Keith Duggar: belief

Transcript context

…Okay, your comment the expression to make that point. Yeah. So I think I think some of the hang up or crux may actually be, like, what we mean by model. And I'm sure this is a whole philosophical debate that I'm probably not qualified to, you know, decide. But I think, for example, you know, if you're flying an airplane, like, airplane internally has a computational model of the airplane, and you're interacting with this computer and through controls that then are enacted through all kinds of gears and cables and levers and things like that. But I think of the model as being the thing that's in the computer, and then it's modeling the the airplane. Right? And so in that sense, you know, the DNA of a plant species must incorporate the code for the model. Right? Because that's what unfurls is the plant. It's the same DNA in every cell that's enacting a program that's essentially happening through gene expression, you know, and so a particular cell, maybe some salt content is in there, which causes it to release a hormone that binds to all the other cells in the plant, which activates certain genetic pathways. So I kind of think about in that same analogy, you know, the the core of the model is is the code, you know, that's running and operating and controlling these processes. And then I think of the embodiment of the plant as the stuff that the model is modeling. Right? But I guess, you know, there's some vagueness there too. You could if you wanted to simulate these kinds of things, you could read the DNA as the code that the priors that specify the structure. And, you know, I think that if if if you think of DNA as prescribing the structure of your generative model or your world model or your factor graph that will be fit for purpose and is learnable. So you start off with say DNA. DNA does not tell you what particular kind of plant you're going to be, where it's not going to tell you how to engage in your phototaxis and point towards the sun or compete with other plants that are trying to deny you sunlight. That is something that you have to update and learn during your particular lifetime. But you're equipped with the basic structure, the prior on the structure of your generative model. And of course that is most gracefully accommodated I think again with respect to the renormalization group. We're just talking about 2 scales. So you've a slow scale where you've got the you mentioned before viral mutation. So the viral DNA, should it have RNA or DNA, is changing very very slowly on a timescale that is greater than or equivalent to the lifespan of any given virus. And that's, if you like, specifying the initial conditions, the structure for the specification of a particular instance of a virus. Maybe just jump in for a minute because I think actually it's not even specifying the structure. Think it and this is what you pointed out before about the difference between say active inference versus modeling is actually the DNA is specifying a policy. Yes. It's It's effectively just specifying a policy that every single cell in the organism follows. And so this policy is not instructions for a structure, but it's just instructions on what to do in response to a certain set of sensory states. Right? So it's almost it's the policy that the DNA specifies, and this policy applies to every cell. And then somehow miraculously, it works out to create a structure that is fit for purpose in its particular environment.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.