Showing posts with label causality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label causality. Show all posts

Thursday, January 22, 2026

Natural and artificial intelligence

As we saw in the previous post, the book Free Agents by Kevin Mitchell deals with the origins of human consciousness and free will. In a brief epilogue, the book addresses the topic of strong artificial intelligence—the real kind, which doesn't yet exist—and formulates some hypotheses about the possibility of its becoming feasible.

It emphasizes that one of the most active branches of research in AI, especially in recent years, is the field of artificial neural networks, which has led to advances such as Large Language Models (LLMs). It compares these neural networks in our programs with those that exist in our brains and in the brains of many animals more or less similar to us. It says that we are witnessing impressive advances in fields such as image recognition, text prediction, speech recognition, and language translation, based on the use of deep learning, remotely inspired on the architecture of the cerebral cortex.

Thursday, December 5, 2024

Correlation or causality

Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, best known for promoting eugenics, invented the mathematical concept of correlation. Since then, many mistakes have been made relating correlation and causality, which sometimes coincide, but can also be completely different.

Two variables are said to be correlated when increases in one resemble increases in the other, and decreases in one resemble decreases in the other. But not all correlations are the same: to distinguish them, Galton devised the correlation coefficient, a number between -1 and 1.