Tags / 24 quotes from 9 sources
#evolution
100,000 Articles - And The Data Scientists Who Mine Them - Bio-it World
Taxonomy evolution via text mining
AI also brought to the table a program called Data Harmony MAIstro (for Machine-Aided Indexing), which took over the job of assigning terms to individual articles. MAIstro is a text mining program that searches for phrases within the papers submitted to PLOS, and relates them…
American Economic Association
Cambrian explosion
About half a billion years ago, life on earth experienced a short period of very rapid diversification called the "Cambrian Explosion." Many theories have been proposed for the cause of the Cambrian Explosion, one of the most provocative being the evolution of vision, allowing…
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Consciousness is the key issue for superintelligence
There are a few who argue that consciousness is a result of the fundamental organizational principle of the brain and therefore that we cannot call any machine truly intelligent without it. In other words, human consciousness is not a useless phenomenon but confers some real…
Number sense is like color perception
Dehaene further likens our perception of math to how we perceive color. Color is not an objective property of the world that exists independently of human brains. Color does not exist in the world. Our brains create color when certain wavelengths of light hit our eyes, and they…
Dragonflies fooled by polarized light
Donald Hoffman relates the following example about dragonflies to illustrate the idea that biological perception does not report the truth about the world: Many dragonflies, for instance, lay their eggs in water. For millions of years, their visual systems have guided them to…
A quick trick instead of the truth
more polarization the better. In the environment in which they evolved, this trick was a useful guide to behavior and allowed them to avoid constructing a complex understanding of the truth.
Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina)
Why human childhood lasts so long
It’s a question that bothers many evolutionary scientists: How come it takes so long to raise a human child? Aside from perhaps a whale or two, we have the longest childhood on the planet. Where did this decades-long sojourn come from, and why don’t other animals have to go…
Big brains, narrow hips and the birth of parenting
But why does it take so much time and effort? Blame our big, fat, gold-plated, nothing-else-like-it brains. We evolved to have larger brains with higher IQs, which allowed us to move from leopard food to Masters of the Universe in 10 million very short years. We gained big…
Embryos still carry our evolutionary past
Fortunately, most babies’ brains form just fine. The brain end of the neural tube continues its construction project by creating bulges of cells that look like complex coral formations. These eventually form the large structures of the brain. Before the first month, the baby’s…
Crystallized and fluid intelligence
Like Mom’s stew, human intelligence has two essential components, both fundamentally linked to our evolutionary need to survive. The first is the ability to record information. This is sometimes called “crystallized intelligence.” It involves the various memory systems of the…
Gestures are windows into thought
Gestures and speech used similar neural circuits as they developed in our evolutionary history. University of Chicago psycholinguist David McNeill was the first to suggest this. He thought nonverbal and verbal skills might retain their strong ties even though they’ve diverged…
What moral means, and whether it is innate
What exactly does “moral” mean? Are any moral absolutes embedded into our brains, or is moral awareness only culturally understood? These questions have occupied philosophers for centuries. The word “moral,” in both its Greek and Latin incarnations, has a strong social…
Epigrams On Programming
Optimization
Optimization hinders evolution.
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Evolution has already solved intelligence
In one sense, the problem of creating intelligent agents has already been solved. Over the course of the earth’s 4.5 billion years of history, evolution has solved the problem over and over again. Mammals arrived 370 million years ago. Our last common ancestor with the apes…
Brooks: get the basics right first
The MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks takes the evolutionary basics as evidence that “hard” tasks like reasoning, planning and language might turn out to be easier to understand once the basics are in place.
Mechanical creatures before mechanical humans
Can our knowledge of evolution inform AI? Brooks believes that it can, and argues that we should first aim to build basic mechanical creatures before we try to build mechanical humans.
From critique to engineering principles
The arguments from evolution, biology and philosophy stand in opposition to much of conventional AI research. But to put these arguments into practice, they need to be translated into engineering principles. Three principles characterize the new approach to AI.
Bottom-up versus top-down AI design
Given the goal of building an intelligent agent, the methodology frequently adopted by Al is to build from the top downwards. That is, higher-level functions such as knowledge and reasoning are targeted first, with lower-level Junctions swept under the carpet until later. New…
AI and the Lamarckian evolution of our species
By engineering our own offspring, many have proposed that Artificial Intelligence can lead to the Lamarckian evolution of our species. In contrast to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, Lamarck proposed that evolution allows characteristics acquired over our…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Consciousness coordinates vast amounts of information
I will spell out the relations between consciousness and intentionality in chapter 9. For the moment, just this: one huge evolutionary advantage of human consciousness is that we can coordinate a large amount of intentionality (“information”) simultaneously in a single unified…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Mushrooms and the origins of religion
Such speculations were to run through the two-volume Mushrooms, Russia and History, which the Wassons published on their return from Mexico. Their book, or so the story goes, had started life as a cookbook of mushroom recipes. As the couple researched their subject, however…
Osho's fourth body
Earlier we saw that Advaita Vedanta was putting down roots in the West and beginning to develop into a new nondualistic philosophy. This is the context in which I’d like—very briefly—to prospect a possible psychedelic/spiritual interface, particularly in terms of the two…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Self assembled from many brain systems
So how does it all come together? It’s too soon to say that there is a definitive answer, but there are sufficient similarities between different researchers’ views to suggest that the outlines of an answer are in place. The central insight is that the sense of self is…
The neocortex is not a neural lasagne
The newest and most advanced parts of our brains are a mere 24–55 million years old, born during the Eocene and Oligocene epochs. This is the neomammalian brain, otherwise known as the neocortex or cerebral cortex. Higher brain functions like logical reasoning and episodic…