Nice to discover Judea Pearl ask a fundamental question. What’s an ‘inductive bias’? Pearl tweets:

“Help! What precisely is “inductive bias”? Some ML researchers are in the opinion that the machine learning category of ‘inductive biases’ can allow us to build a causal understanding of the world. My Ladder of Causation says: ‘This is mathematically impossible’. Who is right?”

A crucial step on the road towards AGI is a richer vocabulary for reasoning about inductive biases. Pearl explores the apparent impedance mismatch between inductive biases and causal reasoning. …

“Skill of solving Bongard problems lies very close to the core of ‘pure’ intelligence, if there is such a thing. Therefore it is a good place to begin if one wants to investigate the ability to discover ‘intrinsic meaning’ in patterns or messages.” — Douglas Hofstadter

Do you think fractals (i.e. iterative and self-similarity) are weird? Well, it isn’t as weird as biological iterative processes.

What’s even weirder is that humans have an intuition that something appears organic. What does it actually mean to have an organic design?

Christopher Alexander, an architect, who wrote ‘A Pattern Language’ that has immensely…

Does anyone ever become conscious of how they know how to ride a bicycle? Have you ever tried explaining to a child how to ride a bicycle? The child learns when they overcome their fear rather than understanding your explanation.

We understand how to ride a bike becoming familiar with the interaction. Although a bike is an unnatural thing with wheels, we are still able to mentally make it an extension of our bodies. The unnatural key to riding a bike is that it must always be moving forward. …

Daniel Dennett describes symmetry breaking using the neologism ‘strange inversion of reasoning’. He describes theories from Darwin, Turing and Hume as examples of these.

Symmetry, or invariance, is a relationship between objects such that their form does not change when they are re-positioned, rotated or made larger or smaller. In mathematics, physical space often exhibits symmetry. An object or figure of which an invariant form can be found has symmetry. It can be described by a set of transformations. A transformation is a mapping that carries every element in a structure into another position and preserves their relationships.The …

Damasio in his book ‘The Strange Order of Things’ argues that the core of condition lies in homeostasis. I agree with this generalization. But let me work out in a tweet storm how consciousness relates to homeostasis.

Human consciousness is related to awareness of surprising or threatening observations. It’s an error-correcting mechanism that lends attention to discrepancies of our expectations of the world.

The mind is composed of many layers of cognition. Also, its massive parallelism implies reducing the conditional checks required for error correction.

To do this, consciousness is engaged only in a time-sliced manner in a periodic manner…

The interview with CNBC of @chamath is a much watch because there is so much insight hidden underneath.

There are many things that caught my attention. The one thing was the abstraction that hedge fund strategies are all ‘momentum’ plays. What it seems to imply is that the marshaling of resources at an opportune time drives the future behavior of a stock.

From basic physics, we know that momentum is mass times velocity. So any ‘momentum’ tactic employs the variation of mass, velocity or both. Wrt stocks, mass is money and velocity is the speed of trade.

We cannot…

Constructivism is perhaps the most important idea that will shape the future of humanity. The ills of society are a consequence of the willful ignorance of constructivism.

There are two important definitions of constructivism, one comes from mathematics and the other from psychology. The mathematical definition leads rejects the law of excluded middle. This definition is relevant in understanding causation. The psychology definition: “Humans actively construct their own knowledge, and that reality is determined by our experiences as a learner.” …

Human intuition sees reality through a deceptive lens. A lens that is biased to seek objects rather than noticing processes. Modern language shares this noun centric bias.

The notion that species were fixed and never changing was ubiquitous in Darwin’s time. Darwin broke this deceptive symmetry in arguing that all life was connected through a process we now know as evolution. During Einstein’s time matter was thought to also be fixed and unchanging. Einstein broke this deceptive symmetry that matter itself had a continual exchange with energy. Hence he formulated his famous relativistic equation E=mc².

Revolutions in science occur when…