On: A warning about 'model welfare'

[lowbloodsugar]

Ok. So now that you do know otherwise, are you still more skeptical of floating point values stored by silicon than floating point numbers stored by chemical potential?

[lukifer → lowbloodsugar]

Chemical floating points are necessary but not sufficient. It’s clearly possible for those values to be intact, with no lights on (certain types of brain injury; those who were fully dead and then revived).

There are also some cog-sci people who think embodiment is a crucial ingredient in consciousness (although I think it’s a fair retort that the embodiment need not resemble us meatbags, or even be composed of atoms)

[Kim_Bruning → lukifer]

> There are also some cog-sci people who think embodiment is a crucial ingredient in consciousness

Very plausible. The Real World(tm) has some very interesting learning properties.

First: Make a prediction

Then observe:

1 If it's caused by our own movement, filter it out.

2. Nothing in the outside world changes most of the time, so anything that's left is small, and small is likely noise. Filter it out.

3. Whatever prediction error remains must be important: Attend to it, and update the predictor.

The learning rule falls out almost automagically.

[adamrezich → lowbloodsugar]

TIL IEEE 754 is a fact of nature