21. Chaos and Reductionism

What people said

animal_spirits · 2020-10 · Recommendation

I think its a good start to learn about chaotic systems instead. For most systems, minute parameter changes can have dramatic effects on the predictability of the system [VIDEO]

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nyrikki · 2024-10 · Reference

Nit: It goes a bit deeper than that. Note this talk by another Pop Sci personality Robert Sapolsky, where he talks about the limitations of western reductionism. [VIDEO] Yet his latest book on free will exclusively depended on an reductionist viewpoint. While I don't know his motivations for those changes, the fact that the paper he mentioned was so extremely unpopular that I was only one of a handful that read it surely provided some incentive: > "REDUCTIONISM AND VARIABILITY IN DATA: A META-ANALYSIS ROBERT SAPOLSKY and STEVEN BALT" Or you can go back to math and look at the Brouwer–Hilbert controversy, which was purely about if we should, universally, accept PEM a priori, which Church, Post, Gödel, and others proved wasn't a safe in many problems. Luckily ZFC helped with some of that, but Hilbert won that war of of words. Where even suggesting a constructivist approach produces so much cognitive dissonance that it is often branded as heresy. Fortunately with the Curry–Howard–Lambek correspondence you can shift to types or categories with someone who understands them to avoid that land mine, but even on here people get frustrated when people say something is 'undecidable' and then go silent. It is not that labeling it as 'undecidable' wins an argument, but that it is so painful to move on because from Plato onward PEM was part of the trinity of thought that is sacrosanct. To be clear, I am not a strict constructivist, but view this as horses for courses, with the reductionis

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IIAOPSW · 2023-03 · Reference

This is simply impossible. The premise that the brain is a big lookup table is appealing, and that sort of 1 neuron = 1 represented item concept certainly happens at the initial stages of the sensory pipeline, but if you attempt to scale it up and up to higher levels of abstraction, to the point where you have neurons that have rote memorized every orientation of your grandmothers face (and everyone else's face), you would need to have far more neurons than can possibly fit in any animals head, let alone yours. This concept is literally known as a "grandmother neuron", and its widely considered to be debunked. I refer you to this neuroscience lecture. [VIDEO] Beyond the simplest, most common tasks where it pays to have a rote lookup table, you truly do need an algorithm.

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