On Sep 16, 2022, at 10:31 AM, Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote:
Responding first to Marcus point:
"I think there will be a transition toward a more advanced form
of life, but I don’t think there will be a clear connection
between how they think and how humans think. Human culture won’t
be important to how they scale, but may be relevant to a bootstrap."
I believe we are "in transition" toward a more advanced form of life,
though it is hard to demarcate any particular beginning of that
transition. The post/trans-humanists among us often seem to have a
utopian/dystopian urge about all this that I am resistant to.
Kotler's <https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/10960.Steven_Kotler>
works (Abundance, Rise of the Superman, Tomorrowland, Art of the
impossible, etc.) are representative of this genre, but since I know
him also to be a grounded, thoughtful, compassionate person, I try
hard to listen between the lines of what normally reads to me as
egoist utopian fantasy. His works are always well researched and
he's fairly good at being clear what is speculation and what is fact
in his writing/reporting, even though his bias is still a very
techno-utopian optimism.
I really liked Spike Jonze movie "Her"
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)> as a compassionate-utopian
story of a fairly abrupt AI transition/emergence ... a fantasy by
any measure of course, but an interesting twist on compassionate
abandonment by our "children".
With Glen's re-statements, I found specifically the following:
Simulation in place of Symbols - I don't know all that Marcus
intended or Glen imputes with this but I think it might be very
important in some fundamental way. I wonder at the possibility that
this fits into Glen's stuck-bit about "episodic" vs "diachronic"
identity (and experience?) modes.
I haven't been able to parse the following very completely and look
forward to more discussion?
- percolation from concrete, participative, perceptual intuition
and imagination (or perhaps the inverse, a wandering from
abstract/formal *toward* embodiment as we see with the rise of
GANs, zero-shot, and online learning AI)
and in fact, all of these as well... good stuff.
- a more heterarchical, high-dimensional, or high-order
understanding of "fitness costs" - fitness of fitnesses
- holes or dense regions in a taxonomy of SAMs - including my
favorite: cross-species mind-reading
- game-theoretic (infinite and meta-gaming) logics of cognition
(including simulation of simulation and fitness of fitnesses)
I introduced "deictec error" because I think it is maybe core to *my*
struggles with this whole topic, so I'm glad Glen referenced it, and
also look forward to possibly more discussion of that in regard to
the rest.
- Steve
On 9/16/22 10:25 AM, glen∉ℂ wrote:
I do see us trying to identify the distinguishing markers of ...
"cognition we can't imagine". That's fantastic. I'll try to collate
some of them going backwards from Marcus':
- novelty - dissimilarity from "cognition as we know it"
- graded separation from human culture/sociality
- simulation in place of symbols (I failed to come up with a better
phrase)
- accelerated look-ahead
- percolation from concrete, participative, perceptual intuition and
imagination (or perhaps the inverse, a wandering from
abstract/formal *toward* embodiment as we see with the rise of GANs,
zero-shot, and online learning AI)
- a more heterarchical, high-dimensional, or high-order
understanding of "fitness costs" - fitness of fitnesses
- holes or dense regions in a taxonomy of SAMs - including my
favorite: cross-species mind-reading
- game-theoretic (infinite and meta-gaming) logics of cognition
(including simulation of simulation and fitness of fitnesses)
It seems like all these are attempts to at least circumscribe what
we can know about what we can imagine. And if so, it's like a convex
hull beyond which is what we can't imagine. I wanted to place
"deictic error" in there. But it seems to apply to several of the
other categories. In particular, part of Dave and SteveS' irritation
with the arrogance of abstraction is that symbols only ever *hook*
to their groundings. Logics over those symbols may or may not
preserve the grounding. Like the rather obvious idiocy of classical
logic suggesting that anything can be concluded from inconsistent
premises. When/if an entity can fully replace all shunted/truncated
symbols with (perhaps participatory) simulations, it might reach the
tight coupling with the simulated (possible) worlds in the same way
Dave implies we couple tightly (concretely) with our (actual) world.
On 9/15/22 21:16, Marcus Daniels wrote:
I think there will be a transition toward a more advanced form of
life, but I don’t think there will be a clear connection between
how they think and how humans think. Human culture won’t be
important to how they scale, but may be relevant to a bootstrap. I
would be surprised if compression, deconstruction, and reductionism
went unused by this species. I would be surprised if such a
species would struggle with quantification. I would also be
surprised if they did not use simulation in place of symbols. I
think they will have dreams of entire human lives, of the rise and
fall of nations, and regard our aspirations like I regard my dog
dreaming of her encounters at the park.
On Sep 15, 2022, at 4:11 PM, Prof David West
<profw...@fastmail.fm> wrote:
Just to be clear, I have zero antipathy towards Wolpert or his
efforts at steelmanning. I think Wolpert does an excellent job of
phrasing as questions what I perceive "Scientists" and
"Computationalists" to merely assert as Truth. I have long tilted
at that particular windmill and I applaud Wolpert, and glen for
bringing him to our attention, for exposing the assertions such
that counter arguments might be made.
And when it comes to "computationalism" and AI; I know it is not
the 1970s and things have "advanced" significantly. And although I
do not comprehend the details as well as most of you, I do
understand sufficiently, I believe, to advance the claim that they
are suffering from the exact same blind spot (with variable
details) as Simon and Newell, et. al. who championed GOFAI. Plus
you all have heard of Simon and Newell but most of you are
unfamiliar with McGilchrist and similar contemporary critics.
My antipathy toward "Scientists" and "Computationalists" arises
from what I perceive as an absolute refusal to credit any science,
math, or ways/means of acquiring/expressing knowledge and
understanding other than theirs. Dismissing neolithic and
pre-modern science is one example. Failing to acknowledge the
intelligence (and probably SAM) of other species—especially
octopi—simply because they do not build atomic bombs or computers,
is another.
A really good book that would inform a discussion of Wolpert's
questions, #4 in particular, is: /Other Minds: The Octopus, the
sea, and the deep origins of consciousness/, by Peter
Godfrey-Smith. A blurb follows.
/Although mammals and birds are widely regarded as the smartest
creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant
branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence:
the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and
above all the octopus. In captivity, octopuses have been known to
identify individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for
food, turn off light bulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains,
and make daring escapes. How is it that a creature with such gifts
evolved through an evolutionary lineage so radically distant from
our own? What does it mean that evolution built minds not once but
at least twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting
an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter? /
davew
On Thu, Sep 15, 2022, at 12:22 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>There is some kind of diectic error in our response.
>
> Korrekshun - "deictic"
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