This podcast will be a shocking experience for anyone who still holds reductionist views on life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8iFtaltX-s
Michael Levin's channel: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+levin+a...
His blog: https://thoughtforms.life/
> a shocking experience for anyone who still holds reductionist views on life.
As far as I understood he doesn't state that life cannot be explained by physics. But that it might be more productive to choose a more high level view.
Makes sense. If a set of physical laws allows life at all, life will maintain its own set of rules (related to reproduction, goal-directed behavior and so on) regardless of low level "implementation details" that are dependent on particulars of the physical laws.
Please read this essay and make your own conclusions. (He rejects physicalism in no uncertain terms). https://thoughtforms.life/platonic-space-where-cognitive-and...
The reasoning in the essay seems a bit iffy.
He goes from:
>patterns that are useful and guide events in the physical world but are not themselves explained, set, or modifiable by the laws of physics. This includes things like facts about prime numbers...
which if fair enough. Prime numbers exist and you find them by doing calculations but he goes on to:
>...this position is unpopular with philosophers of mind because it is fundamentally a dualist theory (by emphasizing causes that are not to be found in physical events)
which seems iffy. As mentioned we find primes by calculation which can be done by physical events.
I think human reasoning tends to get in a bit of a muddle with this because the idea of "non-physical space of truths which we discover" is not an especially good mental model for stuff we could in principle calculate.
That said I figure stuff we could calculates exists even if we haven't done the calculations yet because someone else could have done so, and stuff that could be calculated includes simulations of other worlds.
I don't think that there's a contradiction. "Ingress of platonic forms" is observationally indistinguishable from a selection effect: "Universes that don't admit realization of certain platonic forms are unobservable because they have no observers."
For example, a static zero-dimensional universe. There's no pi, no Chaitin's constant, no nothing. Or, in other words, there's no processes or objects in there that we can describe as "ingress of platonic forms" (and no observers to notice that).
I do like his ideas (and I wrote similar things about platonic forms elsewhere), but it's not a solid refutation of physicalism. It's an attractive framework, but as almost everything in philosophy it can easily be challenged.
A physicalist can say "Physical processes that follow a certain equation trivially have properties corresponding to the properties of the equation. So what? I can measure physical process and I can think about the equation (thinking is a physical process too), but why should I postulate independent existence of a/the platonic form of the equation?"
The fact that my subjective experiences undeniably exist makes me reject physicalism, but I can't prove their existence to anyone else and I can't use their existence as a solid basis for some philosophical view. After all it's just one bit of information. Or zero bits? I wouldn't have noticed my own absence.
But the equation is a platonic form! Otherwise, you will be introducing a third concept, which is unnecessary b/c it has no advantage over the traditional notion of "platonic form".
> It's an attractive framework, but as almost everything in philosophy it can easily be challenged.
Michael is aware of it. He insists that every speculation has to be experimentally tested. But no experiment of this kind will constitute a "proof" - someone can always "challenge" it. This is no different from a physical theory: every interpretation of QM is challenged by someone. :-)
Interpretations of QM are philosophy. That's why there's no consensus regarding them, unlike the underlying equations.
The ontological status of the equations is still unclear. BTW, if you can provide a link to your own essay, I would be interested :-)
Why assume that someone has written their own essay on such a topic?
After this commemt chain it comes across as both dismissive and arrogant.
Why did I assume someone has written an essay? Because he said so! Quoting:
> I do like his ideas (and I wrote similar things about platonic forms elsewhere)
What is dismissive about my interest to his write-up? (I'm sure it was a misunderstanding on your part, you don't need to apologize :-))
Reminds me of Neal Stephenson's Anathem with the higher plane of truth. Neat! I mean, I figured Neal Stephenson got his ideas from somewhere.
"The Matter with Things" by Iain McGilchrist has the same effect. Highly recommend it.
By any chance, have you watched the videos from the recent conference? https://ctr4process.org/conference/metaphysics-and-the-matte...
No, but I will. Thanks.
(link isn’t loading for me on mobile, will try again later)
This project seems a bit funny to me. Cell level simulation is the current bottleneck of the project, why would we not start at the cellular level, and then move up to multicellular organisms? Of course this ultimately leads to the question, can we truly simulate anything if we can’t simulate at the quantum level?(at scale) It would be quite profound to find out that we can fully simulate complex life while abstracting the lower levels, if that were the case, maybe we don’t need them either! Good riddance to all those quantum conundrums (;
I think the assumption is some abstractions aren't leaky.
The abstractions are fictional. The system wasn’t “designed” with separation. We just pretend they are there for tractability.
Certainly this isn't true at every level of granularity unless you're making some Penrosian claim about QM affecting say, one's decision tree? Which is a valid though quite disputed claim, say more about that if you believe it though.
Why not?
“~= 0” just means we likely will be unable to measure any effect. Not that there literally is no effect.
Us being unable to do science on something means we cannot scientifically state that it does not exist. Not that we can categorically state that it does not exist.
It's good that they are still trying. It would be really nice to know how biological neurons really work. That it's so hard, even with the connectome available indicates something important.
I used to think Open Worm was going to be a big deal. Top-down AI seemed to be stuck during the AI Winter. But machine learning got unstuck and Open Worm is still stuck.
When last time I hear about the neuron simulation project, they can not get new budget.
> His goal is nothing less than a digital twin of the real worm, accurate down to the molecule.
I am nitpicking this: The state of computational chemistry is not at a level to support this. I'm optimistic we'll get there eventually; need to find novel approaches, and current ones are too imprecise, or too slow.
I think the connectome aspect is more interesting, as it may be feasible to get there 100% without a computational chem breakthrough.
What's the latest and the best so far? Are they using GPGPU? Is quantum computing there yet, or would it help? Heuristics and sampling?
GPGPU is definitely mainstream for large scale quantum and molecular simulation. Quantum computing might help speed up electronic structure calculations, but my impression is that it’s still in its infancy
To give a sense of the scale of this problem, the largest frontier simulations I’m aware of are around the trillion atom scale. (On tens of thousands of GPUs [0])
Based on a quick web search, a c elegans cell is between 3 microns and 30 microns in diameter, so if we assume we can count atoms using the density of water then an all-atom simulation of a single neuron would need between 5e11 to 5e14 atoms. c. Elegans has 302 neurons so simulating the full neural network will be 2-5 orders of magnitude larger than current frontier simulations. Honestly more doable than I thought it would be, though all-atom simulation of a full organism still seems quite out of reach
This is all with classical force fields. Doing this simulation at the electronic structure level is much much harder with our current modeling capabilities
0: https://www.mrs.org/meetings-events/annual-meetings/archive/...
There's also interesting custom-made machines for molecular simulations that don't rely on GPGPUs and are significantly faster, e.g.: - https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07898 - https://www.psc.edu/resources/anton/
is there any reasoning that for besides highly reductionistic and repetitive systems like crystals, quantum computing can compute quantum properties of molecules?
it seems to me "the quantum computer you seek" is the molecule + the medium (especially the medium) itself
So first I think I might need to apologize for some jargon collision - my background is mostly material simulation, and when I say “quantum simulation” I mostly mean using classical algorithms to solve the quantum mechanical wave equation describing a material or molecule.
I don’t pretend to have any particularly deep insight into quantum algorithms for chemistry, but [0] is a really nice review. It seems like there are a lot of possibilities for simulating general molecular and materials systems on quantum computers. The holy grail would be solving the exact quantum mechanical wave equation in sub-exponential time and space complexity. I don’t know how feasible that is, but it seems like people are making progress using quantum algorithms to accelerate approximate quantum simulation [1].
Back to all-atom c. elegans: I think quantum computing is more about accurate and scalable electronic structure modeling, and simulating enormous systems like this will still require fitting classical (meaning electrons are implicit) force fields and running them at scale for the foreseeable future. A lot of this is space complexity - I’m not sure how a quantum computer could do atomic simulations with sublinear scaling of qubits in the number of atoms being simulated, and were in the very early days of scaling quantum computers up
thanks for the reference.
yes. you nailed my point-that you will have to fit classical or quasi-classical fields, which is liable to require scads of qbits just to get close. qbits are just not "designed" to do that sort of thing.
in any case we ~solved protein folding heuristically and not using fields so i shouldn't be too pessimistic that it's impossible that quantum compute will help eventually.
And I don't think we will get there with digital computers either.
So, with what?
If we get there, and it's not guaranteed that we do, it will be a different kind of machine.
Due to its technical content, some may be unaware that the author of TFA, Claire L. Evans, is a bona fide rock star: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claire_L._Evans with a grammy nomination and everything: https://www.grammy.com/artists/claire-l-evans/280302 . There are not many out there recognized for both music and science writing.. :-)
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I’m going to read her book “Broad band” on women that made the internet.
You're welcome.
If you are interested in more background on biological brains, c.elegans is really just "the very first breakthrough" (in the phraseology of Max Bennett's A Brief History Of Intelligence -- a recent, worthwhile popular science book).
Neat book, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_Band
For a copy near you, https://search.worldcat.org/title/1077130914
1hr long lecture by Claire Evans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLQKp8mHHJ0
>There are not many out there recognized for both music and science writing.. :-)
Yea, she's gonna give it to you baby! She's gonna go far, kid [1]
It's pretty crazy just how computationally intense biological simulations are. The timesteps are just so tiny and the number of nodes involved is insane...
I think it's because we learn biology with a textbook cartoon illustration of the cell with sparse organelles floating in a clear sea of cytoplasm. The packed reality looks more like the halftime bathroom line at the Rose Bowl. Tons of heterogenous proteins and metabolites and mRNA and everything seemingly diffusing to its destination, shouldering past everything else. The sheer combinatorial complexity of the number of neighbors each molecule is imparting force on, combined with the constantly shifting conformational changes of many proteins which change the forces they receive, it's overwhelming. Recall that only recently AlphaFold was able to decently solve protein structures in isolation - add in dozens of shifting neighbors and that's suddenly a dynamic problem.
I am not sure where whole-cell simulation is at the moment since I've been away from the field for about 15 years, but I recall a rather difficult multi-month simulation that was trying to model an "empty" volume of cytoplasm away from the organelles, about 1/50th of total cell volume, and with all proteins and metabolites replaced by hard spheres of varying "stickiness". It was considered a huge success to just get a few of the diffusion rates for various compounds in the right order of magnitude. I mean, if you really want to get the fleeting interactions right you need to be modeling individual water molecules. I know there have been large advances in computing in the intervening years, but this was on I think #20 in the TOP500 at the time. Unlike AlphaGo I don't see any immediate avenue for AI to help with this because unlike protein crystal structures there is no wealth of quality training data for cellular dynamics at the molecular level.
It’s not simply diffusion complexity. A lot of cellular transport is dependent on directed transport via the cytoskeleton and myosin. For example a 1m long neutron would need years to move proteins from one end to the other if it just relied on diffusion.
Great point on the chaos! I'm planning to pursue atomic simulation in college, so I've tried to read as much as I can about the field short of the advanced math (hence college, lol). It seems to me that cross cluster synchronization is a massive scaling issue, since you essentially have global state both reduced and broadcasted every couple timesteps.
I've been thinking it would be cool to design chips to be realtime safe—that way there's no need to synctronize—and have further away information delayed (just like relativity) to deal with speed of light communication issues.
Never heard of fleeting interactions, would you mind to elaborate?
"Fleeting" in this context is just a synonym for "short lived" or "momentary".
the heterogeneity and packedness scratches the surface of the oversimplified complexity. particles are moving (usually with 6 degrees of freedom -- though biology can cheat this) randomly. lets say a protein docks with another protein... the number of unproductive collisions per docking is on the order of millions.
Yeah, I found this when I was Boinc protein folding for Covid. The work units ran for hours, my towercPC nearly melted, and then I found that this produced mere milliseconds of simulation!
Now consider that the Planck time is actually 1e-44 secs.
Hardly any actual physical simulations simulate every possible moment in time. We just calculate consequences of current events and put them in the queue to happen sometime in the future. And there's evidence that the real world works in a similar way.
Bonds jiggle and wiggle with characteristic times in femtoseconds, and most people believe it's not necessary to simulate at higher frequencies than that.
Yes, I agree with that. My point was just that stimulating a rudimentary model of reality is hard work, but reality is way more complex than even that.
> nearly melted
I’ll be that guy, but a computationally complex problem won’t push your computer to a temperature beyond design limits.
It’s just a turn of the phrase.
When someone says that the sky is falling, that also doesn’t need to be explained
You're welcome to come to my attic office in summer, as they ambient temperature reaches 200F m a sunny day and my obsolete-but-powerful tower PC consumes 350W power and adds to the tropical heat :)
> a computationally complex problem won’t push your computer to a temperature beyond design limits.
Allegedly. It allegedly won't do that.
Practically, running your CPU at design limits for a very long period of time tends to cause the temperature of the rest of the chassis to want to equalize to that temperature, which can be above comfort limits.
Except this isn't computational biology, it's fluid dynamics with an agent inside running a neural network.
You'd think they'd try something like smooth particle hydrodynamics so that it can be done more efficiently on a GPU cluster but I think they are just doing classic CFD
My (religious, spiritual, please-don’t-downvote-because-of-hate) opinion is the aspect of free will which extends even to the lowest creatures means computers will never simulate them accurately
No hate from me! You can believe what you like but I do disagree I'm afraid.
I think any rule-following (ie ~computational) system is either below, or at the same level of dynamic complexity as all others.
I also think that it's truly impossible to draw a sharp line between alive and not-alive, so the idea of 'free will' would have to extend all the way down to the smallest things like atoms/quarks/space etc.
Is it really meaningful to suggest that it could be anything like 'free will' at that size? Sure some quantum stuff seems indeterminate but could be fed by something that looks random to us - it might not actually be (dunno!?), but the idea that things at a larger scale could be meaningfully controlled by feeding-in different values (that still somehow have to look perfectly random!) seems extremely far-fetched to me.
Larger things like a molecule, a transistor or a human! generally stay as coherent and predictable/controllable (or self-controlling) things, even in the face of indeterminate-ness at the smallest scales underneath. I just can't see how there's any utility in connecting the idea of free-will/consciousness to this indeterminacy.. it's like saying free will is just fuzziness, and how does that really help in understanding life, the universe and everything?
isn't free will, more about inner control, in opposition to external control?
What a great, thought-provoking question! Thanks mromanuk!
I started reading the Wikipedia page about free-will to try to work out where I stand on this. I think I quite like the classical way of thinking about free will as simply: Being free from coercion in one's decision-making! I guess the source of such limits could be either internal or external or both though! So I don't know whether that helps much in answering your question.
The Wikipedia page says about 'compatibilism' (which holds that free will and determinism are compatible) that it is "the absence of various impediments" and that "a coerced agent's choices can still be free if such coercion coincides with the agent's personal intentions and desires", so that still doesn't really help answer the question.
I accept quantum-mechanics enough to be slightly skeptical of strict-determinism, so I guess maybe I fall more into the 'metaphysical libertarianism' point of view, but I still feel like the non-determinism that QM introduces probably acts more like a limit to how 'free' free-will can possibly be, rather than being a kind of 'secret sauce' that makes it possible for us or some external factor to be able to meddle with what reality (or ourselves) get up to in a meaningful way.
I also think that the internal/external distinction breaks down when examined very closely. For me this leads to the idea that I am actually the same thing (same 'wavefront' or whatnot?) as what caused the existence of the universe that I am a part of. I am both myself and the environment at the same time, but with a limited ability to sense very far into the external universe and its workings, beyond input from senses like sight/hearing/etc (I guess realms of pure-thought should also be included too though! Do we 'sense' reason/philosophy/mathematics/algorithms when we think about them?).
I think one answer (or the avoidance of a clear answer) to your question is that people have been arguing about this for thousands of years, and we (as a collective/species) are still really not very close to being firmly decided about it at all!
Interesting. This kind of dont-understand-therefore-fill-in-the-gaps-with-magic is the same mental shortcut that would lead you to believe that cryptocurrency is a good thing.
Well of course Shakespeare got it wrong with ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’. At least, that's seems to be the acceptably prevalent view.
That was Hamlet, wanting to believe in ghosts, so that his dead dad could reveal that he'd been poisoned in the ear, for the purpose of the plot. So yeah, in the original context it was some paranormal investigator or Scooby Doo level of crap. But subsequently people have picked it up and made it deep and meaningful due to having been wrote by The Bard. Even so, what do we want it to mean? That just about anything could maybe be discovered one day, therefore we can imagine arbitrary things right now and say they're real? Doesn't follow.
My primary reason I like cryptocurrency is it takes money out of the hands of government, which is run by people and is therefore fallible
Every component of cryptocurrencies, every crypto exchange etc is created and run by fallible people as well.
And as could be seen with the FTX debacle the outcome was basically the same but without helpful government regulations.
I trust the source code and decentralized network of miners doing 1 thing - securing the network with predictable emissions policy - over the central bank and politicians
There are many things that we don't consider to have free will that is very hard to simulate accurately. Like the weather, and generally any chaotic system. We can't even simulate interactions between small molecules accurately.
I don't consider free will to be a scientific concept. It is philosophical, or religious. But if we give free will to things we can't simulate accurately, maybe planets like the Earth have free will. It is a common religious belief, and if you believe that simple life forms have free will, not too far fetched. The Earth, with its atmosphere, magnetism and geology is a really complex system we have a hard time understanding.
Life is already an analog computer running on hardware (the universe). You could be correct that if life is using the hardware to the fullest extent, simulating it again would you a horrendous double virtualization penalty.
We could already be living under that same double virt penalty.
I think we have an outsized focus on free will, partly because free will is a trick played on us by evolution. It takes an exorbitant amount of effort to exercise anything close to what most people would consider free will and the phase lag is measured in hours if not years.
Nature being continuous is exactly the reason why our universe is not a simulation.
Can't continuousness be simulated by lazy evaluation? Also you're assuming the simulator is bound by the same physical limitations that exist inside the simulation which seems unreasonable to me. Simulations are usually vastly simpler than the substrate they run on.
Has this been actually proven? I remember multiple experiments trying to prove the opposite - both effectively a discrete-like and a grid-like universe. Wolfram for example has some ideas about discrete graphs https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
> Has this been actually proven?
Neither proven nor disproven in any capacity.
Also I have no clue how anyone could assert that the universe being "continuous" (whatever that means) could be casually claimed by anyone to have any link to our universe being "a simulation" (whatever that means) or not.
>Simulations are usually vastly simpler than the substrate they run on.
So to simulate continuum you need a transfinite VM. It will be more efficient to just run the universe bare metal.
Quantum mechanics teaches us nature isn't continuous though.
The energy levels of electrons bound to atoms/molecules are quantized, and therefore the energy levels of photons emitted/absorbed (when those electrons change energy levels) are quantized.
But as far as I understand that is just the result of constraints imposed by the atom/molecule "box". Like how a guitar string can only vibrate at certain frequencies because an integer multiple of wavelengths of the standing wave must fit on the string.
Outside of such systems, energy levels are not quantized. For example, photons from distant galaxies appear to be redshifted on a continuous spectrum.
And even within the box the energy levels can be varied continuously if, for example, you squeeze the molecule or put it in an electric field.
Does that mean you believe there is something beyond the physical realm that gives free will? Otherwise, it seems to me like another physical process should be able to simulate a creature.
There is still the general fact that plenty of processes are 'chaotic' making them impossible to accurately simulate (because errors in the initial state compound exponentially). But it seems to me like a good enough simulation of a chaotic system is phenemologically indistinguishable from the real thing.
My (similarly religious) opinion is that because we _can_ simulate biological systems, computers can and will have free will too. Human brain is just a physical object that has some particular structure. We have free will (yes, I believe in free will). Then, we are not special, there can be other systems with free will, and we can build them.
If consciousness can be recreated by a computer, then a billion people holding flags up and down could recreate a computer, and consciousness could exist within the flags people are holding. But I do not believe in this form of consciousness and I don’t see a computer simulation as the same.
> computers can and will have free will too
What is free will if it's simply causation? i.e., environmental inputs leading to differences in charge, altering other differences in charge, leading to outputs, leading to environmental outputs, leading to changed environmental inputs, etc. If the chain can be examined and is entirely deterministic, be it neuronal or silicon circuits, where's the escape hatch?
Another thought experiment: if there's something that is you, that decides, and presented two different realities where the environment, brain, etc. were precisely the same, what would cause there to be a difference in decision? If it's deterministic, how is that free will? If it's random, how is that free will?
Physics is famously non-deterministic. Quantum physics is built on irreducible randomness, it is incompatible with determinism (except for evolutions of probability quasidistributions). And we don't even need to try to find "quantum interactions" in human brain — every physical system is quantum, for every photon that touches retina. There's enough indeterminism to hide entire universes.
Free will is the interplay between determinism and randomness, an emergent phenomenon with multiple self-recursive feedback loops and path dependence. Even if we could trace it through all these loops and find all the mixtures of quantum randomness and classical deterministic patterns it emerges from, it wouldn't make it any less magical.
Appreciate the thoughtful comment. Yes, under the hood indeed "every physical system is quantum", yet at the macro level physical systems are more or less predictable, including the brain. The brain's immensely complex structure and extensive interactivity make understanding how it works largely a mystery. The relatively simplistic models we're able to create have so far illuminate only a small part of its functionality.
The idea of free will has been a subject of eternal debate. I suspect this reflects lack of consistent definition. I would posit that free will isn't absolute but necessarily constrained by the nature of individual exercising its will. The stochastic attributes of a system or entity mean its actions are to an extent unpredictable, providing an "opening" for willful behavior.
Humans imagine they have free will because they're aware of their decisions or actions while unaware of the range of factors contributing to a decision or action. Intuitive (vs. analytical) cognition is the operational default. By definition intuition is a computation occurring outside of the person's awareness.[0] Consequently, it augments the impression of exercising unfettered free will.
Perhaps it's most accurate to say we have will or volition but not free of constraints imposed by our biology and physical/social environments. While the randomness inherent in biological systems allows volition to evolve, it also limits what an organism can will itself to do.
[0] Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making 2017, Volume 11, Number 1, March 2017, pp. 5–22
> Perhaps it's most accurate to say we have will or volition but not free of constraints imposed by our biology and physical/social environments.
You might be talking about compatiblism.
> Humans imagine they have free will because they're aware of their decisions or actions while unaware of the range of factors contributing to a decision or action.
Or more likely there’s no evolutionary fitness benefit to being able to understand this, and perhaps it’s even detrimental if it leads to nihilistic or egocentric impulses.
I’ll repeat the question you might have missed
> If it’s random how is it free will?
Stochastic processes won’t get you to free will any more than determinism.
Aren't we just saying that matter is complex enough to form an input to a model of the world and self which results in a really complex feedback loop where organisms which adjusted actions to increasingly complex projected model state had more descendants?
The self is just the only part of the model directly wired to our neurons and self awareness is just correct labeling.
In that context will is certainly a function of a how much a things internal model of self encoding the idea that its actions are moreso based on its own model than the tgings its model is built with and ability to make this distinction right or wrong and free will is basically meaningless.
Its certainly not a magical out for determinism all the qualities that we imbue with such meaning are as based on the same principals as anything else.
I’m curious if you think plants, single-cell algae, or single-cell animals like amoebas will be simulatable?
But simulate-able how? Not like they would exist in reality, interacting with the rest of the universe
Why not? Most simulations (flight sims, etc) include external stimulus.
And my magical belief is there is no free will so that means you’re wrong, right?
Both are silly statements that can’t add anything.
I sympathize with your point of view, but they stated opinion based on faith, which is wholly (holy?) different from stating truth
IMHO "free will" is about motivation, the drive to survive which is inherent to all life. And I don't think we have as much free will as we might think we do - if you've ever seriously starved, you'd maybe understand "free will" a little bit more, and how you aren't really free from your mortal coil at all. Motivation is all a computer is really lacking to have free will. Computers are good at following instructions, but they aren't good at surviving yet since we can just cut their power. God forbid someone like Elon Musk teaches a computer to have real motivation and not just follow instructions. I do think "a computer" in the far distant future could simulate every atomic interaction sufficiently to simulate a living organism, but we are nowhere near that yet. A virtual organism of this type would still be a blank slate and need to learn what free will is to really have any beyond satisfying whatever need it has to survive. Do newborn babies have free will, or are they operating on the instinct coded into their DNA? I subscribe to the latter, because science is my religion.
Musk is an idiot who hires people a lot smarter than him. Every company he has he bought and succeeds only to the extent that he leaves it alone.
No downvotes from me, but where do you think the free will lives? What mechanism produces it? What about that mechanism, if not purely stochastic, is not predictable? If free will can have a real measurable physical effect on this universe, then why can't it be isolated?
I believe our consciousness is separate from our physical body. This metaphysical line of thinking is embodied by “idealism” which is opposed to “physicalism” or materialism. I am also not a determinist and I don’t believe you can replay the universe from first principles and get the exact same timeline.
I’m also religious and I believe in God (and the Holy Trinity) in the core of my being.
In some kind of quantum space probably.
We still don't know so much, yet we claim so much.
Even quantum space can be described by both deterministic and stochastic elements. The stochastic elements of quantum uncertainty are about as much free will as a PRNG – though even more predictable as they don't have a flat statistical distribution. And there are also known exploitable and predictable mechanisms behind quantum mechanics (emphasis added), so much so, that they can be leveraged for computation.
I think when most people say free will they mean dualism, in that there's some sentience in the spiritual plane that directs their bodies in the physical plane. But if this spiritual plane has no observable effect on the physical plane, it's completely incompatible with free will. And if it is observable, then it is indeed a measurable part of physical reality, but yet we haven't measured it - not even stochastic effects (which can still be observed statistically).
Sabine Hossenfelder has a much better informed take on this, and it's worth a watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI5FMj5D9zU
Also of interest, a study where fMRI readings were used to predict a persons decisions well in advance of them executing the decision. The success rate was only 60%, but still better than chance, and this study was way back in 2008:
> fMRI machine learning of brain activity (multivariate pattern analysis) has been used to predict the user choice of a button (left/right) up to 7 seconds before their reported will of having done so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Neur...
Yes, for example we make wild claims like 'biological sentience is incomputable'
a random number generator in base reality? ;) really i'm just using this as a more accessible (to rational materialists) example of how processes can exist outside of our measurable physical reality.
> processes can exist outside of our measurable physical reality
If it can't be measured in reality, how can it be relevant to reality?
> a random number generator in base reality?
How does randomness pertain to free will?
they may have measurable effects in our physical reality, eg. the behavior of the individual and even be correlated with other physical processes.
however, there may be hidden variables outside of our physical reality that are actually mechanizing the result. some such processes may be non-deterministic, which is why i used randomness as an example.
what i'm implying is analogous but opposite to the concept of a philosophical zombie. there may be a ghost in the machine which no measurement can reveal.
P-zombies, conceptually, actually have no ghost in the machine, but are indistinguishable from sentient beings. Sentience and free will are two different things.
> they may have measurable effects in our physical reality
If there’s something external that interfaces with the physical universe, such an externality could be observed. It’s strange that we haven’t found such a force. But if it were to exist, in some parallel universe, that external force would have its own mechanics and its own chain of causality – its own physics so to speak. Dualism doesn’t get you to free will, it just means there’s physics we can’t observe. (Or perhaps there’s some superset universe that interfaces with that universe, and then it’s still determinism or stochastic processes all the way down.)
One interesting fact about C. elegans is that the way the grow from 1 cell to adult (~1000 cells) is almost completely reproducible between different worms.
I.e. the pattern of cell division and the positions and identities of the cells is very fixed, with known timing etc.
Compare this to mammalian development, where even at the early stages, development becomes less rigid and operates by "course correction", rather than by following strict sequences.
(I studied the early development of C. elegans for my PhD)
Interesting article, but no reference to "DEVS"? Prediction of the worms behaviour is a key scene[1] in the opening episode.
Let's see: C elegans -- the worm no computer scientist can crack S. cerevisiae -- the yeast no computer scientist can crack E. coli -- the bacterium no computer scientist can crack HIV -- the virus no computer scientist can crack
Has a computer scientist cracked any complex system that was not engineered?
I have a law to describe human's and our technology: if it can be done, it is bieng done if it cant't be done yet, a bunch of people are trying now,if it's impossible, and multiply proven so, some people are trying anyway, and all of it in complete disregard for any concievable utility or benifit but I cant help but wonder, if and when , someone playing with worm neurons, or myclium networks will get a hello world, and post instructions on how to get it to run doom, which presumably would involve some sort of transaction, involving energy nutritional, and reproductive advantages.
> But there’s a difference between schematics and an operating manual. “We know the wiring; we don’t know the dynamics,” Cohen said.
They have the architecture, but can't read the weights and biases as it were? I was under the impression that they somehow mapped the activations, but if not then they're really just flying blind.
I was reading the article and it disappeared entirely. Is there website functional? Is this intentional?
What do you mean by "disappeared"? Did the page just go white/black or something?
I didn't experience that while reading the article (waterfox browser), and can't recall that ever happening on Wired, and I somewhat frequently read wired articles (few times a week, not a registered/paying member).
I tried it in chromium (no extensions) and if you scroll there is a fullpage ad where the article seems to "disappear" but it's essentially an ad fold, and if you keep scrolling the rest of the article is there. Otherwise not sure what you mean? What browser you using?
OpenWorm is dead afaik. Larson took some of the code and started his own company Metacell. It's not that we can't crack it, it's simply that nobody really dedicated enough time and resources to do it.
Which is the more advanced life form? C. Elegans or LLM? I vote LLM.
I would please advise you to study biology ... The amount of cool shit that goes on at a microscopic level will amaze you
Well, by definition we are simulation LLMs just fine, but per the article we are utterly failing on Elagans, so it seems the smart money is on the latter.
Doesn’t mean it’s more complex though.
It just means the complexity is harder to capture and copy.
LLMs are built via algorithm. Given enough data and a large enough neural network the complexity of an LLM is boundless. I guess my question is are existing LLMs more complex?
LLM research has a much bigger budget than C. Elegans research.
That says more about the industrializaton of scientific research than anything.
LLMs is the new hype product of tech companies. Wait a couple years and the interest will die out.
Maybe we’ll live the day when true neuroscience (none of that Andrew Huberman stuff) will be trending.
More complex and more advanced are not the same thing. Evolution produces a lot of twisty little passages that are only that way because it happened to work.
c. elegans can reproduce autonomously, can source its own energy inputs, etc.
also, last i checked, an llm doesn't meet the definition of life form.
C. Elegant can suffer from depression, exhibiting some behaviours similar to humans with depression.