[mjburgess]

i'm referring to evolution as the process by which animals were built

if aliens had come down and given us laptops, rather we invented digital machines, then likewise i'd be talking about the relevant materials science, physics etc.

reverse engineering a laptop to figure out how it works would require extremely little computer science, and 'only at the end'

the reason digital computers are interesting and useful is that they route electricity around devices which are designed to be responsive to one another. the patterns of activation, as managed by the CPU, are weakly describable by abstract algorithms like sorting

starting with a laptop, and no further information, we'd be 100(s)+ years of research away from needing to understand that CPUs were implementing a sorting algorithm

and importantly, that it is doing so has almost nothing to do with the value of the device -- which lies in its ability to provide 'dynamical power and modulation of operation' using electricity

we're in the same situation with animals and people think that, what, understanding gradient descent or backprop is helpful? this is just some csci bs

[ben_w]

I'm not really following you, sorry; this is all too disjointed.

> we're in the same situation with animals and people think that, what, understanding gradient descent or backprop is helpful? this is just some csci bs

Assuming I've actually got your point for this (and I'm not sure I have):

The backpropagation algorithm itself might be "just some csci bs" (it sure has vibes of "let us shortcut the maths rather than find out how our brains did it"), but gradient descent is nice and general-purpose — much like how evolution is both good for biology and in simulation for everything else.

[mjburgess]

To get my point, imagine a laptop was delivered by an alien in the year 1900.

Now, try to take that seriously and think about the laptop as an actual object of experimental curiosity -- what exactly does science need to invent, discover, describe etc. to understand the operation of that laptop?

99.999% of that new knowledge has to be in physics and chemistry, before the tiny 0.0001% of theoretical csci knowlegde is brought to bare.

Consider how impossible it would be to apply any csci knowledge first: we do not even have the ability to measure the cpu state! So we could not even identify any part of the system with 0s, 1s, etc.

Now: that's a laptop!

Imagine now you're dealing with an animal.

Hopefully its now clear how ridiculous it is to describe basically any aspect of our mode of operation by starting with trivial little csci algorithms. It would be insane even with an actual electronic computer, let alone an organic system.

A system whereby clearly our organic properties are radically fundamental to our mode of operation

[TeMPOraL]

Wrong.

Consider two hypothetical versions of this. One, the exact scenario as you described - history unfolded like it did, until the 1900 alien incident. CS and information theory is in its infancy. You're correct that most of the necessary work would first go to physics and chemistry and their various spin-off fields, because that's what's needed to build tools necessary to inspect the machine in full detail. The math would develop along the way, and eventually enough CS to make sense of the observations made before.

Now for an alternate scenario: it's the 1900 again, with the twist that CS is already well-developed theoretical field of mathematics (IDK, perhaps the same aliens dropped us a mechanical computer in year 1800). We'd still need to push physics and chemistry (and spin-offs) forward, but this time, we would know what we're looking for. We'd know the thing does computation, we'd be able to model what kind of computation it does. The question would change from "what does this thing do" to "how exactly does it compute the specific things we know it does". I imagine this would speed up the process of getting a complete picture, because it's easier to understand a specific solution to a problem once you know the answer, than it is to figure out the answer along with the solution.

In terms of understanding the brain, we are in the second situation. We may still know little about how the gooey thing ticks, but we have a growing understanding of what comes out of all that ticking, and a very good understanding of the fundamental rules of ticking.

[mjburgess]

Nearly every physical system implements every algorithm -- if you wanted to find what in a laptop was 'sorting numbers' that would every part.

The light emitted by the screen is being 'sorted' as it is scanned out, the heat air by the fan is being 'sorted' as it swirls around, etc.

You cannot ask, "what physical system implements this algorithm?" as an investigative question, the answer is: nearly all of them.

This is why computable functions, ie., pure algorithms, are explanatorily useless. They play only a (observer-relative) 'design role' in creating real programs.

[ben_w]

You're normally a lot more coherent than you have been in this thread, so… are you feeling alright? Getting enough sleep?

> The light emitted by the screen is being 'sorted' as it is scanned out, the heat air by the fan is being 'sorted' as it swirls around, etc.

This reads like either you're trolling, or that was written by an LLM, or English isn't your native language, or don't know what 'sorting' is, or you don't know what screens and fans do.

It's so fundamentally wrong I was actually tempted to get ChatGPT to respond to it, but that would be a bit mean and add little.

You're better than this. What's wrong?

[mjburgess]

there's nothing garbled about this idea -- not sure about my messaging in this thread, maybe the explanations are a bit looser today

A computable function is a function from naturals to the naturals typically specified as an algorithm: a sequence of steps by which input numbers are transformed into output numbers.

Eg., consider sorting: 101, 001, 111, etc.

Now any physical system can have any component part associated with 0 or 1. There is no reason, a priori, to suppose that voltage flux on a CPU is a "1" or a "0" any more than to associate a photon emission.

If one associates a photon emission at some location with a 0, and another with a 1, then displaying content on a screen is a form of sorting.

Likewise a planet orbiting the sun is implementing a while(true) i = -1*i, if one associates -1/1 with position of the planet orbiting the sun. This is the heart of 'reversible computing'.

The only reason we associate some microscopic part of a CPU with 0, 1, etc. is by design it is something we as observers bring to bare on our interpretation of the physical system. But there's an infinite number of such attributions. We would only ever come to conclude that voltage flux across transitiors was relevant to the operation of a laptop via physics experiments --- no hope via computer science.

This is very important for understanding why csci is presently useless and misinformative as far as the brain is concerned. There are an infinite number of 0/1 attributions to make, and infinite number of algorithms being implemented etc. almost all of those are irrelevant.

Just, as you detect the absurdity, of using sorting algorithms to understand how an LCD works. This is presently less absurd than people talking about neural networks and equivocating with brain structures