Recent content by BWV

would be good to add an additional prefix for questions that are more 'science journalism' and about trends in a given scientific community rather than a quantitative dive into a specific model or phenomenon If I ask what is the consensus view of 'X' and how it may have changed over some time...

Not claiming there is universal consensus in biology (or that I have any expertise to judge) but not hard to find examples in the literature like...

That is where the agency argument comes in - cells have agency, activation functions in a NN do not.

No one would argue that a ML model based on OLS is not deterministic or is somehow intelligent, nor would anyone make that claim for a simple NN that recognizes cats from dogs. But scale up to 100s of billions of non-linear parameters on language models, slightly different contexts will...

Like I said, ‘part of the discussion’, but think you would be hard pressed to find a biologist arguing that living things do not possess agency

it’s a basic part of the discussion of what makes something alive, for example https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11652585/

Is it not part of the biological definition of living?

Only if it has agency

And neither will LLMs

Again its a philosophical issue - does intelligence require agency? if it does then no current computer system is intelligent, if it does not then both a pocket calculator and a LLM possess intelligence, just at different degrees

That is a philosophical question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room does a pocket calculator understand the commutativity of addition?

channeling Coltrane through Michael Brecker

After Trane was Wayne

A good body of research indicates it’s not possible to bring a healthy fetus to term in microgravity, then even if you could, what do you have to do? Some sort of spinning crèche to facilitate normal muscle development? You need a couple of hundred meter diameter to offset the inner ear /...

Well maybe I should upgrade to the paid version