I need someone smarter than me to parse this

[P3nT4gR4m]

On a side note, Nigel, I'd be interested in your take on this N=2i-1 thing that has flashed across my radar three or four times in the last week or so. Google seems ignorant, the sources are somewhere in the middle of the credibility scale but it seems really interesting and maybe not totally nonsensical. What are proper neuroscientists saying about it? Is it even a thing?

[Junkenstein]

Sano/Nigel, very interesting take. Awesome to see this being analyzed from two very different angles and hitting some similar points.

Sano, you're becoming on of my favorite posters. Keep it up. Seriously, you're pulling out some high quality shit lately. Kudos.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Thanks for the excellent critique!

My pleasure!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

On a side note, Nigel, I'd be interested in your take on this N=2i-1 thing that has flashed across my radar three or four times in the last week or so. Google seems ignorant, the sources are somewhere in the middle of the credibility scale but it seems really interesting and maybe not totally nonsensical. What are proper neuroscientists saying about it? Is it even a thing?

It's not ringing any bells for me at all. N=2i-1 is the degrees of freedom in many statistical analyses, but other than that I got nothing. Do you have a link or any context?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I'm completely struck by this paragraph. Let me try to explain why I think it doesn't make sense at all.

Hoffman: Suppose in reality there’s a resource, like water, and you can quantify how much of it there is in an objective order—very little water, medium amount of water, a lot of water.

Ok, I'm still following so far.

Now suppose your fitness function is linear, so a little water gives you a little fitness, medium water gives you medium fitness, and lots of water gives you lots of fitness—in that case, the organism that sees the truth about the water in the world can win, but only because the fitness function happens to align with the true structure in reality.

In the first place, of course, it is entirely your supposition that the fitness function is linear - in fact, I think there's a very simple experiment to prove it isn't. Do all animals when confronted with a large body of water try to drink it all and end up drowning? Do animals simply charge at the ocean and die? They don't? Well then.

Also notice how he doesn't really define what is "the truth about the water". There are certainly a lot of truths about water - that it is H2O, that it is liquid at certain temperatures, that it dissolves some salts, etc. The closest thing I can interpret from the text (which is unclear) is that "the truth about the water" means, to some organism, something like "more of it will make me fitter" - which is of course a subjective statement. If he defines truth to be subjective like that, then what a surprise that he concludes that we can't really see the world as is!

Generically, in the real world, that will never be the case. Something much more natural is a bell curve—say, too little water you die of thirst, but too much water you drown, and only somewhere in between is good for survival.

Great. We're in the same page then.

Now the fitness function doesn’t match the structure in the real world. And that’s enough to send truth to extinction.

Come fucking on. The only thing you proved is that you supposition about the fitness function being linear is wrong. He's litterally saying, "oh, the first shit theory off the top of my head about the complex behavior of animals is wrong - I guess that means no one can access reality!"

And of course he's still unclear what does he mean by truth. If the "truth" means the subjective thought of some animal that more water will always make it more fit then sure, that's completely extinct. I still can't see how it has much to do about us being able to know that water is H2O, for example.

For example, an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness.

Your point being? First, let me point out how computer-model-centric this is. The only reason some organism might see water as "red" or "green" and not, you know, larger and smaller sizes of water is if that's the only damn thing it's ever tracking. Yeah, sure, that's how evolution works, there's not payout for coordinating different kinds of information, specially the relative sizes of objects, right?

Also, so what if it interprets what it sees in a particular way? You could say the same thing about how we se color - "oh, you're not really seeing blue, you are only interpreting a certain kind of wavelength in a certain way". I think we can all agree this kind of thought is in general useless.

Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction between small and large—it only sees red—even though such a distinction exists in reality.

First of all, your last fucking sentences say the organism sees red AND green. That's a distinction. And of course it completely obviates actual, true biological complexity. For an organism to sense something, it needs to have a way to sense it - an eye for example. Now I know that in a computer you can just program it to sense something, but that doesn't make much sense in reality does it? And if an eye can't make distinctions it's an useless eye, probably not an eye at all. But if it can make distinctions - and the more corresponding to reality the better the organism's fitness - and on top of that the organism has the capability to reason and its species has a long tradition of industry to expand on the organism's natural capabilities of perception (e.g. building telescopes) and its societies have means of storing information and collecting data and comparing theories and... well, you get the point.

Yeah, I didn't even want to get into the weird way he created strawmen to demolish while completely disregarding established research. You do a good job of pointing out how fucking ridiculous his logic is.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Most recent thing that showed up was today. Don't recognise the source (clickbait), came via google.

http://trendintech.com/2016/12/02/new-study-shows-how-human-intelligence-may-be-a-product-of-a-basic-algorithm/

I've seen it posted on a couple of forums and FB places. Didn't want to waste time fact checking if you knew anything about it. Filing it as crap pending further info.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Most recent thing that showed up was today. Don't recognise the source (clickbait), came via google.

http://trendintech.com/2016/12/02/new-study-shows-how-human-intelligence-may-be-a-product-of-a-basic-algorithm/

I've seen it posted on a couple of forums and FB places. Didn't want to waste time fact checking if you knew anything about it. Filing it as crap pending further info.

Oh, gotcha. Here's the journal article it links to. http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnsys.2016.00095/full

This is definitely legitimate neuroscience from a very respected team, and it's pretty interesting; I'd be interested in seeing whether anyone has tried modeling it with rich club networking. I'm strictly a biological neuroscientist with a focus on signaling molecules rather than on connectivity, but the systems neuroscience approach is critical to understanding how my signaling molecules actually accomplish anything so I'll be interested in seeing where this goes.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

This article isn't terrible at breaking it down: http://neurosciencenews.com/connectivity-theory-neuroscience-2917/

[minuspace]

a salient criticism of Hoffman's hypothesis that our perceptual reality has no pressure to conform to actual reality:

The faculty of perception is based upon recognition.  The "accuracy" or "fitness" thereof is provided by natural selection, both determining survivability of the organism at the macro level, and reinforcing connections reproduced at the micro/neuronal.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

a salient criticism of Hoffman's hypothesis that our perceptual reality has no pressure to conform to actual reality:

The faculty of perception is based upon recognition.  The "accuracy" or "fitness" thereof is provided by natural selection, both determining survivability of the organism at the macro level, and reinforcing connections reproduced at the micro/neuronal.

Don't be fooled by the word "microbiology"; it is the study of microbial life, not the study of subatomic particles. Even a cellular level is macro when we are talking about particle behavior, which is the level at which quantum behavior manifests. So, nope.

[minuspace]

a salient criticism of Hoffman's hypothesis that our perceptual reality has no pressure to conform to actual reality:

The faculty of perception is based upon recognition.  The "accuracy" or "fitness" thereof is provided by natural selection, both determining survivability of the organism at the macro level, and reinforcing connections reproduced at the micro/neuronal.

Don't be fooled by the word "microbiology"; it is the study of microbial life, not the study of subatomic particles. Even a cellular level is macro when we are talking about particle behavior, which is the level at which quantum behavior manifests. So, nope.

The above distinction between macro and micro indicates that the premise of recognition obtaining a benefit from accuracy operates at different levels or scales of spatio-temporal extension.  So, yeah, however a fool I do remain, always

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

a salient criticism of Hoffman's hypothesis that our perceptual reality has no pressure to conform to actual reality:

The faculty of perception is based upon recognition.  The "accuracy" or "fitness" thereof is provided by natural selection, both determining survivability of the organism at the macro level, and reinforcing connections reproduced at the micro/neuronal.

Don't be fooled by the word "microbiology"; it is the study of microbial life, not the study of subatomic particles. Even a cellular level is macro when we are talking about particle behavior, which is the level at which quantum behavior manifests. So, nope.

The above distinction between macro and micro indicates that the premise of recognition obtaining a benefit from accuracy operates at different levels or scales of spatio-temporal extension.  So, yeah, however a fool I do remain, always

It's fundamentally no different to think about than individual variations disappearing in the mean of a large group sample. Any kind of probability-based differences in outcome vanish into a probability curve when you have a large sample size. Any time you are looking at any biologically-sized molecule, you are looking at an object with a large enough population of subatomic particles that quantum behavior - that  is, probabilistic behavior - disappears into a probability curve, leaving the molecule as a whole with deterministic behavior rather than quantum (probability-based) behavior. For example, think about coin tosses: each individual coin toss has 50/50 probability, and the fewer coin tosses you make, the less well you can predict the distribution of heads and tails. If you toss the coin 5 times, it might come up heads all 5 times, just by chance. However, if you toss the coin 5000 times, the sum distribution of those tosses will be very very close to 50/50. That is what quantum particle behavior is like, and that's why it isn't applicable on a macro (biological) scale. There  may be some exceptions; it is actually possible that our sense of smell may involve some aspect of quantum detection. However, that is as yet undetermined.

I don't know if that's how a physicist would explain it, but I'm not a physicist.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Not to mention that once you have an atom, you have particles interacting with other particles, which is why we can look at an atom and know what it is and how it will behave.

[minuspace]

So, if we must relegate the designation of all things "micro" to the quantum level, this does /not/ mean that the probability of any such condition is causally independent of say, the determinite perceptions of a macro (biological) scale organism.

[LMNO]

...this does /not/ mean that the probability of any such condition is causally independent of say, the determinite perceptions of a macro (biological) scale organism.

If I understand what you're proposing, I should point out that quantum behavior is not affected by perception.  I think I explained that a while back in some thread or other.  If you really want to know more, I can get into it; but most people don't like it when the universe becomes more interesting and less mysterious.