If, on the occasion I say, "I like you" my saying it is caused by my liking you -- then you can describe this process however you wish.
Since my liking you is caused by my immediate environment, it isn't reducible to a weighted average of my history.
Another way of putting it: the historical positions of all the molecules in some water aren't sufficient to determine its present state. It's state depends on its container (ie., the pressure & temp of its environment). And there are a very very large number of states of water, many still being discovered.
In this sense my state in any moment is a point in an infinite space of states -- not determined by my history. But also extremely complexly by my container -- my social, etc. environment. The world hitting my senses is doing more to me than the air on the water. It induces in me a state which cannot be "averaged" from my history.
Thus, no, we are not weighed averages of our histories. We are profoundly chaotic and organic organisms whose growth in our environments enables us to respond to our enviroments by entering a near infinite number of states. These states arent in our history, they are how our biophysical structure -- via history -- responses to the near infinite depth of the here-and-now.
We are more like water than a computer. A computer is a deterministic machine which is a deterministic function of its deterministic inputs. Water is a chatoic system whose state "isnt up to it". Water's state is /in/ its container, and water itself is a non-determinsitic chatoic soup.
The chaos of water is the least of what one nanometer of a cell has; a cell is a trillion times that adaptive and responsive. And we are a trillion of those.
We are a cascade of chaotic state changes provoked by an infinitely rich environment action on our bodies shaped by a long history of organic growth.
We don't have "neural networks", we have cells. That some form "networks" has nothing to do with what we are. A complete misdirection.
> Since my liking you is caused by my immediate environment, it isn't reducible to a weighted average of my history.
It is not clear to me that this cannot be the case of a weighted average very heavily weighted to the immediate past.
> The historical positions of all the molecules in some water aren't sufficient to determine its present state. It's state depends on its container (ie., the pressure & temp of its environment).
AFAIK, given that you could determine the momenta of the molecules from a history of their positions, this would be sufficient to determine its state (maybe you need their angular momenta independently?) The relevant information about the container has been impressed on the motion of the molecules.
Similarly, we can suppose that the history of your environment becomes manifest in your mental states (and a predisposition towards certain state transitions) - though, on account of the complexity of that environment, in a compressed form.
> We are more like water than a computer. A computer is a deterministic machine which is a deterministic function of its deterministic inputs. Water is a chatoic system whose state "isnt up to it". Water's state is /in/ its container, and water itself is a non-determinsitic chatoic soup.
And yet we can usefully model fluid dynamics on a computer, even though the mathematical representation of the problem is analytically intractable. This line of argument does not appear to be leading in the direction you think it does.
> We don't have "neural networks", we have cells. That some form "networks" has nothing to do with what we are. A complete misdirection.
I am generally distrustful of these ontological arguments - quite often, it seems, things that were once thought of as being completely different turned out to be similar in some relevant way.
Ok, but this is all irrelevant. The trained history of evolution is the Chinese book. The environmental interaction is the symbol being passed into the room.
Without your trained history, you would not be able to say "it is sunny" when the sun hits your skin. We know this for sure, as an elephant or a baby are unable to say it, while a Frenchman would say different words.
Me saying "I like you" is not caused by me liking you. It is caused by me deciding, based on my experience and my perception of the current situation, to utter these words. I may be lying, I may be exaggerating, I may be misdirecting. Human speech is extremely rarey caused directly by interaction with the (external) environment (exceptions would be onomatopoeia exclaimed when in extreme pain, or when surprised, which tend to bypass most computation in the brain).
Since my liking you is caused by my immediate environment, it isn't reducible to a weighted average of my history.
Another way of putting it: the historical positions of all the molecules in some water aren't sufficient to determine its present state. It's state depends on its container (ie., the pressure & temp of its environment). And there are a very very large number of states of water, many still being discovered.
In this sense my state in any moment is a point in an infinite space of states -- not determined by my history. But also extremely complexly by my container -- my social, etc. environment. The world hitting my senses is doing more to me than the air on the water. It induces in me a state which cannot be "averaged" from my history.
Thus, no, we are not weighed averages of our histories. We are profoundly chaotic and organic organisms whose growth in our environments enables us to respond to our enviroments by entering a near infinite number of states. These states arent in our history, they are how our biophysical structure -- via history -- responses to the near infinite depth of the here-and-now.
We are more like water than a computer. A computer is a deterministic machine which is a deterministic function of its deterministic inputs. Water is a chatoic system whose state "isnt up to it". Water's state is /in/ its container, and water itself is a non-determinsitic chatoic soup.
The chaos of water is the least of what one nanometer of a cell has; a cell is a trillion times that adaptive and responsive. And we are a trillion of those.
We are a cascade of chaotic state changes provoked by an infinitely rich environment action on our bodies shaped by a long history of organic growth.
We don't have "neural networks", we have cells. That some form "networks" has nothing to do with what we are. A complete misdirection.