>>The bioelectric network is itself an expression of the genes involved in development.
Yes, you may need genes to express the proteins of ion channels and gap junctions, but there is no anatomy coded by genes, no genes code for how many limbs will a biosystem have (as reiterated by Levin). And it is this level of resolution that actually mattered for years before the launch of molecular biology and medicine.
>>It’s not a separate magical force.
Indeed, it sort of (suppose - by up to 70%) is. If the fine structure constant, which defines the strength of the interaction between a charge and an electric field, were 4% less or more than its current value, the current world and biosphere wouldn't exist. So far physics can't explain why the fine structure constant has this exact value (~1/137, which is also unique that it is a dimenionless constant). (I'm not inferring anything, just presenting raw data).
At least in a specific experimental context and with specific animal models. When they mixed the embryos of a frog and an axolotl, there were no genes in their genome which could predict whether a "frogolotl" will have legs.
That's been reiterated by Levin at almost every presentation. Maybe he's overgeneralizing or there's actually a lack of specific experimental context or reference to a specific study. Maybe "anatomy" is a bit too broad of a term, and the thing inferred is some overall macroscopic patterning, so can't say definitely "untrue", as I haven't yet dedicated time to delve into specific articles and been just consuming lectures/presentations.
But I remember he was mentioning some study in left/right asymmetry in DevBio, where they've shown that it's cell potentials/bioelectric signalling and not genes that determine the left/right asymmetry in embryos.
> where they've shown that it's cell potentials/bioelectric signalling and not genes that determine the left/right asymmetry in embryos.
No, they've shown that electric signaling is how the genes determine the left/right asymmetry in embryos.
How do you think it is that the same thing happens so consistently every time a new organism develops? Where do you think the electric gradients come from?
>>And in the case of the self-transforming machine elves we very clearly have a compatible alternate hypothesis: they are generated by the brain
And what is the actual evidence for this alternate hypothesis? Please provide the exact description of neuronal circuitry (numbers of neurons, network architectures, interconnectivity patterns, amounts of neurotransmitters used, spike patterns and the resulting EEGs etc) which generates this exact experience. Ask a distinguished professor of neuroscience. Use integrated information theory, emergent properties, quantum collapse in microtubules, whatever currently established paradigm - and provide the exact, 100% comprehensive and full description of the brain state that presumably generates this exact experience, also allowing to differentiate from all other experiences like just "machine elves", "non-self-transforming machine elves" or elves with any other properties. Or just begin with the 100% comprehensive and full description of the brain state/circuitry generating the taste of vanilla, which would be distinctly differentiable from the state/circuitry generating a taste of chocolate or garlic.
You don't need a perfect account to have a reasonable account. You've set up an absurd standard which essentially no knowledge could reasonably meet. I'm not a distinguished neuroscientist, but I've published papers in neuroscience and while we certainly can't provide a full account of the precise details of these brain states, the balance of the physical sciences, including neuroscience, leads me to strongly favor the "machine elves aren't real" hypothesis.
Sorry, dude, but your behavior can be formally comparable to a grandma's at a bazaar selling potatoes rather than someone with a slight quest for fundamental science. Obviously her potatoes are the best, *just because* they're reasonably the best and reasonable resources have been invested in them, and all other potatoes are absurd.
Here're the schematics of some modern computer electronics [1], [2]. Every element, every connection is described in detail and in place. Is this absurd?
Under the hood you consider the brain a similar type of computing machine, a bit more complicated, but fundamentally it should be the same. So the relevant schematics should be available.
Yet, instead of acknowledging that in order to obtain 90% of information I requested with modern neuroscience methods a person should be effectively dead or brain damaged, you just call it absurd. So have a reasonable way to the bazaar.
Recent advances in physical science [3],[4] have effectively shown that local realism is false. And there is a corpus of research in neuroscience, which I won't discuss here, as well as developed instrumentation and theory in physics (like field theory) which can allow to test these alternative hypotheses, rather than just bluntly stick to one's important subjectively reasonable opinion.
If you are an expert on how the brain generates what's reasonable and unreasonble, do you have queues of developers, chemists, mathematicians, any other types of technologists, who are developing technologies which actually contribute to human civilization, obviously using their brains for this and asking your recommendations on how to tune their technology generation engine(=brain) to generate more and faster? I doubt that even Huberman has any.
And what evidence do you actually have for your position? Your position is tailored to make subjects better taxpayers, rather than understanding how the brain/mind actually works. That's ok, than just assert this, that it is just a position amongst an infinity of other positions, rather than claiming that your position is the ultimate truth.
So someone is experiencing the self-transforming machine elves. Please provide the exact description of neuronal circuitry (numbers of neurons, network architectures, interconnectivity patterns, amounts of neurotransmitters used, spike patterns and the resulting EEGs etc) which generates this exact experience. Ask a distinguished professor of neuroscience. Use integrated information theory, emergent properties, quantum collapse in microtubules, whatever currently established paradigm - and provide the exact, 100% comprehensive and full description of the brain state that presumably generates this exact experience, also allowing to differentiate from all other experiences like just "machine elves", "non-self-transforming machine elves" or elves with any other properties. Or just begin with the 100% comprehensive and full description of the brain state/circuitry generating the taste of vanilla, which would be distinctly differentiable from the state/circuitry generating a taste of chocolate or garlic.
>>Say it with me, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."
Let's be honest with it. So someone is experiencing the self-transforming machine elves.
Please provide the exact description of neuronal circuitry (numbers of neurons, network architectures, interconnectivity patterns, amounts of neurotransmitters used, spike patterns and the resulting EEGs etc) which generates this exact experience. Ask a distinguished professor of neuroscience. Use integrated information theory, emergent properties, quantum collapse in microtubules, whatever currently established paradigm - and provide the exact, 100% comprehensive and full description of the brain state that presumably generates this exact experience, also allowing to differentiate from all other experiences like just "machine elves", "non-self-transforming machine elves" or elves with any other properties. Or just begin with the 100% comprehensive and full description of the brain state/circuitry generating the taste of vanilla, which would be distinctly differentiable from the state/circuitry generating a taste of chocolate or garlic.
>>People totally blind from birth taking hallucinogens don't see entities
So these people do not trip at all on hallucinogens? Sounds like rather improbable.
~70% of what you call "visual experience" is driven by non-visual cortices,
like anterior cingulate, for example. And even before the visual cortex, even
on the thalamus level, the thalamus receives up to ~60% of top-down connections from non-visual cortices. You do not need to literally see anything in order to get the information about it. Get your potato, monkey.
>>By striving to cleave the drug’s effects from the context in which it’s given—to a patient by a therapist, both of whom are hoping for healing—blinded studies may fail to capture the full picture.
The amount of monkey types amongst these researchers is spectacular. In the current AI boom, with various RAG and prompt engineering, everyone is striving to maximize context, and no-one would deny that modern AI emulates parts of human mind/brain. And context sensitivity of quantum systems is also pretty much obvious.
Modern astronomy, for example, can pretty much as well challenge the standard of randomized controlled trials: no one uses experimental planets and galaxies to test their null hypotheses. No engineer would strive to falsify the objects they are developing by deliberately designing non-working engines etc. And this is pretty much considered science.
While these "social scientists" are still full of medieval bullshit, so that it is more optimal to commit suicide than use their evidence-skewed medicine, which under the hood by default considers the subjects are either rocks or dead.
I don't really get what you are saying here. RTCs are designed precisely to allow one to draw statistical conclusions which would be untenable due to confounding effects that would be impossible to disentangle otherwise, particularly in regimes where effect sizes are small and results are sometimes difficult to quantify.
I'm having trouble understanding what you are even getting at with comparisons to astronomy, where the absence of controlled experiments isn't some grand innovation astronomers cooked up but a basic constraint imposed by studying stuff that is light years away. Any decent epistemologist would tell you that the character of knowledge generated by astronomical observations is of a lower quality than that of a RCT. I'm sure some astronomers or cosmologists would give their left arm to do a randomized controlled trial!
With astronomy, where the data are mainly derived from observations and simulations, no one is spreading alarms that it is not science. While with RCTs - and specifically RCTs in the filed of human cognitive neuroscience and psychedelics - there is all this monkey circus regarding whether placebos or psychedelic experiences are real. In human neuroscience ~80% of data is derived as well from observations and is effectively non-reverse-engineerable, while the hype regarding pseudoscience is much higher.
You buy aspirin in a pharmacy and the drug's instruction label lists tons of adverse effects - this is obviously a seemingly high quality of knowledge resulting from hard work in RCTs. Yet, there's absolutely no information predicting which exact adverse/beneficial effects will manifest in a specific person in a specific state of consciousness - and this is the actual empirical level where RCT derived information should actually matter and where it is ~50% useless (due to lack of context in RCTs themselves).
I still don't see what you are getting at. It is hard to generate good information about the risks and benefits of drugs and doing RTCs is very difficult, for the reasons to which you refer and others. Are you advocating that we just give up on knowing this stuff? That we do large RTCs that have the statistical power to characterize more "context"? I'm having trouble understanding whether your comment just comes down to "getting knowledge is hard and I'm tired of people trying to do it."
I am not advocating for anything, just exercising my English and typing skills. But you can try measuring more parameters in every person, integrate various findings from science and plan experiment design more carefully.
I have heard about only one startup using AI to facilitate RCTs.
A more optimal option is of course suicide, as the more of these RCT researchers will be out of the game, the more newer and more flexible brains will come in.
Modern astronomy, for example, can pretty much as well challenge the standard of randomized controlled trials: no one uses experimental planets and galaxies to test their null hypotheses.
Modern astronomy and astrophysics is just about the most rigorous experimental science outside of particle physics. Models are developed against simulations and past observations. Then new observations are proposed, selected, scheduled, and performed. The null hypothesis is almost always based on the standard models and can only be overturned by new models using new data.
A future observation of some phenomenon "out there" is, in principle, no different from a future observation of some phenomenon in the lab. We don't call them "experiments" but they are every bit as difficult to falsify. Perhaps even moreso, since those who collect the data are generally not the same people as those who design and test the models. Since data is eventually released publicly, anyone is free to re-run the simulations and re-test the models against the same data, as well as propose future planned observations to test any weaknesses in the models.
This may be a peak HN comment. Calling researchers who are experts in their fields and have dedicated a lifetime towards gaining knowledge and experience in the field are described as "monkey types".
I was listening to Science of Everything podcast by James Fodor (probably) on podbean.com for a 6 part "How computers work". He sort of is studying for a PhD or something, and he mentioned (in the 2nd part) that the uncertainty principle is actually applied in computer electronics for electron energies.
For transistor design, yes, so they can eliminate the effect and cancel it. The operation of the final chip is not affected by QM uncertainty, even though the individual electrons are.
If were in your shoes I'd start with optimizing the coin and the surface it falls on. Gambling cheaters will coat their hands with sticky stuff so they can take an extra chip here or there, if you coat the edge of the coin with that kind of stuff it would help I think.
Consider the law of induction, according to which the fact that monkeys flipped coins for gozzilions of years with an average probability 0.5 doesn't mean they'd flip it with the same probability tomorrow.
Suppose the protocol exists. It's not "gambling cheating" at all, it's not even "gambling", rather following some general methodological guidelines from quantum mechanics (least but not last). The question is to get enough subjects willing to replicate it.
There are numerous techniques to throw dice with controlled rotation so you can be sure that one side will wind up on top or that a particular axis stays horizontal so you know two sides will never come up. This is why playing craps you have to bounce the dice off a wall. It is possible sometime to throw non-spinning dice right into the corner of the wall and the floor but if you succeed at that you will never play craps with those people.
I think your problem is really close to that problem, I don't think there's anything wrong with card mechanics and such, it's using it to cheat that is wrong.
I'd focus on coins only. There was a link on HN about some pilot study by some students, where they tried to emulate or used an actual mechanical hand or something similar flipping coins.
How? (though not in my protocol) For example, attaching a magnetic levitation system under the surface with the flipper unaware of it, and upon switching the current on through the system, the coin levitates probably on its edge. And it is a problem for the flippers and inference makers for not being able to arrange for such option.
Yes, you may need genes to express the proteins of ion channels and gap junctions, but there is no anatomy coded by genes, no genes code for how many limbs will a biosystem have (as reiterated by Levin). And it is this level of resolution that actually mattered for years before the launch of molecular biology and medicine.
>>It’s not a separate magical force.
Indeed, it sort of (suppose - by up to 70%) is. If the fine structure constant, which defines the strength of the interaction between a charge and an electric field, were 4% less or more than its current value, the current world and biosphere wouldn't exist. So far physics can't explain why the fine structure constant has this exact value (~1/137, which is also unique that it is a dimenionless constant). (I'm not inferring anything, just presenting raw data).