HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

igiveup

54 karma · joined August 24, 2022

submissionscomments
igiveup··on Why do bees die when they sting you?
>simple algorithm

Reminds me of this article about the deceptive simplicity of evolution: http://pchiusano.github.io/2018-04-21/evolutionary-methods.h...

Not saying all of that is true. It seems to be pretty much philosohpy at this point. But maybe one day our methods scale up enough or evolve :-) in some other way and there will be a breaktrough in evolutionary AI, like there was in neural nets.

igiveup··on Is dark matter’s “nightmare scenario” true?
If the unmodified gravity and this new force always oocur together, why not just call them one force? What is it that makes them "distinct"?
igiveup··on Digital astronomy with cellular automata
Cool and everything, but not sure about the relation to Kolmogorov complexity.

1) Are there any assumptions about the compression algorithm that approximates KC? E.g., I can imagine a compression algorithm which stops as soon as it manages to compress data by a single byte, and I don't think that approximates KC.

2) Isn't the KC of all these cellular automata basically the same, and rather low? It's always just Life with different constants, right? (Sometimes a bit lower, when the constants allow for further compression.) Edit: I see the mistake now, the CA needs to include initial conditions

igiveup··on Free Will: Who’s in Control?
I find it hard to argue about these claims. Might be because of a complete lack of definitions in the article, and most articles that deal with free will.

> Every decision we make can be reduced back not to our agency as individuals, but instead simply to a set of neurons firing

Why not? I thought that pile of firing neurons IS an individual.

> in the brief moments before you become aware of what you will do next, your brain has already decided your next step

I'm pretty sure "me" and "my brain" are the same person. I am observing my own thoughts ("consciousness"). I guess it takes a while to close this feedback loop, but it's still "me" on both sides of it, right?

> Neuroscience has confirmed there is no physical place where the “self” exists in the brain.

I'm pretty sure the place is "inside my skull". Too large, or what? Would "inside left prefrontal lobe" be more acceptable, if that was the case? Or would the question just shift to "But where in the prefrontal lobe?"

← PreviousPage 2 of 2