Re: [FRIAM] A* and emulatoin
Oh my! I heard nothing of it until now We are heading back to our own Tornado Alley... flying into Denver... (far western edge) and then Mary to Wisconsin which is on the northeastern edge. I checked weather and it was suggested that there might have been 6" (15cm) hail in Minnesota? I see/hear Santa Fe has been under early monsoons and that is calming the otherwise out-of-control Pecos fire(s) but that California is starting to see more lightning caused fires (so far a modest reprieve this year). Zelazny/SciFi fans might check out the 1960s? "Damnation Alley" or skip forward to Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather"... On 6/28/22 7:18 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote: There was a Tornado in the Netherlands yesterday. Hope you are OK? Very unusual for Europe. The weather is too warm for this season. We have July temperatures in June. Probably another sign of climate change https://news.sky.com/story/netherlands-at-least-one-dead-as-tornado-sweeps-through-dutch-coastal-town-12641338 -J. Original message From: Steve Smith Date: 6/26/22 09:16 (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] A* and emulatoin 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.
Re: [FRIAM] A* and emulatoin
>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? Given a differential function R -> R a new function can be constructed which at each point is the derivative of the original function. if the original funcion is infinitely differentiable (snooth) its derivative also is. Many funcatons such as ax + b yield a constant function after one derivatie and infinitely many 0 functions after that where 0 means the function f(x) = 0 for all x. Other differentiable functions such as exp(x) or sin(x) simply return similar infinitely differentiable functions; or themselves. A function f: R^n -> R^m gemeralize these ideas. As for dimensions, read about differentials, exterior derivatives, 1-forms etc. That probably doesn't help much. only if the topic we are studying is infinitely differentiable I suppose. So the implication of every tangent on a tangent is that the topic of interest is (yet more) smooth?-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
Re: [FRIAM] A* and emulatoin
There was a Tornado in the Netherlands yesterday. Hope you are OK? Very unusual for Europe. The weather is too warm for this season. We have July temperatures in June. Probably another sign of climate changehttps://news.sky.com/story/netherlands-at-least-one-dead-as-tornado-sweeps-through-dutch-coastal-town-12641338-J. Original message From: Steve Smith Date: 6/26/22 09:16 (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] A* and emulatoin 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
Re: [FRIAM] A* and emulatoin
>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? Given a differential function R -> R a new function can be constructed which at each point is the derivative of the original function. if the original funcion is infinitely differentiable (snooth) its derivative also is. Many funcatons such as ax + b yield a constant function after one derivatie and infinitely many 0 functions after that where 0 means the function f(x) = 0 for all x. Other differentiable functions such as exp(x) or sin(x) simply return similar infinitely differentiable functions; or themselves. A function f: R^n -> R^m gemeralize these ideas. As for dimensions, read about differentials, exterior derivatives, 1-forms etc. That probably doesn't help much. Frank -- Frank Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Research: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2 -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
Re: [FRIAM] A* and emulatoin
Fascinating example, David! George Duncan Emeritus Professor of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University georgeduncanart.com See posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram Land: (505) 983-6895 Mobile: (505) 469-4671 My art theme: Dynamic exposition of the tension between matrix order and luminous chaos. "Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion." >From "Notes to myself on beginning a painting" by Richard Diebenkorn. "It's that knife-edge of uncertainty where we come alive to our truest power." Joanna Macy. On Mon, Jun 27, 2022 at 1:33 PM Prof David West wrote: > Syncretic might be a term of interest here. Usually applied in the area of > religion, e.g., the fusion of Vudun and Catholicism, so that Legba is a > black saint in his niche in the Catholic cathedral in Havana. > > My favorite example of syncretism was a nighttime pageant in Rio de > Janeiro. A hill was covered in matte black so a spotlighted figure would > appear to descend from heaven when walking down the hill. At the top of the > hill, the figure was the Virgin Mary in immaculate white robes. As She > descended clothing was shed and when she reached the bottom of the hill she > was fully naked and 9 months pregnant, the personification of an > Afro-Brazilian fertility goddess. > > dave west > > > On Mon, Jun 27, 2022, at 11:04 AM, glen wrote: > > Yeah, I don't like "synthetic" as much because it seems to rely on a > > false dichotomy between us and the other animals. Is a termite mound > > "synthetic"? Granted, "artificial" may hide some of that, too. But I > > think it's reasonable to say there are, say, naturally occurring > > (geological) mounds. Then there are artisan-generated, artificial, > > termite mounds, where the termites are the artisans. [⛧] > > > > And none of that artisanal stuff *requires* the artisan to > > reductionistically "understand" everything from first principles in the > > way "synthetic" might. "Synthetic" also often carries another false > > dichotomy between synthesis and analysis. It's false because nobody > > ever does pure [synthe|analy]sis. They're always done together. > > "Artificial" allows for that mode mixing. [We've had this discussion > > before in the usage of terms like "naturfact".] > > > > And that targets artificial morality nicely, I think. I've never really > > grokked the difference between morality and ethics, I think because > > making the distinction is a kind of composition/division fallacy. > > Ethics seems to carry the pretense of (or a slippery slope to) > > universality/monism, whereas morals seem to carry the pretense of > > individualism/relativism. If laid out on a spectrum, that's fine. But > > to draw a sharp line seems like sophistry. > > > > While I'm a consultant on a project regarding the ethics of AI in > > medicine, what interests me most is simulating the agency of an > > individual practitioner ... similar to the way we used to play > > red-blue-gray teams back at lockheed ... or the way you might simulate > > modern [cough] cyberwarfare. > > > > > > [⛧] Of course, you have to go all the way down to the 3rd defn in AH to > > find the right one. So if "synthetic" might mean "cobbled together from > > stuff you found lying around", then maybe it's better than > > "artificial". What I mean by both terms is closer to "glitch" ... a > > little bit of intent and a little bit of accident. > > > > AH "3. A phenomenon or feature not originally present or expected and > > caused by an interfering external agent, action, or process, as an > > unwanted feature in a microscopic specimen after fixation, in a > > digitally reproduced image, or in a digital audio recording." > > > > On 6/27/22 09:54, Steve Smith wrote: > >> 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
Re: [FRIAM] A* and emulatoin
Syncretic might be a term of interest here. Usually applied in the area of religion, e.g., the fusion of Vudun and Catholicism, so that Legba is a black saint in his niche in the Catholic cathedral in Havana. My favorite example of syncretism was a nighttime pageant in Rio de Janeiro. A hill was covered in matte black so a spotlighted figure would appear to descend from heaven when walking down the hill. At the top of the hill, the figure was the Virgin Mary in immaculate white robes. As She descended clothing was shed and when she reached the bottom of the hill she was fully naked and 9 months pregnant, the personification of an Afro-Brazilian fertility goddess. dave west On Mon, Jun 27, 2022, at 11:04 AM, glen wrote: > Yeah, I don't like "synthetic" as much because it seems to rely on a > false dichotomy between us and the other animals. Is a termite mound > "synthetic"? Granted, "artificial" may hide some of that, too. But I > think it's reasonable to say there are, say, naturally occurring > (geological) mounds. Then there are artisan-generated, artificial, > termite mounds, where the termites are the artisans. [⛧] > > And none of that artisanal stuff *requires* the artisan to > reductionistically "understand" everything from first principles in the > way "synthetic" might. "Synthetic" also often carries another false > dichotomy between synthesis and analysis. It's false because nobody > ever does pure [synthe|analy]sis. They're always done together. > "Artificial" allows for that mode mixing. [We've had this discussion > before in the usage of terms like "naturfact".] > > And that targets artificial morality nicely, I think. I've never really > grokked the difference between morality and ethics, I think because > making the distinction is a kind of composition/division fallacy. > Ethics seems to carry the pretense of (or a slippery slope to) > universality/monism, whereas morals seem to carry the pretense of > individualism/relativism. If laid out on a spectrum, that's fine. But > to draw a sharp line seems like sophistry. > > While I'm a consultant on a project regarding the ethics of AI in > medicine, what interests me most is simulating the agency of an > individual practitioner ... similar to the way we used to play > red-blue-gray teams back at lockheed ... or the way you might simulate > modern [cough] cyberwarfare. > > > [⛧] Of course, you have to go all the way down to the 3rd defn in AH to > find the right one. So if "synthetic" might mean "cobbled together from > stuff you found lying around", then maybe it's better than > "artificial". What I mean by both terms is closer to "glitch" ... a > little bit of intent and a little bit of accident. > > AH "3. A phenomenon or feature not originally present or expected and > caused by an interfering external agent, action, or process, as an > unwanted feature in a microscopic specimen after fixation, in a > digitally reproduced image, or in a digital audio recording." > > On 6/27/22 09:54, Steve Smith wrote: >> 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
Re: [FRIAM] A* and emulatoin
I accept your problems with "synthetic" as described and agree that cobbled or mashed up has a more promising connotation than constructed or designed or fabricated. It has been a *long* time since I thought about that (faulty) dichotomy. The morality/ethics is also awkward for me... I suppose it isn't as much about individual/group as organic/engineered. Since I've been reading Charlton *on Bateson* I am very reminded how Bateson's seemly ideosyncratic language used to really put me off, but now I feel more he was likely working in the interstices of meaning between/among the conventional uses and landed on one bit of lexicon or other awkwardly at least in part because the conventional use *was* off in some way (or in it's precision it was naturally *wrong*?). I'm still struggling/fumbling with it. On 6/27/22 7:04 PM, glen wrote: Yeah, I don't like "synthetic" as much because it seems to rely on a false dichotomy between us and the other animals. Is a termite mound "synthetic"? Granted, "artificial" may hide some of that, too. But I think it's reasonable to say there are, say, naturally occurring (geological) mounds. Then there are artisan-generated, artificial, termite mounds, where the termites are the artisans. [⛧] And none of that artisanal stuff *requires* the artisan to reductionistically "understand" everything from first principles in the way "synthetic" might. "Synthetic" also often carries another false dichotomy between synthesis and analysis. It's false because nobody ever does pure [synthe|analy]sis. They're always done together. "Artificial" allows for that mode mixing. [We've had this discussion before in the usage of terms like "naturfact".] And that targets artificial morality nicely, I think. I've never really grokked the difference between morality and ethics, I think because making the distinction is a kind of composition/division fallacy. Ethics seems to carry the pretense of (or a slippery slope to) universality/monism, whereas morals seem to carry the pretense of individualism/relativism. If laid out on a spectrum, that's fine. But to draw a sharp line seems like sophistry. While I'm a consultant on a project regarding the ethics of AI in medicine, what interests me most is simulating the agency of an individual practitioner ... similar to the way we used to play red-blue-gray teams back at lockheed ... or the way you might simulate modern [cough] cyberwarfare. [⛧] Of course, you have to go all the way down to the 3rd defn in AH to find the right one. So if "synthetic" might mean "cobbled together from stuff you found lying around", then maybe it's better than "artificial". What I mean by both terms is closer to "glitch" ... a little bit of intent and a little bit of accident. AH "3. A phenomenon or feature not originally present or expected and caused by an interfering external agent, action, or process, as an unwanted feature in a microscopic specimen after fixation, in a digitally reproduced image, or in a digital audio recording." On 6/27/22 09:54, Steve Smith wrote: 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
Re: [FRIAM] A* and emulatoin
Yeah, I don't like "synthetic" as much because it seems to rely on a false dichotomy between us and the other animals. Is a termite mound "synthetic"? Granted, "artificial" may hide some of that, too. But I think it's reasonable to say there are, say, naturally occurring (geological) mounds. Then there are artisan-generated, artificial, termite mounds, where the termites are the artisans. [⛧] And none of that artisanal stuff *requires* the artisan to reductionistically "understand" everything from first principles in the way "synthetic" might. "Synthetic" also often carries another false dichotomy between synthesis and analysis. It's false because nobody ever does pure [synthe|analy]sis. They're always done together. "Artificial" allows for that mode mixing. [We've had this discussion before in the usage of terms like "naturfact".] And that targets artificial morality nicely, I think. I've never really grokked the difference between morality and ethics, I think because making the distinction is a kind of composition/division fallacy. Ethics seems to carry the pretense of (or a slippery slope to) universality/monism, whereas morals seem to carry the pretense of individualism/relativism. If laid out on a spectrum, that's fine. But to draw a sharp line seems like sophistry. While I'm a consultant on a project regarding the ethics of AI in medicine, what interests me most is simulating the agency of an individual practitioner ... similar to the way we used to play red-blue-gray teams back at lockheed ... or the way you might simulate modern [cough] cyberwarfare. [⛧] Of course, you have to go all the way down to the 3rd defn in AH to find the right one. So if "synthetic" might mean "cobbled together from stuff you found lying around", then maybe it's better than "artificial". What I mean by both terms is closer to "glitch" ... a little bit of intent and a little bit of accident. AH "3. A phenomenon or feature not originally present or expected and caused by an interfering external agent, action, or process, as an unwanted feature in a microscopic specimen after fixation, in a digitally reproduced image, or in a digital audio recording." On 6/27/22 09:54, Steve Smith wrote: 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
Re: [FRIAM] A* and emulatoin
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
Re: [FRIAM] A* and emulatoin
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
