elharo comments on Rationality Quotes July 2013 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Vaniver 02 July 2013 04:21PM

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Comment author: elharo 03 July 2013 10:26:02AM 1 point [-]

I’ll mention what I’ll call the “radio theory” of brains. Imagine that you are a Kalahari Bushman and that you stumble upon a transistor radio in the sand. You might pick it up, twiddle the knobs, and suddenly, to your surprise, hear voices streaming out of this strange little box. If you’re curious and scientifically minded, you might try to understand what is going on. You might pry off the back cover to discover a little nest of wires. Now let’s say you begin a careful, scientific study of what causes the voices. You notice that each time you pull out the green wire, the voices stop. When you put the wire back on its contact, the voices begin again. The same goes for the red wire. Yanking out the black wire causes the voices to get garbled, and removing the yellow wire reduces the volume to a whisper. You step carefully through all the combinations, and you come to a clear conclusion: the voices depend entirely on the integrity of the circuitry. Change the circuitry and you damage the voices.

Proud of your new discoveries, you devote your life to developing a science of the way in which certain configurations of wires create the existence of magical voices. At some point, a young person asks you how some simple loops of electrical signals can engender music and conversations, and you admit that you don’t know—but you insist that your science is about to crack that problem at any moment.

Your conclusions are limited by the fact that you know absolutely nothing about radio waves and, more generally, electromagnetic radiation. The fact that there are structures in distant cities called radio towers—which send signals by perturbing invisible waves that travel at the speed of light—is so foreign to you that you could not even dream it up. You can’t taste radio waves, you can’t see them, you can’t smell them, and you don’t yet have any pressing reason to be creative enough to fantasize about them. And if you did dream of invisible radio waves that carry voices, who could you convince of your hypothesis? You have no technology to demonstrate the existence of the waves, and everyone justifiably points out that the onus is on you to convince them.

So you would become a radio materialist. You would conclude that somehow the right configuration of wires engenders classical music and intelligent conversation. You would not realize that you’re missing an enormous piece of the puzzle.

I’m not asserting that the brain is like a radio—that is, that we’re receptacles picking up signals from elsewhere, and that our neural circuitry needs to be in place to do so—but I am pointing out that it could be true. There is nothing in our current science that rules this out. Knowing as little as we do at this point in history, we must retain concepts like this in the large filing cabinet of ideas that we cannot yet rule in favor of or against. So even though few working scientists will design experiments around eccentric hypotheses, ideas always need to be proposed and nurtured as possibilities until evidence weighs in one way or another.

--David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, Random House, pp. 221-222

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 July 2013 09:55:48PM 29 points [-]

If you could damage wires in a certain way and make the voices forget how to pronounce nouns, eliminate their short-term but not long-term memory, damage their color words, and so on, you would have a solid case for the wires doing internal, functional information-processing in causal arrangements which permitted the final output to be permuted in ways that corresponded to perturbing particular causal nodes. In much the same way, a calculator might be thought to be a radio if you are ignorant of its internals, but if you have a hypothesis that the calculator contains a binary half-adder and you can perturb particular transistors and see wrong answers in a way that matches what the half-adder hypothesis predicts for perturbing that transistor, you have shown the answers are generated internally rather than externally. In a world where we can directly monitor a cat's thalamus and reconstruct part of its visual processing field, the radio hypothesis is not just privileging a hypothesis without evidence, it is frantically clinging to a hypothesis with strong contrary evidence in denial of a hypothesis with detailed confirming evidence.

Comment author: Pfft 06 July 2013 12:44:22AM 4 points [-]

(I don't think the cat experiments are very conclusive here. As far as I know, the functions that have been identified in the early visual system are things like edge detection and motion detection. But such functions are used for video compression. So not only could a radio set perform them in principle, an ordinary digital TV set already does.)

Comment author: BloodyShrimp 03 July 2013 11:01:52PM 6 points [-]

I don't think this is quite where the analogy was. The brain's information-processing features you describe seem to be analogous to the radio's volume and clarity... it seems Eagleman was trying to compare the radio's content not to the brain's content, but to consciousness or something. At least, that's the best steelmanning attempt I've got.

Comment author: DanArmak 03 July 2013 07:04:30PM *  15 points [-]

This isn't an ancient pre-scientific text; it was written in 2011. I completely disagree with the claim that:

I’m not asserting that the brain is like a radio—that is, that we’re receptacles picking up signals from elsewhere, and that our neural circuitry needs to be in place to do so—but I am pointing out that it could be true. There is nothing in our current science that rules this out. Knowing as little as we do at this point in history, we must retain concepts like this in the large filing cabinet of ideas that we cannot yet rule in favor of or against.

There's also nothing in our current science that rules out a teapot orbiting the sun. That does not mean a hypothesis with no evidence for it should be elevated to the level of serious discussion.

There is no reason to think the brain could possibly be receiving "marching orders" from elsewhere, and we absolutely should discard this concept and rule firmly against it. And the same goes for any other equally unfounded ideas that this is an allegory for.

ideas always need to be proposed and nurtured as possibilities until evidence weighs in one way or another.

No, because there is an infinity of ideas you could consider. You must wait until evidence weighs sufficiently in favor of some one idea to elevate it above the others, before considering it at all.

Comment author: mwengler 20 July 2013 04:06:29PM 2 points [-]

Some of the things you would discover would include that in some locations the voices don't show up. Investigating that, you would find that deep in caves they were gone. If you had access to the materials radios are made from, you would discover that in a metal box the voices don't show up. You would infer from this that the voices are coming from outside and are somehow picked up by the box. You might also discover by putting pieces of radios together differently that you could get your own voice to come out of the speaker by hooking up two speakers in series with the power source.

My point is that you would learn a lot more about what is really going on then this long quote suggests.

Comment author: Martin-2 09 July 2013 03:32:12AM 0 points [-]

I like the premise. Last month's Douglas Hofstadter quote comes to mind. Some problems:

At some point, a young person asks you how some simple loops of electrical signals can engender music and conversations... you insist that your science is about to crack that problem at any moment.

Why would I insist this? I don't even know how the electrical signals (the what?!) change the volume. I just know how to make the wires change the volume, and I know how to make them change the music too.

You would conclude that somehow the right configuration of wires engenders classical music and intelligent conversation. You would not realize that you’re missing an enormous piece of the puzzle.

Some inquisitive Bushman I turned out to be. This is still a very magical radio.

Also, I think a clever Bushman could figure out that the radio is transmitting sounds from somewhere else. It is the reality after all so there are clues. He hears a person talking when no one's there; the circuitry is too simple to write symphonies and simulate most human discussion; the radio doesn't work in caves...

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