[ExI] predictive neurons?

Mike Dougherty msd001 at gmail.com
Fri Jan 29 14:52:18 UTC 2010


On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 9:32 PM, Spencer Campbell <lacertilian at gmail.com> wrote:
> Nice catch, Mike. And, is that a preliminary hypothesis toward
> explaining precognition that I see you forming there?

yes.  maybe not "explaining" as much as "reserving possibility"

I've been reading about genetic algorithms as a computational method
of problem solving.  What I find really fascinating is that each
phenotype has almost no intelligence at all - the eventual 'solution'
is simply the luckiest of the unintelligent phenotypes that is
discovered to answer the fitness function better than any of its
siblings or ancestors.  It's not so much that nature necessarily has a
use for intelligence, because it mostly employs brute force over a
long time.  If the process of natural selection has any primary goal,
we probably won't know what it is - however, an obvious subgoal is
survival (and propagation).  So despite the relative rarity of life in
the universe, where is is known to exist it flourishes in a surprising
range of scenarios.  If there is any evolved (discovered by dumb-luck)
predictive or anticipatory ability in humans, it seems to me that
there would potentially be some chance for it to manifest in
apparently novel situations.  If a better predictive modeling ability
(precog) confers any advantage to those who have it, then eventually
we might all be using it.  Arguably, mathematical modeling as
offloaded to high performance computers is an extension of our ability
to rationally solve problems - then yes, we already are predicting
behaviors with high degree of success and accuracy.  "People who
bought ABC also bought DEF" is an automated hypothesis that tests the
correlation between products and behaviors of people who buy them.
This kind of analysis is being done everywhere, every day, all day.
(ex: http://thenumerati.net/index.cfm?catID=18)



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