Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk.
It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. Within the first hour, the foal will stand, and despite long legs, this usually works the first time. Lying down, however, is not preprogrammed. I've watched a foal circle trying to figure out how to get down from standing, and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap. Standing up quickly is essential to survival, but smoothly lying down is not.
Within a day, a newborn foal can run with the herd.
Of the mammals, most of the equines and some of the rodents (beavers) are precocial.
Pigs are, monkeys are not. It's not closely tied to evolutionary ancestry.
One of the most curious things I learned about babies is that they are born with a walking instinct, long before they actually can walk. If you hold them up, they will move their legs in a perfectly correct walking fashion. But they lack the strength and agility to keep their body up. At around 3 months this walking instinct disappears, and then at around a year we 'relearn' to walk when we have the strength and agility to hold ourselves up.
But if we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, humans would likely be walking very near immediately.
If we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, walking would be much more difficult. Notably, on flat ground we absolutely must have an upward component to our application of force with the surface - this is clearly seen in videos taken on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions. This baby on a hypothetical lower gravity world would find standing easier, yes, but not mobility. At least not once he's taken his first few trail steps.
I did enjoy the first season of the series, but then was turned off by some story arcs, but maybe I will give it a try again. Are the books more consistent?
is it true that it's a tradeoff ? the "more precocial" the less flexibility to learn new things ? on the contrary knowing less equals less assumptions, which needs more flexibility in exchange.
Would be true that what is precocial in us is the ability mimic and abstract specific patterns into general rules ?
How newborn brain works is absolutely fascinating for me. I just don't understand how is it possible.
Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information.
Human body, including brain, gets built using this information only. So our "preconfigured" neural networks are also built using this information only.
And apparently it's enough to encode complex behaviour. That's not just visible things. Brain processes a humongous amount of information, it basically supports living processes for entire body, processing miriads of sensors, adjusting all kinds of knobs for body to function properly.
I just don't understand how is it possible just from a purely bit size approach. For me, it's a mystery.
As a person who knows next to nothing about how the brain or the genes that configure it work, I tend to think of this in terms of 80s video games like River Raid. The level data for these games, if stored naively, would fill the computer's available memory many times over. So they just store a pseudorandom number generator seed along with a few other parameters. Coupled with a few rules to make the level playable, it can generate a seemingly impossible number of levels with very little stored data.
Maybe the genes just encode a few crucial rules and the rest just emerge from that.
Oh, and I know even less about how the universe works. But I tend to think of it in the same terms: Emergent phenomena stemming from simple rules à la Game of Life.
Ever since I read about Rodney Brooks and his idea of the Subsumption architecture I've been convinced that something like this is going on in our minds - likely with some other mechanisms too. It just clicks for me - I'm mostly likely completely wrong, but it's a pretty cool idea, and I've used it to create some really interesting simulations.
It somewhat makes sense if you think of it in terms of a really complicated 1.5GB metaprogram with a huge pile of conditionals that are triggered by the programs it itself writes (proteins).
The final you is made up of an incomprehensible huge number of copies of the metaprogram, running different configurations, and spitting out programs to each other which then do more stuff.
Our human brains can't really conceive of a configurable metaprogram that writes programs by interacting with itself in different configurations that it itself sets up.
There is a finite size program that can generate infinite digits of pi (in infinite time). Kolmogorov's complexity of pi is finite even when the object is infinite.
It's not very surprising that it takes a few GB of a program to encode conscious 'us'. Humbling to think about it though...
For a demonstration of Kolmogorov complexity, it's good to watch "A mind is born"[0] by lftkryo. It's only 256 bytes, but can generate over 2 minutes of complex music and video. Also, the name is appropriate for this topic :D
Nature recently posted an interesting video [1] about what causes developing hearts to have their first beat. The gist is that eventually random electrical noise triggers a propagating wave which is then continued and repeated by the cellular automation nature of heart tissue. You don't need as much software if your system is composed of emergent properties.
I think it's a wrong way to look at it. In addition to DNA information content, one should count also the complexity of the proteins and higher-level structures in the gametes.
No they don't. There is plenty of external stimuli that also serves as input, e.g. the process of raising a child and complex thoughts that may only be transferred from grown human to grown human.
Try raising a human in a barren cell without human contact or as part of a pack of wolfs and you'll see how much a human brain is built from "DNA only".
Yeah compared to animals we have a lot of extra bootstrapping outside of physics/chemistry alone via culture and stored information similar to how cell DNA bootsraps via physics, human mind boostraps via stored information in human "network" (talking, internet, books) after being born.
Certainly, and I don't think anyone really doubts this.
Still, people are sometimes surprised by how DNA may affect more parts of behavior than they previously thought.
Not necessarily by directly coding for the behavior. In many cases, the DNA will just modulate how we learn from the environment. And if the environment is fairly constant, observed behavior can correlate more strongly with DNA that one might have expected.
Have you looked into the amazing things people do with procedural generation with only a tiny bit (kilobytes, often) of source code? My intuition is that this is vaguely analogous.
Here's an example from 2003, where the entire source code, from music to visuals, fits in 64 kb: https://youtu.be/HtJvSvQnep0
Well, nature has a big advantage over us in that it doesn't need to "make sense" of that code :). So it can, for example, do crazy reusage optimization patterns. A "subroutine" that is used in one place could also be part of a "data piece" of another part. A "header" part can also double down as a "validator" of another part. Doesn't need to make sense, it just needs to work. The only limits are the laws of physics. I would not even call it compression at this point. It's more like heavily optimized spaghetti code.
I don't think human DNA generally codes for the behavior derectly. Rather, DNA can code for how the brain learns from incoming data streams.
If the brain naturally tunes into some sources or patterns of input rather than others, it may learn very quickly from the preferred sources. And as long as those sources carry signals that are fairly invariant over time, it may seem like those signals are instinctual.
For instance, it may appear that humans learn to build relationships with kin (both parents and children) and friends, to build revenue streams (or gather food in more primitive societies) and reproduce.
Instead, the brain may come preloaded to generate brain chemicals when detecting certain stimuli. Like oxytocin near caregivers (as children) or small fluffy things (as adults). When exposed to parents/babies, this triggers. But it can also trigger around toys, pets, adopted children, etc.
Friendship-seeking can be, in part, related to seretonin-production in certain social situations. But may be hijacked by social media.
Revenue-seeking behavior can come from dopamin-stimulus from certain goal-optimzing situations. But may also be triggered by video games.
And the best known part: Reproductive behavior may primarily come from sexual arousal, and hijacked by porn or birth control.
Each of the above may be coded by a limited number of bytes of DNA, and it's really the learning algorithm combined with the data stream of natural environments that causes specific behaviors.
A lot of animals are born "hardcoded" with most of the instincts they need to survive, so some behaviors are clearly innate.
And "how the brain learns from the incoming data streams" is, in part, driven a set of behaviors too.
A baby's eyes are trying to detect and track certain preset features long before the primary visual cortex learns to make sense of them. That's a behavior, and it exists for a reason. As the baby develops, the baby would try to seek out certain experiences to learn from them, which is a behavior that exists for a reason too.
There's a hypothesis that certain mental disorders are caused by this innate learning process going off course, but it's just a hypothesis, of the kind that's hard to prove conclusively.
> Human body, including brain, gets built using [DNA] information only
I think there is a good chance there are other substantial information transfers from one generation to the next. The total genome of all that gut bacteria is orders of magnitude larger for example.
It’s not foolproof, but I can easily transmit a huge amount of information to someone by saying “Titanic prow king of the world scene.” In seven words, which could be fewer if I were really trying, the recipient has a moving image and sound in their head (as long as they’re the right age group- every example I could think of made me feel old).
Well that was transmitting "a pointer" more than anything else, but yes I agree that nature could be doing the same thing. Not hardcode behaviors, but certain chemical reactions to some "pointers" that are totally environment related. Arachnophobia apparently could have a genetic component, so there could be a "spider pointer" somewhere.
Well technically yeah but consider that it takes ~9 months for the product to function without constant life support, at least a few years until majority of the basic functions work and ~15 years until it is fully functional.
9 months is caused by head size to how far you can stretch the exit ratio. In a way, we are born prematurely, to lessen the probability of death in childbirth (for both the mother and child).
If compressed, then there is room for more. (but afaik much is rather unused)
And for me I cannot say, that life is not a mystery to me, but this specific part I have less trouble with imagining it. As little code can create complex worlds and simulate them. (a minecraft wasm build for example is just 14 mb, but fully working)
I think you're underestimating the role epigenetic information plays. 1.5 GiB encodes every protein used to build us, sure, but which genes get switched on when and how are sensitive to factors not encoded for in DNA, including the environment of the cell and the fundamental chemistry of biology. Epigenetic information is hard to capture but can profoundly affect how an organism develops; cloned cats, for instance, may show a vastly different fur color and pattern from the original, to cite just a highly visible example.
The even crazier thing is that DNA does not encode any of that. Behaviour and morphology is not directly encoded in there, you'll only find recipes for proteins. The zigote will divide into billions of cells that share that same recipe book. Depending on the electric and chemical signals surrounding cells are sending, individual cells get their "personalities" or function. This cell colony forms an organism which emerges from the sum of morphology and behaviour of all cells. But you'll find no recipe for an arm in DNA, it is the result of the work of the collective intelligence that is your body.
I'm not sure in what sense there isn't a recipe for arms in our DNA. To me, it seems the DNA does encode that stuff, but in a highly compressed format that is then "unzipped" through the laws of physics and biology into a living and breathing being with arms.
I mean, the information has to be in there somewhere, right?
For me, it's one of the last true mysteries! We've figured out damned near everything else, nothing has this level of "unknown" to it.
It's simply mind-blowing to me how such a tiny block of data can encode such high-level behaviours so indirectly!
Genes code for proteins, not synapse weights!
Those proteins influence cell division, specialisation, and growth through a complex interplay of thousands of distinct signal chemicals.
Then those cells assemble into a brain, apparently "randomly" with only crude, coarse patterns that are at best statistical in nature. Some cells are longer, some shorter, some with more interconnects, some with less, but no two perfectly alike.
Then, then, somehow... waves hands... magically this encodes that "wide hips are sexually attractive" in a way that turns up fully a decade later, well into the "pre-training" phase!!!
What... the... %#%@!
How does that work!? How does any of that work?
Y'all work in AI, ML, or adjacent to it. You know how hard it is to train a model to learn to detect anything even with thousands of examples!
PS: Human DNA contains only 750 MB (62 billion bits) of information, of which maybe 0.1% to 1% directly code for brain structure and the like. Let's be generous and say 10%. That is just 75 MB that somehow makes us scared of snakes and spiders, afraid of heights, attracted to the opposite sex, capable of speech, enjoy dancing, understand on instinct what is a "bad" or "good" smell, etc, etc...
The brain absolutely and biology in general when one starts digging.
Discovery of DNA was positioned as a "Biology: Mission Accomplished" - it's far from true. We don't understand all of DNA and epigenetics. We don't have a good understanding of how life began.
Back to the brain, it's power consumption to capabilities, weight to capabilities is just insane. The link to brain size and intelligence is a mystery as well - jumping spiders, octopus, corvids, parrots ...
There is still a big discussion of nature vs nurture. Did not follow the subject you mention but many things can be in fact just learned.
Also, as mentioned previously, there is more than the DNA at work - like at least epigenetics, but I guess the fetus is influenced a lot by the mother's body.
Epigenetics and mother's body influence feel - to me - like magic more or less the same. And the nature vs nurture regarding tastes developed either early or later on, well, as a father of 2 siblings who are radically different in certain tastes, I don't really know where I would have nurtured them into being different. I try to introspect a lot on that, maybe we did something but honestly... I don't think so.
This is why I’m so insistent that LLMs aren’t the best way (if they are a way at all) to getting to human level intelligence. The maximum amount of energy and input data required for training and inference is many orders of magnitude less than we are currently using.
Wow! Some years ago I was thinking about reasons for why people on ADHD/autism spectrum are different.
First heard somewhere (don't remember where or exact idea) that neurons initially form groups and these groups then perform functions. This led to an idea that if someone's brain sacrificed some "copy other primate" groups for "pattern recognition" groups, you would get a unit with higher IQ for non social use, without changing the brain to be more effective in general. This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking" tendency or "not seeing forest for the trees" tendency in autist spectrum folks.
On another occasion, it occurred to me that regular brain run / loop consists of a short reality check and longer flow state. If there are too many reality checks, you get anxiety and can't work effectively. OTOH, too little realty checks and you get stuck on non important things. At the same time, impairing this "check to flow" balance in a safe (non anxiety provoking) environment would result in an individual that could perform the kind of deeper work with results not achievable by not modified individuals.
Have watched 50+ h of psychology lectures, but don't have any formal knowledge on these things so please take it with a grain of salt.
Edit: myself I'm formally on ADHD, and in personal opinion also on Autism spectrum. Just learned to "act normal" very well by the time I got into diagnosis.
> This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking".
The concept of envy/malice/insecurity and people lying to your face and stabbing you in the back was completely foreign to me up to the age of 36.
Only in the face of overwhelming evidence and harm to myself did it all click.
Lately I'm seeing myself in this junior dev I'm mentoring, I'm strongly suspecting he's on the spectrum (that's why he was rejected initially from an internship, despite my input that he'd make a great dev, which proved 100% accurate) -- the guy is totally happy in his technical world, jabs and callous remarks from others completely go over his head.
A lot of people on the spectrum simply have a deep interest in things and systems. I could be wrong, but I think some of those spindle neurons and circuitry made to model others just get used in some people to get systems.
I often get frustrated because people seem to want to learn HOW a technical insight and it's impossible for me to tell them HOW I got to that conclusion, other than I deeply immersed myself in it and it just clicks.
I get the same awe when my wife makes jokes about a behavior of mine or someone else and I can see just how deep, funny and plausible her whole internal model of others is; and sometimes how wrong it is, just like my internal model of a system sometimes is. Alas I can change my internal models of systems on a whim.
Without reading the article, the headline, taken at face value, should come with the caveat that human brain is preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world we've evolved to inhabit. Modern industrial civilization is something different. I wonder to what degree common mental disorders would count as disorders outside the highly unnatural environments and systems we've built for ourselves.
I feel like people on the autism spectrum would still be worse off in a pre-civilization pre-agrarian world, but ADHD would make pretty much no difference.
I've always found Retinal Waves[1] interesting. During development of the visual system, there are spontaneous bursts of activity without external stimuli, helping the synapses to organize properly.
In my layman's view, it's like hallucinating shapes that are important to learn. Very similar to the "priming" described in the article, but easier to visualize (literally).
Maybe I’m overlooking something, but wouldn’t this be similar to an instinct that is preprogrammed from natural selection? For example, sea turtles know they need to move from the beach toward the ocean, and spiders know how to spin their species specific web pattern. No-one teaches the sea turtles or spiders how to do this. Wouldn't this be the same for our thoughts and thinking?
This seems like it was proven ages ago with the no-free-lunch theorem.
Humans could not learn to function unless their brains encode a useful prior for learning about the world. That prior means "preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world".
The short form of the no-free-lunch theorem is that if there is no prior (i.e. all possible universes are equally likely) then for any learning problem P there are an equal number of universes that learning system A will outdo learning system B on that problem.
If not all universes are equally likely, one learning system can vastly outdo another or even most other learning systems. Not equally likely is the assumption built into brains. Without that, you can't learn effectively.
So the biology is just implementation of that general principle. The details of how that implementation works are interesting, but whether we are preconfigured for learning was never in question.
IMO TFA doesn't map too cleanly onto the concept of "bootloader" (nor "microcode" for that matter). But I guess the question is, as always, can you unlock it.
One could ask the same question about any trait of any organism ... and the answer is always the same. Do you have a problem with birds being able to build nests specific to their species, or cuckoo chicks instinctively pushing the eggs of the host species out of the nest? The answer is one of the best understood facts of science, and the basis of all of biology. Why would anyone expect the human brain not to be "preconfigured" by the billions of years of environmental forces that produced it?
It's not "chosen". It is evolution. Your DNA has the metaprogram that sets up all the programs in your brain. Most of them are learning programs but you also have hardcoded programs on how to perform your bodily functions, how and when to cry, and how to suck on a tit.
Anthropomorphic language about evolution is simply a convenient metaphor that eases communication ... it has no metaphysical implications.
> You guys have entered the domain of philosophy a long time ago and didn't realize it, thinking it is still empirical science.
This ad hominem sweeping generalization about people you know nothing about is so casually expressed while being so extraordinarily arrogant. Among other fallacies packed into it is a radically false dichotomy.
It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. Within the first hour, the foal will stand, and despite long legs, this usually works the first time. Lying down, however, is not preprogrammed. I've watched a foal circle trying to figure out how to get down from standing, and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap. Standing up quickly is essential to survival, but smoothly lying down is not. Within a day, a newborn foal can run with the herd.
Of the mammals, most of the equines and some of the rodents (beavers) are precocial. Pigs are, monkeys are not. It's not closely tied to evolutionary ancestry.
But if we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, humans would likely be walking very near immediately.
They have humans growing up on Mars, the asteroid belt, moons. Anyone who doesn’t grow up on earth cannot go there without extreme gravity training.
But IMHO, series have done a really good job overall. Given how nearly impossible it is to simulate micro-gravity, or other advanced technology.
That trade has an extreme genetic advantage when other animals see you as their succulent mains on the a la carte exotic wildlife menu.
Would be true that what is precocial in us is the ability mimic and abstract specific patterns into general rules ?
Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information.
Human body, including brain, gets built using this information only. So our "preconfigured" neural networks are also built using this information only.
And apparently it's enough to encode complex behaviour. That's not just visible things. Brain processes a humongous amount of information, it basically supports living processes for entire body, processing miriads of sensors, adjusting all kinds of knobs for body to function properly.
I just don't understand how is it possible just from a purely bit size approach. For me, it's a mystery.
Maybe the genes just encode a few crucial rules and the rest just emerge from that.
Oh, and I know even less about how the universe works. But I tend to think of it in the same terms: Emergent phenomena stemming from simple rules à la Game of Life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture
There is a finite size program that can generate infinite digits of pi (in infinite time). Kolmogorov's complexity of pi is finite even when the object is infinite.
It's not very surprising that it takes a few GB of a program to encode conscious 'us'. Humbling to think about it though...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8
[1]: https://youtu.be/SIMS2h5QsZU
No they don't. There is plenty of external stimuli that also serves as input, e.g. the process of raising a child and complex thoughts that may only be transferred from grown human to grown human.
Try raising a human in a barren cell without human contact or as part of a pack of wolfs and you'll see how much a human brain is built from "DNA only".
Still, people are sometimes surprised by how DNA may affect more parts of behavior than they previously thought.
Not necessarily by directly coding for the behavior. In many cases, the DNA will just modulate how we learn from the environment. And if the environment is fairly constant, observed behavior can correlate more strongly with DNA that one might have expected.
Here's an example from 2003, where the entire source code, from music to visuals, fits in 64 kb: https://youtu.be/HtJvSvQnep0
Here's a good gallery of such demos: https://64k-scene.github.io
Well, nature has a big advantage over us in that it doesn't need to "make sense" of that code :). So it can, for example, do crazy reusage optimization patterns. A "subroutine" that is used in one place could also be part of a "data piece" of another part. A "header" part can also double down as a "validator" of another part. Doesn't need to make sense, it just needs to work. The only limits are the laws of physics. I would not even call it compression at this point. It's more like heavily optimized spaghetti code.
If the brain naturally tunes into some sources or patterns of input rather than others, it may learn very quickly from the preferred sources. And as long as those sources carry signals that are fairly invariant over time, it may seem like those signals are instinctual.
For instance, it may appear that humans learn to build relationships with kin (both parents and children) and friends, to build revenue streams (or gather food in more primitive societies) and reproduce.
Instead, the brain may come preloaded to generate brain chemicals when detecting certain stimuli. Like oxytocin near caregivers (as children) or small fluffy things (as adults). When exposed to parents/babies, this triggers. But it can also trigger around toys, pets, adopted children, etc.
Friendship-seeking can be, in part, related to seretonin-production in certain social situations. But may be hijacked by social media.
Revenue-seeking behavior can come from dopamin-stimulus from certain goal-optimzing situations. But may also be triggered by video games.
And the best known part: Reproductive behavior may primarily come from sexual arousal, and hijacked by porn or birth control.
Each of the above may be coded by a limited number of bytes of DNA, and it's really the learning algorithm combined with the data stream of natural environments that causes specific behaviors.
And "how the brain learns from the incoming data streams" is, in part, driven a set of behaviors too.
A baby's eyes are trying to detect and track certain preset features long before the primary visual cortex learns to make sense of them. That's a behavior, and it exists for a reason. As the baby develops, the baby would try to seek out certain experiences to learn from them, which is a behavior that exists for a reason too.
There's a hypothesis that certain mental disorders are caused by this innate learning process going off course, but it's just a hypothesis, of the kind that's hard to prove conclusively.
I think there is a good chance there are other substantial information transfers from one generation to the next. The total genome of all that gut bacteria is orders of magnitude larger for example.
It’s not foolproof, but I can easily transmit a huge amount of information to someone by saying “Titanic prow king of the world scene.” In seven words, which could be fewer if I were really trying, the recipient has a moving image and sound in their head (as long as they’re the right age group- every example I could think of made me feel old).
Well that was transmitting "a pointer" more than anything else, but yes I agree that nature could be doing the same thing. Not hardcode behaviors, but certain chemical reactions to some "pointers" that are totally environment related. Arachnophobia apparently could have a genetic component, so there could be a "spider pointer" somewhere.
Talk about compile time.
If compressed, then there is room for more. (but afaik much is rather unused)
And for me I cannot say, that life is not a mystery to me, but this specific part I have less trouble with imagining it. As little code can create complex worlds and simulate them. (a minecraft wasm build for example is just 14 mb, but fully working)
I mean, the information has to be in there somewhere, right?
For me, it's one of the last true mysteries! We've figured out damned near everything else, nothing has this level of "unknown" to it.
It's simply mind-blowing to me how such a tiny block of data can encode such high-level behaviours so indirectly!
Genes code for proteins, not synapse weights!
Those proteins influence cell division, specialisation, and growth through a complex interplay of thousands of distinct signal chemicals.
Then those cells assemble into a brain, apparently "randomly" with only crude, coarse patterns that are at best statistical in nature. Some cells are longer, some shorter, some with more interconnects, some with less, but no two perfectly alike.
Then, then, somehow... waves hands... magically this encodes that "wide hips are sexually attractive" in a way that turns up fully a decade later, well into the "pre-training" phase!!!
What... the... %#%@!
How does that work!? How does any of that work?
Y'all work in AI, ML, or adjacent to it. You know how hard it is to train a model to learn to detect anything even with thousands of examples!
PS: Human DNA contains only 750 MB (62 billion bits) of information, of which maybe 0.1% to 1% directly code for brain structure and the like. Let's be generous and say 10%. That is just 75 MB that somehow makes us scared of snakes and spiders, afraid of heights, attracted to the opposite sex, capable of speech, enjoy dancing, understand on instinct what is a "bad" or "good" smell, etc, etc...
Discovery of DNA was positioned as a "Biology: Mission Accomplished" - it's far from true. We don't understand all of DNA and epigenetics. We don't have a good understanding of how life began.
Back to the brain, it's power consumption to capabilities, weight to capabilities is just insane. The link to brain size and intelligence is a mystery as well - jumping spiders, octopus, corvids, parrots ...
Also, as mentioned previously, there is more than the DNA at work - like at least epigenetics, but I guess the fetus is influenced a lot by the mother's body.
However think about birds. They lay eggs. So there's no direct connection between mother body and child body. Yet it works somehow...
First heard somewhere (don't remember where or exact idea) that neurons initially form groups and these groups then perform functions. This led to an idea that if someone's brain sacrificed some "copy other primate" groups for "pattern recognition" groups, you would get a unit with higher IQ for non social use, without changing the brain to be more effective in general. This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking" tendency or "not seeing forest for the trees" tendency in autist spectrum folks.
On another occasion, it occurred to me that regular brain run / loop consists of a short reality check and longer flow state. If there are too many reality checks, you get anxiety and can't work effectively. OTOH, too little realty checks and you get stuck on non important things. At the same time, impairing this "check to flow" balance in a safe (non anxiety provoking) environment would result in an individual that could perform the kind of deeper work with results not achievable by not modified individuals.
Have watched 50+ h of psychology lectures, but don't have any formal knowledge on these things so please take it with a grain of salt.
Edit: myself I'm formally on ADHD, and in personal opinion also on Autism spectrum. Just learned to "act normal" very well by the time I got into diagnosis.
The concept of envy/malice/insecurity and people lying to your face and stabbing you in the back was completely foreign to me up to the age of 36. Only in the face of overwhelming evidence and harm to myself did it all click.
Lately I'm seeing myself in this junior dev I'm mentoring, I'm strongly suspecting he's on the spectrum (that's why he was rejected initially from an internship, despite my input that he'd make a great dev, which proved 100% accurate) -- the guy is totally happy in his technical world, jabs and callous remarks from others completely go over his head.
A lot of people on the spectrum simply have a deep interest in things and systems. I could be wrong, but I think some of those spindle neurons and circuitry made to model others just get used in some people to get systems.
I often get frustrated because people seem to want to learn HOW a technical insight and it's impossible for me to tell them HOW I got to that conclusion, other than I deeply immersed myself in it and it just clicks. I get the same awe when my wife makes jokes about a behavior of mine or someone else and I can see just how deep, funny and plausible her whole internal model of others is; and sometimes how wrong it is, just like my internal model of a system sometimes is. Alas I can change my internal models of systems on a whim.
In my layman's view, it's like hallucinating shapes that are important to learn. Very similar to the "priming" described in the article, but easier to visualize (literally).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinal_waves
Humans could not learn to function unless their brains encode a useful prior for learning about the world. That prior means "preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world".
The short form of the no-free-lunch theorem is that if there is no prior (i.e. all possible universes are equally likely) then for any learning problem P there are an equal number of universes that learning system A will outdo learning system B on that problem.
If not all universes are equally likely, one learning system can vastly outdo another or even most other learning systems. Not equally likely is the assumption built into brains. Without that, you can't learn effectively.
So the biology is just implementation of that general principle. The details of how that implementation works are interesting, but whether we are preconfigured for learning was never in question.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/innateness-history/#PlaAr...
who is doing it? why the observed instructions are chosen?
You guys have entered the domain of philosophy a long time ago and didn't realize it, thinking it is still empirical science.
> You guys have entered the domain of philosophy a long time ago and didn't realize it, thinking it is still empirical science.
This ad hominem sweeping generalization about people you know nothing about is so casually expressed while being so extraordinarily arrogant. Among other fallacies packed into it is a radically false dichotomy.
P.S. Oh dear ... -15 karma, numerous dead comments, and "philosophy" like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30359825
Well, I won't be engaging again.