Of course it is, and you could say the same with regard to mammalian brains in general. However the divergence starts very early in development (seven weeks) so is very big and very significant. By the time a human is born the brain is very different from a monkey's.
Hey, $DEITY did its absolute best with the constraints and the requirements. But hey, can't please everyone apparently. Be happy you can relieve yourself well past the intended warranty period. The parts were designed to be easily _aftermarket_ replaceable with sufficient advances in technology, retaining the fundamental design without changes.
Separation of functions/concerns is not great, for starters.
The testes are dangerously exposed, the plumbing is convoluted and failure-prone (and doesn’t recover well from mechanical insults).
The prostate, which serves no function outside of reproduction, lies inline with the urethra and quite consistently loses flexibility and becomes enlarged with age, causing all sorts of structural issues impacting basic urological function.
Female reproductive vs urinary anatomy is largely physiologically distinct (proximity and UTI risk notwithstanding). Though plenty of room for improvement there too — starting with endometrial tissue being far too prolific. Fun fact: endometrial tissue can migrate to the brain and cause haemorrhaging in severe cases of endometriosis.
Plenty of room for improvement across the board, I’d say!
> The most successful at communicating their view that they are the most successful
To who? Other humans?
It's seagull mating season where I am, and I don't speak seagull, but I'm pretty sure one of the things they're trying to convey to their fellow seagulls is that they're extremely successful.
Can't argue with it either. They're very much alive, which is the best you can be in this particular competition.
Corn, albeit not an animal has been pretty successful in terms of number of individuals. Their bi-pedal underlings have cleared swathes of land and take meticulous care of their well-being so they can bask in the sun undisturbed.
So, the most successful at arrogance? In other words, the least successful at humility? Ironically, since humble and human share a common root. Just playing devil's advocate here, but what you propose is not a good metric to maximize.
I fail to see that, it's simply one of all other random mutations, it's just that this one has a big downstream effect of enabling other more complex mutations
Arguably much less successful since jellyfish have been around 700+ million years ands it’s not clear if humans will make it even the next couple thousand.
But the jury is still out on that one
When you've mentioned that, I've noticed that by default I imagine just a shape devoid of color and texture. But I can imagine a donut, or a blue torus, but I need to explicitly think the word "blue".
Actually this is true whichever interpretation you take, give or take some knowledge around black holes.
I think hawking actually proved that this is true regardless of how black holes work due to hawking radiation.
(This is way beyond my area of expertise so excuse me that this might be a stupid idea.)
I assume the following happens: while a (small) subsystem is in "pure state" (in quantum coherence), no information flows out of this subsystem. Then, when measuring, information flows out and other information flows in, which disturbs the pure state. This collapses of the wave function (quantum decoherence). For all practical purposes, it looks like quantum decoherence is irreversible, but technically this could still be reversible; it's just that the subsystem (that is in coherence) got much, much larger. Sure, for all practical purposes it's then irreversible, but for us most of physics anyway looks irreversible (eg. black holes).
The problem is that the larger subsystem includes an observer in a superposition of states of observing different measured values. And we never observe this. Copenhagen interpretation doesn't deal with this at all. It just states this empirical fact.
So if I understand correctly, you are saying the observer doesn't feel like he is in a superposition (multiple states at once). Sure: I agree that observers never experience being in a superposition.
But don't think that necessarily means we are in a Many-Worlds. I rather think that we don't have enough knowledge in this area. Assuming we live in a simulation, an alternative explanation would be, that unlikely branches are not further simulated to save energy. And in this case, superposition is just branch prediction :-)
Yes, I think that's a stance many physicists take these days. Unfortunately, it's not verifiable. And we also don't have any clue how gravity (which does become relevant at our scales) would fit into this picture.
Unitarity means that information (about quantum states) is not lost, despite it appearing otherwise after a measurement. The Many-Worlds interpretation seems to be the simplest way to explain where this information has gone.
> In what ways do LLMs meet the definition of having consciousness and agency?
Agency: an ability to make decisions and act independently. Agentic pipelines are doing this.
Consciousness: something something feedback[1] (or a non-transferable feeling of being conscious, but that is useless for the discussion). Recurrent Processing Theory: A computation is conscious if it involves high-level processed representations being fed back into the low-level processors that generate it.
Tokens are being fed back into the transformer.
> that's a bit like looking at a bird in flight and imagining going to the moon: only tangentially related to engineering reality.
Is it? Vacuum of space is a tangible problem for aerodynamics-based propulsion. Which analogous thing do we have with ML? The scaled-up monkey brain[2] might not qualify as the moon.
Kernel address space layout randomization they are talking about is a bit different than (x != null). Other bug may allow to locate the required address.
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