There's a nice thread in your responses to 3 of the questions:
5: "alternative SAM"
8: limitation of "mind" but not brain
12: *all* of physical reality
These (and I prolly missed some) allude, I think, to the distinction between the
indexicality of the subject (the actual animal-agent) and the linguistic subject (the
token "I" when spoken by the animal-agent). In our arguments about an inner
life (interior world) versus a behavioristic flattening to monism, we don't articulate
well enough that language vs speaker distinction.
Wolpert's trying to discuss built artifacts, whether source code or arts/anthropology
*publications* is largely irrelevant, to me. A published paper in an anthropology journal
*is* a "finite sequence from a finite alphabet", however distinct it might be
from a mathematical proof. So, it's not that hard to widen SAM to include such things. We
don't need to write him off as a Scientismist.
And if we do widen the domain of SAM in that way, then we get to a kind of
Wittgensteinian [in]effability, even if it's not formalizable like that from
Tarski or Gödel. When I hear you poetry fans talk about how poetry gets at some
corners/edges of the universe that other forms cannot, what I hear is the idea
that poetry brings the linguistic subject *closer* to the ontological subject.
It gets into those pathological corners that more explicit artifacts (like
prose or math proofs) can't reach. This is especially true with things like
cadence, onomatopoeia, etc. *Spoken* poetry is tacitly different from written
poetry *because* it is a composition of speaker and language.
I'm not a fan of neuro-linguistic programming. I think it's largely nonsense.
But there is *something* that makes it easier to be a guru-in-the-flesh than to
be a guru-in-writing. So whatever that thing is, body language, pheromones,
whatever, that is also SAM. Prestidigitation is not categorically different
than, say, lab chemistry. Our SAM assumes our bodies, in the lab, doing
benchwork as much as it assumes computers executing Matlab and hands writing
equations.
So, if one buys that rhetoric, Wolpert's mistake is in separating the speaker from the language. There's no problem
with the conception of "all of reality". There's only a problem assuming it can be written down (as SteveS
mentioned via "not-prestateable"). But to be fair, Wolpert's "Physical Limits of Inference" treats
this very issue, which is why I'm pretty sure "What Can We Know" is a bit of a steelman of a position he may
not hold himself.
On 10/1/22 14:05, Prof David West wrote:
continuing in the original thread ...
Wolpert question 5: my previous arguing that knowledge and information—but of a different
order/kind—and "TRUTH" can be found on an LSD trip seems like a negative answer
to Wolpert's Fifth. Yes, we do have access to and can learn to use 'alternate states of
consciousness' and create/discover alternative SAM.
skipping six because I am the dumbest computer person in the group.
Wolpert 7: I am not sure how you would derive a conclusion that human cognitive abilities are
constrained by our SAM. First, why the assumption that SAM is the sole apex of human cognitive
product? Arts, Anthropology? I have found a parallel with Wolpert's assumption‚in the work of Ian
McGilchrist. The latter argues that our minds and our cognitive abilities "suffer" from
the "left brain's limited perceptual and processing mode." The SAM created during a
period of left-brain dominance would be constrained accordingly and there would seem to be a
correlation: constrained SAM—constrained cognition.
Wolpert 8:if there is a restriction to finite sequences, then yes, it is a limitation of
our "mind" but not our brain. Our brains are massively parallel / distributed
processors of massive amounts of sensory input and aggregate, connect, and correlate that
data to present an abstracted, simplified, and, in important aspects, imagined REALITY to
our mind. Same idea as the originated and perpetuated Maya.
Wolpert 9: as the least mathematician among you, I will keep my comments as philosophical/speculative as possible. I wrote a long essay on the futility of Software Engineering. In that essay, I coined the term Turing Space,the binary realm of executing programs—the mental model of the state changes of the computer at one step of a program to the next; the mental model the Brooks (No Silver Bullet) stated was beyond human capability to generate/maintain/utilize. My metaphor for Turing Space was the infinite tape in the Turing Machine model. Infinite IS, after all, infinite. There are an infinite number of binary strings that will cause the Turing Machine to start and stop in the exact same state, There are an infinite number of such strings that will do otherwise. There are an infinite number of 'efficient' strings in the infinite set of strings that produce the 'correct' result. There are an infinite number that are 'inefficient'. Software
