Chris Adami

The mind as a computational system The present document is an excerpt of an essay that I wrote as part of my application material to graduate school in Computer Science (with a focus on Artificial Intelligence), in 1986. I was not invi...

As far as the illusion of consciousness is concerned, I wrote about it 40 years ago. arxiv.org/abs/1712.01093

Agency is like consciousness in the sense that we'd like to measure it, but when we try we realize that there are non-biological things that have some small amount of it. It cannot be defined in a meaningful way that distinguishes life from non-life.

I describe the T. brucei stuff in my book in chapter 6.4

I think "agency" shares a lot with "consciousness", in that we think we must be able to measure it, and then realize we can't. It's more of a feeling. With consciousness, I always say: "The illusion of consciousness is certainly real".

When I look at biology (all the complex messy stuff) all I see is one goal: getting the genome cleanly into the next generation to ensure information survival. Perhaps I've looked at T. brucei too much, because all their agency is: "if you carry even a single mutation (in mt genes) you must die".

You are looking at life from the point of view of the individual. That is where we disagree. From my point of view, the individual is a means to an end, which is the indefinite persistence of information.

I’m curious what your definition of agency is

What you described has all that.

The Penicillin Myth Competing theories seek to explain inconsistencies surrounding Alexander Fleming’s famed discovery.

This story about the mystery behind Fleming's discovery of Penicillin has an MSU connection! @msumgi.bsky.social
press.asimov.com/articles/pen...

I later found out that biology is not, in fact, boring. But you can certainly teach it in the most boring manner possible.

Fairly simple: I knew after high school that it was going to "science/math". In high school, chemistry (inorganic) was easy but boring. Biology (plants and cell division, basically) was boring. Math was a tool, not science. That left physics. So I went to Bonn University to study physics.

Oh, no doubt about it. The proof that channels have a finite capacity was a huge breakthrough. It’s just odd that he hadn’t seen the formula before. He reinvented it and used it very differently

An exceprt of Max Planck's "Wärmestrahlung" from 1905 in (in German), showing the entropy formula.

And here is p. 125 of my copy of Planck's "Wärmestrahlung" (1905). He even does "max entropy". But I think von Neumann had understood this more deeply, because by realizing it is the classical limit of the vN entropy, it was not at all limited to phase space probabilities, but any states, really.

This is the way.

You should also tell them that when Shannon came to him in 1946 or so to ask what he should call his p log p formula, he told him to call it entropy, but not telling him that he already wrote down that formula as the classical limit of the vN entropy in 1927. "It has been used under that name".

Brown nose by proxy

We should all share the name of the folder we use for those. Mine is called “Nuts”.

a bunch of ants are crawling around a circular object that looks like an infinity sign Alt: A bunch of ants are crawling around a Mobius strip, which is a one sides object produced by twisting one end of a flat strip by 180 degrees and then gluing it to the other end.

Mathematician and astronomer August Ferdinand Möbius was born #OTD in 1790. 🧪 🔭

He is best known for devising a surface that not even the New York Times could find a way to both-sides.

But they forget that every mutation can change the fitness effect of every other mutation via epistatic interactions. So, you don't need to invoke rapidly changing environments: every mutation coming after a beneficial mutation within the fixation time window can change the adaptive trajectory 2/2

Adaptive tracking with antagonistic pleiotropy results in seemingly neutral molecular evolution - Nature Ecology & Evolution Population genetics simulations and analysis of experimental datasets in yeast, Drosophila and E. coli show that beneficial mutations are abundant but transient, as they become deleterious after envir...

Interesting article in which the authors show that the vast majority of beneficial mutations (as determined by deep mutational scanning) do not fix because the environment changes so fast that those mutations lose their benefit before fixation. (1/2) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'd also like the Supreme Court to hear a complaint. You just go and ask them, right? That's how it goes?

That's basically the plot of "Satanic Verses" (the part about the puppet, not the AI).

Got to review my first fully AI-generated paper today. Fortunately as a pre-peer-review, so I could spare some other reviewers the indignity of writing a reply to a chatbot.

Once you've done all this you can come back and use my info-theoretic tool, which will just extract the information. But you need to know information about *what* (i.e., annotated phenotype). That tool (IDSeq) does it better than any ML tool in existence, here or anywhere else in the universe.

But you can actually binarize the byte, and you can do the same with your abundances (turns out the organism only cares about high/low info). Here, the ten classes (numbers) will be immediately apparent, but if you know the phenotype on a subset, you can use that for training.

Here's a description of dimensionality reduction techniques for hand-written images. The images are both simpler and more complex than the microbiome: there are 782 "abundances", but each has a range of one byte. colah.github.io/posts/2014-1...

How many biomes? What do you want to predict if you knew the patterns?

Approximate cloning is totally allowed.

I have been complaining about this many times. I try to submit to journals with active editors (who are involved in the decision making and don’t just count balls and strikes). But with varying success.

Come on!