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Santa Fe Institute Profile picture
@sfiscience
Mar 31, 2021 • 9 tweets • 15 min read • Read on X
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"The Evolution of Agency"

Follow this thread for highlights from today's seminar by @WiringTheBrain of @trinitycollege. Watch without login on Facebook (we will post the recording to YouTube within 24 hours):

facebook.com/santafeinstitu…
"The genome doesn't specify the outcome at all; it just encodes the biochemical rules by which development happens."

- @WiringTheBrain on the multi-level interplay of "nature" and "nurture" on #personality ImageImageImageImage
"It's trendy today to deny that #FreeWill is real."

- @WiringTheBrain quotes @SamHarrisOrg & Schopenhauer on the prominence of biological #determinism and neural #reductionism in modern thinking on the nature of choice.

facebook.com/santafeinstitu… ImageImageImageImage
Ways out of physical and biological #determinism include Cartesian dualism and the compatibilism of SFI/@TuftsUniversity Prof @danieldennett.

"But I think we have to get OVER determinism first, as opposed to just accepting it."
- @WiringTheBrain at SFI:

facebook.com/santafeinstitu… ImageImageImageImage
"Life is not a state or a property; it's a #process, like a storm, or flame, or tornado. Where a living system differs is in the boundary that makes it into an entity that persists over time."

- @WiringTheBrain on "The #Evolution of #Agency" at SFI today:
facebook.com/santafeinstitu… ImageImageImageImage
"Life's #purpose is to exist..." and from this emerge the innovations of approach and avoidance, which lead to the emergence of #meaning — which isn't localized in the signals an organism senses, nor in the organism's body, but appear in the interactions.

@WiringTheBrain at SFI: ImageImageImageImage
The evolution of #meaning, from the pragmatic coupling of sense input to motor function, to the #nervoussystem's extraction of high-level representations, decoupling sensory input from action.

Or to put it another way, from reflex to reflection...

@WiringTheBrain at SFI today: ImageImageImageImage
"An exact inversion of the reductionist logic: [biological states] only have causal power because they have #meaning at the level of the organism."
- @WiringTheBrain on how lossy compression in complex systems challenges physical & biological #determinism:
facebook.com/santafeinstitu… ImageImageImageImage
"As you go up the hierarchy [of organizational complexity], timescales tend to get longer and and cognitive objects more abstract."

- @WiringTheBrain presents a naturalistic model that anchors #meaning & #value in a multilevel process of data aggregation:
facebook.com/santafeinstitu… ImageImageImageImage

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More from @sfiscience

Santa Fe Institute Profile picture
Mar 10, 2023
🧵 "The Smell of Inhibition. A Code in the Nose?"

ICYMI, this week's SFI Seminar by Fractal Faculty Stuart Firestein (@Columbia) on "what started out ass a very simple-seeming problem [re: #olfaction] and turned out to be very complicated":

"Everything we know about the world comes through these little holes in our head and the skin covering our body, processed through tissue specialized to interpret it."

"The thing to notice about [sight and hearing] is that they're [processing] fairly low-dimensional stimuli."
"Even a simple smell is composed of a VARIETY of molecules, and these are high-dimensional from a chemical point of view. And it's also a somewhat discontinuous stimulus. How do we get from this bunch of molecules to this unitary perception of something like a rose?"
Read 8 tweets
Santa Fe Institute Profile picture
Mar 10, 2023
🧵 "#Possibility Architectures: Exploring Human #Communication with Generative #AI"

Today's SFI Seminar with ExFac Simon DeDeo @LaboratoryMinds (@CarnegieMellon), streaming now:
"A key feature of this is talk is that we make sense of what each other are saying IN PART by what they say, but ALSO by what we expect of them."
"Language transmits info against a background of expectations – syntactic, semantic, and this larger cultural spectrum. It's not just the choices of make but [how] we set ourselves up to make later choices."

@LaboratoryMinds re: work led by @clairebergey:
Read 15 tweets
Santa Fe Institute Profile picture
Mar 9, 2023
"I think what really drives [the popularity of the #multiverse in #scifi] is regret... There's a line in @allatoncemovie where #MichelleYeoh is told she's the worst version of herself."

"I don't think we should resist melting brains. I think we should just bite the bullet."
"When you measure the spin of an electron, or the position...what happened to all of the other things you could have seen? Everett's idea is that they're all real. They all become real in that measurement."
- SFI Fractal Faculty @seanmcarroll at @guardian
theguardian.com/science/audio/…
"At the level of the equations there is zero ambiguity, but the metaphors break down. The two universes it splits into aren't as big as the original universe. The thickness of the two new universes adds up to the thickness of the original universe."
Read 4 tweets
Santa Fe Institute Profile picture
Dec 14, 2022
"Compositionality in Vector Space Models of Meaning"

Today's SFI Seminar by @marthaflinders, streaming:


Follow this 🧵 for highlights!
"Scientists gather here
Santa Fe Institute, oh so near
Inquiring minds seek truth"

#haiku about SFI c/o @marthaflinders & #ChatGPT

...but still, #AI fails at simple tasks:
"One way to represent the kind of #compositionality we want to do is with this kind of breakdown...eventually a kind of representation of a sentence. On the other hand, vector space models of #meaning or set-theoretical models put into a space have been very successful..."
Read 14 tweets
Santa Fe Institute Profile picture
Dec 13, 2022
"Humans are prone to giving machines ambiguous or mistaken instructions, and we want them to do what we mean, not what we say. To solve this problem we must find ways to align AI with human preferences, goals & values."
- @MelMitchell1 at @QuantaMagazine:
quantamagazine.org/what-does-it-m…
“All that is needed to assure catastrophe is a highly competent machine combined with humans who have an imperfect ability to specify human preferences completely and correctly.”

- Stuart Russell (@UCBerkeley) as quoted by @MelMitchell1 in her latest @QuantaMagazine article
"It’s a familiar trope in #ScienceFiction — humanity threatened by out-of-control machines who have misinterpreted human desires. Now a not-insubstantial segment of the #AI research community is concerned about this kind of scenario playing out in real life."
- @MelMitchell1
Read 6 tweets
Santa Fe Institute Profile picture
Dec 12, 2022
"Training Machines to Learn the Way Humans Do: an Alternative to #Backpropagation"

Today's SFI Seminar by Sanjukta Krishnagopal
(@UCBerkeley & @UCLA)

Starting now — follow this 🧵 for highlights:
Image
"When we learn something new, we look for relationships with things we know already."

"I don't just forget Calculus because I learned something else."

"We automatically know what a 'cat-dog' would look like, if it were to exist."

"We learn by training on very few examples." Image
1, 2) "[#MachineLearning] is fundamentally different from the way humans learn things."

3) Re: #FeedForward #NeuralNetworks

"You choose some loss function...maybe I'm learning the wrong weights. So I define some goal and then I want to learn these weights, these thetas." ImageImageImage
Read 13 tweets

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