Lara_Foster comments on Anthropomorphic Optimism - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 August 2008 08:17PM

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Comment author: Lara_Foster 05 August 2008 01:23:27PM 0 points [-]

Kennaway- I meant why can't we make something that C. elegans does in the same way that C. elegans does it using it's neural information. Clearly our knowledge must be incomplete in some respect. If we could do that, then imitating not only the size, but the programming of the caterpillar would be much more feasible. At least three complex programs are obvious: 1) crawl -coordinated and changeable sinusoidal motion seems a great way to move, yet the MIT 'caterpillar' is quite laughable in comparison to the dexterity of the real thing, 2)Seek- this involves a circular motion of the head, sensing some chemical signal, and changing directions accordingly, 3) Navigate- caterpillar is skillfully able to go over, under, and around objects, correcting its path to its original without doing the weird head-twirling thing, indicating that aside from chemeoattraction, it has some sense of directional orientation, which it must have or else its motion would be a random walk with correction and not a direct march. I wonder how much of these behaviors operate independently of the brain.