I’m not missing anything. I’m simply explaining to you that the fitness function for living organisms is far more complex than simply striving for efficiency. I understand perfectly well how entropy and thermodynamics work.

You’re being deeply uncharitable here. I never said redundancy in biological systems is something that is never selected for. I was simply stating that the selection for such redundancy is bound by thermodynamic processes that govern natural selection in the first place. Physicists that have ventured into the field of biology have suggested that this is the case for decades. However it’s only in the past 15 or so years that the field has advanced to the point where these hypotheses are testable. Honestly it’s fascinating and outside of this dumb argument you should look into it because it aligns surprisingly well with Marx’s observations about economic development. If you are genuinely interested I’ll share some papers.

There is plenty of real evidence.

No there isn’t. You’ve just made some foolish assumptions and you’ve ignored me yet again. I won’t dox myself but this isn’t some casual interest for me. To give you some idea of where I’m coming from, I’ve seen a hemispherectomy before. I’ve literally stared into a persons skull as half of their brain tissue was either removed or surgically disconnected. I then saw that person wake of up from anesthesia with some complications but less than someone unfamiliar with the procedure would expect. None of this is new to me.

In all of the cases you’ve referenced so far, the patients have cognitive deficiencies. It’s not at all the same as a person losing a kidney or donating a lobe of their liver where a they can got on to be perfectly healthy with what remains. It’s also key to realize that in the cases you’re referencing the problem starts very early in development. That gives the brain time to develop in a unique way which allows it to retain much of its intended function. What you’re seeing is not proof of redundancy but rather proof of compensatory reorganization in the remaining tissue. It’s likely the brain in these patients have, on average, a higher degree of interconnectivity than what you might find in a normal healthy brain. In which case, some complexity is lost but maybe not as much as you’ve assumed. If you tried to remove pieces of a fully healthy brain you will mostly likely see a severe loss of function, think traumatic brain injuries and stroke victims. This is amazing stuff but you’re making assumptions that just don’t align modern neuroscience.

More evidence comes from birds like corvids who exhibit high levels of intelligence and problem solving that’s comparable to primates.

You’re assuming size and complexity are the same thing! They aren’t. Corvids have a way higher neural density than the brains of primates. It’s fascinating but it does not back up the idea that much of the brains complexity is redundant. In fact it would suggest the opposite because under a selective pressure to reduce the size of a brain it still seems that complexity must be preserved in order to achieve similar cognitive capacities.

I linked you a blog post by a biologist discussing a paper.

Maybe at one time he was. Now he’s just a science fiction author. Also what does having a degree in biology prove? I can link you to blog posts written by biologists that claim Covid 19 is a weapon created by China’s evil communist scientists. Would you trust them too? Academic rigor requires more than just the musings of any individual scientist.

This is a very well known case that’s in no way controversial.

I’m not saying the case itself is controversial. However, the assumptions you’ve made and the conclusions you’re trying to draw from such cases is! At least it would be amongst neuroscientists.

about the level of discourse I’ve come to expect from you lol

I mean you’re right here in the mud with me lol.

Also, I’ve engaged with you as much as I have because I generally agree with most of what you post on this site. I’ve generally appreciated your presence. However, that makes it all the more maddening when you go on to spew such ignorance about the human brain and AI. You make bold claims and then won’t even cite a real peer reviewed publication. I get that kind of behavior flies in online marxist circles especially since some of the best Marxist theoretical papers these days aren’t even translated into English. However, when discussing things like neuroscience I expect better. Throw the science out and what you’re left with is pure idealism.

For example, plants don’t use the most efficient wavelength for producing energy, they use the one that’s most reliably available.

You’re missing the point entirely. Biological systems are governed by the laws thermodynamics. The reason why complex structures are even possible in a universe where entropy is king is because biological systems offer the most direct path towards a total increase in the amount of entropy in our little corner of the universe. Natural selection is governed by those principles. The brain has a disproportionately high metabolism relative to other organs in the human body. To argue it’s largely a redundant structure like the kidneys or liver you need real evidence.

Maybe read the actual paper linked there?

You linked a fucking blog post written by a science fiction author not a peer reviewed scientific paper. And yes I did read it. Is your ego so large that you can’t possible conceive of someone coming to a different conclusion when faced with the same “evidence”?

What I linked you is a case study of an actual living person who was missing large parts of their brain and had a relatively normal life. But hey why focus on the actual facts when you can just write more word salad right?

Word Salad? Is this word salad, “In most of these cases it seems much of the outer layers of the cerebral cortex are in tact.”? Do you not have an argument against that or do you know so little about the human brain that “cerebral cortex” sounds like gibberish to you? If you’re not convinced how about you try taking a lobe out of someone whose brain hasn’t been forced to adapt to extreme conditions and tell me how that experiment works out. Maybe then you’ll understand how “redundant” the brain really is.

You might as well start believing in the astrology, crystals, and energy healing. At least those interests will make you seem fun and quirky instead of just a sad debate bro.

Big “I know you are but what am I” energy. lol

You’re betraying your ignorance of how biology works and illustrating that you have absolutely no business debating this subject.

Have some humility and willingness to learn.

Efficiency is not the primary fitness function for evolution, it’s survivability.

I didn’t say it was the primary function. I guess all that talk about straw men was just projection. You don’t trust me, fine. Then what about Darwin who literally said, “Natural selection is continually trying to economize every part of the organization.” Now please go and read some introductory texts on biology before trying to explain to me why Darwin is wrong. There’s so much going on when it comes to the thermodynamics of living systems and you’re clearly not ready to have a conversation about it.

Here’s a concrete example for you of just how much of the brain isn’t actually essential for normal day to day function.

You’re baseless assuming that hydrocephalus causes the brain to lose a substantial amount of its complexity. Where is the evidence for that? In most of these cases it seems much of the outer layers of the cerebral cortex are in tact. It’s also really telling that your citation’s first source is an article titled “Is Your Brain Really Necessary” which is followed in the Journal by another article entitled “Math and Sex: Are Girls Born with Less Ability?”. But hey neuroscience hasn’t really advanced at all since 1980 right? The brain is totally redundant right? There’s no possible way a critical and discerning person such as yourself could have been taken in by junk science, right?!!

That’s literally the whole context for this thread, it just doesn’t fit with the straw man you want to argue about.

I took issue with specific statements you made that stand apart from the rest of your comment. That’s not a straw man. Although honestly this is on me. What can I expect from someone who thinks LLMs and the Human Brain are operating on similar principles? You’re so wound up in a pseudoscientific fiction there’s nothing I can do. You might as well start believing in the astrology, crystals, and energy healing. At least those interests will make you seem fun and quirky instead of just an over confident tech bro.

The straw man is you continuing to argue against equating LLMs with the functioning of the brain, something I never said here.

I’m not claiming you ever said they functioned exactly the same way. Im simply stating that you’re way off base when you claim that they appear to operate using the same principles or that all evidence suggests the human mind is nothing more than a probability machine. That’s not a straw man. You literally said those things.

There is zero evidence that all the complexity of the brain is inherent to the way our reasoning functions.

You’re betraying your own ignorance about neuroscience. The complexity of the brain is absolutely linked with its ability to reason and we have plenty of evidence to show that. The evolutionary process does not just create needless complexity if there is a more efficient path.

Again, we don’t have a full understanding of how the brain accomplishes tasks like reasoning. It may be a lot more complex than what LLMs do, or it may not be. We do not know.

This is such a silly statement especially when you’ve been claiming that both the brain and AI appear to work using the same principles. If you truly believe the mind is such a mystery then stop making that claim.

You decided to ignore that to focus on braying about tech companies and LLMs instead.

I don’t really care about your arguments concerning embodiment because they’re so beside the point when you just blowing right by the most basic principles of neuroscience.

I bring up tech companies because they’ve had a massively distorting effect on how many computer scientists think the world works. You’re not immune to it either simply because you’re a critic of capitalism. A ruthless criticism of that exists includes the very researchers whose work you’re taking at face value.

our brains appear to work on similar principles.

Sure in the same way that a horse and a motorcycle operate on similar principles and serve the same function.

Maybe try engaging with that instead of writing a wall of text arguing with a straw man.

Where the straw man? You’ve missed my point entirely. LLMs and the human mind operate on categorically different principles. All the verbiage used to describe neural network models has little to do with how the brain actually works. That’s honestly wasn’t a problem until Tech companies started purposely misusing those terms and now far too many people seem to think “AI” is something it’s not.

All the evidence suggests that our own minds are also nothing more than probability engines.

This completely understates the gulf between what we call AI and how the human brain actually works. The difference is so severe that acting as if they’re quantitatively comparable is basically pseudoscience. You might as well start claiming that we’re not far off from building a Dyson sphere just because we invented solar panels.

Most “AI” these days are built using linear feed forward networks. The brain is constructed using nonlinear recurrent networks which are can do far more with less. Now you could theoretically create the same output from a linear feed forward network but it’s way less efficient and would require many more neurons to achieve such a result. Which is wild when you consider that there are orders of magnitude more synapses in just the regions of the brain associated with language than there are parameters used in even today’s most advanced “AI” models. Now consider that human synapses rely on over a hundred qualitatively different neurotransmitters and not just a single 16-bit number. It’s also not just the scale of the signal that transmits information in a human synapse but the pattern too. Would you be surprised to know that there are a whole variety of signaling patterns neurons use? Because that’s true too. I haven’t even gotten into the differences in complexity in terms of how neurons process the information they receive. As of now there is no “AI” system that comes anywhere close to replicating that kind of complexity. It’s absurd to suggest where dealing with qualitatively similar machines here.

The squad was born in the original Trump administration so it shouldn’t be that surprising to see a return of these kinds of progressive candidates.

WhyTF do we even have primaries then! If they are not going to play by their own rules of their special little club, let’s just extend Ranked Choice Voting to cover the general and scrap the primaries altogether!

Because the US doesn’t really have a true democracy. It’s always going to be weighted against the actual interests of the people. The more success candidates the Zohran have, the more the established politicians will stack the deck against them. The good thing is that the more the game is rigged the more obvious it all becomes.

That would be nice except as it stands Americans are getting pushed out into the pacific to drown. The balance of power between working people and wealthy elites has to shift before any meaningful progress is possible.

Kind of telling to be complaining about this on a day which celebrates the end of slavery.

Why not? Based on Iran’s history, I think it’s highly improbably they would use nukes offensively. They have every reason to want to develop a nuke. It’s likely that they even have the capacity to make one. Even then, they’ve refused to. All evidence points to the fact that they genuinely want peace. All of their responses to either American or Israeli attacks have been very limited. Even their allies all seem primarily interested in self defense.

While the government may not be to your liking, having nukes is not going to prevent organic resistance. In fact, having a real deterrent against foreign military intervention ensures that the people of Iran can focus on fighting for their personal freedoms and not their very lives. In the past there have been real protest movements in favor of social reform. Now though? Iranians are demonstrating in defiance of Israel and in support of the Iranian state.

To be clear, I’m not exactly a fan of nuclear proliferation. However, in a world where the only country to ever use nukes as a weapon and their genocidal proxy are aiming to obliterate your country, having a nuclear deterrent makes everyone safer.

It could be the business was borderline insolvent and cash from the checks acted as a short term loan from Walmart.

That or he was trying to create the create the illusion of cash flow in order to get the business to qualify for certain kinds of loans. The money from the loans he could subsequently embezzled. Then if the company went bankrupt the creditors would be at a loss.

If you end up integrating LLMs in a way where it could impact patient care that’s actually pretty dangerous considering their training data includes plenty of fictional and pseudo scientific sources. That said it might be okay for medical research applications where accuracy isn’t as critical.

That’s a pretty classic Marxist understanding of how class conflict actually happens. In response to a crisis a state can either adapt or fall into chaos if it can’t. That’s essentially what happened during the new deal era and the civil war respectively. Although arguably the external threats of WWII allowed the US to adapt rather than fall apart.

I think the line between a liberal democracy and fascism is much blurrier than most people think. I suspect the transition from one to the other, going in either direction, is entirely dependent on how much internal forces threaten the ruling capitalist class.

Right now, I think the US is on the decline but hasn’t yet experienced a crisis which really threatens the power of the capitalist class. Fascists seeking power therefore need to manufacture crises in order to accumulate power. That’s where I think the US is at right now.

However, I’m not sure how well it will really work. Democratic state leaders are effectively demonstrating that the existing law enforcement structures are perfectly capable of violently cracking down on dissent. So if you’re a wealthy capitalist, why would you push your bought and paid for judges and politicians to make Trump president for life? It seems like a needlessly risky move in my opinion.

That said, we can only say that the rich will operate rationally to protect their own interests on average. Individually, they can be wildly erratic like Elon Musk has proven to be. As such, the more wealth is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, the less predictable the outcomes are.

I think you might be underestimating the number of democrats that are also war hawks who want to bomb Iran.

Vincent Bevins the author of The Jakarta Method actually wrote a book about why the protest movements of the last few decades rarely achieved their stated goals. It’s worth checking out.

Not really. The overwhelming majority of those protests were peaceful. However the media latched on to the few cases where riots broke out which is pretty much what they always do.

Yes. It was the largest protest movement in US history and it did precisely nothing to stop police brutality.

It really depends on how far both sides are willing to escalate.

Israel appears to be emboldened for a variety of reasons. Nobody is stopping their genocide. Hezbollah is on its back foot. Netanyahu sees political gain in a war with Iran. Trump is reckless enough to not reign Israel in.

However, Israel cannot wage all out war without the backing of the US. Iran knows this which is why I think their responses to past Israeli attacks have been fairly measured. These attacks are a serious escalation though and it’s hard to say how Iran may decide to respond.

If they seriously think the US is ready to back Israel in an all out war then we’re going to face consequences globally. Iran has the capacity to obliterate much of the middle east’s oil infrastructure, which the US is heavily invested in. That could cause energy prices to spike and create all kinds of downstream havoc for the global economy.