What expertise I have is often manifest by a gut instinct that something is a 
bad idea.   I’m curious what daydreaming or brainstorming is like with gut 
feelings informed by all the things GPT systems have seen.    To me that sounds 
much more efficient than trying to communicate with Siri or fumbling with a 
keyboard (even though I’m a fairly fast typist).   That’s a high latency 
connection that requires coding and decoding language.  What is dreaming like 
with an integrated GPT-like database?

From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, June 5, 2023 8:13 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism


Marcus -

Even though I play the Luddite most of the time, I am in fact fascinated with 
the possibilities of post/transhumanism, at least in the sense that it feels 
"inevitable".   With the implied magnitude of qualitative change in Homo 
this-n-that to Homo postHomo or maybe Homo Cyborgis or quite possibly Homo 
goneBabygoneNevertobeSeenAgain along with all mammalian/warm-blooded/vertebrate 
life, depending on our overshoot, it seems worth a second thought or two as to 
what we *might* have some control over.



We are about to enter a chaotic maelstrom of change, and while that can seem 
hopeless, I do believe that extreme sports enthusiasts are very precise about 
the line they enter their maelstroms from/on.  (Surfing, skiing, 
Niagra-Falls-Barrel-Diving... etc)



Regarding the augmentation of LLMs...  we were all born in a time of huge 
augmentation in the form of libraries and books and most saliently perhaps 
reference books for our language (dictionary, encyclopedia, etc) and reference 
books to our myriad specialties (Technical Libraries).  *IN* my lifetime I have 
participated in the digitization of most if not all of that matter as well as 
adapting the professional and plebian workplaces to those changes, whilst 
adapting our personal lives (e.g. handheld device connected to the "global 
brain" 24/7) to those changes.   We can all probably conjure a 1000 
utopian/dystopian vignettes supporting/undermining any determination of whether 
this is "for the good" or not.   I'm almost completely habituated to this 
"modern era" but old enough to still have intellectual inertia making paper 
maps, newspapers, magazines, etc.  at least *quaint* items if I almost always 
defer to the other.  I recently gifted my 1903 Blackies Encyclopedia set to a 
HS History teacher to use in his classes to give his students a snapshot of 
time *in the original text and atoms* for whatever that is worth.



I'm not likely to be an early adopter of neural interfaces (unless I face an 
acute disability in that area) but I am already a fairly regular 
GPT4-whisperer.  I can't say it has improved any of the practical aspects of my 
life (yet), but it has been an interesting correspondent in the way I usually 
burden *this group* with my maundering speculations.   GPT4 is infinitely 
patient, broadly and deeply informed, and only occasionally fails to provide me 
with some interesting feedback.



I recently funded a Kickstarter for a powered exoskeleton (Lower extremety 
only) which may return to me a little more mobility than megadosing NSAIDS and 
velcro-strapped stabilization belts for my hips...   I don't know that this 
will be anything more than a novelty or if it will be as (relatively) good as 
the Oculus (I've been playing with VR since before it was called that and was 
totally blown away by the "value" Oculus represents).



<ramble off>

- Steve
I don't mean "we" as in FRIAM, I mean "we" as in nations.   A benefit of 
capturing knowledge with LLMs, or similar technology, is that people wouldn't 
need to be educated about the same material over and over, especially if these 
systems are integrated into our neural systems.  Why not have individuals 
inherit a common database so that their lives can be spent on differentiated 
activities?   There's so little that tie together individuals besides their 
fears and superstitions.  When I see chatGPT emit passable conversations like 
this, it seems kind of absurd to waste years of a young person's time covering 
the same old ground.  (Actually, it already seems that way to me.) Countries 
like Israel and Greece have mandatory military service.  Some believe this 
instills in them values greater than themselves.  In this case of the Borg, 
care of the collective is care of the self and vice versa.  The common practice 
in the open source LLM community of fine tuning pre-trained LLMs is so much 
more efficient than what humans do to educate.
________________________________
From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com><mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> on 
behalf of Jochen Fromm <j...@cas-group.net><mailto:j...@cas-group.net>
Sent: Sunday, June 4, 2023 3:17 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
<friam@redfish.com><mailto:friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

Discussions with large language models are new. But you are right, we had 
discussions of similar topics before. Maybe I was hoping I could inspire Nick 
and/or Eric to write a summary of their ideas and what we have discussed before 
( such as the solution to the hard problem of consciousness, the nature of 
subjective experience and what it has to do with path dependence, complexity 
science and James' radical empiricism ).

-J.


-------- Original message --------
From: Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com><mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com>
Date: 6/4/23 9:54 PM (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
<friam@redfish.com><mailto:friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism


The conclusion I draw is that these conversations have all occurred before.  So 
I wonder, why have them?



From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com><mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> On 
Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Sunday, June 4, 2023 10:44 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
<friam@redfish.com><mailto:friam@redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism



ChatGPT now allows sharing conversations. I've asked it about William James 
book "Essays in Radical Empiricism"

https://chat.openai.com/share/375aef4e-a8d6-467e-8061-bd85b341c46b



-J.





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