Category: Life Ideas
-
An New Law Needed?
On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems - by Michael L. Wong, et al. (2023) Systems of many interacting agents display an increase in diversity, distribution, and/or patterned behavior when numerous configurations of the system are subject to selective pressure. The universe is replete with complex evolving systems, but the existing macroscopic physical laws…
-
Generating meaning – AI²: predicting wor(l)ds
I would like to quote some of the great insights and statements from the opinion by G. Pezzulo, T. Parr, P. Cisek, A Clark, and K. Friston published in TICS: “Generating meaning: active inference and the scope and limits of passive AI“. Does ChatGPT ‘understand‘ what it talks about in the way we do, or…
-
“don’t hate the players, change the game” – The dark side of competition in AI
Competition. It’s a fundamental part of human nature. […] When it’s done right, it can drive us to incredible feats in sports and innovation, […] healthy competition, because even though individual companies might come and go, in the long run, the game between them creates win-win outcomes where everyone benefits in the end. But sometimes…
-
Interoception and Active Inference for mental health
Interoception refers to the process by which the nervous system senses and integrates signals originating from within the body, providing a momentary mapping of the body’s internal landscape and its relationship to the outside world. Active inference is based on the premise that afferent sensory input to the brain is constantly shaped and modified by…
-
Human society is currently undergoing a socio-cultural ETI
An evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI) occurs when a previously independent organism becomes a lower level unit within a higher hierarchical level (for example, cells in an organism, ants in a colony). Based on archaeological and historical accounts from the last 12000 years, this article “Human societal development: is it an evolutionary transition in individuality?”…
-
EXplore-versus-EXploit problems
Trade-offs between producing costly movements for gathering information (‘explore’) and using previously acquired information to achieve a goal (‘exploit’) arise in a wide variety of problems, including foraging, reinforcement learning and sensorimotor control. Determining the optimal balance between exploration and exploitation is computationally intractable, necessitating heuristic solutions. In “Mode switching in organisms for solving explore-versus-exploit…
