TheVat

https://archive.is/2024.01.03-125833/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/01/fetal-maternal-cells-microchimerism/676996/ Years ago, the patient had carried a male embryo, whose cells had at some point wandered out of the womb. They’d ended up in his mother’s thyroid—and, almost certainly, a bunch of other organs too—and taken on the identities and functions of the female cells that surrounded them so they could work in synchrony. Bianchi, now the director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, was astonished: “Her thyroid had been entirely remodeled by her son’s cells,” she said. The woman’s case wasn’t a one-off. Just about every time an embryo implants and begins to grow, it dispatches bits of itself into the body housing it. The depositions begin at least as early as four or five weeks into gestation. And they settle into just about every sliver of our anatomy where scientists have checked—the heart, the lungs, the breast, the colon, the kidney, the liver, the brain. From there, the cells might linger, grow, and divide for decades, or even, as many scientists suspect, for a lifetime, assimilating into the person that conceived them. They can almost be thought of as evolution’s original organ transplant, J. Lee Nelson, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, told me. Microchimerism may be the most common way in which genetically identical cells mature and develop inside two bodies at once. (article goes on to describe some implications of microchimerism, for the immune system, organ transplants from close relatives, etc.)

These seem to be the Right's favorite conceptually empty attack phrases. I have no idea what they really mean, nor do most people who use them. It's impressive that politicians can get a quarter of the GOP to rank fighting these chimeras at the top of their concerns. I'll bet if you actually defined the real meanings of woke and liberalism and presented them (minus those hot button words, or following them with "agenda") to your polled sample, you would get a much smaller group that wanted to "fight" them. For example, here is the actual definition of woke from Merriam Webster: "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)" Yeah, my God, let's fight this looming threat of people attentive to important facts and issues, especially where racial bias in concerned! This could destroy the basic fabric of American life and drain our precious bodily fluids!

The LLM is still essentially what it was, a stochastic parrot which makes ranked lists of word probabilities and word pairing probabilities. There is zero modeling of an actual world. The only thing its doing is modeling next-word probabilities, its only "world" is statistical frequencies of strings within blocks of text. It is so very very far from AGI that all the hype around it is just ludicrous. They understand nothing. I would recommend anything by Emily Bender, who coined the phrase stochastic parrot, on this topic. The fundamental algorithms of LLM machines has not changed in the past year. If it has, @iNow could post some citation on that. Yep. Self attention is a basic aspect of all machine learning, especially natural language processing, and pattern recognition as in computers doing visual discrimination of objects.

Arise, oxysomes of the world! You have nothing to lose but your electron transport chains!

Thanks. On Q* I am not excited yet. It relies on a Markov decision process, so it's still a stochastic algorithm and builds no meaningful model of the world. That model I see as essential to AGI. But maybe Q (why do I see John DeLancie's mug whenever I refer to it) will do better at limited domain expertise than I expect. I always have doubts about reinforcement learning, maybe due to its roots in Behaviorism. It's all very lab rat-ty. 🙂

I expect you're getting some pushback on that. For one thing, intelligence is a vague blanket term for a vast array of cognitive skills. For another, some species have evolved in ways driven by other forces than intelligence. While a crow drops pebbles in a bottle to raise the water level so it can drink, a mesquite bush completely absent intelligence puts down a deeper taproot. An ancient hominin species, H. Floresiensis, decreased its cephalization ratio on a group of islands where protein sources were scarce and a large brain couldn't be supported on the food supply - it's likely this decreased their intelligence and yet it was adaptive in that set of environmental stresses. Sharks are dimwitted and yet have thrived for hundreds of millions of years with a minimal repertoire of instinctive behaviors and no sign of augmenting their cognition. Humans happen to be a weak, clawless, and neotenic species that found the developing of atypical cognitive skills like complex language and toolmaking to be adaptive as it spread through a huge range of ecosystems and climates. We, as a species, are outliers in regard to the adaptive uses of cognitive skills. And a global catastrophe which greatly diminished our protein supply could send us back to being pinheads like H. Floresiensis, cheerful morons digging up tubers in a planetwide shift to insular dwarfism.

Searles point has always been that formal programs, as a set of coded instructions, can only embody the syntactic elements of expertise or knowledge, without the semantics (understanding of meaning). Put differently, computers enact only unconscious processes, be they symbol-based or stochastic (the current emphasis in deep machine learning). While I take the points here regarding the usage of unconscious - it hearkens back to Jungian woo, or to the unhelpful wobbly table vagueness that @iNow mentioned - it can refer in a literal way to operations like those involuntary ones in the autonomic nervous system and up to the brainstem. Such operations aren't preconscious because they never rise into the spotlight of conscious attention or deliberation. I have been AFK a lot the past two weeks so will try to catch up a bit more on the threads before saying more.

The GOP biggest weapon is web-borne propaganda which grossly misrepresents his performance as president, the obstructions of Congress, and the globally driven nature of problems like inflation, war, and surges of refugees. Yup. Having US public schools dial back their social studies requirements has been lethal to our politics.

Eye color genetics turns out to be complex.... https://www.news-medical.net/health/Genetics-of-Eye-Color.aspx

I'm just glad that no one is keeping him away from cheeseburgers. Though any 25th Amendment scenario could be scary if TFG chooses Nikki as a Veep. She strikes me a Right Wing shapeshifter posing as a reasonable conservative centrist.

Cousins marrying is not uncommon in many societies. Einstein married his first cousin, Elsa, and no one called it incest. Wisely, they did not have children. I have wondered if blue eyes were co-selected, due to the complexity of pigmentation as @CharonY mentioned. Lesser pigmentation in the skin certainly had a strong selective advantage in the north, in getting sufficient vitamin D. Blue peepers could be like blonde hair, a trait that piggybacks on that adaptive train of lower melanin, but then also does have a slight sexual advantage - anthropologists sometimes refer to an overall set of traits that simply make someone more noticeable. In a group of brunette girls, male suitors might take more notice of the blonde blue-eyed cutie. Like Van Morrison, I've always had a soft spot for brown eyes. Yes, for a few generations there would be the novelty factor and so a temporary sexual selection. Have also wondered if an element of tender feelings about babies was in play, too. Pale hair and blue eyes are prevalent in infants, so when those phenotypes start to emerge in a group, there would be the novelty of attractive "babes." (sorry - this is a bit tongue-in-cheek)

Wait, didn't Lao-tzu say "the Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao" - ? I wonder if Pooh spiked the honey jar.

In Maine a SoS ruling has no force until it undergoes court review, so Trump is not booted off yet. As for the probability that SCOTUS will allow any ballot exclusions, my Bayesian inference is p = 0. My Bayesian beliefs on the viability of snowballs in Hell are rationally updated every day by the antics of Trump, the number of motions filed in federal courts, and the so-called Supreme Court.

I think of genetic drift and gene flow as sort of the yin and yang of evolution, with gene flow increasing adaptive diversity while drift tends to reduce it with alleles sometimes dropping out completely, as in bottlenecks and founder effects. I think of the Afrikaaners who have a terribly high rate of Huntington's, the infamous "sampling error" of the founder group in South Africa. Due to cultural forces of isolation, the Afrikaaners couldn't benefit from a compensatory gene flow from other African populations that would have greatly reduced the incidence of the Huntington alleles. Another thought - drift, when filtered through natural selection, can sometimes give the illusion of an adaptive effect. I think of my college days and being fairly gobsmacked by SJ Gould's spandrels, in this context. If I recall rightly, polar bears were implicated. Ursine albinism was a fairly neutral mutation and stayed at some consistent level in the bear population as it was a "spandrel" trait that piggybacked on some other trait that was adaptive. Then a group that has a large and non-random sample of the albino alleles gets pushed northward and becomes a founder group in the land of endless snow. So this group serendipitously finds that all those individuals who blend well on white backgrounds are better able to sneak up on seal pups. The evolutionary form of dumb luck. Dumb luck that looked adaptive.

What do the opinions of businessmen have to do with a scientific question at all? On the subject of hair loss, it seems reasonable to consider that both genes and environment will have some effect. The genetic factor of follicle lifespan is certainly there, but there are also factors like diet, smoking, lifestyle that may affect blood circulation to the scalp and follicular viability. Might be interesting to look for studies of MPB that compare smokers and nonsmokers, for example, given the effects of smoking on narrowing dermal capillaries.

A mention of externalism, among other theories of mind, in a New Yorker book review from about four years ago, caught my attention recently. It relates somewhat to the seminal (for this thread) Aeon paper by Epstein, in regard to models of cognition that do not use the information processor metaphor. https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/do-we-have-minds-of-our-own Manzotti, who has become famous for appearing in panels and lecture halls with his favorite prop, an apple, counts himself among the “externalists,” a group of thinkers that includes David Chalmers and the English philosopher and neuroscientist Andy Clark. The externalists believe that consciousness does not exist solely in the brain or in the nervous system but depends, to various degrees, on objects outside the body—such as an apple. According to Manzotti’s version of externalism, spread-mind theory, which Parks is rather taken with, consciousness resides in the interaction between the body of the perceiver and what that perceiver is perceiving: when we look at an apple, we do not merely experience a representation of the apple inside our mind; we are, in some sense, identical with the apple. As Parks puts it, “Simply, the world is what you see. That is conscious experience.” Like Koch’s panpsychism, spread-mind theory attempts to recuperate the centrality of consciousness within the restrictions of materialism. Manzotti contends that we got off to a bad start, scientifically, back in the seventeenth century, when all mental phenomena were relegated to the subjective realm. This introduced the false dichotomy of subject and object and imagined humans as the sole perceiving agents in a universe of inert matter. The article looks at Tim Parks book, “Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness," and may be of interest here. Parks explores several theories which depart from the computational model of mind. I also found a good summary piece on these issues in MIT Technology Review.... https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/25/1030861/is-human-brain-computer/ Has a nice pro and con exchange on the legitimacy of the IP model of mind.

The study of alignments of random points in a plane seeks to discover subsets of points that occupy an approximately straight line within a larger set of points that are randomly placed in a planar region. Studies have shown that such near-alignments occur by chance with greater frequency than one might intuitively expect.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignments_of_random_points

I have heard the US military has fairly robust Faraday shielding on its systems. Probably also the case with Big Tech - server farms, etc. At the residential level, there's the sealed metal box as a basic Faraday Cage (with padding so that the protected device is not in contact with the metal exterior). In a last-minute situation where you know an attack is coming, you can toss stuff like backup drives in the microwave (probably would be a good idea to chop off the plug and power cord so it doesn't conduct a powerful EMP into the interior). Also seems like a metal trash can with a snug-fitting lid would work, if you had bulkier electronics (again, padded). I am also wondering if a box type FC would benefit from a grounding wire. The trash can, I guess, one could just set on soil for a crude grounding? As far as empirical testing of my crude residential solutions, I expect the standard test of a FC would be to put a cellphone in there then call it.

It was sort of a joke regarding the way Republicans who appear non-committed will still back Trump after they've complained bitterly about his shortcomings. But maybe they will surprise me and dump him for real this time. For sure, demographics like suburban women seem poised to divorce him.

What is this rare cryptozoological phenomenon you speak of?

Agree that, as @iNow observed, Gorsuch will backpedal on his 2012 ruling. No doubt he will assert that Trump's conduct was in no way an insurrection and therefore Section 3 would not be applicable. Hell, the only time Section 3 worked was for a couple years during Reconstruction, and by 1874 the South had managed to elect dozens of representatives who had been prominent rebels. They should call Section 3 the Swiss Cheese Clause.

Maybe Nikki will pick up some primary wins after all. 😄

Thanks for zoom session report. So much to chew on there. Marcus has always struck me as a voice of reason in confronting some of the breathless claims for AI. Like his observations on what AI theorists call factuality, as deep learning programs can maintain no world model from which to build the kind of understanding that conscious beings do. Without world models, you are left with only syntax, and it's back to the old Chinese Room. And the problems of symbol grounding are something that cognitive scientists/linguists like Chomsky can really help sharpen our view of. Rich models of the world, innate pathways for meaning and semantics, deep structures that allow an instinctive grasp of a world out there...this is Chomsky territory. (and Chomsky is still exploring at age 95, still showing up for symposia and interviews, he's an amazing guy) There are places for both GOFAI and machine learning to shake hands in solving such problems. I would hope everyone here can keep focus on the many issues of AI, rather than on personalities. Leave the past burns behind.

Yep. Good essay. And comments from you. There is no morally tenable position that involves victimized groups claiming a basis to victimize another group. One would hope that functional adults could at some point own up to the Nakba and ensuing ghettoization. The process where people in a nation develop some historical self-awareness can happen, though it's often slow. In the US, for example, a huge majority now understand the American Nakba of indigenous people, and that the European settlers were culpable in acts of genocide and dispossession. At some point, we were able to shift from viewing Native Americans solely as terrorists to viewing them as brutally murdered and displaced peoples trying to keep some shred of their former lives, lands, and cultures. As with so many such situations, land is key. And displacement often is run on the principle that my people can make better use of that land than you do, we are better, more civilized, and some ancient text proves it!