I appreciate your addition of the 'M' to the *-match and want to remind
myself out loud in front of you that I once (and maybe should again)
preferred *synthetic* to *artificial*.... in the early days of VR,
"Artificial Reality" was in the running as a term, but I felt *Synthetic
Reality* carried the assertive sense of intentionality. "Artificial"
felt more passive... an artifact of a willful creation with "Synthetic"
feeling closer to the dynamic act of *synthesizing*. And of course now
(maybe not then), the spirit OF a mashup vs a whole-cloth thing comes
through with "Synthetic". This of course before I came to learn the
terms artifice and artificer in this context.
Is "Ethics" not in some sense *artificed* or *constructed* morality? I
don't know, it is definitely an interesting tangent to all the other
tangents that we tangent on here (tangentially). As an aside, does a
tangent of a tangent (of a tangent) imply higher and higher derivatives,
it seems like it is precisely that?! but in what dimension?
On 6/27/22 4:16 PM, glen wrote:
Thanks very much for that link to mental contagion. It targets a
number of problems I have with intersubjectivity, even if the author's
nowhere near as skeptical as I think they should be. >8^D
I drafted and deleted a response to Marcus' point about simple or
high-order prediction. My draft targeted the distinction between
[si|e]mulation more directly than yours. But yours homesteads a much
more aggressive territory. (Tangentially, one of the A*'s I've been
most interested in lately is AM - artificial morality. It turns out
that simulation has a huge role to play in spoofing biases.)
I intended to end that deleted post with my old rant about the (lack
of a) difference between verification and validation ... a standard
pedantic stance of gray bearded simulationists. I was once laughed out
of the room at an SCS meeting for suggesting they're foundationally
the same thing. Pffft!
But all this hearkens back to the long-running thread on
[in|ex]tensional attributes and the ontological status of their
distinction. When is mimicry sufficient and when is "from whole cloth"
necessary? As someone quipped re: Lemoine's attribution of sentience
to LaMDA, "I have met meat Beings I consider less than sentient."
On 6/25/22 23:55, Steve Smith wrote:
This is what made it through my semi-permeable filter-bubble membrane
first thing this morning (CET):
https://theconversation.com/googles-powerful-ai-spotlights-a-human-cognitive-glitch-mistaking-fluent-speech-for-fluent-thought-185099
which became grist for the mill we have been grinding with here of
late. It highlights interesting things like how flawed (but useful?)
the Turing Test is. The TT represents precisely "the glitch". I
think this idea points in the general direction of conscious
empathy... if we recognize language fluency *as* mental fluency,
then it is more obvious that we would grant others who present
language fluency as being similar to ourselves, possibly assuming
that "other" is closer to "not other" simply because of the familiar
language that flows out of us.
In my (limited) EU travels this season I have heard only a half-dozen
languages with half as many accents/dialects each... In
english-speaking ireland, a little gaelic slipped out here and there
but the accent referenced it with every lilt. This was not
unfamiliar to my ear, so I mostly heard it as "same", but in Wales,
the Welsh was not nearly (at all?) familiar and the
romanisation/anglification of the written Welsh was overwhelmingly
unfamiliar. When I read a sign, I felt like I was left with a
mouthful of consonants and diacritics that I had to spit out just to
clear my vocal passage to start on the next phrase.
It gave me more sympathy for my non Southwest colleagues
struggling with the various anglifications of the hispanification of
a dozen different native American languages (starting in my
neighborhood with Tewa/Tiwa/Towa and expanding out withe Keres and
Dine' and Zuni ...) The (nearly conventional/normalized) rendering
of most of these languages is for me familiar enough that I don't
struggle or wince, but after (especially Welsh)... "I get it". When
confronted with each British accent (I couldn't identify or
distinguish many if any) it took a few hours at least to become
habituated enough to not be disturbed (intrigued or put off,
depending) by the unfamiliar sound patterns and often idiomatic
constructions.
I thought i would be able to "hear" French as comfortably as I did
Italian 10 years ago, but it seems the "Romance" connections between
Spanish and Italian and the plethora of Latin words/phrases in
science made it much more familiar than French. The tiny bit of
French I think I am habituated to are a few Americanized stock
phrases and maybe a very little bit of dialogue from movies... After
a week of hearing almost nothing *but* French it no longer felt
outrageously "Other" even if I couldn't hardly parse a thing out of a
run-together-spoken-phrase. Mary and I observed one another trying
to speak English to someone who did not speak much if any and we
realized that we were both prone to repeat the same sentence with a
word choice or two changed, but more emphatically (and therefore more
run-together) each time. Not helpful, and perhaps what the few French
who bothered to speak to us once it was established that we had no
language in common, were doing themselves. It was hard to recognize
even word-breaks in the word-salad coming at us. The little German
we were exposed to had a *different* set of familiar words and sounds
and I think the English and German might have a much stronger
phonemic overlap, making it not sound quite as foreign... though I
was left wanting to clear my throat after hearing much spoken
german... and then here in the Netherlands with *many*
English-speaking-with-Dutch-Accent we are much more comfortable...
and much of the written Dutch is familiar even when the pronunciation
is a git foreign.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-cognitive-glitches-of-humans-laurie-santos-on-what-makes-the-human-mind-so-special
In trying to (re)find the first article, I ran across this article
which was a bit more interesting to me. The point they make about
human cognitive bias against anyone who speaks differently (acutely
illuminated by the once-familiar term "deaf and dumb" or "dumb-mute"
for those who could not speak (due to deafness, aphasia, or perhaps
some trauma? The line from the Rock Opera "Tommy"s Pinball Wizard
comes to mind: "That deaf, dumb and blind kid, could sure play a
mean pin ballll!"
A counter to the *negative* bias I recently heard was: "Don't
mistake an accent for a personality"...
It is fascinating to me how many ways we can split a hair in
discussing AI, etc. A* really. Intelligence, Reasoning, Life,
Consciousness, etc. ad nauseum. And yet it is useful (I think) to
note that no one of them is really broad nor narrow enough at the
same time. Each is a facet or reflection of the other. The second
article seems to discuss "emotional intelligence" or I think more
aptly "emotional knowledge". My very first (and practically only)
published "artpiece" was a visual study on the distinction between
"knowing" and "knowing-about", with AI climbing the steep part of the
hill toward a pinnacle (or more likely series of false summits) of
"knowing about" without possibly getting at all any closer (at all)
to "knowing".
This leads me back to Marcus' haunting suggestion that "is learning
anything more than imitation/emulation?"
Following Glen's ideation about bureaucracy as a form of tech, I find
that a great deal of my daily interaction with other people is, in
fact, with their bureaucratic roles. I am seeking a transaction...
knowledge, information, material goods, a service. And given the
level of the mutual (mis)understanding I've been enduring for over a
month now in those transactions, It now feels like a luxury to expect
a service person to articulate their preferences and basis of their
preferences in a given baked good, bit of unfamiliar produce, or even
(gawdess forbid) Beer! But it has trained me to "listen for emotional
content" more than substance. If I ask for a "Blonde" or a "Bruun"
or a "Trippel" or a "Wit" and they rattle off something about one or
more of them, I will choose one based on the level of excitement in
their voice-eye over any imagined information content their response
implied. I am sometimes disappointed but almost always surprised.
The vocabulary of European Beers overlaps (up to language) what I am
familiar with amongst American Craft beers but my exploration is
wider (through clumsiness if nothing else). My best strategy is
simply to (try to) ask for "whatever is brewed locally". Also a good
strategy for food it seems.
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