DaveW , et al-
Fascinating concept and not far from some of the maunderings I went
through when I read Snow Crash <https://www.zompist.com/snow.html>
(Stephenson) and Jayne's Bicameral Mind
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind>
theory decades ago. I also wandered into similar territory when I was
trying to describe Fred Unterseher's ideas (and practice) around
holographic mandalas here a few months ago?
Taking your ideation as seriously as my background/understanding allows:
I think of what you describe as triggering a "refactoring" (using a
system development term). Or an avalanche in "punctuated criticality"
<https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9701157>speak. Or Poincare's
Bifurcations.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifurcation_theory#:~:text=Bifurcation%20theory%20is%20the%20mathematical,a%20family%20of%20differential%20equations.>
Or Piaget's Accomodation
<http://psychology.iresearchnet.com/developmental-psychology/cognitive-development/accommodation/>.
It is not clear to me how one would go about labeling the training set
in this case, I am hoping there will be some discussion here of that
that would look like. I'm definitely a charlatan when it comes to ML
and AI LLM technologies of today.
I am also not clear "to what end" such a project would be mounted? I am
sure most answers have a component of "because we can".
In the sense that "seeking enlightenment" in the Buddhist sense is
(probably?) entirely an oxymoron, this would seem on the surface to be a
fools errand at best and perhaps something like deeply wrong-headed (aka
Evil?) at worst.
Your references to the (in)effability made me think of Chomsky's Deep
Structure
<https://instituteofclinicalhypnosis.com/nlp/difference-between-deep-and-surface-structure-nlp/#:~:text=The%20terms%20deep%20structure%20and,to%20represent%20the%20deep%20structure.>,
which I am pretty sure others here know a lot more about than I do.
Also the (related?) very idea of an ur-language
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Human_language> .
Spike Jonze seemed to investigate/reference this obliquely in his movie
Her <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)> and particularly in the
AI's own development of a super/transcendent-AI in the spirit of Alan
Watts.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/alan-watts-reborn-in-her_b_4848864
I am also a little ambivalent on this specific conception, perhaps
because I am probably intellectually more drawn to Gradualism than to
Subitism <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitism> in ideas of Buddhist
Enlightenment. Perhaps because my first *effective* introduction to
Buddhism was through Stephen Levine's A Gradual Awakening
<https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/402994> and Vipassana
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samatha-vipassana> Buddhism. And the
paradox reflected in my favorite line from pop-western Buddhism: /"The
only difference between before enlightenment and after enlightenment is
that you realize you have always been enlightened"/
/"the Lotus Flower blooms in Muddy Waters"/
The general bootstrap structure of the impending singularity
<https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/com.ch1/vinge.singularity.html> is
fascinating to me. I prefer Vinge's conception
<https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/com.ch1/vinge.singularity.html> over
that of Kurzweil which seems excessively narcissistic and
self-indulgent. And all this lead me to find this Chalmer's paper on
the topic: https://consc.net/papers/singularity.pdf. A few years ago I
picked up Bostrom's book Superintelligence
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies>
and found it to be a very good survey of the state of things... but I
now feel that this 9 year old work is quite dated and nevertheless
deserves a re-read? If I can find time between my DDOS attacks on
FriAM here (nod to EricS).
- Steve
On 1/28/23 4:10 PM, Prof David West wrote:
This is a serious question albeit one in a realm that many would dismiss as
non-serious. First, some background.
Rinzai Zen is the "sudden enlightenment" school that asserts the possibility of
a single event serving as a 'trigger' that evokes/instills-in-the-mind a state of
enlightenment. The trigger might be a closed fist of your guru striking your ear, or—as
was the case with Hui Neng (illiterate peasant who became the Sixth Patriarch)
overhearing a fragment of the Diamond Sutra spoken by a passerby of the fish market where
he was working.
This kind of "evocative trigger" is analogous to your nose detecting the scent
of cinnamon as you walk past a bakery and your mind instantly filled with a complete
memory of grandmother's kitchen, all the scents and sounds, and emotions, an activities,
in complete detail.
A 'Zen evocative trigger' would, by analogy, fill your mind with—put your mind
in a state of—Enlightenment. This might be ephemeral, satori with a lower case
's', or permanent, Satori with an upper case 'S'.
There is a large body of art (calligraphy, painting, poetry, ceramics, ...)
that embodies exactly this kind of trigger; one that can be 'sensed' even if
its sensing does not trigger (S)satori.
So the question: is it possible to construct a self-learning AI with a training
set of such art and, once trained, turn it loose on the Google image base to
find other examples of art with evocative triggers?
Of course, there is a hidden assertion: whatever the quality or characteristic of the art
that embodies the 'trigger' is ineffable; which means, in this case, it has no
"representation" (word, symbol, brush stroke, etc.).
davew
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