Speaker unverified: belief

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…No. No. But, I mean, there's an analogy in neural networks. There's this thing called the lottery ticket hypothesis, which spoke about pruning. Yeah. And what the researchers found is that you train this big dense neural network, and after it's trained, because you need the density for stochastic gradient descent for training tractability, after it's trained, you can prune away 90% of the connections and it still works the same And, maybe evolution and our biological instantiation, maybe it's the same thing. We've been through this billion plus year training process and all of these things we think are important like the instantiation, the auto poiesis, the agency and so on, maybe those are vestigial and we can now just kind of snip, snip, snip and we can just kind of create this abstract version. It seems reasonable. What do you think? It's just vestigial. I mean, I think we really need to take seriously the economy that is there and of biological information processing. Do a lot more with a very limited energy budget running our brains every day than is is like artificial neural networks are really really expensive to run. It doesn't strike me that biological cognition could get away with being that wasteful. That surely to keep things sort of blowing up in terms of like energy being consumed for information processing biologically, that there must have been a fair amount of pruning on the way. I kind of think of agency as being a bit of a spectrum from, you you can think of it in a deflationary sense as being this autonomous thing that's the cause of its own actions. Right. And then the deep philosophical sense is that there's this intentionality and you can control the future and whatnot. And it rather speaks to like the physicist's view is that, you know, all of these, you have this light cone, you have all these micro interactions. Yeah. And, of course, that's beyond our cognitive horizon, so we develop ideas of representations where we can have these distal relationships between things that are in our mind and things that are far away in time and space. And I suppose you think of that as being another form of idealization. But the fascinating thing though, when I think about agency I think about it in terms of like apparent causal disconnectedness. We agents because you have consistent beliefs and ideas and you're not just an impulse response machine that's your being actions aren't determined entirely by this situation, you're a person. Yeah. And I kind of perceive that as a kind of causal disconnectedness.…

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