To answer the headline I would say the briefness of human life. Consider for
example Steve Jobs or Paul Allen. Despite all their billions they could not
prolong their life by a year. Or recently Gene Hackman. Despite being a
Hollywood star with 2 Oscars, a net worth of $80 million and a $4 million
residence in Santa Fe (which looked on pictures like paradise) his life was
limited just us ours. By the way have you met or seen him in Santa Fe? I didn't
know he was living there. -J.
-------- Original message --------From: Prof David West <profw...@fastmail.fm>
Date: 3/1/25 5:39 PM (GMT+01:00) To: friam@redfish.com Subject: [FRIAM]
what's so special about humans Just an observation, related, I think to Jon’s
post, about biological entities. Specifically, about humans.A standard issue
human being exists in a maelstrom of sensory inputs. Every nerve-ending and
most individual cells receive constant stimulus. 100 billion nerve endings,
30-37 trillion cells.The human organism evolved to “make sense” of this
massive, and constant, input: both the inputs—as a whole and by the organism—as
a whole.Initial “sense-making” probably focused on simple gradient detection:
low-high intensity, intermittent-constant, attractive-repellant,
safe-dangerous, and, likely, some kind of spatial organization—here, there, up,
down, right, left.Then, the most primitive of categorizations: ‘self’ versus
‘other’.Shortly thereafter, a host of additional categorizations (as yet
unnamed), like this, that, those. Brian Cantwell, On the Origin of Objects,
discusses this extensively. An extension to the self-other category happens
here: Us versus Them.The driving force, to this point, is simply survival. This
also leads to the next advances, specialization within the organism (we get a
brain) and “filtering”—prioritization of some inputs over others, especially
with regard those objects along the attractive-repellent and safe dangerous
gradients.Not only do we get a brain, we get one with two lobes. Consider a
bird, it must simultaneously locate and consume a seed and maintain constant
awareness of its environment lest it becomes food itself. The two lobes of the
brain assume primary responsibility for one of those two needs. In humans, the
left worries about manipulating the world and the right maintains our awareness
of and place in the world. [I am now channeling Ian McGilchrist, nearly 3,000
pages in The Master and His Emissary and The Trouble with Things vol I and
II.]Then language happened. When communication was exclusively oral, auditory
and visual—and local; it retained an appeal to the whole brain, the whole
organism; e.g., stories, rich in context, evoking memories of shared
experiences and places.Written language, however, gave a bit of ascendancy to
left-brain skills. Telegraph and radio technologies removed context and
evocation, diminishing communication to the exchange of mere words. Shared
context, evocation of shared experience, non-verbal communication (e.g., body
language, intonation, even pheromones) were lost.Shannon killed “meaning” (and
admitted such) with his information theory.Digitization stripped data, e.g.,
the frequencies lost when a square wave replaces a sine wave.Computing added
algorithms and finally realized the Cartesian (Leibniz, Pascal, et. al.)
assertion that thought was nothing more than the formal manipulation of
precisely defined “tokens of thought.”Computational Thinking reigns supreme as
the epitome of the left-brain mode of thinking.But only at the cost of
ignoring or refusing to recognize most of the ways that a human, as a
whole-organism, makes sense of the totality of the stimuli it receives.Spurious
claims that humans cannot sense or be aware of, and therefore cognition cannot
be affected by, much of the stimulation being received are easily proven false.
“Cocktail party effect;” the human eye can detect a single photon; subsonic
sound inducing fear; human ability to accurately differentiate between live,
analog recorded and digitally recorded music; pheromonal responses; alterations
in brain chemistry; etc., etc. Huxley’s thesis that, for survival purposes,
many sensations and gradations of sensations are ‘filtered’ (in that they are
kept below a threshold of conscious awareness, but are still being received)
and Mescaline inhibits those filters so that a more complete apprehension of
the world around is obtained.Similarly ignored, how the organism-as-a-whole,
and the right-brain specifically, processes inputs-as-a-whole to affect and
support cognition. Muscle-memory, embodied metaphor, and situated cognition
(how physical environment impacts thinking, e.g., Moroccan tailor who can lay
out patterns on cloth to minimize waste in the shop, but not in a classroom or
office) would be examples.Then the whole notion of culture. Ninety-percent of
what a human being “knows” is tacit knowledge about one’s culture. It invisibly
(below the threshold of conscious awareness) shapes, constrains, and supports
human cognition. AI advocates (especially those claiming the imminence of AGI)
are guilty of extreme hubris. They are exemplars of left-brain, computational,
thinking and, because of that, they assume that that mode of thought is the
be-all and end-all of cognition. In point of fact, left-brain (science,
mathematical, computational) thinking addresses and sometimes resolves only the
simplest of problems. Left-brained thinking is relatively simple to replicate
with a program. This does not mean the program is, in any way, “intelligent”
beyond the most simplistic and limited definition of that word. Certainly
nothing even approximating the whole-organism grounded intelligence of a human
being.If, in a year or so, ChatGPT or sibling is capable of recognizing itself
in a mirror, something a human infant can do in 18-24 months, I might change my
mind.davew.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -.
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