Re: e pluribus unum: My thought experiment goes something like: Why would I and, say, a Boston Bro (or any of any other stereotype) class ourselves in the same tribe? You can formulate it at other scales with other classes, etc.. But the gist is the same. E.g. why would I and an elderly black woman in Mississippi class ourselves together?
By "why", I mean "what composition(s) of the two is(are) necessary and sufficient for the reflective agents to behave collaboratively?" (or if adversarially only temporarily so for a game like dialectics or red-teaming) It's useful to assume shared values like less poverty, healthcare, roads, etc. ... all stemming from [proto]ideologies like the Enlightenment program. But such programs and value systems aren't biologically based (and therefore not physically based). And if they're cultural and, as evidence is mounting, culture is at least somewhat ungrounded/unbound to biology, then what we need is a kind of multiverse of cultures. Maybe we simulate them all and find out which ones don't break under inference and, of those, which obtain more frequently than the others. "Artificial Culture" ala Artificial [Life|Intelligence]. Any starting Language is a candidate. An alternative is to identify where culture is bound to biology and adopt that as Language_0, only adding theorems to get L_1 … L_n as their credibility increases. It would be my claim that a compositional principle like "e pluribus unum" based on a partially grounded [proto]ideology is bound to fail unless the free variables are "smaller than" or "fewer than" or somesuch the bound variables. Until we have some such candidate, we can't tell the difference between entertainment and ... oh, IDK ... "learning"? "progress"? "growth"? E.g. My adversarial way of arguing with people is often characterized as "attack" or "contrarian" or whatever. This is why things like steelmanning, ironmanning, strawmanning, and civility porn are deeply interesting to me. Neither I, nor others, can tell whether such facile [un]othering - tribe swapping - is purely for entertainment or if there's a deeper structure akin to a memory palace at work. Some of my friends really enjoy the Jackass franchise. I don't. I also feel nauseous when I watch the ICE raids. But I *do* enjoy Karen and Copaganda videos. What biological role do these [un]othering exercises play? My use of the word "enjoy" is equivocated. They're both cautionary like the Grimmest of Grimm and something like an eval loop for edgy behavior. How many, or what diversity of, Florida Man videos does one have to watch before you realize you may as well *be* Florida Man yourself? On 8/17/25 4:48 AM, Santafe wrote:
— that cruelty is entertainment (that one is canonical, and I raised it long ago in my characterization of fascism as using performances of cruelty to promise an identity to the masses, to keep them organized in the mob); and
On 8/18/25 11:17 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
Ah, lasing, yes. This is probably the quality I find most obnoxious, recruitment as the highest moral value. I suspect this is why I appreciate AI slop. My encounters with it act to degauss my already over-saturated and over-fit classifier. I continue to value my xenophilic interactions, the presentation of aberrations unimagined by others like myself. I don't believe we are on the trail to anything like the emergence of synthetic subjectivity, as others seem to believe. But I would love to engage a properly self-reflective and non-human language engine, to explore why we do or don't agree on our uncanny valleys. Why we never will. I suppose for as amenable as chatbots are programmed to be, there is something to the inherent non-recruitment of the AI's perceptions that I find valuable. [...] It is my experience that many grant it the case (via a belief in continuum) that history can be baked into the smallest moments, can be meaningfully distilled and faithfully preserved into a Markovian state, when it may just as easily (or more probably be the case) that a corollary of the Enlightenment-discovered world provably forgets and non-computably produces more.
On 8/19/25 5:06 AM, Santafe wrote:
So when things are going easily and comfortably, we get drafted along in the current and think they are going well because we are driving. Then the current shifts, and we all get drafted in some very un-well direction. And the fact that we didn’t understand what was going on before, which made things okay for a while, leaves us without the tools to understand why the new direction is different from the old one, what is actually driving, and what the options or right responses are to a situation one would like to change. (And again, I don’t mean this in a reductio sense of “we don’t understand anything”. I think there is tons of low-hanging fruit that we do sort of understand and that could direct helpful action. But it is very partial, and not enough on its own to precipitate sea changes.)
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