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?
unfortunately you are singing my song here... or dreaming my dreams.
This too compels me (or at least my ego?)...
For many years, I have felt that my own voracious appetite for the
written, crafted, and produced creative constructions of others (aka
literature, art, pop fiction, pop media, etc) has been "dreaming other
people's dreams" and the nature of wireless streaming video into the 50"
diagonal box in my living room, the 5" diagonal mobile phone in my hand,
and the 360 degree stereographic sensorium of my Oculus has jacked it
up to a new level...
Our brains were (maybe) wired/evolved to stare into a flickering fire
(or at the shadows thrown on the cave wall) and tell one another stories
handed down and around, embellished, superposed, morphed, hyperbolized,
personalized over a lifetime. Surely Kokopelli's greatest gift to each
village he entered was the gift of new ideas hidden in familiar but not
stories? That and (if the more salacious stories hold) the gift of an
outsider's genetic material into the community. The hard-goods or even
seeds he might have carried in his Santa-esque backpack are
qualitatively the same?
I am not *nearly* thoughtful enough about the schlock I consume...
ranging from doomscrolling GoogleNews and YouTube to several
high-production-quality Hollywood movies (blockbuster or not) a similar
number of Indie flicks (often as high of quality surprisingly) and one
or more ongoing Streaming Series. In between all that passive "lean
back" consumption (coupling?) I read a *lot* of long-form journalism and
roughly as much Educated-Lay level professional sci/tech papers which
impinge on my professional (and now more broadly personal) interests.
Following Piaget's theory of structural learning, I expect this either
confronts my brain with regular "refactorings" or requires a lot of
deprecation/pruning of things I "thought I knew". I suspect if I were
to go back and review the FriAM archives and my own (or anyone else's)
text here I could find inflection points in the underlying "models" I
was operating on at the time. With enough time, the new models/patterns
seem to be resolvable with the old ones in some kind of "meta-pattern*
which can itself be a pattern worthy of abstracting/refactoring?
Referencing Glen's references to "diachronic" vs "episodic" I am left
with the feeling that these are "naturally" composed episodes with
internal diachronicity but (for some more than others) also strung
together diachronically to some extent?
Given that it is our "gut instincts", what if our AI were to engineer
our gut biome to carry all that extra information and every meal is like
a system update?
*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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