Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk.
It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. Within the first hour, the foal will stand, and despite long legs, this usually works the first time. Lying down, however, is not preprogrammed. I've watched a foal circle trying to figure out how to get down from standing, and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap. Standing up quickly is essential to survival, but smoothly lying down is not.
Within a day, a newborn foal can run with the herd.
Of the mammals, most of the equines and some of the rodents (beavers) are precocial.
Pigs are, monkeys are not. It's not closely tied to evolutionary ancestry.
One of the most curious things I learned about babies is that they are born with a walking instinct, long before they actually can walk. If you hold them up, they will move their legs in a perfectly correct walking fashion. But they lack the strength and agility to keep their body up. At around 3 months this walking instinct disappears, and then at around a year we 'relearn' to walk when we have the strength and agility to hold ourselves up.
But if we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, humans would likely be walking very near immediately.
If we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, walking would be much more difficult. Notably, on flat ground we absolutely must have an upward component to our application of force with the surface - this is clearly seen in videos taken on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions. This baby on a hypothetical lower gravity world would find standing easier, yes, but not mobility. At least not once he's taken his first few trail steps.
Wow! Some years ago I was thinking about reasons for why people on ADHD/autism spectrum are different.
First heard somewhere (don't remember where or exact idea) that neurons initially form groups and these groups then perform functions. This led to an idea that if someone's brain sacrificed some "copy other primate" groups for "pattern recognition" groups, you would get a unit with higher IQ for non social use, without changing the brain to be more effective in general. This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking" tendency or "not seeing forest for the trees" tendency in autist spectrum folks.
On another occasion, it occurred to me that regular brain run / loop consists of a short reality check and longer flow state. If there are too many reality checks, you get anxiety and can't work effectively. OTOH, too little realty checks and you get stuck on non important things. At the same time, impairing this "check to flow" balance in a safe (non anxiety provoking) environment would result in an individual that could perform the kind of deeper work with results not achievable by not modified individuals.
Have watched 50+ h of psychology lectures, but don't have any formal knowledge on these things so please take it with a grain of salt.
How newborn brain works is absolutely fascinating for me. I just don't understand how is it possible.
Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information.
Human body, including brain, gets built using this information only. So our "preconfigured" neural networks are also built using this information only.
And apparently it's enough to encode complex behaviour. That's not just visible things. Brain processes a humongous amount of information, it basically supports living processes for entire body, processing miriads of sensors, adjusting all kinds of knobs for body to function properly.
I just don't understand how is it possible just from a purely bit size approach. For me, it's a mystery.
IMO TFA doesn't map too cleanly onto the concept of "bootloader" (nor "microcode" for that matter). But I guess the question is, as always, can you unlock it.
Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk.
It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. Within the first hour, the foal will stand, and despite long legs, this usually works the first time. Lying down, however, is not preprogrammed. I've watched a foal circle trying to figure out how to get down from standing, and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap. Standing up quickly is essential to survival, but smoothly lying down is not. Within a day, a newborn foal can run with the herd.
Of the mammals, most of the equines and some of the rodents (beavers) are precocial. Pigs are, monkeys are not. It's not closely tied to evolutionary ancestry.
One of the most curious things I learned about babies is that they are born with a walking instinct, long before they actually can walk. If you hold them up, they will move their legs in a perfectly correct walking fashion. But they lack the strength and agility to keep their body up. At around 3 months this walking instinct disappears, and then at around a year we 'relearn' to walk when we have the strength and agility to hold ourselves up.
But if we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, humans would likely be walking very near immediately.
If we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, walking would be much more difficult. Notably, on flat ground we absolutely must have an upward component to our application of force with the surface - this is clearly seen in videos taken on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions. This baby on a hypothetical lower gravity world would find standing easier, yes, but not mobility. At least not once he's taken his first few trail steps.
Wow! Some years ago I was thinking about reasons for why people on ADHD/autism spectrum are different.
First heard somewhere (don't remember where or exact idea) that neurons initially form groups and these groups then perform functions. This led to an idea that if someone's brain sacrificed some "copy other primate" groups for "pattern recognition" groups, you would get a unit with higher IQ for non social use, without changing the brain to be more effective in general. This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking" tendency or "not seeing forest for the trees" tendency in autist spectrum folks.
On another occasion, it occurred to me that regular brain run / loop consists of a short reality check and longer flow state. If there are too many reality checks, you get anxiety and can't work effectively. OTOH, too little realty checks and you get stuck on non important things. At the same time, impairing this "check to flow" balance in a safe (non anxiety provoking) environment would result in an individual that could perform the kind of deeper work with results not achievable by not modified individuals.
Have watched 50+ h of psychology lectures, but don't have any formal knowledge on these things so please take it with a grain of salt.
How newborn brain works is absolutely fascinating for me. I just don't understand how is it possible.
Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information.
Human body, including brain, gets built using this information only. So our "preconfigured" neural networks are also built using this information only.
And apparently it's enough to encode complex behaviour. That's not just visible things. Brain processes a humongous amount of information, it basically supports living processes for entire body, processing miriads of sensors, adjusting all kinds of knobs for body to function properly.
I just don't understand how is it possible just from a purely bit size approach. For me, it's a mystery.
Waiting for scientists to discover HUMAN.md
Kant said it first! https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/
Seems reasonable our grey mass needs a bootloader.
IMO TFA doesn't map too cleanly onto the concept of "bootloader" (nor "microcode" for that matter). But I guess the question is, as always, can you unlock it.
Makes sense, life was brute-forced.
"preconfigured" and "with instructions". i have a problem with these.
who is doing it? why the observed instructions are chosen?
just a lot of pretraining through evolution
who? The evolution. The observed instructions are also chosen by evolution