? What about causality or laws of nature? And what of universals or possible worlds or counterfactuals? If those exist, are they physical?

And then there's consciousness, and the ideas we have about the world, of which the study of physics is but one domain (containing concepts of energy, mass, fields, laws, information). Are these ideas physical?

What about the debate over the proper interpretation of quantum mechanics? Is that physical or philosophical? Is philosophy physics?

You quickly run into problems when you say that everything is domain X, because then you have to justify lumping everything into that category.

And the idea that everything is physics is open for debate, so clearly not everyone agrees that it is true by definition. Most things in philosophy don't get a free pass by virtue of definition, because people aren't going to usually agree to go along with said definition. Instead, they will want to ask what it means for everything to be physical.

And even if we don't have the correct algorithms in sight today, there is every reason to believe that whatever processes are occurring in our brains and bodies, can indeed be simulated and replicated virtually.

The only way to argue against this idea is to claim that there is some special magical non-material aspect to our existence... which no article or neuroscience education has yet demonstrated.

The article, however, is rubbish. As psychologist, I cringed throughout. It is a blurr of half-baked ideas and ill-understood controversies from cognitive science. The author manages to write an entire article about information at its core without ever properly defining information, not to speak of representation. In the sense of Shannon, or course neurons are channels transmitting information. What else would they do?

And of course we can decode that information even from the outside, even down to discrete processing stages during the execution of mental tasks (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejn.13817). And if there are truely no representations in the brain, as the author states, how do we plan for future events that are far beyond the horizon? And even if you reject all that, there is DNA in the brain that is literally information and expressed (decoded and made into protein) ALL THE TIME.

Regarding cognition, the good Mr. Epstein has not grasped the difference between computers and computability. I don't think anybody is looking for silicon in the brain. The smart people are asking how it is possible for a complex system to operate in a complex world without an outside unit directing their behavior. They ask "How how can the human mind occur in the physical universe" (http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/?post_type=publications&p=14305)? How is it that we can do the things we do? How do we set goals, plan steps to achieve them, and choose the right actions for implementation?

I get where you are coming from and I agree with you regarding a dangerous misunderstanding of AI, especially ML. But this article is not helping putting things in perspective. I am willing, however, to concede one point to Mr. Epstein: His brain is dearly lacking information, representation, algorithms, or any such marker usually signifying intelligent life.

Jaron Lanier argues that computers and computation are cultural. Why give them a special ontological status? Yeah, we can think of the universe as computational or informational. We can also think of it as mathematical, mental or just whatever physics posits (fields, strings, higher dimensions, etc). Whatever the case, when someone like the article in the OP states that reality is X, then an ontological claim is being made. Its metaphysics.

One could instead argue that the world just is itself, and anything we say about it is our human model or best approximation. Which would be a combination of realism (the world itself) and idealism (how we make sense of it). Then it's just a matter of not mistaking the map for the territory. Instead of saying that the brain or the universe is X, we say that X is our best current map for Y. We don't say that London is a map. That would be making a category error.

Less load/process/store of absolute data and more like natural processes such as the process of erosion creating rivers. The analogy of the environment as a "lock" and organisms are just the most fit "keys" to success in particular environment.

So the computer analogy is bad because organisms are more a matrix of interactions, feedbacks and responses that work well enough, but dont follow a "logical" design. This can be replicated within a computer easily and the result is evolutionary computation & hardware, genetic algorithms and evolutionary neural networks. The problem in understanding the result of evolutionary systems is that they're blind to design and only respond to fitness and therefore create systems that are so tightly coupled it's a quest to understand how the model even works.

So the article is suggesting we shouldn't apply human design principles to evolved solutions. Perhaps we need some kind of "messy science" to make sense of it all.

Going forward, machine learning running evolutionary algorithms on neural networks should be able to produce sufficiently incomprehensibility for us to be studying our own inventions for years to come.