Glen -
Very well articulated, the images such as "where the cartoons don't
weave together well" and "dog catches car" were particularly poignant.
I am reminded of Scott McCloud's maxim about panel cartooning that "all
of the action happens in the gutters".
I'm unclear on your first point regarding whether "the Transformer is
categorically different from our own brain structures" (or not). I'm
not sure if the scope is the human brain or if it is somehow the larger
"stigmergic culture within which said brains are formed and trained"?
I'm looking for evidence to help me understand this.
Your distinction between (pure) Science and (practical?) Engineering is
on point IMO. While I have also burned plenty of muscular and neural
calories in my life attempting to "form the world" around me, I believe
those energies have significantly been applied more like the "running
alongside the car" you evoke. I also agree that many are biased
heavily in the other direction. I'm not sure which of the SUN founders
said something like: "the best way to predict the future is to create
it". I don't disagree with the effectiveness of such a plan, the likes
of all the TechBros (billionaires or not) or more to the point of the
moment, the Broligarchs (Billioned up as well as now MAGAed up) are
playing it out pretty clearly right now.
The question is perhaps more what the "spiritual" implications of doing
such a thing is? At the ripe old age of 68 (in a month) and a few
years into no longer seeking significant work-for-pay (retirement/failed
career?) I can reflect on the nature of the many things I asserted
myself against (work, homebuilding, tech innovation, travel, influencing
others) and have to say the very little if any of it feels like the
kind of "right livelihood" I now wish it had been. Having enough
material (own my own home and vehicles and tools and ...) momentum to
maybe coast on over the horizon of my telomeric destiny with access to
enough calories (dietary and environmental), I can be a little less
assertive at making sure the steep pyramid of Maslow is met than I did
in my "prime".
I am currently focused on ideations about what the phase transition
between homo-sapiens/habilus/technicus/??? and homo-hiveus/collectivus
might look like. Your (glen's) notion that we are collectively roughly
a "slime mold" might be accurate but I think we might be at least
Lichens or Coral Reefs, or even Colonial Hydrozoans? Maybe I can do
this merely out of "idle curiosity" or perhaps my inner-apex-predator is
lurking to pounce and *force* things to fall "my way" if I see the
chance. It is a lifetime habit (engineering-technofumbling) that is
hard to avoid... hard not to want to "make things better" even when
I've schooled myself well on the nature of "unintended consequences" and
"best laid plans".
Mumble,
- Steve
On 1/9/25 7:28 AM, glen wrote:
OK. In the spirit of analog[y] (or perhaps more accurately "affine" or
"running alongside"), what you and perhaps Steve, cf Hoffstadter, lay
out seems to fall squarely into xAI versus iAI. I grant it's a bit of
a false dichotomy, perhaps just for security. But I don't think so.
I don't see architectures like the Transformer as categorically
different from our own brain structures. And if we view these pattern
induction devices as narrators and the predicates they induce as
narratives, then by a kind of cross-narrative validation, we can
*cover* the world from which we induced the narratives. But that cover
(as you point out) contains interstitial points/lines/saddles/etc
where the cartoons don't weave together well. The interfaces where the
induced predicates fail to match up nicely become the focus of the
ultracrepidarians/polymaths. So the narration is a means to the end.
The question is, though, to what end? I'm confident that most of us,
here, think of the End as "understanding the world", with little
intent to program in a manipulative/engineering agenda. Even though we
build the very world we study, we mostly do that building with the
intent of further studying the world, especially those edge cases
where our cartoons don't match up. But I believe there are those whose
End is solely manipulative. The engineering they do is not to
understand the world, but to build the world (usually in their image
of what it should be). And they're not necessarily acting in bad
faith. It seems to be a matter of what "they" assume versus what "we"
assume. Where "we" assume the world and build architectures/inducers,
"they" assume the architecture(s)/inducer(s) and build the world.
In the former case, narrative is a means. In the latter, narrative is
the End.
And the universality of our architecture (as opposed to something more
limited like the Transformer) allows us to flip-flop back and forth
... though more forth than back. Someone like Stephen Wolfram may have
begun life as a pure-hearted discoverer, but then too often got too
high on his own supply and became a world builder. Maybe he sometimes
flips back and forth. But it's not the small scoped flipping that
matters. It's the long-term trend that matters. And what *causes* such
trends? ... Narrative and its hypnotic power. The better you are at
it, the more you're at risk.
I feel like a dog chasing cars, running analog, nipping at the tires.
The End isn't really to *catch* the car (and prolly die thereby). It's
the joy of running alongside the car. I worry about those in my pack
who want to catch the car.
On 1/8/25 12:54, Santafe wrote:
Glen, your timing on these articles was perfect. Just yesterday I
was having a conversation with a computational chemist (but more
general polymath) about the degradation of content from
recursively-generated data, and asking him for review material on
quantifying that.
But to Steve’s point below:
This is, in a way, the central question of what empiricism is. Since
I have been embedded in that for about the past 2 years, I have a
little better grasp of the threads of history in it than I otherwise
would, though still very amateurish.
But if we are pragmatists broadly speaking, we can start with
qualitative characteristics, and work our way toward something a bit
more formal. Also can use anecdotes to speak precisely, but then
suppose that they are representative of somewhat wider classes.
Yesterday, at a meeting I was helping to run, the problem of AI-based
classification and structure prediction for proteins came up briefly,
though I don’t think there was a person in the room who actually does
that for a living, so the conversation sounded sort of like one would
expect in such cases. The issue, though, if you do work in the area,
and know a bit about where performance is good, where it is bad, and
how those contexts are structured, there is a lot you can see. Where
performance is good, what the AIs are doing is leveraging low-density
but (we-think-) good-span empirical data, and performing a kind of
interpolation to cover a much denser query set within about the same
span. When one goes outside the span, performance drops off in ways
one can quantify. So for proteins, the well-handled part tends to be
soluble proteins that crystallize well, and the badly-handed parts
are membrane-embedded proteins or proteins that are “disordered” when
sitting idly in solution, though perhaps taking on order through
interaction with whatever substrate they are evolved to handle. (One
has to be a bit careful of the word “good” here. Crystallization is
not necessarily the functional context in which those proteins live
in organisms. So the results can be more consistent, but because the
crystal context is a rigid systematic bias. For many proteins, and
many questions about them, I suspect this artifact is not fatal, but
for some we know it actively misdirects interpretations.)
That kind of interpolation is something one can quantify. Also the
fact that there is some notion of “span” for this class of problems,
meaning that there is something like a convex space of problems that
can be bounded by X-ray crystallographic grounding, and other fields
outside the perimeter (which probably have their own convex regions,
but less has been done there — or I know so much less that I just
don’t know about it, but I think it is the former — that we can’t
talk well about what those regions are).
But then zoom out, to the question of narrative. I can’t say I am
against it, because it seems (in the very broad gloss on the term
that I hear Glen as using) like the vehicle for interpolation, for
things like human minds, and the tools built as prosthetics to those
minds. But the whole lesson of empiricism is that narrative in that
sense is both essential and always to be held in suspicion of
unreliability. To me the Copernican revolution in the empiricist
program was to emancipate it from metaphysics. As long as people
sought security, they had tendencies to go into binary categories: a
priori or a posteriori, synthetic or analytic, and so on. All those
framings seem to unravel because the categories themselves are parts
of a more-outer and contingent edifice for experiencing the world.
And also because the phenomenon that we refer to as “understanding”
relies in essential ways on lived and enacted things that are
delivered to us from the ineffable. One can make cartoon diagrams for
how this experience-of-life interfaces with the various “things in
the world”, whether the patterns and events of nature that we didn’t
create, or our artifacts (including not only formalisms, but
learnable progams of behavior, like counting out music or doing
arithmetic in the deliberative mind). The cartoons are helpful (to
me) for displacing other naive pictures by cross-cutting them, but of
course the my cartoons themselves are also naive, so the main benefit
is the awareness of having been broken out, which one then applies to
my cartoons also. (I don’t even regard the ineffable as an
unreachable eden that has to be left to the religious people; there
should be lots we can say toward understanding it within cognitive
psychology and probably other approaches. But the self-referential
nature of talk-about-experience, and the rather thin raft that
language and conversation form over the sea of experience, do make
these hard problems, and it seems we are in early days progressing on
them.)
In any case, the point I started toward in the last two paragraphs
and then veered from was: when one isn’t seeking security and tempted
by the various binary or predicate framings that the security quest
suggests, one asks different questions, like how reliability measures
for different interpolators can be characterized, as fields of
problems change, etc. The choice to characterize in that way, like
all others, reduces to a partly indefensible arbitrariness, because
it reduces an infinite field of choices to something concrete and
definite. But once one has accepted that, the performance
characterization becomes a tractable piece of work, and the pairing
of the kind of characterization and the characteristics one gets out
is as concrete as anything else in the natural world. It comes to
exist as an artifact, which has persistence even if later we decide
we have to interpret it in somewhat different terms than the ones we
were using when we generated it. All of that seems very tractable to
me, and not logically fraught.
Anyway; don’t think I have a conclusion….
Eric
On Jan 9, 2025, at 4:16, steve smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote:
Why language models collapse when trained on recursively generated
text
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14872
Without doing more than scanning this doc, I am lead to wonder at
just what the collective human knowledge base (noosphere?) is if not
a recursively generated text? An obvious answer is that said
recursive text/discourse also folds in sensori-motor engagement in
the larger "natural world" as it unfolds... so it is not *entirely*
masturbatory as the example above appears to be.
seems to make the point in a hygienic way (even if ideal or
over-simplified). We make inferences based on "our" (un-unified)
past inferences, build upon the built environment, etc. In the
humanities, I guess it's been called hyperreality or somesuch.
Notice the infamous Catwoman died a few days ago.
I need to review the "hyperreality" legacy... I vaguely remember the
coining of the term in the 90s?
It all (even the paper Roger just posted) reminds me of a response
I learned from Monty Python: "Oh, come on. Pull the other one." And
FWIW, I think this current outburst on my part spawns from this essay:
Life is Meaningless: What Now?
https://youtu.be/3x4UoAgF9I4?si=7uVDeiDQ8STTJtv7
In particular, "he [Camus] has to introduce the opposing
concept—solidarity. This solidarity is a way of reconstructing
mutual respect and regard between people in the absence of
transcendent values, hence his argument for a natural sense of
shared humanity since we are all forever struggling against the
absurd."
Fascinating summary/treatment of Camus and the kink he put in
Existentialism... familiar to me in principle but in this moment,
with this presentation and your summary, and perhaps the
"existential crisis of this moment" (as discussed with Jochen on a
parallel thread?) it is particularly poignant.
Thanks for offering some "solidarity" of this nature during what
might be a collective existential crisis. Strange to realize that
it might be "as good as it gets" to rally around the
"meaninglessness of life"?
On 1/7/25 09:40, steve smith wrote:
Regarding Glen's article "challenging the 'paleo' diet
narrative". I'm sure their reports are generally accurate and in
fact homo-this-n-that have been including significant plant
sources into our diets for much longer than we might have
suspected. Our Gorilla cousins at several times our body mass and
with significantly higher muscle tone live almost entirely on
low-grade vegetation. But the article presents this as if ~1M
years of hominid development across a very wide range of
ecosystems was monolithic? There are still near subsistence
cultures whose primary source of nourishment is animal protein
(e.g. Aleuts, Evenki/Ewenki/Sami)?
I'm a fan of the "myth of paleo" even though I'm mostly
vegetarian. I like the *idea* of living a feast/famine cycle and
obtaining most of my nutrition from fairly primary/raw sources. Of
course, my modern industrial embedding has me eating avocados
grown on Mexican-Cartel owned farms and almonds grown in the
central valley of California on river water diverted from the
Colorado river basin. <sigh>.
On 1/7/25 06:21, glen wrote:
Archaeological study challenges 'paleo' diet narrative of ancient
hunter–gatherers
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-archaeological-paleo-diet-narrative-ancient.html
Renee' convinced me to eat fried chicken the other night. ...
Well, OK. She just put it in front of me and my omnivorous nature
took over. Fine. It's fine. Everything's fine. But it reminded me
of the fitness influencers and their obsession with chicken and
[ahem] "protein". Then I noticed the notorious non-sequitur
science communicator Andrew Huberman is now platforming notorious
motivated-reasoning through evolutionary psychology guru Jordan
Peterson. Ugh. And Jan 6 is now a holiday celebrating those
morons who broke into the Capitol. Am I just old? Or is the world
actually going to hell in a handbasket? Get off my lawn!
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