Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 487

45 experts tell us when AI will think like people – and they’re all over the map

It’s almost as if we’re missing something:

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Architects of Intelligence: The truth about AI from the people building it (2018) compiled by futurist Martin Ford (23 experts) and Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI (2019), compiled by John Brockman (25 experts) offer a total of 45 experts foretelling our future. Some experts, Rodney Brooks (Rethink Robotics), Judea Pearl (UCLA), and Stuart Russell (UC Berkeley), were interviewed for both books, which is why the number sums to 45, not 48.

The major disagreements among contributors to both Architects of Intelligence and Possible Minds (2019) are the classic ones: Whether AI will have human-like intelligence and/or wipe us out. And yet, as a reviewer of both books notes, the essayists seem haunted by the specter of another “AI winter” when advances hit a ceiling and stall, perhaps for decades.

Software engineer Brendan Dixon notes that “Roughly every decade since the late 1960s has experienced a promising wave of AI that later crashed on real-world problems, leading to collapses in research funding.” He offers some context … “Artificial Intelligence: Prophets in Conflict” at Mind Matters News

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See also: What Are the “Architects of Intelligence” actually designing? Even their polite disagreements are fairly substantial. But future apocalypses offer a hidden benefit: Whether they ever happen or not, they distract us from critical thinking about present-day issues.

and

Possible Minds?: But What If the Minds Are IMpossible? Suppose we actually can’t create thinking AI? How would THAT change the world? What if human-like AI turns out to be impossible because reasoning is not calculation and calculators do not reason?

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Exoplanets: Those water worlds would have sterile oceans too…

artist’s concept of an ocean planet with two satellites/Lucianomendez (CC BY-SA 4.0)

A kind reader writes to tell us of recent research into the concept of ocean planets which brings up a little-noted problem:

It turns out that water worlds may be some of the worst places to look for living things. One study presented at the meeting shows how a planet covered in oceans could be starved of phosphorus, a nutrient without which earthly life cannot thrive. Other work concludes that a planet swamped in even deeper water would be geologically dead, lacking any of the planetary processes that nurture life on Earth…

“We have this stereotype that if we have oceans, we have life,” says Tessa Fisher, a microbial ecologist at Arizona State. But her recent work contradicts this idea. Fisher and her colleagues studied what would happen on an “aqua planet” with a surface that is almost or completely covered by enough water to fill Earth’s oceans five times.

On Earth, rainwater hitting rocks washes phosphorus and other nutrients into the oceans. But without any exposed land, there is no way for phosphorus to enrich water on an aqua planet over time, Fisher reported at the Laramie meeting. There would be no ocean organisms, such as plankton, to build up oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere, she says — making this type of world a terrible place to find life. Alexandra Witze, “Exoplanet hunters rethink search for alien life” at Nature

Rats. An ocean planet seemed such a great idea in principle.

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See also: Recent finding: The “water world” exoplanets are NOT habitable ocean planets So, it turns out, even if there IS lots of water in a solar system, that doesn’t add up to habitability either. Talk about Rare Earth and Privileged Planet.

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Shedding light on water’s weird qualities

drop of water/José Manuel Suárez (CC)

You heard that the Sun is “stranger than astrophysicists imagined.” Swell, water is weird too. Researchers in Japan tried to find out why water behaves in the (life-friendly) way it does:

The researchers, with the benefit of supercomputers, were able to tweak and untune a computational model of water, making it behave like other liquids. “With this procedure,” Russo said, “we have found that what makes water behave anomalously is the presence of a particular arrangement of the water’s molecules, such as the tetrahedral arrangement, where a water molecule is hydrogen-bonded to four molecules located on the vertices of a tetrahedron,” a shape of four triangular planes. “Four of such tetrahedral arrangements can organize themselves in such a way that they share a common water molecule at the center without overlapping,” Russo said. As a result, when water freezes, it creates an open structure, mostly empty space and less dense than the disordered structure of liquid water, which is why water props ice up. Both highly ordered and disordered tetrahedral arrangements give water its “peculiar properties.” The paper’s title spells this out: “Water-like anomalies as a function of tetrahedrality.”Brian Gallagher, “Why Water Is Weird” at Nautilus

Paper. (open access)

Nautilus pursues the matter further with chemist Richard Saykally.

See also: Experiment Makes Fundamental Asymmetry Of Water “Glaringly Clear”

Water can exist in two different liquid phases

A new piece found in the puzzle of water’s strange, life-enabling behavior

and

Michael Denton: Does water’s remarkable fitness for life point to design?

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At Quanta: Sun “stranger than astrophysicists imagined” Naturally, they’re hoping for some new physics to come out of these surprises. Just think, if new physics comes out of this, it will be real physics too, not rubbish about the multiverse or how we are all living in some space alien’s giant sim world.

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At Quanta: Sun “stranger than astrophysicists imagined”

Sun/NASA

Naturally, they’re hoping for some new physics to come out of these surprises:

Gamma rays, the highest frequency waves of light, radiate from our nearest star seven times more abundantly than expected. Stranger still, despite this extreme excess of gamma rays overall, a narrow bandwidth of frequencies is curiously absent.

The surplus light, the gap in the spectrum, and other surprises about the solar gamma-ray signal potentially point to unknown features of the sun’s magnetic field, or more exotic physics.

“It’s amazing that we were so spectacularly wrong about something we should understand really well: the sun,” said Brian Fields, a particle astrophysicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.Natalie Wolchover, “The Sun Is Stranger Than Astrophysicists Imagined” at Quanta

Just think, if new physics comes out of this, it will be real physics too, not rubbish about the multiverse or how we are all living in some space alien’s giant sim world.

See also: Michael Denton On Why The Sun Is Remarkably Fit For Life

Early Sun’s rotation rate was just right for us, it turns out

and

New study: Yes, our sun is peculiar

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Yale: Weird new crab species forces rethink of definition of crab

Artist’s concept of Callichimaera perplexa/Elissa Martin, Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History

And maybe of how animals evolve over time:

The crab family just got a bunch of new cousins, including a 95-million-year-old species that will force scientists to rethink the definition of a crab — and perhaps the disparate ways animals evolve over time…

“Callichimaera perplexa is so unique and strange that it can be considered the platypus of the crab world,” said Luque. “It hints at how novel forms evolve and become so disparate through time. Usually we think of crabs as big animals with broad carapaces, strong claws, small eyes in long eyestalks, and a small tail tucked under the body. Well, Callichimaera defies all of these ‘crabby’ features and forces a re-think of our definition of what makes a crab a crab.” Jim Shelton, “Meet Callichimaera perplexa, the platypus of crabs” at YaleNews

What makes a crab a crab? This almost sounds like philosophy class.

Anyway, National Geographic describes it as “crazy” Researchers found a fossil site in Colombia from 90 million years ago featuring very well-preserved bodies including the“platypus” of crabs:

Today’s adult true crabs typically have wide, oval-shaped bodies, and their eyes are mounted on stalks. Crabs that burrow or swim, such as blue crabs, might have flattened, oar-like pairs of hind legs. What’s more, true crabs’ tails are tucked underneath the body.

Callichimaera breaks all of these rules. Its body is far narrower and fuselage-shaped than the standard crab body plan, and its Ping Pong ball-like eyes aren’t on stalks, a trait more often seen in larval crabs today than in full-grown adults. In addition, its tiny tail isn’t tucked underneath the body, and it has two pairs of enlarged, paddle-like limbs—but they’re on the animal’s front, not its rear. Its shell also bears a pattern unlike anything seen on another crab, living or dead.Michael Greshko, “How did crabs evolve ‘crabbiness’? It’s complicated.” at National Geographic

Relax. We didn’t know there were rules for crabs. But this one was compared to a “flying dolphin.”

Maybe we will find a lot more such oddities as we explore more. The overall group (shrimps, crabs, lobsters) is said to date from 350 to 370 million years ago.

See also: Cambrian shrimp’s heart more complex than modern one

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Rob Sheldon: Here’s why physicists are surprised by the universe’s increased expansion rate

The three basic steps astronomers use to calculate how fast the universe expands over time, a value called the Hubble constant. /NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

Recently, we heard that new Hubble measurements show that the universe is expanding much faster than expected:

New measurements from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope confirm that the Universe is expanding about 9% faster than expected based on its trajectory seen shortly after the big bang, astronomers say.

The new measurements, accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal, reduce the chances that the disparity is an accident from 1 in 3,000 to only 1 in 100,000 and suggest that new physics may be needed to better understand the cosmos.

“This mismatch has been growing and has now reached a point that is really impossible to dismiss as a fluke. This is not what we expected,” says Adam Riess, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University, Nobel Laureate and the project’s leader. Chanapa Tantibanchachai, “New Hubble Measurements Confirm Universe Is Outpacing All Expectations of its Expansion Rate” at Johns Hopkins University

We asked Rob Sheldon, our physics color commentator, to help us understand what that implies:

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The news isn’t exactly new, we have been hearing this for several years now. The essential problem is not the expansion of the universe (that goes back to the 1920’s and the Hubble constant), nor is it acceleration of the universe (that is the dark energy hypothesis, and the 2011 Nobel prize was awarded to Riess, Perlmutter & Schmidt for supposedly demonstrating this with supernovae).

Rather the hullabaloo is that two different methods for measuring Hubble’s constant (H0) are disagreeing. The measurement of Hubble’s constant has been an ongoing task since 1927, and one of my professors in grad school, Virginia Trimble, has written a series of papers on the history of that measurement: Here. , here, and here.

In units of km/s/parsec, H0 has been as high as 625 (Lemaitre) and as low as 33 (Trimble). Over the years, different methods have converged on a number around either 68 or 74. At first, the error bars were large and no one thought too much of the discrepancy, but in recent years the error bars have shrunk to less than 2, and shown no sign of converging. That is to say, there’s less than one chance in million that the two numbers will magically agree in the future.

What does this mean?

Well the two methods differ in that one is “direct” and the other “indirect”. Clearly one or both of them is making a mistake. Since it is hard to find (and people have looked) a reason why the direct method is failing, the feeling is that the indirect method must have a mistake in its model.

To explain further, here is a long description of the two approaches.

Starting with the direct method, we measure the difference to neighboring galaxies, measure how fast the galaxy is moving away using the red shift, and plot up thousands of galaxies to see how their distance from us is correlated to their speed away from us. A best fit line is plotted up, and we get Hubble Constant = 74 km/s/parsec. The red shift measurement is good to 4 or 5 decimal places, but the distance is a bit tricky, which is described next.

Nearby stars we can measure by parallax (like using two eyes to thread a needle), but for more distant stars we need to use Cepheid variables. Nearby galaxies have distinguishable Cepheids, but distant galaxies are just a blur. So we construct a “distance ladder”, use parallax on nearby Cepheids to calibrate, then use Cepheids in nearby galaxies to calibrate, then use calibrated galaxies (Fisher-Tully) to measure truly distant galaxies, and finally use supernovae in calibrated galaxies to measure truly distant supernovae. This chain gives us distances which we can then plot the red-shift to get the velocity. The recent measurement discussed in this article was done by Adam Riess on Cepheids in nearby galaxies to recalibrate and check the first “step” on the ladder, whose errors propagate up the ladder, so we need to know it precisely.

The 2nd method of measuring Hubble’s constant, is to find the “temperature” of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR). One prediction of Lemaitre’s “Big Bang” was that we should see the afterglow of the explosion today, but greatly cooled down by the expansion of the universe. In 1978 Penzias and Wilson got the Nobel prize for having discovered this afterglow in the microwave spectrum while setting up a satellite communication systems to look at the sky. As you all know from your stove heating elements, a cold stove is black, a hot one is cherry red, and should you have a welder’s torch, a really, really hot stove element is blue-white. The color comes from the shape of the “blackbody spectrum” or the light emitted from hot objects. (It’s called blackbody because the color doesn’t come from paint.)

So by measuring the temperature of the CMBR with 9 different microwave channels the Planck satellite could fit a really good curve through the data and get the temperature to 4 or 5 decimal places. This tells us the temperature of the universe now.

Right after the Big Bang, when was really, really hot, the electrons both emitted light and absorbed it, but on the whole, absorbed it. Electrons made the universe opaque, so the universe was black. As it cooled a bit, the electrons found protons, made hydrogen, and the density of electrons dropped, making the universe transparent, and allowing the light to escape. This is known as “decoupling”, and the light that escaped was thermal, blackbody radiation emitted from “cherry red hydrogen” or plasma.

So we have two temperatures we know, plasma and CMBR, and we can calculate how much we have to “stretch” or expand the universe to make the short-wavelength plasma light look like the long-wavelength microwaves we see today. That gives us an expansion factor. In order to get a Hubble constant, we just need to know the time between those two events. And for that we need a model.

The model of choice is called “The Big Bang Nucleosynthesis” model, one of the first computer versions being a FORTRAN code that Hoyle developed in 1967. There’s a lot of things one could say about it, but like Darwinian evolution, the one thing you cannot say is that it is wrong. Many refinements have been added over the years, but the essential 1-dimensional, isotropic, homogeneous, with no magnetic field, version is unassailable, (despite the fact that modern computers can do 3-D, anisotropic, heterogenous magnetized versions.)

Using this model, the Planck team has reduced their temperature data to fit many of the variables in the model, calling their output “precision cosmology”.

The Wikipedia article has a table of 17 model parameters with 4, 5, and sometimes 6 digit accuracy. Well, one of those numbers is the Hubble constant= 67.31 +/- 0.96, which is some 6 error bars (or “six sigma”) from the Hubble Constant =74 of the direct method. Recall that in astrophysics, 5-sigma is the gold-standard. So we’re talking a serious discrepancy.

Then the hand-wringing is that the model might be wrong, and all those 17 precise cosmological parameters might be wrong as well. This is not just embarrassing to the team. A decade or two of cosmology papers have used these numbers as well.

By the way, I’m working on my non-standard model using large magnetic fields in the BBN to generate a very different equilibrium. Preliminary results with some kluged reaction rates were promising, showing that we might be able to explain not just this expansion problem (magnetic fields can seriously distort the universe expansion rate), but also the Li-7 and deuterium abundance problems, dark matter, and horizon problems. Finding collaborators turned out to be the highest hurdle yet to overcome.

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Sounds interesting. Maybe he needs a Kickstarter fund to support graduate students who sign on to the project.

Backing down on Darwinian fundamentalism?

Charles Darwin, 1854

A neurologist attempts the hopeless task of distinguishing between skeptics and deniers. (Anyone who believes their lyin’ eyes instead of an approved tale is bound to be a denier in some circles.) Along the way, he takes on evolution (of course). But instead of telling us that all evolutionary biologists approve the Modern Synthesis (updated Darwinism), he says something interesting:

For example, let’s take evolutionary theory. There is almost unanimous consensus (>98%) among experts that evolution happened, that all living things on Earth are related through a nestled hierarchy of common descent. Further, the evidence for that conclusion is overwhelming and cannot be reasonably denied. Further still, there is no alternative scientific hypothesis that can account for that mountain of evidence (note the word “scientific” in that sentence). But the same is not true of all aspects of evolutionary theory. That natural selection is a main driving force of evolutionary change is also well established, but there is still legitimate debate about the role and magnitude of other factors, such as genetic drift. When we drill down to details about which species evolved into which other species and when, drawing a precise tree of evolutionary relationships, then there is considerable debate and much that is unknown.Steven Novella, “Skeptic vs. Denier” at Neurologica Blog

Well, that’s putting it mildly for sure. That is probably as much of the mess as Novella can acknowledge. But he doesn’t even mention Darwinism, much less demand assent.

If we are going to talk about “considerable debate” and “much that is unknown,” let’s consider the way underlying Darwinian fundamentalism skews discussion. We’ve touched on a few such issues recently. To name just two:

A large proportion of the life forms that have ever existed is extinct. Yet, by way of explaining odd discoveries, like cannibalism of nestlings, researchers will tell us that it is somehow “adaptive.” Some have even worked out a mathematical formula for how that is so.

Maybe. The overwhelming presumption of explicitly Darwinian mechanisms prevents us from considering: Maybe it’s not adaptive. Maybe in 50k years, this species will be extirpated from this region and at some point, nest cannibalism will be the tipping point.

Do we know? No, we don’t. But we do know that extinction happens. And seeing every strange behavior as adaptive is a blip in thinking produced by default Darwinian assumptions. Agnosticism on the subject of nest cannibalism would be wiser until more is known.

Then there is the weird habit of attributing impossible thought processes to animals who are supposedly thinking in Darwinian terms about how to ensure the survival of their selfish genes. For example, the mares who supposedly cause an abortion because they perceive that the stallion will not accept another stallion’s offspring. The mare presumably knows all this and can act on it—even though she cannot otherwise perform the simplest reasoning tasks.

And there’s the Darwinbird of pop science who “is optimising the likelihood of her offspring mating and rearing young (so ensuring the continuation of her genes into future generations)” by controlling the sex of her offspring: “There is some evidence she can bias the sex ratio by controlling hormones, particularly progesterone.”

So we are really to believe that a bird who is too stupid to evade a giant wind turbine is planning her offspring’s future? Does “science-based thinking” really require that of us?

Maybe if all the Darwin noise dies down, we will have a clearer idea of how the ecology — in which any evolution must occur — actually works.

See also: Birds Are Found To Plan Like Humans For Their Offsprings’ Future

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Recent finding: The “water world” exoplanets are not habitable ocean planets

drop of water/José Manuel Suárez (CC)

Hard on the heels of learning that life-friendly planets orbiting young stars would quickly lose atmosphereand that it “now seems inevitable” that we’ll find life out there anyway, wew find out about the giant water worlds:

Using new data about the radii and mass of exoplanets collected by the Gaia space satellite, Harvard planetary scientist Li Zeng and his colleagues gather more details about the exoplanets’ internal structures.

They found that those big gas dwarfs are better explained as water worlds. But these are not water worlds like Earth, where despite covering 71 percent of the surface, water only accounts for 0.02 percent of Earth’s mass. Instead, these worlds are made of 25 percent and up to 50 percent water, with strange, vast oceans covering them. It’s possible that up to 35 percent of all known exoplanets are these vast ocean-covered orbs, Li noted at a conference last summer.
Jason Daley, “One-Third of Exoplanets Could Be Water Worlds With Oceans Hundreds of Miles Deep” at Smithsonian Magazine

These are not “ocean planets.” Their surface temperatures are expected to bde in the 200 to 500-degree range and the oceans could be hundreds of miles deep: “Unfathomable. Bottomless. Very Deep,” a researcher told Gizmodo (quoted at Smithsonian). To say nothing of very high pressure.

The researchers think that the reason we don’t have these impressive but big-waste-of-water worlds in our own solar system is the gas giants: “In other star systems without a Jupiter-sized planet, the formation of rocky “super-Earths” and water worlds is probably pretty common.”

So, it turns out, even if there is lots of water in a solar system, that doesn’t add up to habitability either. Talk about Rare Earth and Privileged Planet.

See also: Researchers: Most life-friendly planets orbiting young stars would quickly lose atmosphere from their results: More dramatically, the results of this study imply that for planets orbiting M-dwarf, the planets can only form Earth-like atmospheres and surfaces after the activity levels of the stars decrease, which can take up to several billion years. More likely is that many of the planets orbiting M-dwarf stars to have very thin or possible no atmospheres. In both cases, life forming in such systems appears less likely than previously believed.

Researcher: Why finding extraterrestrial life “now seems inevitable,” maybe soon. He ends with, “The ancient question ‘Are we alone?’ has graduated from being a philosophical musing to a testable hypothesis. We should be prepared for an answer.” It’s worth asking another question: What if, after decades of research, no answer comes? What would that change?

Faint hopes easily revived: Life may be evolving on closest exoplanet

Forbes cosmology commentator: Maybe we ARE alone

Still no space aliens? That’s because they are keeping us in a zoo!

and

Tales of an invented god

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How the human brain works is actually quite controversial

Keep that in mind when AI boosters claim that their product will function like a human brain:

A group of Swedish and Italian researchers recently found that most parts of the brain are involved in processing signals arising from touch. Thus they determined that the brain does not operate like a set of switches, as we used to think:

“We immediately realised that our findings deviated strongly from the accepted view that different parts of the brain are responsible for different specific functions,” says Henrik Jörntell, one of the researchers behind the study…

“According to a prevailing view of the brain, known as functional localisation, the brain works like a set of switches: different parts of the brain are responsible for different functions. This theory is certainly easy to comprehend, but when we measure the activity levels in individual neurons, we get a different picture, which indicates that functions are in fact processed more globally by the whole brain,” says Henrik Jörntell. “The Human Brain: Even Basic Facts Are Hotly Contested” at Mind Matters News

The story goes on to talk about the major current squabble as to whether neurons do or do not regenerate in adults. It turns out, we don’t even know that for sure.

Either way, many, many splintered lecterns will need recycling.

If the AI boosters really knew how the human brain functions, they’d be getting the Nobel for Medicine instead of some geek prize.

See also: Brains are not billions of little computers

and

Researchers identify a new form of brain communication

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Intelligent computers? You may as well believe that Penn and Teller really do magic

Ed Feser

A computer is not—in and of itself—smarter than a pile of tinkertoys, a philosopher argues:

“The thing to emphasize is that the computer is not in and of itself carrying out logical operations, processing information, or doing anything else that might be thought a mark of genuine intelligence—any more than a piece of scratch paper on which you’ve written some logical symbols is carrying out logical operations, processing information, or the like. Considered by themselves and apart from the conventions and intentions of language users, logical symbols on a piece of paper are just a bunch of meaningless ink marks. Considered by themselves and apart from the intentions of the designers, a Tinkertoy computer is just a bunch of sticks moving around, as stupidly as if they had been tossed down the stairs.” – Edward FeserMichael Egnor, “Computers are no smarter than tinkertoys” at Mind Matters News

Michael Egnor responds:

Feser is right. There’s not a shred of intelligence in a computer. Human beings are intelligent and we use computers to represent and leverage our human intelligence. All of the logic “in” a computer is really human logic, represented in a computer. All of the mathematics, all of the literature, all of the thought in a computer program is really just human thought, represented in the computation. Michael Egnor, “Computers are no smarter than tinkertoys” at Mind Matters News

Yes, that Ed Feser, the one who has been anti-ID. Michael Egnor is planning to interview him. Should be interesting.

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See also: Are electrons conscious?

and

Why apes are not spiritual beings

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