To help prune geometricly expanding larding:
Regarding growth vs "mere" dynamism. I re-refer you to Deacon's
homeo,morpho,teleo-dynamic as I think this is what he is *trying* to
attend to. I have also used the distinction of "deterministic but
not-prestateable" which is another gesture in the same direction I think
you are making with "adversarial accumulation", though I'm not sure
"adversarial" is central excepting insomuch as it invokes "co-evolution"
as you state later.
I didn't mean to suggest that cancer isn't *alive*, or even that ice9
(and other self-organizing systems) aren't in some sense proto-life.
Cancer is *adaptive* in a way that crystalization or simple
autocatalytic systems are not. And I like your description as
"psychopathically immortal" It seems this is a characteristic of a lot
of systems we consider pathological (to the larger context they exist
in?) such as self-serving political behaviour, self-serving bureaucratic
behaviour, self-serving corporate management behaviour, etc. ad inf.
My seconding of DaveWs "antipathy" was specifically in the mode NOT of
singling out Wolpert, but rather acknowledging (weakly I guess) your
point about his steelman... the steelman represents a general trend that
DaveW (and I to a lesser extent) might be bothered by... not necessarily
intending to impute bias on Wolpert but on the target of the steelman he
puts forth? There is some kind of diectic error in our response.
I am also interested in responding to another bit of "chumming" you did
I think with Christian List... I will try to avoid these errors when I
do that. As you are thanking us for the engagement here, I want to
thank you for having such interesting provocations and thrashing in
followup.
On 9/15/22 11:59 AM, glen∉ℂ wrote:
It's tough to resist the "larding". But I'll try.
- Static-dynamic: By "grow", I don't really mean "dynamic"... or not
merely dynamic. I mean something more akin to a co-evolutionary,
adversarial network accumulation. Time is necessary. But so is space.
The contrast with specification targets "algorithms", compressions,
and "finite sequences from finite alphabets". *Can* such adversarial
accumulation be specified, formally or even informally?
- Ice9, cancer, et al: I think I disagree. I should avoid the word
"intelligent" because I agree with Dave, that concept is one of the
worst examples of homo-arrogant abstraction. I *do* consider cancer to
be alive in some interesting sense, if only a pattern of behavior on
top of a living substrate. My cancer, in particular, is really just a
psychopathic immortal cell type. The runaway growth is really just
that some cells refuse to politely commit suicide. I also think it's
reasonable to call some of our AI workflows "alive" in some primitive
sense, again even if only as a pattern of behavior on a living substrate.
- Scientism: But Wolpert's explicitly asking about our biases! That's
the whole point of the paper, to object to that ethno-centrism. Y'all
seem to be criticizing Wolpert for *trying* to steelman the
Scientismists. You literally cannot make an effective objection
without first demonstrating that you understand the details of your
opponents' position. Calling him biased in this way *because* he's
trying to build a good steelman seems a bit myopic. Of course, maybe
we don't have to play the game he sets up. I tried to show I object to
his steelman (but not his conclusion) because our proofs don't seem
like *only* "finite sequences from finite alphabets". And I tried to
object to that with List's mention of indexicality. But I think we
could reformulate Wolpert's questions with that and it would be even
more steely. *And* it would still agree with Wolpert's main point:
that we are more limited/biased than we can possibly imagine.
In any case, don't read my comments the wrong way. I'm enormously
grateful y'all have engaged.
On 9/15/22 10:02, Steve Smith wrote:
glen∉ℂ wrote:
Great question.
I also appreciate the specificity of the question, despite wanting to
tease it into 3 parts: A) convincing evidence; B) superior
intelligence; C) cultural inheritance .
I agree with Dave's emphasis against "finite sequences from a finite
alphabet" as being central to our SAM. *If* Wolpert's actually
relying on that as crucially as he seems to be, then the "grow vs.
specify" accusation isn't a strawman.
Static (specification) vs dynamic (growth) is an important and I
think fundamental distinction. A genome *is* a finite specification
while the embryology of it's earliest expressive development and the
"cultural embedding" it continues to form within are not precisely
finite (maybe finite-huge in scale but not finite in pre-stateability?).
But the question Wolpert wants to ask remains; and your concise
phrasing nails it. If there is an "effective computing" artifact
that demonstrates maximal intelligence with minimal cultural
grounding, what is it? One valid answer is there is no such thing.
I do think the question is on the same as "what is art" and "what is
pornography" and the answer "I know it when I see it" isn't fully
responsive but possibly as good as it gets?
All forms of "intellignece" are not abstract, are
embedded-embodied-concrete, tightly grounded to context. (Where I'm
probably relying on my definition of "concrete" more than Dave's.)
In pursuit of an abstract definition of B) above it is tempting to
gesture toward "fitness for survival" but with a *larger* sense of
"self" and a long-now sense of "time". Ice9, Cancer and grey-goo
have high fitness by some measure but in both cases most would be
loathe to call them "intelligent". An expansive fitness with an
arbitrarily broad sense of "what means self" might be the most
abstract way of thinking of "superior intelligence"?
But I think that answer, however valid, is unsound. There are ways
of behaving that *translate* across contexts. The berserker
physicists who take that to the extreme notwithstanding, anyone who
travels experiences this. As Wolpert explicitly mentions, perhaps
the "level" at which this occurs is our bodies? As long as the
society I visit on Alpha Centauri was built by homonid-similars, I
think some set of my behaviors will translate, however small that set.
I think you are arguing for the definition of "self" in this case to
be confined to the contents of our skin-bag (torus really), and maybe
on a good day some of the cells recently shed from it's surface or
expelled from one end of it's digestive canal or the other?
But maybe there's a lower level, perhaps capturing less concrete
detail than a homo-built society, of water and carbon based life?
I.e. any society built by water and carbon based life will allow
some translation of behaviors to our society?
It is familiar to define it as carbon-based life, but seems like a
coincidence of history and awareness (if perchance there are
non-carbon based life-forms we are unaware of within our light-cone)?
I don't grok Dave's antipathy, though. It seems to me like Wolpert
is *asking* these questions and challenging our berserker
Scientismists and Mathematicians in the very same gist as Dave does.
Wolpert wouldn't write (and distribute) papers like this if he
*weren't* a bit skeptical of the universality of our SAM.
Speaking for my inner DaveW, I think *my* antipathy is not really
specifically to Wolpert's specific questions/formulation, but the
*larger* expanse of Wolperts-at-large whose biases are (naturally)
ethno-centric or more accurately human-chauvanistic and
contemporary-western-civilization centric? I am more acutely
antipathic in this regard *because* I often *am one*... there is no
anti-smoker at large than a former smoker, especially one who
perchance sneaks a guilty fag in private now and then?
On 9/14/22 22:29, Marcus Daniels wrote:
What would be convincing evidence of a superior intelligence
independent of cultural inheritance?
On Sep 14, 2022, at 7:34 PM, Steve Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
On 9/14/22 7:31 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
ML gets better every day because it learns more like a newborn
child than a university student. This isn't 1970s AI anymore.
It all seems like a strawman argument, whether you know it or not.
And as I have referenced watching a puppy and a kitten grow
together from 3 and 4 months respectively, I believe that broadly,
contemporary ML is learning like they are. Current fetishes for
NLP to drive NLG and Visual Art misses a *lot* that animals (even
one's domesticated by us for millenia) do so well as they express
what their genes and gestation already prepare them for.
I'd claim the puppy knows a modest vocabulary of human
utterances/gestures already, though to a dog, I think human
language is very tonal to animals, to the point that maybe I can
say "YES" in the same tone I say "NO" and vice versa and the tone,
not the phoneme would dominate.
The kitten is (as I feel all cats are) almost entirely
disinterested in our *intentional* communications and *much more*
aware of the implications of our *actions* than in our words. The
puppy does seem to have a much stronger sense of anticipating our
interests and seeking our approval. The cat is more interested in
her interests and treating us as facilitators or constraints to
obtaining those.
Paw prints of either species qualify as "art" in our house anytime
they get involved in a painting project or the setting of plaster,
cement, or clay. Our appreciation of same reflects *our*
training more than *theirs*.
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2022 5:54 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Wolpert - discussion thread placeholder
Regarding Wolpert's first four questions:
In my opinion, all four reflect a kind of arrogance that I have
accused Scientists and Mathematicians of many times in the
past—an attitude that modern formal and abstract math and science
are a kind of ultimate achievement of our species. Any and all
other forms/means of understanding are discounted or denied. This
is analogous to the arrogance of Simon and Newell (mentioned
previously) that a machine that thought like a university
professor was necessarily intelligent.
Ignored in the AI instance is the learning ability of a new born
child. Ignored in the case of SAM is the very real Science and
Mathematics exhibited by our species beginning in the Neolithic.
Metallurgy, agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, weaving,
cooking, food preservation, etc.
Levi-Strauss writes extensively of two different kinds of
science: concrete and abstract; the former grounded in perception
and imagination, the latter divorced from same. The object of all
science is connections and explanations and based on
experimentation and empirical evidence, but "concrete science"
relies far more heavily on sensible intuition and not formal
"proof."
SAM, for Wolpert, seems to be restricted to the that which came
into being the past few hundred years. This fetish makes
questions like—"Why do we have that cognitive ability despite its
fitness costs?"—somewhat nonsensical. What fitness costs?
Mutually assured destruction with nuclear weapons?" Certainly
there were no evolutionary fitness costs; and, in fact, those
cognitive abilities were essential and the prime mover of our
species out of the neolithic.
A more reasonable question is what caused a small subset of our
species to 'go beserk' and take a subset of the SAM that served
our species so well for so long, to such abstract extremes? An
answer might be found, and is argued, in the Ian McGilchrist
works on recent "left-brained" dominance. [left-brain is such a
limited shorthand for what McGilchrist argues in some 700 pages
of prose, that I am trepedatious using it lest it evoke the wrong
headed popularization of the notion.]
If we ignore the aberrant contemporary SAM and ask if we can find
evidence that other species, e.g., cephalopods and cetaceans,
have an equivalent to the concrete SAM that was widespread among
our own species as far back as the neolithic. The answer is yes.
Tool making, modification of environment, herding, even
quasi-domestication of other species can be found.
The cognitive abilities of dolphins and octopi (et. al.) are well
documented and include language, reasoning, knowledge of spatial
relationships, planning, and even (when given LSD (famously the
research by John Lilly with dolphins and more recently with
octopi), altered states. There is little, or no, reason not to
assume them to be SAM-sufficient for their environments and
needs, just as humans were prior to, roughly, the Renaissance.
to be continued ...
davew
On Mon, Sep 12, 2022, at 6:29 AM, glen∉ℂ wrote:
My question of how well we can describe graph-based ... what? ...
"statements"? "theorems"? Whatever. It's treated fairly well in
List's
paper:
Levels of Description and Levels of Reality: A General Framework by
Christian List http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21103/
in section "6.3 Indexical versus non-indexical and first-personal
versus third-personal descriptions". We tend to think of the 3rd
person graph of possible worlds/states as if it's more universal
... a
complete representation of the world. But there's something
captured
by the index/control-pointer *walking* some graph, with or
without a
scoping on how many hops away the index/subjective-locus can "see".
I liken this to Dave's (and Frank's to some extent) consistent
insistence that one's inner life is a valid thing in the world,
Dave
w.r.t. psychedelics and meditation and Frank's defense of things
like
psychodynamics. Wolpert seems to be suggesting a
"deserialization" of
the graph when he focuses on "finite sequences of elements from a
finite set of symbols". I.e. walking the graph with the index at a
given node. With the 3rd person ... whole graph of graphs, the
serialization of that bushy thing can only produce an infinitely
long
sequence of elements from a (perhaps) infinte set. Is the bushiness
*dense* (greater than countable, as Wolpert asks)? Or sparse?
I'm sure I'm not wording all this well. But that's why I'm glad
y'all
are participating, to help clarify these things.
On 9/12/22 06:13, glen∉ℂ wrote:
While math can represent circular definitions (what Robert
Rosen complained about), there are deep problems in the
foundations of math ... things like the iterative conception of
sets ... that are attempts to do what Wolpert asks for in the
later questions. And it's unclear to me that commutative
categories reduce to "finite sequences of elements from a
finite set", prolly 'cause I'm just ignorant. But diagrammatic
loops in graphs don't look to me like finite sequences.
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