3,252 karma · joined August 17, 2011
They'd be created with big red warning signs, installed into browsers and other places by anyone who wants to test, and then publicly revoked every month. Rinse, repeat.
It's a godsend for those looking to do what they want with old hardware. You can now pretend to be the authoritative domain for updates.
Roughly, my question is "Don't we see other post-collision galaxies that still have dark matter, and if so, why?"
If we have two identical scenarios with different outcomes under a theory, that doesn't bode well for the theory.
This kind of presumes dark matter has been definitively proven already, though.
From the outside, CDM may be a better theory than MOND, but it doesn't seem settled to me. I haven't heard anyone describe it as a "Law" yet.
Couldn't someone equally characterize the creation of dark matter as "adding and tweaking mass until you fit the data"?
It seems that having some galaxies without dark matter is also pretty bad for CDM. Why would CDM be absent in those cases? Without an explanation, isn't it bad for CDM (as well as MOND)?
Nobody wants a theory where exceptions can be hand-waved away as "Oh, that galaxy must not have DM" or "That galaxy has too much/too little/different balance/etc".
What's next, tobacco company bemoans anti-smoking ad restrictions?
Based on the timing, I'm deeply surprised it came out 2 years after the NES was released in the US, but I suspect it was way cheaper, and bought by some number of clueless parents.
E.g., a high-level auditory neuron might primarily fire in response to high-pitched voices, but if you hear someone say your name in a high-pitched voice at a party, you can bias that neuron to try more selectively fire in response to just their voice, "tuning out" similarly-pitched voices.
"It is very difficult to disagree with anyone of the caliber such as this man".
Nobody suggested you argue with Hickey to his face.
How attention affects biological neurons has little in common with the ML mechanism of attention.
Salience explains the "why", but I'm talking about the "how".
> Part of the reason was not knowing about generalized pose neurons
I have to ask, did they not look up how the human visual system works? The primary visual cortex has any number of early neurons that are spatially-tuned for various shapes and edges, and this is pretty basic knowledge.
In fairness, neural networks are more divergent from biology than a lot of people think, but it seems there's still low-hanging fruit to be grabbed with a minimal collaboration.
So instead of being a useful, if imperfect, analogy from an outside domain, trying to use ML attention to understand biological attention just results in confusion (like this article).
Neuroscientists aren't going to tell ML researchers they can't use "attention", but nor are they going to pay attention to them (pun intended). Neural networks are almost always too divergent from biology to shed light on real neurons.
As a former perceptual neuroscientist, I can assure you that ML "attention" has very little to do with biological attention.
"Spreading activation" would be a better analogy.
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It's mostly harmless, though it occasionally results in head-scratchers from the biological POV. I once saw a ML paper talking about "retinal attention", which is funny, because the retina is one of the few places in the central nervous system where afawk, attention is impossible.
There's simply no efferent (brain->retina) non-motor nerves capable of biasing photoreceptor output; the retina is largely ballistic. (Eyeball motion is not attention.)
When you place someone on a pedestal, you make it hard to evaluate them critically. The remaining Clojure community has a problem with it.
Most of human brain activity is unconscious, yes, but p-zombies don't quite fit us imo, since they have NO conscious awareness by definition. I really feel it's meant to be a more present/absent distinction.
They're a good fit for Watts's aliens, though.
There's a lot more going on at synaptic clefts, so just knowing the number of synapses doesn't tell you enough to model anything. You still need to know which neurotransmitters are used, how much, second-order effects like G proteins, basal firing rates, distance to the axon hillock, the shape of the neuron's effect on potential decay, etc.
And that's all to predict whether one neuron will fire. You could get very different behavior between different two neuronal pairs having the same synaptic count.
"Magnetism is second nature to us electromagnetic chemists, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for one or two paramagnetic substances."
"And diamagnetic, of course."
"Of course."
Whereas "vampires" immediately call to mind Vlad, Dracula, Twilight, etc. and an entire literary tradition of the last century, which Blindsight has little to do with. There's the riffing on crucifixes with the right-angle seizures, but that's more cutesy than serious.
It's not the worst decision on Watts' part, but I think you're in the minority in liking it.
SKAT had some great headquarters, I'll say.
That reminds me of a Philip K Dick short story along those lines, The Golden Man. It's about a good-looking mutant who has no verbal abilities, but can see all possible outcomes up to a point in the future. He breaks free of containment, uses his ability to seduce women (also to escape), and in the end, the govt officials tasked with capturing him lament that he might be the end of the human race, if he has children with his ability.
It's not about consciousness, but the story definitely supposes that evolution can jettison intelligence if a better ability came along.
I guess that would fit with Watts's idea of humans being a local maxima. IIRC, wasn't the vampires' dominance ended by the invention of architecture, given they had some sort of right-angle-based susceptibility to seizures?
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the book, even if there's parts I disagree with. I just think it fell short of being hard SF grounded in what we know already.
As I'm demonstrating, the Chinese Room argument is still relevant regardless of Searle's original intent, because its underlying logic also applies to neurons and neural networks.
I restated it in modern neuronal terms because the exact same pieces/gestalt argument applies to biology.
Nobody still discusses the Chinese Room because they're interested in 80's symbolic AI. This is why I said the "original formulation is awkward to modern ears".
It's more of a literary criticism, I think.
I get the vampire is meant to be part of the diversity of human nature in the crew.
The problem for a lot of readers is it's distracting while not adding anything substantial.
It's more like Watts got some glee out of updating vampire mythology in the future, rather than deeply serving the plot. The vampire could have easily been replaced with a genetically-engineered super-smart psychopath, and nothing important would have changed.
The original formulation is awkward to modern ears, but the heart of the problem remains: How does/can consciousness emerge from smaller unconscious parts?
A single neuron can be modeled with a physics simulation, and is clearly not conscious. But at what size/configuration does a group of neurons become conscious?
"No computer scientist that I know of takes the Chinese Room argument seriously" Well, you now know one who spent years of his life studying consciousness.
Also, why would you even assume a priori that computer scientists have any worthwhile insights on the topic of consciousness? It's a completely different field. (I swear, the denigration of non-CS expertise on HN is maddening, as is the idea that every programmer is secretly a Renaissance polymath.)
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What's funny is I read Blindsight in grad school, and also dislike it, but for very different reasons. A much better criticism is Watts's idea that human consciousness is useless or detrimental, because the aliens don't have it and don't need it.
First, the idea that consciousness confers no advantages is odd. The very word "blindsight" refers to doing a task without conscious awareness, but I can tell you from the zillion studies done on GY, blindsight task performance is nowhere near as good as sighted performance. Given Watts named his book after that, you'd think he might have known more about it.
Second, the book rests on the assumption that consciousness is cheap enough that its metabolic costs are irrelevant.
I don't recall if Watts states this explicitly, but I think the idea was that humans were the local maxima on earth due to other, non-consciousness advantages, and that most life in the galaxy didn't use it.
The problem is the brain is an incredibly expensive organ to maintain, consuming a huge fraction of our energy budget to maintain homeostasis. Forget the galaxy, if consciousness had no benefits (or was actively detrimental), then a sapiens variant without it on earth might easily out-compete the conscious variant and spread.