If you have a certain kind of cell (e.g. penicillium), then you can add certain kinds of organic matter (e.g. food), and then this organic matter spontaneously converts into more of the original kind of cell (e.g. it gets moldy). This makes cells much more influential than other similarly-diminished entities.
In order to get something analogous to cells, it’s not just enough to discover small structures, since there’s lots of small structures that don’t form spontaneously like this. It seems dubious whether current mechanistic interpretability is finding features like this.
I agree that it is dubious at the moment. I just think it’s too early to tell and the field itself will undoubtedly grow in complexity over the coming years.
Your point about the spontaneity of cells forming stands, although I wasn’t phrasing the analogy at the level of thermodynamics / physics.
If you have a certain kind of cell (e.g. penicillium), then you can add certain kinds of organic matter (e.g. food), and then this organic matter spontaneously converts into more of the original kind of cell (e.g. it gets moldy). This makes cells much more influential than other similarly-diminished entities.
In order to get something analogous to cells, it’s not just enough to discover small structures, since there’s lots of small structures that don’t form spontaneously like this. It seems dubious whether current mechanistic interpretability is finding features like this.
I agree that it is dubious at the moment. I just think it’s too early to tell and the field itself will undoubtedly grow in complexity over the coming years.
Your point about the spontaneity of cells forming stands, although I wasn’t phrasing the analogy at the level of thermodynamics / physics.