Our understanding of the world is overfit to the macro level, where we project concepts onto experience to create the illusion of discrete objects, which is evolutionally beneficial.
However, at the quantum level, identity is not bound to space or time. When you split a photon into an entangled pair, those "two" photons are still identical. It's a bit like slicing a flatworm into two parts, which then yields (we think) two separate new flatworms... but they're actually still the same flatworm.
Experiments like this are surprising precisely because they break our assumption that identity is bound to a discrete object, which is located at a single space, at a single time.
Depends on your interpretation of quantum mechanics. In Bohmian Mechanics, there is a discrete particle guided by a wave described by the wave function. Also, macro discrete objects are not illusions, they're the result of decoherence. The superposition is suppressed from view, assuming the wave function isn't collapsed or just a mathematical prediction tool.
> Essentially all intelligent life is a pachinko machine that takes a bunch of sensory inputs, bounces electricity around a number of neurons, and eventually lands them as actions, which further affect sensory inputs.
This metaphor of the pachinko machine (or Plinko game) is exactly how I explain LLMs/ML to laypersons. The process of training is the act of discovering through trial and error the right settings for each peg on the board, in order to consistently get the ball to land in the right spot-ish.
I recognized the word "glymphatic" from recent articles about the discovery of the brain's self-cleaning system, and then understood from the headline that these authors identified that the mechanism by which this occurs is driven by norepinephrine.
Care to explain your perspective? "Engineering" can be a bit of a fuzzy definition. To some it means "building something". To others, it requires the application (and understanding!) of mathematic and scientific principles to build something.
I would disagree that most engineering is not involved in building something...whether most engineers understand the math/science behind it is debatable.
At some point, we will have no idea that the majority of the commenters we're interacting with are actually just generative AI.
Related: I've found that the internet becomes significantly better when I use a Chrome extension to hide all comment sections. Comments are by far the most significant source of toxicity.
I treat it a lot like english. Run-on sentences, too much technical jargon, and too many fragmented short sentences all make it harder to read. There's analogies to writing code.
I mean, at least western people seem to think in recipes, todo lists, or numbered instructions. Which is what procedural code is.
Dogma will chop up those blocks into sometimes a dozen functions, and that's in stuff like Java, functional is even worse for "function misdirection / short term memory overload".
I don't really mind the hundred line method if that thing is doing the real meat of the work. I find stepping through code to be helpful, and those types of methods/functions/code are easy to track. Lots of functions? You have to set breakpoints or step into the functions, and who knows if you are stepping into a library function or a code-relevant function.
Of course a thousand line method may be a bit much too, but the dogma for a long time was "more than ten lines? subdivide into more functions" which was always weird to me.
It may not apply to Tesla, but in my industry you refit over christmas week, because you weren't going to be running the line on the 25th and 26th anyway.
And it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone, because it's all planned well in advance, and in the weeks leading up to the refit a mountain of new machinery appears in a staging area.
I think the argument is in whether "thought" only applies to conscious articulation or whether non-linguistic, non-symbolic processes also qualify.
We only consciously "know" something when we represent it with symbols. There are also unconscious processes that some would consider "thought", like driving a car safely without thinking about what you're doing, but I wouldn't consider those thoughts.
I find an interesting parallel to Chain of Thought techniques with LLMs. I personally don't (consciously) know what I think until I articulate it.
To me this is similar to giving an LLM space to print out intermediary thoughts, like a JSON array of strings. Language is our programming language, in a sense. Without representing something in a word/concept, it doesn't exist.
"Ich vermute, dass wir nur sehen, was wir kennen." - Nietzsche, where "know" refers to labeling something by projecting a concept/word onto it.
