On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 9:05 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 8/31/2014 9:36 PM, Russell Standish wrote: > >> On Mon, Sep 01, 2014 at 12:24:37PM +1200, LizR wrote: >> >>> As per what I was saying about Watson (or whatever it's called), the baby >>> needs to be immersed in an environment in order to develop any form of >>> consciousness beyond the rudimentary raw feels provided by nature - that >>> is, it needs to be educated by interaction with the environment, and with >>> other people (i.e. assimilate culture). >>> >>> This actually supplies a good reason for why we should find ourselves >> in a regular, lawlike universe. We can get by with a smaller genome, >> and learn the rest of the stuff that makes up our mental life, which >> is a more likely scenario (even evolutionary speaking) than having a >> large genome directly encoding our knowledge. >> >> Of course, that is only possible if in fact the environment is regular >> enough to be learnable. >> > > So that's why Amoeba dubia has a genome 200x bigger than ours? It must > live in a very irregular environment. > One of the main problems with genetic programming is bloat control: how to prevent the system from generating larger and larger programs. This is not an easy problem to solve. A friend of mine did a PhD just on this topic. One of the tricky things that happens is that, even if you discourage bloat with naive approaches -- e.g. have program size negatively impact fitness -- you are fighting adaption. Program chunks can find ways to survive, for example by making their own removal too destructive. In nature there are natural incentives against bloat. Mutations in gene transmission are a big one: the larger the (meaningful) DNA, the more likely it is that it will fail to transmit due to mutational noise in the channel. On the other hand, if organisms become too good at fighting the noise in the channel they lose adaptability. So we get into "evolution of evolvability" issues. So it's not so surprising that all sorts of weird fluctuations are seen in nature, as the case of a single cell organism with a much larger DNA than our own. I don't think we have the tools to fully understand this level of complexity yet. Telmo. > > Brent > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
