A Heretic's Blog
“Quantity has a quality all its own” is a quote often attributed to Joseph Stalin. Recent results in AI show how this works for thinking. Here is a short video from OpenAI. OpenAI is a commercial company and not, as the name suggests, an open source collaboration. Nevertheless, the video shows how current AI systems … Read more
The doctor-patient relationship is based on specific decisions. Alice is sick. So what’s on her mind when she visits the hospital? Firstly, she wants a diagnosis. What is wrong with her? Then she wants to know the best treatment to reduce her symptoms and return her to health. Perhaps she hopes for a cure or … Read more
This post was going to be a more detailed explanation, but it rapidly became too complicated. So let’s make it short and simple. Probability is about what we know and what we don’t. It is a measure of information and uncertainty. There’s too much philosophy floating about. We will start with Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword. … Read more
Before we begin, this is about a great historical experiment. It says nothing about the efficacy and utility of vaccines. Don’t confuse science with technology: vaccination is a technology. We can accept Pasteur’s experiment on anthrax in sheep while understanding that it doesn’t apply elsewhere. Specifically, it doesn’t validate or invalidate any other vaccine, in … Read more
The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does. Let’s take a trivial example. What is this for: A radiator has one dominating characteristic; it gets hot. Its purpose is to heat the room. Now, something a little more demanding. What’s the purpose of this cheetah’s behaviour: It’s hunting. The purpose of its current behaviour … Read more
Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system. The good regulator idea applies to all real-world systems, that is, all systems that manage others or are self-regulating. An organism needs a model of its environment to survive. Animals, or other organisms, with the best models, have an advantage. For example, … Read more
Imagine a world where organisms are intelligent. Clever like a smartphone rather than human genius, which is in short supply. We are all becoming familiar with artificial intelligence, its power and its limitations. When organisms have these properties, the fashionable and much-idolised genes become a low-level memory needed to generate proteins. By contrast, cells are … Read more
When the complexity of the environment exceeds the capacity of a system, the environment will dominate and ultimately destroy it Norbert Wiener coined the term cybernetics, concerned with control and communication in living things and machines. Cybernetics involves several disciplines, including control theory, information theory, systems theory, and robotics. However, Ashby’s simple law of requisite … Read more