I like the arc. I've been interested in cross-species mind reading for awhile,
to my usual vapid dilettante extent. A recent pop-sci article is here:
https://theconversation.com/bees-can-learn-remember-think-and-make-decisions-heres-a-look-at-how-they-navigate-the-world-203837
I've recently gone back to your (EricS') unification of free energy types in Box 7.1 because I'm trying to parse
Solms' "The Hidden Spring". The concept of laziness seems related to a "default mode"
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network>, to me. The link to Williams Syndrome and wolves
suggests a huge array of speculative possibilities about one's ability to enter a "wandering mode", by
contrast with more objective oriented behavior. I can't help but be attracted to the idea that one's ability to
optimize for anti-surprise might be directly proportional to one's ability to daydream. But this may not be
disjoint from some forms of vigilance.
Non sequitur story time. When Renee's kid came to live with us because their life just hit bottom,
I bought them a used car. Because they have the worst luck, they were rear-ended by an uninsured
driver, which totaled the old thing. They made the off-hand comment "Who would have thought
the person who would rear-end me would be uninsured?" ... or something like that. My unstated
reaction was "Me! I thought of it! That's why I spent the extra money for comprehensive
coverage of a cheap, old, used car." Such pre-emptive planning is, I think, what allows even
those who may tend toward sometimes debilitative vigilance (like apocalypse preppers, or neurotic
people with social anxiety) to wall off a copse in which they can daydream.
I'd speculate that we (from folding proteins up to simulating-cortex animals) can outsource the
"walling off" to our (built) environment, which includes other agents. E.g. a Williams
Syndrome victim, with their stereotypically extravagant social skills (perhaps learned *because* of
their otherwise debilitating fears) can build such strong social connections, as long as they have
a reliable support structure of the right kind. But, going back to the wolves and large molecules,
the type and form of the "wall" matters. Nobody expects a honey bee to be able to stay in
default mode if they're out there on their own like a bumblebee. So nobody would expect a wolf to
daydream under the same conditions a family dog would daydream.
On 5/31/23 20:02, David Eric Smith wrote:
Yeah. It’s a good objection, because I don’t know either.
I know what sources I am feeding off of. They are all this popular-science
writing, and who knows its status; maybe it becomes the urban legend of
“intellectual” spectators?
There is the whole follow-on from the Siberian silver foxes, and the stylized
facts of piebald coloring, round ears, and chattiness as the mark of
epigenetically altered hormonal profiles among domesticates. Not sure how you
do that with primates that already have short ears and limited hair, but
there’s always the chattiness.
Some of it, I think, came from reading Barry Lopez’s book Of Wolves and Men as
a young kid (a book that at the time, I figured was just a surplus on the
used-book tables, but which I have seen referred to repeatedly over the years),
and then some decades later, some other book-length thing about social
intelligence among dog breeds and their relations to wolves. The broad thesis
being that adult wolves don’t have a sense of humor. People see wolf pups that
look like dog pups and think “I’ll raise one of those”, and then suddenly the
transition to adulthood happens, and all this “relation” they thought they had
vanishes as the wolf becomes the adult wild animal, and they realize they are
in completely over their heads.
Factoid upon factoid, somewhere in this I fit the thing my boss mentioned a
couple of years ago, about a Nature (?) article reporting that one of the
mutations systematically separating dogs from the grey wolf was in the gene
that is cognate to the one that mutates to cause Williams Syndrome in people.
I mentioned that on the list maybe a year ago, but have’t gone to find the link
myself.
The thing about vigilance as an important defining dimension of the PTSD
phenotype comes from the Jonathan Shay book I mentioned, and probably also Tim
OBrien’s The Things They Carried, though not emphasized there the same way in
its own name. Seems to correlate with being surprisingly strong while being
surprisingly skinny and not needing to eat much (or having an interest I eating
much), and with a portfolio of health problems that shorten lifespan. Shay
thinks that hypervigilance, as a requirement for survival, is one of the
drivers of PTSD and not only a symptom; the other major one being betrayal
within what was supposed to have functioned as the social in-group and support
structure. That was the connection to the SFI talk on “Living with Distrust”
as a locked-in low-benefit social state (anthropological study of a small
village I Romania).
Are wild animals like that? I do have that impression, with about as much
depth as my other impressions. Getting close to a wild fox seems very very
hard. Raccoons too. I think of big male domestic cats as being pretty
menacing (having been attacked by one in the dark one time), but the reputation
is that faced with a fox or a raccoon, they don’t have a chance of surviving.
Makes me imagine that bobcats look like slightly enlarged big domestic cats,
but probably aren’t like them very much at all.
I was having this discussion with someone once, sitting outside a small
artificial lake in a little forest glen, watching the birds fight continuously
with each other in every pairing over territory. Thinking “These animals are
really willing to make an effort.”
Eric
On May 30, 2023, at 4:27 PM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
"Somehow not the domain of peace and spirituality that I think first-worlders like
to project onto first-nationers, and which might even be true for the first-nationers,
since they are also from a milder time by a lot than a large extinction."
IDK, man. Are wild animals different from us in any significant way? Are they actually
never lazy, never unvigilant, etc? Or, perhaps, is the attribution of vigilance (and
hence never unvigilance) an illusion born of othering? A standard whipping post for me is
this "Are you a cat person or a dog person" cocktail party ice breaker.
Admitting the false dichotomy, dog people tend to think of cats as non-social, selfish,
blahblah. Cat people tend to think of dogs as slobbery, vapid, etc. It's complete
nonsense born of arbitrary delusions.
But of course, there is something to be said of the built environment. It would be difficult for a
human reared in a city to navigate the Mongolian desert. But is that difference any greater than
plopping a city dweller 13,000 years in the past? Are office or political games significantly
different from the "games" wild babies play under the vigilant eye of their den mother?
Yeah, I know. I'm putting too much weight on "significant". Obviously, everything's
different from everything else. (I regret not being able to engage more with Jon's exploration of
Deleuze.) But my conservatism tells me that objective othering would rely solely on coherent
traits, fingers vs. claws, hair vs. fur, cortex or no cortex. A human now would be insignificantly
different from a human then. If the apocalypse doesn't transform us into something other than
human, whatever is rebuilt will be strikingly similar to what we have now.
On 5/28/23 11:29, David Eric Smith wrote:
I’m not sure elitist, Steve,
That’s one bad habit that I don’t think they have.
More along the line, I suspect, of “out of ordinary people who mostly get mowed
down, here and there will be some pockets that started to pay attention and got
lucky enough to have time to make a culture of it, of sorts”
Wes Jackson likes the term “saving remnant”.
I happen to be in Sweden just now, and it has me thinking about sci-fi futures,
ad also Nietzsche’s “last man” etc.
Also on this theme is the very interesting SFI lecture “living with distrust”,
which signals things I have seen (Ernst Fehr?) and others say about the Ache
and Machiguenga and other groups.
What do I think the saving remnant will be? I imagine people who lost all the
epigenetic marks associated with domestication, and took on hormone profiles
more like chimps. Or “born this way” to PTSD.
Take any wild animal, and contemplate just how _different_ they are from us.
Never lazy. Never un-vigilant. Or read Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam.
Suppose all the people who remain have survived only because they are that.
Unwind not only the past 70 years of developed-world tranquility, but the
history of human domestication since at least the younger dryas. Maybe a lot
longer ago than that.
What is it like to have your Time Machine and go spend a weekend with those
guys in their home? Jared Diamond would be jealous. Somehow not the domain of
peace and spirituality that I think first-worlders like to project onto
first-nationers, and which might even be true for the first-nationers, since
they are also from a milder time by a lot than a large extinction.
I wish I had the imagination to be interesting. It would be invigorating to
read someone who could really imagine a different world, and a different us,
and take you there in some convincing way.
Eric
On May 28, 2023, at 6:55 PM, Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote:
Eric -
Thanks for passing this link around here. I suspect most here have the background to appreciate/parse
this < insert Steve Martin's "hear me now and believe me later" SNL skit> but maybe not
an "affordance to know" the more acute implications of it.
One of the things I find (most) interesting in the RGND rhetoric is their
(appropriate) invocation of Complex Systems ideas as well as the convergence of
human consciousness (mostly from a neuroscience perspective) and the complex
systems which are the techno-social-economic systems that are our
energo-materio culture which is the engine that is spinning the earth-systems
out of the orbits they were in pre-anthropocene (150 or 15000 years?)
I may be reading them wrong, but this feels like "yet another" elitist trope,
this time on (nanotech?) steroids:
/In short, we think it’s probable that MTI civilization will collapse
catastrophically but that pockets of people with a rising level of
consciousness and awareness of our eco-predicament will survive and act as the
seeders of a new world.///
I particularly appreciated your pithy observation:
/But here, we can maybe somehow combine the capitalists and the GNDers.
The concentration in the rate and provision of services, and of the ownership
of the proceeds by whoever the rulers turn out to be, leaves the rest of us
free to die off in peace, and not carry on the guilt of being ecological
criminals. It’s a win-win./
/
/
Thanks to Sabine (as Cassandra) and Eric and Marcus for raising this to my
attention... queing it up to provide background for my read lead me to her
Collective Stupidity episode <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25kqobiv4ng>.
I am left wondering if/how LLMs reflect/relate to Wisdom/Stupidity of Crowds?
Seems like LLMs are literally the encapsulation of collective knowledge.
Sabine's invocation of "Information Cascades" was interesting in contrast with
entrainment and canalization. Will LLMs in some way help us avoid these
short-circuits/shunts? Or aggravate them?
- Steve
On 5/28/23 2:46 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
This comment leads to an interesting angle that I haven’t heard.
Bill Rees, whom you can find here:
<d8f080_78c1ab7b00b045ff9bbc01a273b00173~mv2.jpg>
Home | The REAL Green New Deal Project
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.realgnd.org%2f&c=E,1,s4xLfGynLIjkrUt9NbN7gTjzG9OOoaJe64vBX3p4819H6jFz9AJSSe-qv9yDN4qwXF8gSayAREexT0axFnHBthp_EmNYm91Bl5Edsist24GG&typo=1>
https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2frealgnd.org&c=E,1,o-jD2Pd3Y2XABKHYvdjInzR4x3ep6uYbwcsXC-DFCaj9q_hjiE7VWqV3KWC2P3ekWNDW6V-PTSH_3BQuFildW1lxnqFkgyRufuDcSLp4&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.realgnd.org%2f&c=E,1,mLU-zLi9KLRqdV1LCSsLf4xAqRPWhhLSvzK0ajNxs-Bl31f_tDo3AuTO8FftJArhBwcEpVAtKd58f8Nn8HWN8QWG-poN1K4CsHllfzctVyYuePFkCMo,&typo=1>
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.realgnd.org%2f&c=E,1,ui2uypSQ13uMOEz7hzM4YulUakJ2dduLZEW4fMauG5gh85fLSDmPC9mu3saCYT5TA1zSp3f4E7hrdi7Iu-Yxbt88L44PzeI9TxTtDQBN6mNsS-h87nJxhCE,&typo=1>
writes numerous papers about how 90% of us need to die, or that this is just
what will happen whether we articulate such a need or not. I won’t go so far
as to say that Rees “wants” 90% of us to die (see the smiling grandfatherly
bearded ecologist photo in the pages), but after a long life of writing
Jeremiads and not seeing the world change its ways, he seems so defeated by
frustration that I read in him a deep and now constitutive misanthropy.
(btw: the Real GND website is best read while listening to Sabine
Hossenfelder’s song My Name is Cassandra, Prophet of the Dark. Thanks Marcus
for making me aware of her oeuvre, I had never noticed it.)
Usually, the problem with the bait-and-switch of new technologies is “look, it
will save so much labor we will all have leisure to be creative while still
having comfortable levels of consumption”, when what actually happens is
classic Marx: the few who can enclose the new services, either because they are
exclusive or just through market-gravitational effects, now own an even larger
sector of all income, and the expanding remnant is made increasingly desperate.
But here, we can maybe somehow combine the capitalists and the GNDers. The
concentration in the rate and provision of services, and of the ownership of
the proceeds by whoever the rulers turn out to be, leaves the rest of us free
to die off in peace, and not carry on the guilt of being ecological criminals.
It’s a win-win.
I worry that that story is probably incomplete, and maybe thereby wrong. The
concentrating advantage of advanced autocomplete services might only be a
transient while our current stock of primary knowledge is “enough” and “not
fully mined”. Maybe all the inefficient activity of ordinary people is somehow
a diffuse source that actually expands the primary base. Certainly my
impression of ecological organizations is that, below any small population of
charismatic megafauna, there is a whole pyramid that goes down to an
astonishing number of nitrogen-fixer bacteria.
But I don’t know, what organizations are necessary by physical, mathematical,
and biological laws, and which might be possible that we just haven’t ever seen
before.
Eric
On May 28, 2023, at 7:27 AM, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com> wrote:
Looking at the recent rapid release of open source LLM systems like Falcon and
Mosaic ML, Llama, etc. there is more going-on than titans like Microsoft, and
Google battling it out with giant closed systems. These are human know-how
crystalized into open-source deliverables. Why not share knowledge
representations in this way? Consider the cost and time that goes into
medical or legal training. Sure the energy requirements of digital systems
are high, but so are the energy expenditures of a planet full of humans.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:*Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> on behalf of Steve Smith
<sasm...@swcp.com>
*Sent:*Friday, May 26, 2023 2:06 PM
*To:*friam@redfish.com<friam@redfish.com>
*Subject:*Re: [FRIAM] crackpots and privilege
My grandsons' girlfriends (twenty-somethings) say that they think babies are
disgusting. I hope they change their minds. In any case, what does a shortage
of babies have to do with AI?
Babies *are* (can be) disgusting, but same for puppies, kitties, and
garden-soil from the right (wrong) perspective!
Maybe the point is "nobody left for the AI overlords to lord over" ?
I think the key is "existential threat"... I didn't look for Schmidt's
statement anywhere, so I'm just speculating that maybe he's doing a mild echo of Musk's
idea that a collapsing (first) world population is somehow a *bigger* existential threat?
With my techhead hat on I am inclined to imagine that AI will help me (well,
not ME anymore, but people vaguely like who I once thought I was or wanted to
be) solve micro-techonomic problems like the ones that lead to Teflon(tm) and
Velcro(tm) and higher density/faster-charge EV batteries, and higher
density/dynamic range pixel-displays, and neural lace to wire (grow?) into my
brain/ganglia, and microbes that can convert moon/mars-dust to
Soylent/Huel/Water/??? etc.
My PsychoHistory hatted self (Asimov - Foundation
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)>and thenon-fictional variant
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory#:~:text=Psychohistory%20is%20an%20amalgam%20of,stated%20intention%20and%20actual%20behavior.>)
is inclined to imagine that AI *can* help with the "big problems", the ones nominally too large, too
interdisciplinarian, too obtuse, too "wycked" (In Complexity Science jargon), possibly too
counter-intuitive for most (any?) human or group of humans to grasp.
My Ned Ludd (very tight by definition?) hat has me thinking more down the rabbit holes of
worst-case scenarios where all the arrogant, narcissistic @$$h0ii3z of the world (starting at the
top with those whose names start with Pu Tr Be Zu Mu(r/s) Ne De ... and staggering down the
hierarchy of potency and scope to most of us here most of the time) think they "know what is
best" and put their resources to using the AI lever to "make it so"...
Even (especially) me, I constantly imagine that "if they made ME King" (or to the point,
if *I* was the/wormtongue/in the AI Overlord's ear) that I would "make the world safe and
happy for everyone, ever after with no unintended consequences or unpleasant side effects".
One *might* guess that the smartest thinkers in the most grounded, thoughtful, gentle think-tanks (e.g. in a
Tibetan Lamasary or the "Club of Rome" or SIPRI or CESR or the Justice League of America or the
people who task "jewish space lasers" or ??? ) would be practicing their AI-whispering skills right
now. Maybe tasking Marcus' Quantum Computer with "the hard problem of universal consciousness"?
An up-to-date version of Asimov's9 Billion Names of God
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God>?
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM
On Thu, May 25, 2023, 12:48 PM Roger Critchlow <r...@elf.org
<mailto:r...@elf.org>> wrote:
Google news decided to surface an article from Fortune today. It's headlined
"Society's refusal to have enough babies is what will save it from the existential
threat of A. I., Eric Schmidt says". The headline is accompanied by a very serious
head shot of Eric. Nice try, Google, but you're not sucking me down that rabbit hole.
Meanwhile, someone apparently read my mind about the rationality of disaster prepping and wrote
an epic novel about it 40 years ago in Catalan. The Garden of the Seven Twilights by Miquel de Palol
is available in English translation and as an ebook
https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fonoverdrive.com&c=E,1,i24jZ6qaXt_S4iwj4KlMCQL6JG0XDon8-oMTJAP7ZXZqRuQYl4sOgliRqIdLRRoLtoiRQ33fBCUhyBXnVUXfLmSYt7wqI61-Pu3hh6TNpJiYDl91xrw,&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2foverdrive.com&c=E,1,qiLuQHPdYM-73PUnxLjrSTzI76V8rfL6yb0_zHcdufFpFa1_kCTZkOyfYIh_N_0ysaWtjxXmwlL7kj8mmwGK2wfSP_01M-8QKT_yUEwBhHUL1Wuk-x_ACQBsspQ,&typo=1>at
your local library. The narrator crosses refugee swamped Barcelona to check on his mom and gets
sent off by her to a McMansion'ed medieval monastery high in the Pyrenees where the elite are amusing
themselves with stories while awaiting the resolution of the first war of entertainment. Lots of
stories about themselves and their friends and acquaintances.
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
