[FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

[Marcus Daniels]

Dogs and humans share 84% of their DNA, so that almost sounds plausible on the face of it.  However, humans have about 16 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex but the whole human genome is only about 3 billion base pairs, and only about 30 million of it codes for proteins.   This seems to me to say that learning is more important than inheritance of "theories" if you must insist on using that word.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Tuesday, December 1, 2020 9:06 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

Sorry. That wasn't my intention. Humans and dogs are nothing but machines (for this thread anyway). The point I'm trying to make is that the machinery inside your dog *is* a theory. The reason your dog understands the world in a similar way to other dogs is because dogs have similar machinery, similar theories. The difference between humans and dogs is that they have different machinery, different theories. The difference between an AI and a human is ... wait for it ... different theories. 8^D

On 12/1/20 9:00 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> You seem to be implying that humans are somehow different than machines.    That they have something like Chomsky's language acquisition device which is novel in ways that humans don't understand well enough to implement.    My dog learns all sorts of conditional probabilities.    For example, she knows she can paw on the garage door in the evening and find me on that conveyor belt machine thing.   She knows or at least reacts to a correlation between me grabbing my wallet and driving to the dog park.  She knows that food is available immediately after that trip.  These networks of relations are the sort of structures that were learned in my copy deprotection example.   Just deeper networks with somewhat more precise perceptual cues.   I'm pretty sure my dog has no time or interest in theory.   There are balls to chase, and delivery people to scare off.    I would even say my dog performs experiments when she slams a toy down in front of me to see if it is a good time to play.

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