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 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 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 "deaf and dumb" or
"dumb-mute" for those who could not speak (due to deafness,
aphasia, or perhaps some trauma? The line from the Rock Opera
"Tommy"s Pinball Wizard comes to mind: "That deaf, dumb and blind
kid, could sure play a mean pin ballll!"
A counter to the *negative* bias I recently heard was: "Don't
mistake an accent for a personality"...
It is fascinating to me how many ways we can split a hair in
discussing AI, etc. A* really. Intelligence, Reasoning, Life,
Consciousness, etc. ad nauseum. And yet it is useful (I think) to
note that no one of them is really broad nor narrow enough at the
same time. Each is a facet or reflection of the other. The second
article seems to discuss "emotional intelligence" or I think more
aptly "emotional knowledge". My very first (and practically
only) published "artpiece" was a visual study on the distinction
between "knowing" and "knowing-about", with AI climbing the steep
part of the hill toward a pinnacle (or more likely series of false
summits) of "knowing about" without possibly getting at all any
closer (at all) to "knowing".
This leads me back to Marcus' haunting suggestion that "is learning
anything more than imitation/emulation?"
Following Glen's ideation about bureaucracy as a form of tech, I
find that a great deal of my daily interaction with other people
is, in fact, with their bureaucratic roles. I am seeking a
transaction... knowledge, information, material goods, a service.
And given the level of the mutual (mis)understanding I've been
enduring for over a month now in those transactions, It now feels
like a luxury to expect a service person to articulate their
preferences and basis of their preferences in a given baked good,
bit of unfamiliar produce, or even (gawdess forbid) Beer! But it
has trained me to "listen for emotional content" more than
substance. If I ask for a "Blonde" or a "Bruun" or a "Trippel" or
a "Wit" and they rattle off something about one or more of them, I
will choose one based on the level of excitement in their voice-eye
over any imagined information content their response implied. I
am sometimes disappointed but almost always surprised. The
vocabulary of European Beers overlaps (up to language) what I am
familiar with amongst American Craft beers but my exploration is
wider (through clumsiness if nothing else). My best strategy is
simply to (try to) ask for "whatever is brewed locally". Also a
good strategy for food it seems.
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