we have been using ML to solve useful problems in biology for more than 3 decades. However, it was usually called "advanced statistics and probability on large data sets" because, to be honest, that's what most modern ML is.
There's an emergent quality to AI models. Not all statistical models can dream pandas on the moon or solve hundreds of tasks, even without specific training.
I'd love to believe this, but nobody has demonstrated that yet. Also, I'm of the belief that if you have enough ram, either an infinitely tall-and-thin or wide-but-short MLP could do anything transformers can (happy to be pointed at a proof otherwise).
There's evidence everywhere, every second of every day. It doesn't follow from the mind having a material basis that it is doing linear algebra calculations like a Python machine learning program. That's quite a leap.
> There's evidence everywhere, every second of every day. It doesn't follow from the mind having a material basis that it is doing linear algebra calculations like a Python machine learning program. That's quite a leap.
Not literally, no. But it is entirely possible that what the human mind is doing is equivalent (in the Turing machine sense), if far more efficient (calorically) and robust (though haphazard and stochastic).
> It doesn't follow from the mind having a material basis that it is doing linear algebra calculations like a Python machine learning program. That's quite a leap.
It's clearly doing math and obviously no one actually believes its running python programs, you created a strawman.
sure, but I think it's fair to say that brains probably aren't doing lballistics calculations when a baseball player sees a pop fly and manveuvers to catch it. Rather, brains, composed mainly of neurons and other essential components, approximate partial differential equations, much like machine learning systems do.
> sure, but I think it's fair to say that brains probably aren't doing lballistics calculations when a baseball player sees a pop fly and manveuvers to catch it.
Well, I know you were talking about throwing, but there is some[1] talk/evidence in the evolutionary biology/neural darwinsm community that complex language development was a consequence of human developing the ability to hunt by throwing rocks (a very complicated and highly mathematical task). From my understanding after developing the required shoulder/arm morphology to throw at high speed brain sized tripled in early hominids.
So the brain actually might be doing something closer to math than we might think.
