My posting this morning on analog approaches to AGI. (http:// s33light.org/post/10356965451). Some of you probably know a lot more about analog technologies and experiments and might be able to say whether these ideas are already in circulation.
9/19/11 Learn To Forget (Fade Out) Well, your fingers weave quick minarets Speak in secret alphabets I light another cigarette Learn to forget, learn to forget The Doors - Soul Kitchen I woke up just now thinking about how remembering and forgetting is the method by which a Turing machine, and therefore all modern computers, do what they do. Reading, writing, and erasing. It is an appealing way to describe the essence of consciousness, and indeed we have seen how successful it has been in extending our own consciousness into these kinds of these devices and through them. Going back (again) to wag (http://s33light.org/post/3991599269) and wegh (http://s33light.org/post/4002126588), it occurs to to me how this sense of passively ‘rocking to sleep’ versus actively ‘getting ready to roll’ corresponds to forgetting and remembering. What you do when you wake up is remember who and where you are. That’s a profound little detail if you think about it. If you didn’t do that, you would wake up a confused amnesiac and probably start wandering around the neighborhood wondering what planet you were on. So this if wag and wegh are the sensorimotive correlates to electromagnetic* frequency and amplitude (private subjective feelings through time rather than public objective behaviors across space) then that might mean that the way to get from a binary computer to a living organisms is not to start with an inanimate memory machine and speed it up, but to start with energy and slow it down. Organic matter is a complex resistor. From semi-permeable membranes to synaptic clefts, living organisms and their nervous systems (bugs have em too - http://insects.about.com/od/morphology/ss/internalanatomy_2.htm) slow down and spread out the read/write operation to a continuum of partial remembering and partial forgetting. Like a game of telephone** or RNA transcription, evolution is driven by imperfect replication. Each remembering is imperfect, each forgetting leaves recoverable traces, so that our bodies both recapitulate the entire history of evolution and present a completely unique and novel individuality, regardless of the number of iterative replications. It is an Infinite State Autopoietic non-machine. Non machine because it never does exaactly the same thing twice but never entiirely abandons what it did before. The sensorimotive correlate of this is the experience of learning - making sense of what is experienced. Keeping what seems significant but also not forgetting completely about what seems insignificant. It’s a different kind of memory than a semiconductor. Slower. Less precise, but more meaningful and sensible in both the sense of richer sensation and being open to possibilities of making greater sense. Is it enough to just deepen each binary digital impression into an analog wave form event? Each keystroke a nano-scale lightning strike or piano chord with an attack and decay? Is that all there is to Frankenstein’s Dream - focus more on optimizing the energy pattern of the event within the semiconductor than counting more events faster? Instead of using transistors as binary memory switches, you use them to wax and wane, like a billion microcosmic sunrise-sunsets. Sunsets within lunar orbits within seasons within synodic periods along the ecliptic. That’s how our anthropological scale system does what it does. You might have to suspend the components apart in orbits rather than connect them together in circuits; by spinning them in a vacuum or floating them a fluid to let the right kind of evanescent wave functions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4NEgA7BC5o) (fade- outs) occur. Not ginormous supercolliders, but nanocolliders to tune into multiple levels and frequencies of orbiting rhythms and oscillations at the same time, from slow gentle waves washing up on a long flat beach to heartbeats and animal respiration to molecular and tissue level vibrations that we see and hear. This machine will not communicate These thoughts and the strain I am under Be a world child, form a circle Before we all go under And fade out again and fade out again Radiohead - Street Spirit Anyone want to help me patent artificial life? *or quantum, or EM-quantum if you like **I’ve never thought of the game of telephone as a possible divination tool - like if someone starts by asking a question in someone else’s ear and the you kept circulating and circulating until some external event triggers a stopping point to get your answer. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.