Also relevant given the post is also about fusion.
At this conference for progress nerds, with big arguments between solar and fission nuclear "no one wanted to defend fusion".
> Fusion promises cheap clean limitless power if only we can solve difficult technological hurdles. But we already know how to produce cheap clean limitless power. The only delay is regulatory, and fusion doesn’t solve this.
...
> the only pro-fusion sentiment I saw at the conference was a series of graphs comparing “fission” and “fusion” and showing strong performance advantages for
”fusion” in all categories. But it turned out the pro-solar faction had mischievously labeled solar as “fusion” since it ultimately comes from the sun’s solar core. It was a good trick - think of solar as a new high-tech wonder, instead of as the annoying thing environmentalists keep nagging us about, and it really does look like a miracle.
To detect a presence, a real brain takes in sensory input and compares it to expectations, and stays calm or registers surprise, and from time to time issues predictions to guide the organism.
To detect an absence, the brain cannot rely on sensory input, by definition. To be surprised if sensory evidence is _not_ there requires a model of the world strong enough to register surprise if the expectation is not there, without a sensory prompt.
It seems to me detecting an absence is a strictly higher-order neurological task than processing sensory input.
If LLMs can't do this strictly higher-order neurological task, is that not a capability currently unique to living things?
Thinking is still currently unique to living things, so you don't need to resort to what you describe to find the human brain uniquness.
Onto what you describe, it has to do with memory. Memory is storing and playing back sensory input, in the absence of that sensory input. So your brain plays back some past sensory input and checks it against current sensory input.
Eg you left the pen on the table. When you come back the pen isn't there. Your brain compares the stored memory of seeing the pen on the table vs what you see now.
LLMs might not be very consistent overall in their learned architecture. Some paths may lead to memorized info, some paths may lead to advanced pattern matching.
I know less-than-zero about the subject but I’d imagine the temporal aspect alone is a problem. Aren’t these agents reasoning from a fixed/ frozen version of “reality” rather than adjusting in real-time??
I once read a small book for an anthropology class, and got more and more puzzled, and rather incensed. It was covering its subject well but with this bizarre hodgepodge of different anthropological framings, some of them quite anachronistic, some current, jumping around with jarring inconsistency.
I got to the end (it was a small book, only maybe 110pp) wondering what in the heck this thing was, and flipped to look at the author at the back. And it was a missionary! Instantly my attitude flipped; I was in awe that a missionary could do such good anthropology, and the inconsistencies in framing made perfect sense.
This author has good psychological insights, but her theoretical framings are somewhat mis-specified, inconsistent, sometimes out-of-date by psychological standards, to my eye. But it's very good stuff.
artist : psychologist :: missionary : anthropologist
"Missiology is the academic study of the Christian mission history and methodology". Earlier, Missiology used to be called as "Practical Anthropology". Even today, the best materials for learning phonetics and linguistics practically come from Christians, because of their drive to proselytize everyone on this earth, with various languages, etc. "Summer Institute of Linguistics" is one such.
Ok, so, try dividing time into a view of it repeating, and progressing.
Time "repeats" in that we have days, years; your heart repeatedly beats about once a second; menstruation is about a month.
Time "progresses" more literally in that nothing repeats, "repeating" seems like an abstraction. Tuesday, Nov 12, 2024 only happens once; Tuesday happens every week; Nov 12 happens every year.
It's not very workable to keep in mind the literal physical view that every day, every second is unique. Interferes with using experience.
Here's [0] a nice video on Schrodinger's equation, where it's written nicely
H psi = ih d/dt psi
H is doing a lot of work. psi is the mysterious wave function. h explains what it's talking about by giving the units.
The i on the right side, in this writing, is associated with the time partial derivative d/dt. i, the imaginary number, is associated with rotations, which means in a way this writing of Schrodinger's Equation is implying rotational time, repeating time.
Suppose time really is legit repeating even way down deep. Then try reinterpreting your negative feedback loops as repeating time.
To extend speculatively, invoke the notion of fractals, where you can iterate and find more complexity thereby.
So suppose that life repeats time, but in the manner of a fractal where you uncover more structure by iterating.
It's been a while since I took any classes about it, but I don't think i implies "repeating time." I'm pretty sure it's just from the fact that waves themselves are repeating, i.e. periodic. But Schrodinger's equation doesn't say anything about the nature of time itself IIRC.
Yeah, yes, Schrodinger meant no such thing. But suppose for a moment that a wave, in going up and down repeatedly, is manifesting time itself repeating. Like time legit has an aspect where it's a repeating thing.
To reconcile that with the common experience of time progressing, it could be a sort of statistical matter of time not repeating exactly, where the accumulation of little differences produces the experience of passing time out of quantum-level mostly repeating time.
Here's another answer to the Fermi Paradox, that while life is normal and abundant, there are lots of random possibilities for destruction such as a primordial black hole coming by.
The apparent rarity of intelligent life might be a statistical matter of there being lots of opportunities for such life to arise, but also lots of hazards of random destruction.
... on reflection, while this might be intellectually satisfying, it's not particularly nice to contemplate.
Oh, is that why Tolkien had Frodo throw the Ring in the Fire on March 25? And then King Elessar made that day the first day of the New Year. And the tradition held on until the 18th century. Huh.
I'd really like to know if menstrual synchronization is real, because there's a straightforward explanation: temporal herding. In the ancestral environment, it drew predators, so under the normal dynamics of prey and predators it pays to herd together. Herding in space is easy to see; herding in time, as of oak trees tending to produce acorns in the same year, is also easy to note after awhile. So if our ancestors evolved to all menstruate at the same time as a defense against predation, it seems perfectly straightforward. But all I hear is anecdotes that are promptly attacked, so, is this a real physical phenomenon?
https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1lojll9/if_its_th...