/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11172486
youre not seeing the forest for the trees.. if the mushroom can think in such long time spans it could "naturally" select for chemicals that allow it to interact with mammals that shit a lot (think about cow poop and mushrooms) then primates flip over the cowpatties

but yeah dud let the smugness make you arrogant... look how darwinism is already working in your subconscikous

>>10960488
Depends on your definition for "rational."
There are definitely sound reasons for why people take the local path of least resistance instead of a harder local path that would lead to less resistance / more gains in the future.
There's a reason for them to not do this too, but that doesn't make their decision irrational. It just makes immediacy something they're assigning greater value to than someone else might. And/or it means they have less energy or willingness to take on local / immediate stressors in exchange for future benefits.
I'll give you a simple and concrete example here: Some portion of severely ill cancer patients will opt for admittance to a hospice for pain management only (i.e. the disease itself won't be treated, they'll just be made more comfortable for the remainder of their life) or euthanasia instead of going through a very difficult and painful stretch of time where they need to take chemotherapy / radiation that will make them suffer to an extreme degree in exchange for a possible remission where they could be healthy and live out a potentially long and pleasant life afterwards.
I'd argue neither choice is "more rational" than the other in that case. Suffering more up front could get you a huge payoff afterwards. But it's not irrational to prefer not taking on a very large amount of suffering regardless of how much you might benefit from doing so later on. For most people, there is probably some level of physical trauma they would refuse to agree to no matter how much money you offered them. For sure I imagine some would amputate their own right foot with a rusty saw if you gave them $1,000,000 in exchange, but I wouldn't, and I imagine most wouldn't.

>>10878052
"Magic" probably comes from the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction "magh-" meaning something along the lines of "to be able to."
If a predatory animal has more success catching and killing its prey by taking more care to remain still and quiet before pouncing, then that for example could be a helpful association for it to pick up (quiet and motionless --> reward of food).
This behavior is generalized and not specific to any one particular scenario like the quiet and motionless hunting example. If it were specific and not generalized it would be too limited and inflexible of a trait and the animal subject would not be able to learn how to respond to all the other scenarios of life or death importance it will encounter on a regular basis.
As a consequence of associative behavior acting generally and not case-specifically, *faulty* associations can be (and are) made. B.F. Skinner made famous observations about these faulty associations in his study of pigeons. The pigeon test subjects would repeat arbitrary body movements they happened to have been engaging in when they were fed in the past, effectively behaving as though a coincidence were a cause and their body movements could create another feeding event. The common term for this idea of course is "superstition."
Similarly with our own species, we have a history of people using body movements or performing rituals like sacrificing an animal, behaving as though such actions could create what are in reality not causally connected outcomes such as having a good harvest ("lottery in June, corn be heavy soon") or curing a sick child.
Magic is a collection of faulty associations where the practicing party believes their rituals cause desired outcomes.
Science in contrast is the system of formally testing and documenting apparent associations so we can reliably manipulate natural phenomena for concrete results e.g. the harnessing of electricity and telecommunications networks that allow you to read this.

>>10860060
>Nuclear weapons stopped large sale wars and even shitholes like North Korea can survive only because people fear nukes.
>On galactic scale you have relativistic kill missiles and other shit that would work as deterrent same way nukes work on Earth.
For this argument to work you would need everyone in the observable universe to all be aware of these deterrents.
For them to all be aware of these deterrents would mean alien life is detectable, defeating the purpose of this argument for why alien life isn't being detected.
>>10860053
>Fermi paradox is complete bullshit
People today are way too quick to shit on the Fermi Paradox. I think maybe out of frustration from years of being told in trash pop sci articles about it. It's a great insight and exactly what we should be asking questions about, regardless of whether the resolution involves life being extremely uncommon to the point of effectively not existing for us to see or not, and regardless of whether alien life would be more exotic and different than we'd know how to look for or not.
In fact both of those resolutions were brought up in the original formulation of the 'Paradox', so it's kind of silly to call it bullshit even if you have good reason to argue for either of those resolutions. Obviously there's some sort of resolution that makes the lack of alien life detection explicable, and Fermi was never under the impression there *wasn't* some resolution / explanation. The point was just to bring up how it was an unresolved question that we ought to explore, not to assert there was no resolution.

>>10792426
>It literally does.
Or maybe, get this... Our personal notion of there being something literally appearing to us when we use our sensory organs isn't a fundamental aspect of reality transcending the physical world and the issue is instead how our brains make us believe and behave.
The universe is pretty large and the portion of the universe where human beings take up space is pretty small to make one of the grossest understatements possible, so we'd probably do better to place suspicion on how our brains make us believe things before deciding what we're compelled to believe is definitely, literally real because of how strongly we believe it's real and that it's the rest of the universe that needs to account for what happens as some newly defined fundamental force on par with electromagnetism.
>inb4 "but we only ever know anything at all through our experience"
Which do MRIs have more reliable data on:
Their own mechanisms for allowing them to scan, or the subjects they scan?
Just because we get information about the world through our sensory organs doesn't mean we have reason to assume our notion of what sensory "experience" is constitutes more reliable information than the information we gather through our sensory organs about the external world. We also in some real sense aren't limited to only taking in information through personal sensory interactions so long as you don't subscribe to the view we're in some maliciously illusory trap. Barring that view we have knowledge from the common ground across multiple different observing parties, along with knowledge from mechanical devices and knowledge from abstract mathematical models. When these various different modes of information gathering agree, that gives us some idea of what the world independent of any one party is like. We also have dreams to contrast with, where there truly is a world of nothing but perspective, and it's dramatically different from consensus reality with its lack of consistency.

>>10715500
It's always impressive if you actually understand it. Unfortunately you see the opposite opinion constantly where people scream "it's just [insert your preferred reductionist description of an ML method here]" over and over, as though the fact what's done makes sense and consists of any sort of method at all somehow invalidates the fact you're getting a program to gain abilities nobody could ever enumerate a list of rules for.
I can unironically say it's still very high up on the list of most impressive things you can learn about and work with. And for all the deflation-happy anons looking to smugly point out how ML isn't really anything like how the human brain operates, keep in mind there already exist a variety of human behaviors we know for a fact MUST involve something comparable because we can prove these behaviors are *optimized* behaviors e.g. different aspects of movement like walking:
https://jeb.biologists.org/content/208/6/979
Now the deflation-anons are right that artificial neural networks using gradient descent aren't doing what the brain is doing. But this is more of a technicality and less of an attack on the fundamental similarity between systems than I see most anons give credit for. The reason being that optimization is optimization.
The particulars of how optimization is accomplished is an interesting open problem for the human brain and the corresponding optimized behaviors. But as long as it's a behavior we can show is optimized, the ultimate answer is going to be one of a variety of fundamentally equivalent and interchangeable approaches. You don't get radically different answers in these cases, by definition. Optimization means you have a deterministic best answer, and whether you get there with an algorithm running on a machine or a biological process you'll still be landing on that deterministic best answer with both.

>>10649107