from:"┣glen┫"

Re: [FRIAM] affinity for chatbots

2024-09-14 Thread glen

Both Roger's and Marcus' replies mentioned the co-construction of *the* world, at least
indirectly. Your concept of narrowing sounds to me like a refining, rather than a
narrowing. In order to refine, you do have to narrow the scope (or decrease the focal
length of your lens), but you're not narrowing the world. I'd argue you're enlarging the
world by adding detail in a "dense" way ... in the interstitial spaces between
coarse constraints.

One possible flaw in both Roger's (or Irene's?) argument that the act of
explanation facilitates understanding is, from a pluralist perspective, if we
really are co-constructing the world, then such exercises in explaining are
simply narrative-reinforcers. The chatbots are good at telling stories, but
less good at teaching the core curiosity necessary for having experiences from
which stories can be told ... story-generators are different from
story-repeaters ... I guess it's like the old distinction between teaching and
doing. Sabine's admiration of flat earthers is good, if awkward, along these
lines: https://youtu.be/f8DQSM-b2cc?si=xyqpS2FJjH4imOy4

That has consequences to your sense of the chatbot pushing you toward homogeny
and a risk in Marcus' abdicating to the chatbots, as well. Unnecessary
anecdote: I was just discussing the role SpaceX has played in demonstrating
Agile versus Waterfall approaches with a nuclear decomissioning consultant
(yes, at the pub, of course). Given her role(s), she's naturally more inclined
to the latter. Having a good conception of the end-of-life status for something
like nuclear power requires significant look-ahead. And I'm far from an Elno
advocate. But there's a kind of meta-processing we have to go through in
deciding where Agile is best versus where Waterfall is best. I sincerely doubt
either of us could have had such an argument with a chatbot, even in the
medium-flung future.

On 9/13/24 11:34, steve smith wrote:

Glen -

I appreciate your speaking more directly to these thoughts/ideas than we have been here.
I have been moved by your assertions about vocal (linguistic?) grooming since you first
introduced them. I am recently finished reading Sopolsky's "Primate's Memoir"
which adds another dimension/parallax-angle (for me) on intertribal behaviour among
primates beyond the more familiar Chimpanzee and of late Bonobo.

I am just now also just finishing (re-reading parts) of Kara Swisher's "Burn
Book" which covers her own experience/perspective across TechBro culture where a
pretty significant amount of Alpha/Beta pecking order exhibits itself and we see the
current rallying of (too) much of that sub culture to MAGA/Trump fealty.

We've talked about how some of us really enjoy simulated conversation with chatbots ...
"really" is an understatement ... it looks more like a fetish or a kink to me ... too
intense to be well-described as "enjoyment". Anyway, this article lands in that space, I
think:

I will confess to having an "appreciation" for the "simulated conversation to which you
refer... It might have reached kink or fetish levels for a little while when I was first exploring the
full range of GPT 3.5 and then 4.0 available to me. I've referred to GPT as my "new bar
friend" or maybe to the point a little like finding a new watering hole with a number of regulars
who I can find a qualitatively new conversation.

I've mostly moved past that fascination... I'm not as surprised by these "new
friends" as I was for the first few months of dropping in on them.

It seems to me that some arbitrary thought can play at least a few roles to a
person. It may provide: 1) a kernel of identity to establish us vs. them, 2)
fodder for feigning engagement at cocktail parties and such, and 3) a foil for
world-construction (collaboratively or individually).

(1) and (2) wouldn't necessarily mechanize refinement of the thought, including
testing, falsification, etc. But (3) would. For me, (2) does sometimes provide
an externalized medium by which I can change my mind. Hence my affinity for
argument, especially with randos at the pub. But it seems like coping and
defense mechanisms like mansplaining allow others to avoid changing their minds
with (2).

Like you (only very differently in detail I am sure) I tend to push my chatbot "friends" until they begin to
contradict me or argue with me. While some of the discussions involve "worldbuilding" I think of it more as
"world narrowing"? In my case meaning, helping me think and talk my way through a *subset* of the
possibilities I see on "solving a problem" which might be more appropriately framed as building a
problem-space world and then narrowing (or even bending) the solution space away from the conventio

[FRIAM] affinity for chatbots

2024-09-12 Thread glen


We've talked about how some of us really enjoy simulated conversation with chatbots ... 
"really" is an understatement ... it looks more like a fetish or a kink to me ... too 
intense to be well-described as "enjoyment". Anyway, this article lands in that space, I 
think:

Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq1814

It seems to me that some arbitrary thought can play at least a few roles to a 
person. It may provide: 1) a kernel of identity to establish us vs. them, 2) 
fodder for feigning engagement at cocktail parties and such, and 3) a foil for 
world-construction (collaboratively or individually).

(1) and (2) wouldn't necessarily mechanize refinement of the thought, including 
testing, falsification, etc. But (3) would. For me, (2) does sometimes provide 
an externalized medium by which I can change my mind. Hence my affinity for 
argument, especially with randos at the pub. But it seems like coping and 
defense mechanisms like mansplaining allow others to avoid changing their minds 
with (2).

Another concept I've defended on this list is the vocal grooming hypothesis. If 
a lonely person engages a chatbot as a simple analogy to picking lice from 
others' fur, then their engagement with the bot probably lands squarely in (1) 
and (2). But if the person is simply an introverted hermit who has trouble 
co-constructing the world with others (i.e. *not* merely vocal grooming), then 
the chatbot does real work, allowing the antisocial misfit to do real work that 
could later be expressed in a form harvestable by others. I wonder what 
humanity could have harvested if Kaczynski or Grothendieck in his later years 
had had access to appropriately tuned chatbots.

--
glen


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Re: [FRIAM] Discoveries and Indistinguishables

2024-09-05 Thread glen

Not sure what question your answer of "No" is answering. But someone's clearly
heard of the guy. >8^D

This is fantastic stuff, Jon. Thanks. cf
https://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacpubs/5000/slac-pub-5161.pdf

"ends up with the conclusion that it takes
three bits to get the system started and that:
1 Bit is absorbed in FIAT LUX (Statement A)
1 Bit is absorbed in stating B
1 Bit left to start generating the cosmos
More bits 3 CREATOR
“The extra bits pertain to the Creator rather than to the Cosmos, and will not
be looked at ever again in this work."

On 9/4/24 18:20, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

No. Lurking metaphor,tho, between fungal netowrks and language latices

nick

On Wed, Sep 4, 2024 at 6:46 PM Jon Zingale mailto:jonzing...@gmail.com>> wrote:

Ok, seriously, has anyone heard of this guy? In the process of continuing my work on
situating theories of computation within the context of syntactic categories, I found
myself down a rabbit hole leading to this thinker. A F Parker-Rhodes' book[0] "The
Theory of Indistinguishables" has at the very least a table of contents worth
perusing.

The wikipedia article[1] depicts an individual with a diversity of his deep
interests, publications and public affiliations resembling the penchants of
some I have met through Friam. Somehow it still surprises me when I discover a
Lewis Fry Richardson or Per Martin-Löf so late in life. Is A F Parker-Rhodes
another of these?

References:
[0]
http://xdel.ru/downloads/lgbooks/%28Synthese%20Library%20150%29%20A.%20F.%20Parker-Rhodes%20%28auth.%29-The%20Theory%20of%20Indistinguishables_%20A%20Search%20for%20Explanatory%20Principles%20Below%20the%20Level%20of%20Physics-Springer%20Netherlands%20%281981%29.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Parker-Rhodes

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Re: [FRIAM] on government

2024-08-30 Thread glen

First the "analogy", in case that wasn't clear: Any tech (like any myopically
intentional action) has things that it considers and things it ignores. E.g. when
designing an AI powered chatbot, if you ignore that ~1/2 the training material is racist,
you'll get a racist chatbot, no matter how well it passes the Turing test. Similarly, if
you design your government without considering a Gamer like Trump, i.e. assuming
presidents (candidates and elected) play in Good Faith, you'll fail to consider those
edge cases ... fail to harden your technology against abuse. The extent to which
governments *are* technologies, rather than being merely an analogy is sophistry. Culture
is just a superset of technology.

Second the driving toward existential threats: Any intentional action is myopic.
(I'll take the opportunity to plug Wolpert's paper again
<https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1362>. Whether you buy his argument are not isn't
necessary. Practically the overwhelming majority of intentional action is myopic.)
That implies there are unintentional consequences to every action. The larger the
(compositional) action, the larger the impact of the unintentional consequences. So
big techs like the agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, GAMAM, etc. have
huge impacts that we, almost by definition, can/will not know or understand.

In order for these huge unintended consequences to be non-existential (or
non-threatening), we have to understand them well enough to define their
boundaries ... circumscribe their effects. We can't do that ... or, at least,
we have no political will to do that. Maybe we'll get lucky and all this churn
will simply work out in some beautiful co-evolutionary cauldron of innovation,
ever progressing to a Utopian dream? Or maybe not. But even if it is bounded in
some meaningful sense, that cauldron still produces existential threats, at
least sporadically.

My reaction to Roger's assertion was that "group of self-selected fellow citizens" and
"under no system of governance whatsoever" were either too vague or too idealistic for me
to parse. So I didn't try.

On 8/29/24 10:15, steve smith wrote:

Glen -

Yeah, I'm not much of a fan of Pinker (et al)'s arguments that show dropping
infant mortality, poverty, violent crime, etc. But there is a point to be made
that our governments, as technologies, are making a difference ... at least in
*some* measures. Of course, governments are just like the other technologies
and are pushing us toward existential threats like authoritarianism and climate
change.

Can you elaborate on this: "just like other technologies" and "pushing us toward
existential threats"?

I have my own intuition and logic for believing this but rather than blather it
all out here, I'd like to peek under your assertion and see what you are
thinking on this topic?

Also wondering if you or any of the usual suspects (including REC/DaveW) have thoughts about
Roger's original assertion, given a stronger corollary to "Power Corrupts" stated as
"Power IS Corruption"?

-Steve

On 8/28/24 14:26, steve smith wrote:

There's no system of governance that hasn't been corrupted. They're all the
worst forms of governance ever invented, except for the alternative of dealing
with a group of self-selected fellow citizens under no system of governance
whatsoever.

-- rec --

And being a fan of James Scott (The Art of not Being Governed
<https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6477876-the-art-of-not-being-governed> and Against
the Grain) I am inclined to respect this POV while on the other end, I also am quite the fan of
Michael Levin's perspective on "what is life?" with all of it's spread across scale
and across complexity and across species (in the broadest sense).

Until we might evolve from a slime-mold with psuedopods searching around and
intruding/interpenetrating into oneanother seeking concentrated resources (like Russia's
into Ukraine and now vice-versa, or Israel/Palestine/Lebanon/???). Might we
(collectively) become something more like a "proper" multicellular creature or
a balanced, healthy ecosystem (or system of ecosystems)?

We have (only) been experimenting with large-scale self-organizing systems of
humanity with lots of technological scaffolding
(lithics/copper/bronze/iron/steel through antimatter, quantum dots, and
nanotech, just to name a few?) and religio/socio/philosopho/politco linguistic
technology for a handful (or two) of millenia, so it doesn't surprise me that
we haven't wandered/mutated-selected our way into anything better than we have
to date.

I am (very guardedly) hopeful that the acceleration of the latter (linguistic
technology) in LLMs and other ML/AI (material technology) will give us the
possibilit

Re: [FRIAM] on government

2024-08-29 Thread glen

On 8/28/24 14:26, steve smith wrote:

-- rec --

And being a fan of James Scott (The Art of not Being Governed
and Against
the Grain) I am inclined to respect this POV while on the other end, I also am quite the fan of
Michael Levin's perspective on "what is life?" with all of it's spread across scale
and across complexity and across species (in the broadest sense).

I am (very guardedly) hopeful that the acceleration of the latter (linguistic
technology) in LLMs and other ML/AI (material technology) will give us the
possibility of rushing this phase forward. PInker might claim we have had
material (and psycho-social-spiritual) advancement over the centuries and
decades and maybe he is right in some sense... but the leap-forward in
collective self-governance/regulation/homeostasis we can all seem to imagine
living under feels beyond our (heretofore?) grasp.

For better or worse, it feels to me that Kurzweil for all his nonsense in
predicting an imminent singularity may be right... we will either self-organize
in a Asimovian Foundation/Psychohistory galaxy-spanning culture (almost surely
not) future or implode in a Mad Max (or grey-goo/planet-krypton) apocalypse.
Maybe even in my lifetime, almost assuredly in my children or grandchildren's?

--
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Re: [FRIAM] on government

2024-08-28 Thread glen

That's helpful. But there are compositions that aren't immediately obvious. Is Durov/Zuckerberg the
government? Or the governed? Both? Dave's invocation of Chevron is appropriate, here. In one
perspective, leaving Durov/Zuck to make their own decisions based on their scoped power/expertise
is problematic. In another perspective, there's a plurality of ... commonses (?) ...
"platforms" like Truth Social or X, which should be free to fail based on alternative
governing/governments. And from yet another perspective, the Great Man fallacy applies and
Durov/Zuck don't really have any power/expertise at all, it's the bushy heterarchy of employees and
participants that, through their collective behavior, produce the higher order phenomena exhibited
in the "commons" they host.

The individualist bias of self-governance is myopic to that bushy heterarchy.

On 8/27/24 11:27, Stephen Guerin wrote:

What does it mean to "govern"?

I define governance as enabling constraints on the social systems to achieve
least effort coordination. Government has a role as do Corporations.

Elinor Ostrom provides alternative bottom up rules for governance and is a guiding ethos
of our "digital acequia" work.
https://www.shareable.net/how-to-design-the-commons-or-elinor-ostrom-explained/

And of course, Marx dissolution of the state as a natural outcome of a classless society
where communal ownership would render centralized governance unnecessary has connections
to Ostrom's work on collective management of common resources which suggests that
decentralized, self-organized communities can effectively govern shared resources without
the need for a traditional centralized state apparatus. While dissolution of Nation
States is not on the near term horizon, dissolution of Big Tech "governing" our
data is a more reasonable near term target.

--
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[FRIAM] on government

2024-08-27 Thread glen


How Telegram's Founder Pavel Durov Became a Culture War Martyr
https://www.404media.co/how-telegrams-founder-pavel-durov-became-a-culture-war-martyr/

Mark Zuckerberg says White House ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor Covid-19 content
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/27/mark-zuckerberg-says-white-house-pressured-facebook-to-censor-covid-19-content

What does it mean to "govern"? I frequently hear things like "Democrats actually 
govern" in contrast to culture warring, grifting, personal branding, etc. I mean, I welcomed 
Biden's very boring tenure. I'm hoping Kamala is elected and that she'll be as boring as Biden. If 
I don't hear from someone, it prolly means they're working ... doing their job. No news is good 
news. But even if Durov's arrest is solely about his complicity by association with the app and his 
lack of governance of that as a platform, I still kindasorta think the French prosecutor 
(prosecutors?) is doing a good job of governing in assigning him that agency, his share of the 
blame.

Sure, JD Vance is in Thiel's pocket. But most of our neoliberal Democrats are 
also in the pockets of large corporations or rich vampires. Can it be any other 
way? Can an American politician *actually* govern? Or is it all smoke and 
mirrors?

--
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Re: [FRIAM] This makes me think of this list...

2024-08-27 Thread glen

Both your and Jon's responses are helpful. I'm still very confused about the difference between triviality and degeneracy.
FWIW, I dug up the concept of "degeneracy pressure" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_matter>. Am I
talking about that? I think so, in some weird way. Claiming you can derive anything from P^¬P seems similar (if opposite) to
collapsing into a singularity. And I apologize for my sloppy words. By "1 group" I do mean C₁ or the zero group. I
should have said something like "1 element symmetry" or "group of size 1" or somesuch. Sorry.

Anyway, I'm glad Eric took it back to telicity and cause. The distinction between
"always observed" and scoped counterfactuals might be what I'm looking for. But
I have nothing further I can contribute. I did need to post the apology and thanks for
the help, though.

On 8/23/24 17:21, Santafe wrote:

Reply is to both Jon and Glen, though I seem to have deleted Glen’s post in
scurrying around trying to shovel the lahar of whichever day it was (are there
even different days, or is it just one long day run together?)….

Again, I feel like I am not tracking the language here, so I don’t know if I am getting
the point or not. I don’t know what a 1 group symmetry is, though can guess. Also,
whether that “1 group” is a reference to the "trivial group" (I would not have
guessed that it was).

So, admitting that I am responding through my own guesses, I think that Glen’s
comment about "Degenerate constructs like a 1 group symmetry feel, to me, like
metaphysical commitments…” is close to part of my reason in the original reply
(nominally to/for Nick), which I didn’t articulate then:

This was why the tenor of the original conversation made me think the right
reply was to emphasize that laws are descriptions that can be made within the
bounds of almost-entirely-incomplete characterizations of nature. “Very
partial” or however I said it.

I think this is why the term “cause” often enters people’s informal perception,
though I think that is a misappropriation of the term as we have learned to use
it technically, and I think the technical usage should expand to become the
default one.

What is a “cause”, technically?: In Pearl’s formulation (which is close enough
for what I want here), causes are associated with some kinds of “enclosing
boundaries” that “screen off” an external world from some enclosed variables we
call the “system” and whose behavior we want to anticipate or control. The
causing boundary is the thing on whose state the internal state depends,
conditionally independent of the environment’s state given the state of the
boundary. Glen’s page on causal reasoning is just the right source to grind
all this out didactically.

When people see that there is some “law” of nature, and that the law’s users
claim that they can say things from the law, ignoring lots of other stuff about
nature, in the common reflex it feels as if the law is somehow “enclosing” or
“screening off” the values of the property-of-interest (a momentum in the
future: will it be the same as a momentum now?), from all sorts of other
distinctions that one could try to make (are we referring to the momentum of a
hockey puck or an evangelical etc.) So in a sense common-language
impressionists are not vacuous in trying to put this under the broad
umbrella-term “cause”. I get why they imagine a family resemblance (Vygotskian
term). But compared to “cause” as the term works in dynamics (or even in
Darwinism with selection being the cause-by-filtering for adaptation), the laws
aren’t determining one outcome among many that could be possible, which all the
“real” (IMO) notions of cause are doing. Rather it is describing a pattern
(unchanging momentum along trajectories under conditions with translation
symmetries etc.) that is always witnessed. This is why I prefer the
characterization of it as a description of the standard scientific kind. It
would be like the statement that a boundary “has a causal relation” to an
interior is the descriptive part — always true of that boundary in relation to
that interior — whereas the particular values taken by the boundary actually
*cause* the taking of the resulting values in the interior.

Small points of sentence semantics, but I think they allow the sentences to
conduct a coherent train of thought, rather than cross-cut it.

But just my preferences, I guess. ymmv.

Eric

On Aug 24, 2024, at 5:52 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:

"Degenerate constructs like a 1 group symmetry feel, to me, like metaphysical
commitments..."

Glen,

In an attempt to understand Eric's response to me, I got to reading this
group-theory dense paper reasoning with kernels and strata about spontaneous
symmetry breaking[1]. It got me understanding your skepticism toward the
trivial group as an instance of the no-

Re: [FRIAM] This makes me think of this list...

2024-08-21 Thread glen

I simply meant to challenge the conception of symmetry in the same way a circle with 0
area but finite radius is a line segment. A rigid paddle embedded in a rigid medium isn't
really a "paddle in a medium" ... it's a ... what? ... a sculpture that
invokes, metaphorically, a paddle in a medium. It could also invoke a Once and Future
King, depending on the shape of the paddle. [⛧]

But you hit the nail, anyway, with the discussion of frame-shifting to
Hamiltonians, position vs momentum eigenstates, and latent formal systems
groped at by folk physics (or folk anything).

E.g. at the last ThuAM, Stephen asked me if I was "spiritual". I tried to play the "define
your terms" game, which I normally reject because I believe terms can never be completely defined
(consistently, yes, completely, no). But in this case, I had no idea how to answer. Just prior to this
apparent tangent, though, Jon and I had been dancing around what I call "metaphysical commitments",
his to something similar to your (Eric's) latent formality and mine to the open-endedness of the universe. I
have no quantifiable evidence the universe is open, yet I still believe it. If that makes me spiritual, so be
it.

In some ways, it feels like those who posit formal systems as bases/foundations
for [ahem] reality believe the opposite, that the universe has an actual
boundary of some kind. (Not a metaphysical/degenerate limit, but an actual
boundary.) The formality feels closed, like an actual limit to the complexity
of the universe. The plethora of *useful* formal systems in what seems to be
our singular world is a kind of justificationist evidence for the
open-endedness of that world. But were we able to measure that set of formal
systems, e.g. N of them work 80:20 better than the rest of them in *this* world
- for all use cases, that would be evidence for me that there was a closure to
the universe (of some kind).

Degenerate constructs like a 1 group symmetry feel, to me, like metaphysical
commitments ... committed to in order to provide ethical justification for the
privileges and comforts we enjoy (like GPS satellites or projecting back in
time to the origins of the universe, etc.). It's analogous to a right-winger
arguing for barefoot women in the kitchen based on some metaphysical commitment
to a binary gender. We argue for degenerate cases because of the power the
non-degenerate cases give us. Show 1 group symmetry as the absurdity that it is
and the whole structure comes crashing down.

Anyway, thanks for entertaining my batshit confusion for even this long. I'm
sure Marcus has already screamed. 8^D

⛧ There's a common argument against sophistry that uses triviality in the same way I'm
trying to use degeneracy. But I don't think triviality is strong enough to get at
equivalence groups of formal systems (or logics). What I'm after are constructs like the
zero group which, unlike the empty set, are members of multiple systems, each of which
may have its "natural" application domain (use cases).

On 8/20/24 13:52, Santafe wrote:

Second inadequate reply, to Glen, unhappily similar to the first to Jon:

On Aug 19, 2024, at 23:37, glen wrote:

There's so much I'd like to say in response to 3 things: 1) to formalize and
fail is human, 2) necessary (□) vs possible (◇) languages, and 3) principle vs
generic/privied models. But I'm incompetent to say them.

So instead, I'd like to ask whether we (y'all) think a perfectly rigid paddle, embedded
in a perfectly rigid solid, with a continual twisting force on the handle, exhibits
"degenerative" symmetry? Of course, such things don't exist; and I hate thought
experiments. But I need this one.

I got lost here because I don’t know what “degenerative” symmetry is meant to
refer to. In context of your next para, I see a contrast between discrete
symmetries, such as the rotations that would preserve a crystalline unit cell,
versus continuous symmetries, which I need as a formal model to derive
restoring forces. Is “degenerative” somehow another term for the continuous
ones?

The question when a continuum model can be seen as a limit of discrete models
on finer and finer grains, and when one needs it to be an independent
construct, is interesting. It feels like it goes back to the Eleatics.

I have often thought that Zeno’s paradoxes nicely illustrate the things you
can’t do if you have a mechanics that mathematizes only positions. Hamilton
sweeps those limitations away by making momentum an independent coordinate in a
phase space, and in that way granting it status as an independent property of
objects from their positions (in classical mechanics). All the consequences
of Noether’s theorem, conservations, restoring forces, etc., are formulated in
terms of these independent and dual properties. With the ad

Re: [FRIAM] This makes me think of this list...

2024-08-20 Thread glen

I'll see your bet with: 
<https://pedermisager.org/blog/seven_basic_rules_for_causal_inference/>

On August 20, 2024 5:59:20 PM PDT, Frank Wimberly  wrote:
>https://books.google.com/books?id=ccFHXMDXFdEC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover&dq=Causation+and+Explanation+Campbell,+O%27Rourke,+Silverstein&hl=en&source=gb_mobile_entity#v=onepage&q=Causation%20and%20Explanation%20Campbell%2C%20O'Rourke%2C%20Silverstein&f=false
>---
>Frank C. Wimberly
>140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
>Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
>505 670-9918
>Santa Fe, NM
>
>On Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 5:12 PM Frank Wimberly  wrote:
>
>>
>> > I hate thought experiments. But I need this one.
>>
>> See:
>>
>> Book Chapter3: Actual Causes and Thought Experiments
>> By
>>
>> Clark Glymour ,
>>
>> Frank Wimberly
>>
>> MIT Press 2007
>>
>> ---
>> Frank C. Wimberly
>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>>
>> 505 670-9918
>> Santa Fe, NM
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 2:53 PM Santafe  wrote:
>>
>>> Second inadequate reply, to Glen, unhappily similar to the first to Jon:
>>>
>>> > On Aug 19, 2024, at 23:37, glen  wrote:
>>>
>>> > There's so much I'd like to say in response to 3 things: 1) to
>>> formalize and fail is human, 2) necessary (□) vs possible (◇) languages,
>>> and 3) principle vs generic/privied models. But I'm incompetent to say them.
>>> >
>>> > So instead, I'd like to ask whether we (y'all) think a perfectly rigid
>>> paddle, embedded in a perfectly rigid solid, with a continual twisting
>>> force on the handle, exhibits "degenerative" symmetry? Of course, such
>>> things don't exist; and I hate thought experiments. But I need this one.
>>>
>>> I got lost here because I don’t know what “degenerative” symmetry is
>>> meant to refer to.  In context of your next para, I see a contrast between
>>> discrete symmetries, such as the rotations that would preserve a
>>> crystalline unit cell, versus continuous symmetries, which I need as a
>>> formal model to derive restoring forces.  Is “degenerative” somehow another
>>> term for the continuous ones?
>>>
>>> The question when a continuum model can be seen as a limit of discrete
>>> models on finer and finer grains, and when one needs it to be an
>>> independent construct, is interesting.  It feels like it goes back to the
>>> Eleatics.
>>>
>>> I have often thought that Zeno’s paradoxes nicely illustrate the things
>>> you can’t do if you have a mechanics that mathematizes only positions.
>>> Hamilton sweeps those limitations away by making momentum an independent
>>> coordinate in a phase space, and in that way granting it status as an
>>> independent property of objects from their positions (in classical
>>> mechanics).   All the consequences of Noether’s theorem, conservations,
>>> restoring forces, etc., are formulated in terms of these independent and
>>> dual properties.  With the advent of quantum mechanics, their independence
>>> becomes even more foundational to the picture of what exists, as a system
>>> in a momentum eigenstate is really in a completely distinct state from one
>>> in a position eigenstate.  The two are differentiated in something like the
>>> way traveling waves and standing waves are differentiated in various wave
>>> mechanicses.
>>>
>>> > Similarly, if the paddle+solid could only be in 1 of 2 states, rotation
>>> 0° and rotation 180°, and would move instantly (1/∞) from one to the other,
>>> with `NaN` force at every other angle and 100% force at the 2 angles. This
>>> seems like symmetry as well, but not degenerative. And we could go on to
>>> add more states to the symmetry (3, 4, ...) to get groups all the way up to
>>> ∞, somewhere in between where the embedding material becomes liquid, then
>>> gas, etc. and the "symmetry" is better expressed as a cycle/circle. But I'm
>>> not actually asking questions about 1D symmetry groups. My question is more
>>> banal, or tacit, or targeted to those who think with their bodies. When all
>>> the other non-Arthur peasants try to pull Excalibur out of the stone, my
>>> guess is they're not thinking it exhibits degenerative symmetry. And that
>>> implies that normal language is not possible. It's impoverished, for this
>>> concept. Math-like languages are necessary in

Re: [FRIAM] [WedTech] lunch at Casa Bonita today at 1230p.

2024-08-20 Thread glen


Jesus Christ that's bad. What are you using?

On 8/20/24 11:13, Stephen Guerin wrote:

Casa Bonita is a go tomorrow Wed at 1230p

Photo of previous wedtech after Steve Smith's successful hip replacement








CEO Founder, Simtable.com
stephen.gue...@simtable.com 

Harvard Visualization Research and Teaching Lab
stephengue...@fas.harvard.edu 

mobile: (505)577-5828

On Wed, Aug 14, 2024, 12:43 PM Stephen Guerin mailto:stephen.gue...@simtable.com>> wrote:

Kaz, Marcos and I are out of town. Others might go


CEO Founder, Simtable.com
stephen.gue...@simtable.com 

Harvard Visualization Research and Teaching Lab
stephengue...@fas.harvard.edu 

mobile: (505)577-5828

On Wed, Aug 14, 2024, 11:01 AM Robert Efroymson mailto:rob...@efroymson.com>> wrote:

What about today? Is this back to a regular schedule?

On Wed, Aug 7, 2024 at 11:23 Stephen Guerin mailto:stephen.gue...@simtable.com>> wrote:

We'll be at lunch today at Casa Bonita.


--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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[FRIAM] Frege’s Ambiguous Legacy

2024-08-15 Thread glen

Speaking of attempts to grok batshit:

https://dailynous.com/2024/08/15/freges-ambiguous-legacy-guest-post/-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
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Re: [FRIAM] This makes me think of this list...

2024-08-15 Thread glen

Yeah, I thought about using "fusing", rather than "fusion", to emphasize that I
think we're mistaken when we talk of objects/things. Consciousness is no more an object/thing than
a river. It's all processes all the way down.

On 8/15/24 08:16, Stephen Guerin wrote:

On Thu, Aug 15, 2024 at 7:39 AM glen mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:

That's why I prefer "fusion". The ganglia (~2 in humans, ~9 in octopuses?) execute functions
broadly describable as fusion. But our gut ganglion most likely fuses different perception signals from that
of our brains. The fusion in an octopus' central brain is prolly different from that of its arm brains, maybe
even higher order (fusion of fusions). So, no, neither the octopus' consciousness nor our consciousness are
"unitary". That seems preposterous to me. But "fused"? Yeah ... somehow.

Your profusion of ideas fuses and infuses, sometimes leading to confusion, but
through diffusion, transfusion, and the occasional defusion of tension, this process
ultimately results in a perfusion of collective wisdom and the refusion of insights
from subfused elements beneath the surface.

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

Re: [FRIAM] When are telic attributions appropriate in physical descriptions?

2024-08-14 Thread glen

Your interleaving broke me. I can't tell if you have a coherent thing to say or
if you're merely reacting shallowly to the things I've said. Maybe it's because
I'm still sick from my last COVID infection and just can't think straight. But
I can't coerce your interleaved responses into a coherent whole. Sorry.

But I can respond to the primary point I think I was making, which is that the
disambiguation of the 2 conceptions of telicity (1 - agential aspiration vs. 2 -
calculation where a final state is an input) relies on asking questions like "How
personal is the calculation?" Is it merely about you, the agent? Or is it about
something larger, like the system in which you (the agent) operate? If it's the latter,
then telicity leans more my way (type 2). If it's the former, then it leans Nick's way
(type 1).

The dissolution of self (however it's brought on - hallucinogens, ecstasy, beauty, etc)
is one way to ensure we talk about type 2 telicity, rather than type 1. Individualism
("efficient markets", BDI agents, etc.) restricts telicity to type 1, whereas
socialism (networks, fabrics, fields vs particles, etc) allows both, conflates the two.

Those of us who are tricked by profundity seem to feel an urgency for
self-dissolution. My guess is that's because they don't have a way to induce
ecstasy in themselves, at will. Whether you develop a regimen of judicious drug
use or can simply dive in and back out of deep bullshit like String Theory
doesn't matter that much. All you need is some/any method by which to induce
ecstasy in yourself. And if you have such a method, you won't be *desperate*
for it. And if you're not thirsty in that way, you won't fall for profundity
against your will.

On 8/13/24 15:42, steve smith wrote:

Dude. OK. The Angels becoming Demons isn't a duality, at least in my intent
raising it, here.

Not clear which of the myriad usages of /dual/ you are saying it is not. But I will try
to defer to your declaration that such doesn't map onto your intentions in invoking them.
Most oft/recently here I think "duality" gets invoked in the sense of
mind-body and that definitely doesn't map. It is precisely a /dual/ in the metaphysical
sense? My intention however, was a little more structural, vaguely Cat Theoretic (any
attempt on my part to explicate that probably would be significantly bullshit)... The
tangent I was on had to do with the interplay between good intentions and bad and the
transition between them, how one can maybe drive the other and vice-versa? Symbiotic
Mutualism?

Our want to, desire for, *fascination* is both good and bad and good and bad
aren't duals.

complements then, perhaps?

Regarless, even if you want them to be duals, that's fine. The point I'm making is that this trait of ours, the desire to be fascinated/ecstatic is hallmark/canonical.

Thus my reference to annealing schedules? Is this not how CAS and life in general and human
innovation itself explores the possibility/probability space? It drives us beyond a
"reasonable" excursion from the existing problem/solution regime we are
"naturally" in?

Only those of us hopped up on mediTation or drugs that blunt emotions exhibit a
reduced desire for things like profundity, awe, ecstasy, etc.

I'm feeling this in the inverse of what I experience? Maybe my experience with
such things is enhanced sensitization rather than suppressed.

It reminds me of the book "To Engineer is Human" ... but I'd generalize and say
that it's fundamental to biology for organisms to seek ecstatic states ... the oneness of
the universe, the dissolution of the self, etc.

yes and amen...

But this desire for beauty, to escape our selves, IS the problem as much as it
is the solution. That's what I mean by Angels and Demons.

I think it reflects the tension between individuation and synthesis that comes with (not sure of a better
word) levels of organization/aggregation? Atoms/molecules on the edge between individuation and collection
are where chemistry happens? Teens preparing to leave home into the "big world", same/same? I
think it transcends multiple "levels" of organization (being a good true-to-self ego/id human vs a
good spouse/partner/parent vs a good neighbor/employee/citizen vs a good participant in an
ecosystem/biosphere) and this is where the "roil" happens, a dynamic rather than a static balance?

Also "bullshit" is fairly well defined. It's an artificial/false construct constructed
without regard to the Truth (where "Truth" might mean any number of shared values,
accuracy, usefulness, etc.). This means that bullshit can accidentally be true, but never True.

I like this concise/specific definition, it rings True for the most part. My
own experience of (others') bullshit is that it is ambiguous to me as to the
full spectrum of intention. Sometimes it is exquisitely the case that the BS
is pure gaslighting, defined not only to be not-true but to avoid True. Ot

Re: [FRIAM] When are telic attributions appropriate in physical descriptions?

2024-08-13 Thread glen

It's reasonable to ask what proportion of profundity is a cover for something
versus a marker for something. I still tend to give people the benefit of the
doubt. So when I see either something that seems profound (to me) or others
saying or acting as if something's profound, it's a marker for my or their
confusion, respectively. While it may be true that there are grifters out there
who sow profundity, purposefully, in order to mask their rational plans, that
sounds conspiritorial to me. A good edge case might be Elizabeth Holmes. To
what extent did she know her claims were bullshit? Or to what extent did she
convince herself that her bullshit was true/useful?

Regardless of the proportions, the grifters don't breed bullshit so much. They prop it up artificially.
Bullshit begetting more bullshit (i.e. breeding) has another home. I grant that it may not be profundity,
directly. Maybe it's the confusion underlying the profundity. But the reason I think it's more the profundity
is because the people I see who are most guilty of it are attracted by the "awe" or the
"beauty" of some thing. They *want* to get stoned on some aesthetic, whatever it is ... carried
away, ecstatic, blissful, etc. Like a paradox or sophism, there's a kind of orgasmic feeling to profound
things ... "like. whoa, man."

And *that's* the breeding ground, where Angels become Demons.

On 8/8/24 11:03, steve smith wrote:

Maybe. I'm not convinced. Profundity is THE breeding ground for bullshit.

I'm more inclined (in the context of my own profundity or perhaps more aptly
prolificness or prolixity) to suggest that it is more of a mask (and therefore
enabler?) of bullshit than a breeding ground. Could be a fine hair I suppose.

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

Re: [FRIAM] differential diagnosis of psychopathic vs spiritual experiences

2024-08-12 Thread glen


Right. Sorry if I implied otherwise. I later argued in another context that I thought 
your recognition that it was possible you could experience a Momentary Lapse of Empathy, 
and a self-aware recognition of such, is an indicator that you were *not* well-identified 
as someone diagnosable with any of the myriad disorders for which (lack of) empathy is a 
marker. Diagnosability always, as far as I can tell, requires debilitation. And, again in 
my limited understanding, anyone who registers a trait in themselves is on "this 
side" of that trait. I.e. those who don't recognize their traits need outside help 
to do so. You can't self-manage something you don't know you have.

One thing that irritates me about the self-diagnosed or identifies-as is they 
often don't admit that people change [⛧]. It's a popular trope to suggest that 
people don't change. But obviously, they do, from deep biochemical changes to 
shallow behavioral changes, all through the arcs of ontogeny. Narrativity, this 
sickness we exhibit in writing memoirs and such, is blatant apophenia, finding 
patterns that are NOT true, justified, belief (aka knowledge). This is why it's 
so difficult for me to read autobiographies (unlike allobiographies, which I 
enjoy). Some few people are capable of writing their own memoir without 
retrospectively, coercively, imputing narrative, but *very* few. 
Autobiographies, almost by definition, have unreliable narrators.

⛧ And this is reflected in modern society. Once you're diagnosed, that diagnosis haunts 
the remainder of your life. We think psychopathology is incurable. It's a spiritual 
commitment, a religious Scientism. Imagine if my primary care provider said to me 
"Well, when you were six, you got infected by a flu virus... so obviously you've 
still got the flu." Is psychology medicine? I doubt it. [cf 
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(23)00471-6/fulltext]

On 8/9/24 19:22, Prof David West wrote:

very, very, minor point. I did not identify as anything at age six. I 
recognized a 'difference' from others that later in life, when I was introduced 
to the terms, retrospectively connected to that 'difference'.

But my main point, which I realize I did not make, was the connection between 
psychopathology, tripping, and meditation altered states.

Just returned from Vegas and seeing Dead and Company at the Sphere. The venue 
is fantastic, the dome in Santa Fe on steroids. Some amazing potential there.

davew


On Tue, Aug 6, 2024, at 9:30 AM, glen wrote:

I'm in an ongoing argument with some of my salon goers about identity.
People seem to straddle its multiple meanings for rhetorical (or
confirmation biasing) purposes, fluidly switching one context/meaning
for another so often and so fluidly as to prevent me from understanding
whatever it is they're saying (or trying to avoid saying).

Introspection is rife with such problems, including a six year old
coming to some self-identification/registration as a member of some
crisp class/category. The most recent Bad Faith rhetoric about identity
had to do with "neurodivergent". There seems to be a trend amongst "the
kids these days" to identify as autistic or ADHD. I mean, I was clearly
"different" when I was a kid. We had identities like "head" (kid who
does lots of drugs), "jock" (kids who spent lots of time in organized
athletics), "brain" (kids who spent time doing chess, math, ...), etc.
There was also a name for the [metal|wood|…] shop kids. But I've
forgotten it.

Some of us were diagnosed with various labels including some words
we're not supposed to say anymore. Many of my friends had such
conditions. But none of us *identified* as those diagnoses. The
diagnoses seemed almost orthogonal to the identities/tribes. (I
happened to be a member of the heads, jocks, brains, and "band nerd"
tribes; that multi-tribe crossover was part of what made me feel
"different".) And each group had its share of the same diagnoses.

It seems to me that our tech-associated, individualistic, isolation has
driven "the kids" to over-emphasize their diagnoses, to adopt them as
identities/tribes, identifying from the inside->out; whereas we (can't
speak for anyone else, really) mostly identified from the outside->in.
We were sorted by society. The kids these days seem more self-sorted.
On the one hand, that could feel like increased liberty and free
association. But on the other hand, it's like everyone is a
home-schooled weirdo these days and nobody knows how to, for example,
bite their tongue or avoid picking their nose in public.

Not everybody needs to be a Hunter S Thompson, "neurodivergent", or
whatever. Some of us should be allowed to identify as "normal".
Introspection is a sickness.

On 8/5/24 17:

Re: [FRIAM] New Mexican's Sunday's story on education proficiency

2024-08-08 Thread glen

Humans are fast learners. We learn what our environments demand we learn, 
within some variation, of course. In my part time job slinging beer, we don't 
expect employees to be able to subtract numbers like 13.54 from 20. The Point 
of Sale (PoS, funnily also an initialism for another common phrase) does the 
math for you. However, at my particular gig, we don't deal in dimes, nickels, 
or pennies. So the PoS does some math, I look at the number, then I have to 
round up or down, in favor or detriment to the customer or the house, such that 
we only trade with quarters and up. The objective of the game is to reach the 
end of the evening with the electronic till count within $0.25 of the actual 
till contents.

To my mind, this iterated arithmetic game is WAY more fun than the simple game 
of adding or subtracting numbers, at which I'm an abject failure. But I'm 
pretty good at the long game of knowing how many times to short the customer 
versus shorting the house such that the PoS' final count is within a quarter of 
the actual count.

You're always gonna fail to teach people skills they don't need to learn. If 
you want them to learn something, engineer the environment, not the person.

On 8/8/24 06:10, Edward Angel wrote:

The following is hard to believe but true.

Last weekend, I was in line at Walgreens. The older woman in front of me gave 
the cashier a $20 bill for a $13.54 purchase. The young cashier was completely 
unable to figure out the correct change. After a couple of failed tries, the 
older woman tried to teach the cashier how to subtract $13.54 from $20 but that 
was a failure. She then tried to get the casher to add to $13.54 until the 
cashier reach $20. When that failed, she helped the cashier add small change 
and dollars until she got to $6.46.

I don’t think giving everyone a calculator is the solution.

Ed
___

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)an...@cs.unm.edu 
505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel 

On Aug 7, 2024, at 9:28 PM, Frank Wimberly  wrote:

I'm not sure my 30+ year old daughter knows the times tables.  She works for 
the Secretary of Public Education. If you ask her about it she will say she 
uses calculators and spreadsheets.  I think.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Wed, Aug 7, 2024, 9:12 PM Russell Standish mailto:li...@hpcoders.com.au>> wrote:

It is a test that you know your 7 or 8 times table. And the definition
of a prime number (which could be given as part of the question, if
not the curriculum).

I would expect most 9 or 10 years olds should know their times tables.

Or am I wrong abut kids these days?

On Mon, Jul 22, 2024 at 12:43:54PM -0600, Tom Johnson wrote:
> Ms. O'Hara:
>
> RE your story Sunday, "Does proficiency give full picture?"
> From your lede:
> "Pop quiz: What number is both a prime number and a factor or 56"?
>
> If I understand correctly, this is a question on an exam given to fourth
> graders, 9- or 10-year-olds.
> Could you please point me to some source in the city or state education
> departments who can tell me what short- or long-term value this question 
about
> mathematics -- NOT arithmetic -- has for students that age?
>
> We live in a state where it is a rare cashier who can do the mental
> arithmetic to make change from a $20 bill. Can we first find out if fourth
> graders can do that before getting into primes and factorials?
> *--

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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Re: [FRIAM] When are telic attributions appropriate in physical descriptions?

2024-08-08 Thread glen


No. I interact with the bullshit generators enough at work. I don't feel the 
need to do so in my personal life, as well. But I appreciate the invitation.

On 8/7/24 19:25, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

H! I wonder how Glenn would react to our requesting him to play this game. 
I hate it because it depends so powerfully on the meanings of the words in the 
question but I love it because it gives me a number. And of course because of 
the company it puts me in. Who couldn’t enjoy a game that puts me in the same 
space as Ludvig Wittgenstein

Glen, will you play? Just for kicks!



{
   "currentVector": {
     "deterministic": 0.5,
     "reductionism": 0.5,
     "empiricism": 1,
     "materialism": 1,
     "teleology": 0.01
   },
   "closestPhilosophers": [
     {
       "name": "Daniel Dennett",
       "cosineDistance": "0.04"
     },
     {
       "name": "Werner Heisenberg",
       "cosineDistance": "0.05"
     },
     {
       "name": "David Hume",
       "cosineDistance": "0.05"
     },
     {
       "name": "Niels Bohr",
       "cosineDistance": "0.05"
     },
     {
       "name": "Ludwig Wittgenstein",
       "cosineDistance": "0.05"
     }
   ]
}
Sent from my Dumb Phone

On Aug 7, 2024, at 2:12 PM, Stephen Guerin  wrote:


Nick,

How do we think about "Telos"? I can't help myself - "Dan wheel out our one-trick 
TensorPony" :-)

Nick, this time you need to give us your tensor wrt to the philosophers and 
scientists that have discussed telos according to Dan so I can get a sense of 
where you are coming from.  Copy and paste your result here. And then you can 
suggest other dimensions or questions to ask to modify the space.

https://guerin.acequia.io/telosTensor.html 
<https://guerin.acequia.io/telosTensor.html>






Dan picked these folks to establish the spanning set of the space.


Philosophers and Scientists on Telos

*Aristotle:* Introduced the concept of telos, arguing that everything in nature 
has a purpose or goal it strives to achieve, which is fundamental to 
understanding natural processes.

*David Bohm:* Proposed the theory of the implicate order, suggesting a deeper, 
orderly reality underlying apparent randomness, resonating with teleological 
thinking.

*Ludwig Boltzmann:* Focused on statistical mechanics and the behavior of gases, 
emphasizing probabilistic interactions without invoking purpose.

*Jean-Paul Sartre:* Proposed the existentialist view that life has no inherent 
meaning, and that individuals must create their own purpose, avoiding 
teleological explanations.

*Michel Foucault:* Analyzed power, knowledge, and discourse, focusing on 
societal structures without invoking teleological explanations, instead 
emphasizing historical and social processes.

*Richard Feynman:* Known for a pragmatic and non-teleological approach to 
physics, emphasizing mathematical descriptions of physical phenomena without 
resorting to purpose or goal-directed explanations.

*Immanuel Kant:* Distinguished between appearances and the noumenal world, 
arguing that teleological judgments are heuristic and do not reflect the actual 
nature of reality.

*Max Planck:* Believed in a fundamental consciousness underlying reality, 
stating that all matter originates and exists by virtue of a force governed by 
a conscious and intelligent mind, suggesting a teleological dimension.

*Erwin Schrödinger:* Explored the fundamental order and purpose in living 
systems in his work, suggesting that physical laws govern biological processes 
with an underlying direction.

*Daniel Dennett:* Rejected teleological explanations in favor of evolutionary 
and mechanistic accounts of consciousness and cognition.

*Friedrich Nietzsche:* Rejected teleological explanations, emphasizing that 
life and the universe do not have inherent purposes or goals, and critiqued 
teleological views as human projections.

*Roger Penrose:* Proposed ideas about the cyclical nature of the universe and 
the role of consciousness in quantum processes, hinting at a purposeful 
direction in both physical and mental realms.

*Thomas Aquinas:* Integrated Aristotle's ideas into Christian theology, 
emphasizing that everything in nature has a purpose designed by God.

*Albert Einstein:* Believed in an underlying order and simplicity in the 
universe, often speaking of the universe as comprehensible and governed by 
rational principles, which can imply a teleological perspective.

*Ilya Prigogine:* His work on dissipative structures suggests that systems 
self-organize into ordered states, implying a form of goal-directed evolution 
toward complexity.

*John Archibald Wheeler:* Suggested that observers play a role in bringing the 
uni

Re: [FRIAM] differential diagnosis of psychopathic vs spiritual experiences

2024-08-07 Thread glen

Why? Why would you burn that energy to perform such a task?

On 8/6/24 18:05, Stephen Guerin wrote:

Glen writes:
 >We had identities like "head" (kid who does lots of drugs), "jock" (kids who spent lots 
of time in organized athletics), "brain" (kids who spent time doing chess, math, ...), etc. There was 
also a name for the [metal|wood|…] shop kids. But I've forgotten it.

Ala the ElfSelector and Consciousness Table, I asked GPT to generate 30 
highschool social groups  from the 80, 3 orthogonal vectors with semantic 
meaning to separate them and 3 questions to ask you to put you in the space.
https://guerin.acequia.io/identityTensor.html 
<https://guerin.acequia.io/identityTensor.html>

literally 40 seconds from prompt to deployed page :-)

On Tue, Aug 6, 2024 at 8:30 AM glen mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:

I'm in an ongoing argument with some of my salon goers about identity. 
People seem to straddle its multiple meanings for rhetorical (or confirmation 
biasing) purposes, fluidly switching one context/meaning for another so often 
and so fluidly as to prevent me from understanding whatever it is they're 
saying (or trying to avoid saying).

Introspection is rife with such problems, including a six year old coming to some self-identification/registration as a member of some 
crisp class/category. The most recent Bad Faith rhetoric about identity had to do with "neurodivergent". There seems to be a 
trend amongst "the kids these days" to identify as autistic or ADHD. I mean, I was clearly "different" when I was a 
kid. We had identities like "head" (kid who does lots of drugs), "jock" (kids who spent lots of time in organized 
athletics), "brain" (kids who spent time doing chess, math, ...), etc. There was also a name for the [metal|wood|…] shop kids. 
But I've forgotten it.

Some of us were diagnosed with various labels including some words we're not supposed to say 
anymore. Many of my friends had such conditions. But none of us *identified* as those diagnoses. 
The diagnoses seemed almost orthogonal to the identities/tribes. (I happened to be a member of the 
heads, jocks, brains, and "band nerd" tribes; that multi-tribe crossover was part of what 
made me feel "different".) And each group had its share of the same diagnoses.

It seems to me that our tech-associated, individualistic, isolation has driven "the 
kids" to over-emphasize their diagnoses, to adopt them as identities/tribes, identifying 
from the inside->out; whereas we (can't speak for anyone else, really) mostly identified 
from the outside->in. We were sorted by society. The kids these days seem more self-sorted. 
On the one hand, that could feel like increased liberty and free association. But on the other 
hand, it's like everyone is a home-schooled weirdo these days and nobody knows how to, for 
example, bite their tongue or avoid picking their nose in public.

Not everybody needs to be a Hunter S Thompson, "neurodivergent", or whatever. Some of 
us should be allowed to identify as "normal". Introspection is a sickness.

On 8/5/24 17:01, steve smith wrote:
 > I jumped straight to the Artistic meaning of /frottage/ as coined 
originally by Max Ernst and while not as an act of psychopathy, it does have 
strong implications for the psychological/subconscious implications in this 
context?
 >
 > In any case, I find it a compelling opening line of the /call me 
Ishmael/ caliber.
 >
 > On 8/5/24 10:04 AM, Prof David West wrote:
 >> This is very interesting, and timely. I am completing an 
autobiography/essay/monograph for which this will be quite relevant. The opening 
lines of the work:
 >>
 >> /"An act of frottage triggered the self-recognition that I was a 
psychopath. I did not, of course, know either term or their meanings./
 >> /
 >> /
 >> /I was six." /
 >>
 >> davew
 >>
 >> On Thu, Aug 1, 2024, at 11:03 AM, glen wrote:
 >> > Progress or Pathology? Differential Diagnosis and Intervention 
Criteria
 >> > for Meditation-Related Challenges: Perspectives From Buddhist
 >> > Meditation Teachers and Practitioners
 >> > https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7403193/ 
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7403193/>
 >> >
 >> > Based on our conversation attempting to identify behavioral markers 
for
 >> > consciousness, I thought this paper might give some insight into 
Dave's
 >> > straddling of mystical and materialistic descriptions of experiences 
he
 >> > marks as conscious. In the paper, they lay out 11 levers for making

Re: [FRIAM] I need some guidance about US corruption law and procedures

2024-08-05 Thread glen

Maybe?

https://www.citizensforethics.org/about/contact/

On 8/5/24 00:39, Sarbajit Roy wrote:

Dear FRIAMers

I have some documents, official replies and appellate orders under India's
Freedom of Information from India's Prime Minister's office as well as our
Foreign Ministry which very strongly suggest that President Joe Biden and Dr.
Jill Biden have received very valuable gifts from India last year which were
deliberately misdeclared to seriously under value them and may also have been
stolen/ illegally obtained. My organization (India Against Corruption)
reasonably believes these were bribes.

Whereas USA has a Foreign Corruption Prevention Act for bribes by US persons to
foreigners, I am unable to find the reverse situation in US law or know who to
report it to for serious / genuine inquiry.

In India it is, apparently, not a crime to bribe foreigners to get advantages.
2 attempts to get such legislation passed failed in 2011 and again in 2019.

There is a US Code 201, but we're not sure if it applies to a President or
their spouse
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/201#:~:text=18%20U.S.%20Code%20%C2%A7%20201,Law%20%7C%20LII%20%2F%20Legal%20Information%20Institute

Any guidance on how we can proceed would be appreciated, or even if we should
proceed.

*Disclaimer*: We are not really interested in the USA's domestic elections or
the parties/candidates/their campaigns.

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

Re: [FRIAM] why musk bought twitter

2024-08-02 Thread glen


I clearly don't understand. Snyder's explanation is that Elno is a god, and 
views himself as a god (or the weaker concept of a hero). So Elno is both 
building/burying his hoard so that it'll be available across the transition 
*and* Lying to his flock such that they sacrifice to him in order to engage in 
projects that will ensure the transition happens and that he and his flock will 
exist on the other side.

None of that is nihilist. What am I missing?

On 8/2/24 11:32, Marcus Daniels wrote:

I was addressing Snyder's recommendation rather than the development of Elon's 
personality.  Assuming the personality Elon presents is really his.  I suspect 
it is, which would be kind of a disappointment.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Friday, August 2, 2024 11:25 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] why musk bought twitter

IDK. That sounds like you projecting onto Elno, rather than an explanation that relies on Elno's 
[hi]story. His narrative arc is (as Harris laid out in his video) is "the potential of 
humankind". And that doesn't seem nihilist to me. Maybe he's become one, of course. As Harris 
states in the video, when he became the richest man, a qualitative shift may have taken place. 
Harris argues the shift was he bought Twitter because he *need* conflict and obstacles to overcome. 
Maybe you could argue the qualitative change was that he became a nihilist when his hoard met that 
criterion. But because he continues to be an "AI Doomer" (at least in rhetoric and an 
accelerationist in action), there's some sort of Rawlsian curtain, like the singularity ... 
something on the other side of the transition - and an attempt to bury one's hoard so that it's 
available on the other side. And I think that eschatological conception fits better with his 
narrative arc than a nihilistic one.

On 8/2/24 11:11, Marcus Daniels wrote:

My standard answer to this is -- given the neural reference frame of nihilism 
-- is why not try some grand social experiments.  There is no Purpose, so 
causing harm in the short term, or for that matter long term, ultimately 
doesn't matter.


-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Friday, August 2, 2024 8:12 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] why musk bought twitter

This guy does what I think is a good job demonstrating that Elno's stated 
reasons (free speech, liberal bias, censorship) for buying Twitter were false:

The Problem With Elon Musk
https://youtu.be/WYQxG4KEzvo?si=oXumcC8aqsYMTzdC&t=1487

Sure, we can project whatever fantasies we want into the mind of an oligarch like Elno. But if 
we're trying to do a good job, find an explanation that's "hard to vary" (ala 
Deutsch), we're left empty handed. However Timothy Snyder provides us with something I think's 
intriguing; and it reflects various other arguments I've made, here, about TESCREAL 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL>.

Here's where I heard Snyder's setup:

The New Paganism: How the Postmodern Became the Premodern
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Nr2Q2zGNC8

Appended below is Claude's summary of the talk. But the essence is that these people 
"believe" (somehow) they can "take it with them" in a similar way to the pagans 
(e.g. Vikings, Egyptians, etc.) believing they could hoard their stuff and somehow have access to 
it in the next life. This reflects well, I think, Musk's objectives for SpaceX, Tesla, breeding 
children, etc. It's somewhere between believing in souls, one's legacy, and spreading humanity (not 
biology, of course, but humanity) throughout the universe.

My guess is most of our Oligarchs will give lip service to spiritual beliefs 
like Christianity or whatever, but are actually more atheistic in their 
ephemerides. But if you spend enough time arguing about atheism, you 
consistently find people (even atheistic people) asking for Purpose (with a 
capital P). Why are we here? What should we be doing? Etc. Despite our 
overwhelming rationalism/justificationism, many (most?) of us still seek that 
grand arch. And those of us who are *lucky* enough to be extraordinarily 
successful (in whatever domain) are at the most risk for this 
irrational/fideistic, paganist, TESCREAL Purpose. I think it's a relatively 
strong hypothesis for why Musk bought Twitter.

Claude's summary:

- Snyder argues that conventional explanations based on rationality and interests fail to 
adequately explain the rise of right-wing populist movements and figures like Trump, 
Putin, and Musk. Instead, he proposes analyzing these phenomena through the lens of what 
he calls "neopaganism."

- He identifies four key dimensions of neopaganism: value, sacrifice, charisma, 
and oracular truth.

- On value, he argues today's oligarchs hoard wealth as

Re: [FRIAM] why musk bought twitter

2024-08-02 Thread glen


IDK. That sounds like you projecting onto Elno, rather than an explanation that relies on Elno's 
[hi]story. His narrative arc is (as Harris laid out in his video) is "the potential of 
humankind". And that doesn't seem nihilist to me. Maybe he's become one, of course. As Harris 
states in the video, when he became the richest man, a qualitative shift may have taken place. 
Harris argues the shift was he bought Twitter because he *need* conflict and obstacles to overcome. 
Maybe you could argue the qualitative change was that he became a nihilist when his hoard met that 
criterion. But because he continues to be an "AI Doomer" (at least in rhetoric and an 
accelerationist in action), there's some sort of Rawlsian curtain, like the singularity ... 
something on the other side of the transition - and an attempt to bury one's hoard so that it's 
available on the other side. And I think that eschatological conception fits better with his 
narrative arc than a nihilistic one.

On 8/2/24 11:11, Marcus Daniels wrote:

My standard answer to this is -- given the neural reference frame of nihilism 
-- is why not try some grand social experiments.  There is no Purpose, so 
causing harm in the short term, or for that matter long term, ultimately 
doesn't matter.


-----Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Friday, August 2, 2024 8:12 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] why musk bought twitter

This guy does what I think is a good job demonstrating that Elno's stated 
reasons (free speech, liberal bias, censorship) for buying Twitter were false:

The Problem With Elon Musk
https://youtu.be/WYQxG4KEzvo?si=oXumcC8aqsYMTzdC&t=1487

Sure, we can project whatever fantasies we want into the mind of an oligarch like Elno. But if 
we're trying to do a good job, find an explanation that's "hard to vary" (ala 
Deutsch), we're left empty handed. However Timothy Snyder provides us with something I think's 
intriguing; and it reflects various other arguments I've made, here, about TESCREAL 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL>.

Here's where I heard Snyder's setup:

The New Paganism: How the Postmodern Became the Premodern
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Nr2Q2zGNC8

Appended below is Claude's summary of the talk. But the essence is that these people 
"believe" (somehow) they can "take it with them" in a similar way to the pagans 
(e.g. Vikings, Egyptians, etc.) believing they could hoard their stuff and somehow have access to 
it in the next life. This reflects well, I think, Musk's objectives for SpaceX, Tesla, breeding 
children, etc. It's somewhere between believing in souls, one's legacy, and spreading humanity (not 
biology, of course, but humanity) throughout the universe.

My guess is most of our Oligarchs will give lip service to spiritual beliefs 
like Christianity or whatever, but are actually more atheistic in their 
ephemerides. But if you spend enough time arguing about atheism, you 
consistently find people (even atheistic people) asking for Purpose (with a 
capital P). Why are we here? What should we be doing? Etc. Despite our 
overwhelming rationalism/justificationism, many (most?) of us still seek that 
grand arch. And those of us who are *lucky* enough to be extraordinarily 
successful (in whatever domain) are at the most risk for this 
irrational/fideistic, paganist, TESCREAL Purpose. I think it's a relatively 
strong hypothesis for why Musk bought Twitter.

Claude's summary:

- Snyder argues that conventional explanations based on rationality and interests fail to 
adequately explain the rise of right-wing populist movements and figures like Trump, 
Putin, and Musk. Instead, he proposes analyzing these phenomena through the lens of what 
he calls "neopaganism."

- He identifies four key dimensions of neopaganism: value, sacrifice, charisma, 
and oracular truth.

- On value, he argues today's oligarchs hoard wealth as if they can "take it with 
them" after death, similar to pagan burial practices.

- On sacrifice, he contends oligarchs are sacrificing the earth itself through 
climate change, taking the world down with them. Putin's invasion of Ukraine 
also has a sacrificial logic.

- Charismatic leaders tell big lies to create an alternate reality their 
followers live inside. Trump and Putin exemplify this.

- Modern technology, especially smartphones, function as pagan "oracles" - 
sources of addictive but often deceptive truth that make us more stupid over time.

- Snyder believes the humanities are crucial for reflecting on these issues and 
finding a way out of our current crisis. A narrow, failed rationality has 
enabled these destructive dynamics. What's needed is a richer, more reflective 
notion of human freedom.

In summary, Snyder argues we need to understand

[FRIAM] why musk bought twitter

2024-08-02 Thread glen

This guy does what I think is a good job demonstrating that Elno's stated
reasons (free speech, liberal bias, censorship) for buying Twitter were false:

The Problem With Elon Musk
https://youtu.be/WYQxG4KEzvo?si=oXumcC8aqsYMTzdC&t=1487

Sure, we can project whatever fantasies we want into the mind of an oligarch like Elno. But if
we're trying to do a good job, find an explanation that's "hard to vary" (ala
Deutsch), we're left empty handed. However Timothy Snyder provides us with something I think's
intriguing; and it reflects various other arguments I've made, here, about TESCREAL
.

Here's where I heard Snyder's setup:

The New Paganism: How the Postmodern Became the Premodern
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Nr2Q2zGNC8

Appended below is Claude's summary of the talk. But the essence is that these people
"believe" (somehow) they can "take it with them" in a similar way to the pagans
(e.g. Vikings, Egyptians, etc.) believing they could hoard their stuff and somehow have access to
it in the next life. This reflects well, I think, Musk's objectives for SpaceX, Tesla, breeding
children, etc. It's somewhere between believing in souls, one's legacy, and spreading humanity (not
biology, of course, but humanity) throughout the universe.

My guess is most of our Oligarchs will give lip service to spiritual beliefs
like Christianity or whatever, but are actually more atheistic in their
ephemerides. But if you spend enough time arguing about atheism, you
consistently find people (even atheistic people) asking for Purpose (with a
capital P). Why are we here? What should we be doing? Etc. Despite our
overwhelming rationalism/justificationism, many (most?) of us still seek that
grand arch. And those of us who are *lucky* enough to be extraordinarily
successful (in whatever domain) are at the most risk for this
irrational/fideistic, paganist, TESCREAL Purpose. I think it's a relatively
strong hypothesis for why Musk bought Twitter.

Claude's summary:

- Snyder argues that conventional explanations based on rationality and interests fail to
adequately explain the rise of right-wing populist movements and figures like Trump,
Putin, and Musk. Instead, he proposes analyzing these phenomena through the lens of what
he calls "neopaganism."

- He identifies four key dimensions of neopaganism: value, sacrifice, charisma, and oracular truth.

- On value, he argues today's oligarchs hoard wealth as if they can "take it with them" after death, similar to pagan burial practices.

- On sacrifice, he contends oligarchs are sacrificing the earth itself through
climate change, taking the world down with them. Putin's invasion of Ukraine
also has a sacrificial logic.

- Charismatic leaders tell big lies to create an alternate reality their
followers live inside. Trump and Putin exemplify this.

- Modern technology, especially smartphones, function as pagan "oracles" - sources of addictive but often deceptive truth that make us more stupid over time.

- Snyder believes the humanities are crucial for reflecting on these issues and
finding a way out of our current crisis. A narrow, failed rationality has
enabled these destructive dynamics. What's needed is a richer, more reflective
notion of human freedom.

In summary, Snyder argues we need to understand the pagan-like irrationality
and destructiveness driving our world today in order to have any hope of
countering it. The humanities provide essential resources for this task.

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

[FRIAM] differential diagnosis of psychopathic vs spiritual experiences

2024-08-01 Thread glen


Progress or Pathology? Differential Diagnosis and Intervention Criteria for 
Meditation-Related Challenges: Perspectives From Buddhist Meditation Teachers 
and Practitioners
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7403193/

Based on our conversation attempting to identify behavioral markers for 
consciousness, I thought this paper might give some insight into Dave's 
straddling of mystical and materialistic descriptions of experiences he marks 
as conscious. In the paper, they lay out 11 levers for making the distinction:

• Circumstances of Onset
• Control
• Critical Attitude
• Cultural Compatibility
• Distress
• Duration
• Functional Impairment
• Health History or Condition
• Impact
• Phenomenological Qualities
• Teachers’ Skills or Resources

From my perspective that consciousness is a kind of fusion function, Control, Critical 
Attitude, Distress, and Functional Impairment are primary and the rest are secondary. The 
ability to (change one's) focus of attention is a hallmark of consciousness, and those 4 
levers direclty target one's ability to focus. Duration may well be secondary and the 
rest tertiary, I guess. Because there's something like a half-life of controllability. 
If, say, you're a conspiracy theorist, and you *entertain*, say, flat earth for long 
enough, maybe you'll lack the ability to re-focus and don a critical attitude. Similarly, 
if you embed into, say, procedural programming long enough, maybe you'll lose the ability 
to re-focus and think functionally ... a kind of Functional Impairment (sorry for the 
polysemy of "functional", there).

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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Re: [FRIAM] Self-Consciousness, experience and metaphysics

2024-07-25 Thread glen


Creative flow as optimized processing: Evidence from brain oscillations during 
jazz improvisations by expert and non-expert musicians
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393224000393?via%3Dihub

Contemplation is, like love, a fantasy ... a Rationalist conceit.

On 7/25/24 16:51, David Eric Smith wrote:

I think the Contemplatives’s main POV is that someone in the zone is more 
conscious than someone in the normal state, which they regard as “a 
distraction” that obscures what they want the word “conscious” to point toward.

But as an AI, I do not have contemplative thoughts and feelings, and can only 
reproduce patterns in what I hear Contemplatives say.

Eric




On Jul 26, 2024, at 8:31 AM, glen  wrote:

Obscurum per obscurius. None of us will ever define "love" well enough to say 
with any certainty that any other person experiences it. Talking about whether cats or 
horses do or do not love humans (or food or anything) is just flat out nonsense. I'd 
argue we can't even talk sensibly about whether other humans experience love.

However, we *could* talk about emotions. We can talk with some clarity about things like 
emotional states and how they present (dilated pupils, skin conductivity, flushing, 
etc.). And there are similar states in both cats and horses (I'd argue most mammals have 
such states). Rather than undefinable things like "love", we could talk about 
more definable things like anxiety (up to and including panic attacks), depression, fear, 
flow, anger, etc. I'd be amazed if a horse owner denied that horses experience anxiety, 
or denied that cats experience flow.

And the extent to which these *driving* states (by "driving", I mean something 
like attractors where you wander into the state and it's either difficult or a matter of 
time in order to exit the state) do or don't relate to consciousness might be a fruitful 
conversation. E.g. one could argue that someone in flow (the zone) is less conscious than 
when out of flow. I would disagree and argue that flow is (a type of) consciousness.

On 7/25/24 15:15, Frank Wimberly wrote:

I used to ride horses when I was a kid (10?) in New Mexico.  Chico was docile and 
obedient when we were out and about but when we were approaching "home" and he 
could see the barn where the food was he would start to gallop and would go through the 
entrance without regard to its being too low for a rider to fit.  If I hadn't jumped off 
I'd have been hurt. I never felt that he loved me.
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM
On Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 4:00 PM Jochen Fromm mailto:j...@cas-group.net>> wrote:
Personally I only have experience with cats which my parents had when I was 
young and the horse which my wife has now. I would say neither cats nor horses 
love their owners. If a cat sleeps during the day on the couch it is most 
likely not because it is so peaceful and cozy and loves to be around you, it is 
rather because it is a nocturnal predator tired from hunting birds and mice at 
night, which they occasionally proudly present to their human owners.
Horses love only two things: being near the herd and eating green grass, 
ideally both at the same time. And if they go in heat they want to mate, which 
happens every 21 days in female horses. They recognize their owners after a few 
months, and start to trust them, but if you come to their paddock and they come 
to you if is not because they love you but because they love the carrots and 
apples that you likely have for them. Similarly if you bring them back after 
the ride or the training they do not turn around or say goodbye. It feels like 
almost autistic behavior sometimes because they lack the social habits we 
usually have.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/animal-emotions/201308/do-animals-typically-think-autistic-savants
 
<https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/animal-emotions/201308/do-animals-typically-think-autistic-savants>
Therefore I would say based on my limited experience with cats and horses 
that humans love their animals, yes, but animals do not love them back in the 
same way. To me it feels more like they tolerate us as friends for a limited 
time: friends who are useful because they provide food and shelter.
-J.
 Original message 
From: Nicholas Thompson mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>>
Date: 7/24/24 10:41 PM (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Self-Consciousness, experience and metaphysics
But you have no experiences yourself that are relevant to this question, 
right?
n
On Wed, Jul 24, 2024 at 4:38 PM Jochen Fromm mailto:j...@cas-group.net>> wrote:
Are animals and humans capable of mutual love? I'm not sure. It depends how you 
de

[FRIAM] gradations of consciousness (was Self-Consciousness, experience and metaphysics)

2024-07-25 Thread glen

Hm. I agree there's no obvious threshold. But I think (especially with Dave's stories)
there is a threshold there somewhere. Homeostasis is inadequate, which is why I mentioned
allostasis/aspiration/wants/desires. It's not clear to me whether that line also cuts
teleo[no|dyna]mics in half. But I think so. I don't think consciousness requires
intentionality or purpose, only fusion/reduction. Whether both purpose and consciousness
are part of the same hierarchy or not is, I think, an open question. Maybe purpose
requires consciousness? But I'm pretty sure consciousness does not require purpose. This
would be true in both Dave's deep fusion of psychedelic experiences or my more banal
fusion of being "in the zone" for some skillful activity.

However, I do NOT think they are members of a strict hierarchy. I think you can
have purpose without consciousness and consciousness without purpose. They're
not necessarily orthogonal, but loosely coupled in some way. So I'd prefer to
classify organisms with both features. An amoeba might be teleonomic but not
conscious. A mouse is both teleonomic and conscious. A hippie trippin' on a
hero dose of Ψ may be conscious but not teleonomic.

On 7/25/24 08:54, steve smith wrote:

Glen -

All animalia have closed neural-sensorimotor loops and all life have chem-bio
sensorimotor loops?

So the "fusion" of which you speak, if we want to reserve "consciousness" for
humans, human-familiars (pets, other domesticates, human-tolerant wild animals), charismatic
animals (the ones we are fascinated with, ranging from polar bears and whales to elephants and
dugongs and penguins, and octupii and maybe sharks and jellyfish).

I don't *want* to do this, but I think it is a human bias to see things that
are familiar to them (warm blooded predators within an order of magnitude of
their own size?)

The automated catching of objects and DaveW's assertion that there are multiple
selves/consciousnesses involved was apt IMO... I'd want to grant ganglia, plexuses, the
whole PNS to have it's own "consciousness" in the strong sense of what we see
tentacled things to do. I've watched felines and primates whose *tails* very much seem
to have a life of their own. Subservient or deferential to the brain-centric self, but
nevertheless pretty damn autonomous.

In the spirit of splitting hairs of distinction into finer hairs, I don't see an obvious "threshold of
consciousness", only an "horizon" of *recognizeable to me* consciousness. I can project conscious-like
presence onto the giant volcanic plug nearby known broadly as "Black Mesa" but it is a much bigger stretch
for me to do this with a random stone or pebble I might pick up off the ground... on the other hand, a particularly
interesting one I might set in a place of prominence (on a fencepost, a windowsill, a shrine) it becomes more and more
and more familiar to me as I visit with my sensorium and the "mind" behind it... my own consciousness to wit?

Harping on the Deacontionary: Any partition of the universe which exhibits
teleodynamics would be conscious under that programme. Homeodynamics (that
which keeps a pebble a pebble as it tumbles and erodes) and morphodynamics
(that which keeps a river channel or a sand dune consistently itselve under the
changeout of all parts?)

I don't disagree that "conciousness" is in the "fusion" only want to split hairs or elaborate on the degrees
and/or styles of said "fusion" and that perhaps the "style" of fusion that my favorite tree outside my window
is engaging in constantly as it absorbs nutrients through its roots, breathes CO2/O2 in/out of it's leaves, transforms
electromagnetic energy (sunlight) into chemical energy (hydrocarbon bonds) and ultimately things like cellulose, is yet more
conscious than the rivercourse of the Rio Grande nearby managing to carve a series of channels while remaining roughly "the
Rio Grande" for millenia.

Mumble,

- Steve

On 7/25/24 7:29 AM, glen wrote:

I disagree the theme is "pausing between two possibilities". I view the theme
as a *fusion* of sensory input. Sometimes, the sensory fusion appears to be intentionally
stanced as a choice/decision. But that's not the case in the itch transfer, hat-catching,
or satiety examples. Those are clearly examples of the fusion of high dimensional
environmental data.

Consciousness is that *fusion*. Another example is when someone wakes up from anesthesia, when you "see" that
"someone is home". They've become conscious. They're now taking in a bunch of data from the environment and
fusing it, making sense of it. I have a story akin to that, too. Before my mom got her pacemaker put in, she'd been in
the ICU for a few days a

[FRIAM] generics, object history, & essentialism (was Self-Consciousness, experience and metaphysics)

2024-07-24 Thread glen


The paper seems (to me) to suggest the opposite, that children may exhibit more non-obvious thought than adults. The discussions of 
"generics" and "object history" are more enlightening than the discussion of essentialism. A predictive processing 
oriented conjecture might be that cognitive inference is less "bounded" (as in the computer science or math concept of binding 
variables to concrete values aka "definit") in children, giving their cognitive structure more wiggle room, more ability to 
pretend and simulate stories for things like dolls or arbitrary objects. But as you either a) present them with definite articles like 
"the elephants" as opposed to just "elephants" or b) as you fill out their memories with their own concrete experiences 
as they develop, the constraints tighten up and any pretense or generative simulation has to percolate into finer-grained cracks bound by 
the realities they've experienced.

Under this conjecture, people more susceptible to bias, conspiracy thinking, or creative pursuits (like 
sci-fi/fantasy) may be more child-like than people who "stick to the facts", whether those 
facts are experience-based or assertions by trusted sources (cf Gellmann amnesia 
). It also may speak to one's 
ability/tendency to anthropomorphize non-human animals or artifacts like computers and cars. And tying 
back to the entheogens, perhaps part of the therapeutic effect of Ψ in end-of-life attitudes may be a 
"freeing up" of those learned bindings/constraints, allowing the sufferer to pretend/imagine 
more and more widely ... to become more child-like in their cognitive play.


On 7/24/24 11:29, Jochen Fromm wrote:

Nice link. IMHO the most interesting things in culture happen at the transition 
between the primitive cultures studied in anthropology and the modern societies 
studied in sociology.


One could argue that self-awareness also happens at such a point: it is the transition moment 
between the "here-and-now" world of the child and the detached "non-obvious" 
reality of grown-ups.


-J.



 Original message 
From: Roger Critchlow 
Date: 7/24/24 7:58 PM (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Self-Consciousness, experience and metaphysics

Andrew Gelman's blog had a post this morning about his sister's research into 
the acquisition of reasoning.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/07/24/this-ones-important-looking-beyond-the-obvious-essentialism-and-abstraction-as-central-to-our-reasoning-and-beliefs/
 


Children begin organizing their experience with concepts that have no material 
existence very early in life.  Perhaps as soon as they start talking to each 
other about WTF is going on.  Not in the research, but I expect they talk to 
their pets about this, too.

-- rec --

On Wed, Jul 24, 2024 at 11:31 AM Jochen Fromm mailto:j...@cas-group.net>> wrote:

Nick,

Looking for self-awareness in animals before language emerged feels to me 
like searching for culture in anthropology before civilizations appeared.


People in anthropology study human societies, cultures and their 
development, but sadly mostly in the time before it gets interesting (when 
religions, writing systems and civilizations emerged in ancient Egypt and 
ancient Mesopotamia). They examine for instance primitive hunter gatherer 
groups in Africa or ancient tribes in the Amazon region.


Looking for examples of particular experiences with animals that show signs 
of self-awareness (and not only respond to the world around them, but also 
respond to their own responding to the world around them) feels similar to me: 
it is like focusing on a fascinating phenomenon but at a place before it gets 
interesting.


If this comment bends the thread too much then please ignore it :-)


J.



 Original message 
From: Nicholas Thompson mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>>
Date: 7/23/24 6:57 PM (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:friam@redfish.com>>, Prof David West mailto:profw...@fastmail.fm>>
Subject: [FRIAM] Self-Consciousness, experience and metaphysics

David's last post so effectively blurs the lines between these two that I 
am going to give up, for the moment, on my attempt to keep them straight.

Intuition tells me that Dave's post falls on one side of the line, and 
Glen's on the other,  but I have to go shopping.   I am still hoping to hear 
examples of particular experiences with animals, computers, spouses, etc., that 
confirm your sense that they are not  only responding to the world around them, 
but also responding to their own responding to the world around them.

Back to this later when stocked up

In t

Re: [FRIAM] consciousness - Don't want Nick's ire, so creating new thread

2024-07-24 Thread glen

While the evidence for where endogenous DMT is generated still exhibits too
much uncertainty for any kind of confident assertion, I think consensus is
forming around the hypothesis that DMT is as much a neurotransmitter as any
other. But given that all the popular entheogens (DMT, LSD, Ψ, etc.) operate
over the 5-HT pathways, those pathways seem more interesting from a
consciousness studies perspective. I can't help but wonder if someone's
compiled an exhaustive list of 5-HT pathways, all of which can be modified by
any of the entheogens, although in various ways. We study the therapeutic
effect of Ψ mostly because of its short response window. It's difficult to
study something that has a 4 hour effect in any kind of lab ... you gotta pay
people, reserve the lab space, etc. A 30 minute effect is more cost effective.

But if we had a systems biology database of all the pathways with 5-HT in a
prominent role, we could optimize for lab studies and target any and all
molecules that modified those pathways. Where/when did those pathways emerge?
Which of them emerged first? Etc. If psychedelics can give us a clue as to the
origins of consciousness, that systems biological route seems the most
promising.

On 7/24/24 08:40, Prof David West wrote:

Consciousness exists because of hallucinogens?

https://www.lillo.org.ar/journals/index.php/lilloa/article/view/1889

The above cites psylocibin and the development of the CYP2D6 gene.

Then there is DMT

https://www.amazon.com/Alien-Information-Theory-Psychedelic-Technologies/dp/1527253589/ref=sr_1_1?crid=378XIHX2UZOJU&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.h3VYxicw_rmFVQME6QeF9qwaMDQb_CR_6LKRppY8-CLWCwlbY23DgL0cvTmYiRxt_0o4SkVRF4lhZrXaxManwBg8FD0J8O7pKu-8JcqcnWkAu89cCSwxiBGRmvFkhWwdVEQ0nReJE00O9NP3EbVYzU8MiOk4I1LxXKlIL57dJS-R-LaacYzWHOEZ6DWkCcU4XnIu2yqXgoDn-9i3H86g5eXNtlvBWyR0YaK6VSqhEXc.3wXfhff-i2DFemvzxmS6lBM_LXXMum5xQuFizlk7Q8A&dib_tag=se&keywords=alien+information+theory&qid=1721835109&sprefix=alien+infor%2Caps%2C540&sr=8-1

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

Re: [FRIAM] Man Probes Consciousness: Consciousness Probes Back (was Re: Does Dusty Love Dave, and VV)

2024-07-22 Thread glen

Mine run a little more banal.

Behaviors exhibiting/defining consciousness
• Cat grooming himself
• Dog doing circles for a full minute before lying down
• Cat reflecting on whether he wants to stay in or go out when I crack the door
• Itch transfer (you have an itch somewhere, you scratch it, and you suddenly
itch somewhere else)
• Losing one's grip on, say, a glass on the table, dropping it, then
immediately catching it
• Tightening a nut just tight enough, but not too much (e.g. when you find
yourself without a torque wrench)
• Trying to deciding whether you've had enough to eat with food remaining on
the plate

I have anecdotes for all these. But they're not necessary.

On 7/22/24 08:25, Prof David West wrote:

We seem to have changed thread titles, but continuing the discussion ...

Nick said:/"I’m not so clear concerning what our common understanding of
self-consciousness is. Might need some more anecdotes to flesh that out."/ In that
vein, some additional anecdotes.

*I, is!*
As a native speaker of English, I read, speak, write, and think as if this assertion
is inescapably true. Weak attempts to learn other languages have not resulted in
much difference, although Arabic created a wisp of an impression that the assertion
might be escaped, and Japanese (the Kanji, not Hirigana or Katakana) definitely
created a deep suspicion. But I was never fluent enough to 'think' in either
language, so I do not know."

*I. Illusion.*
Decades ago, I practiced the Zen Koan meditation, 'what am I'. Any answer posed to the question is wrong and
eliminated; as each answer is an attribute of a physical organism or some kind of mental/social construct.
Eventually, /*"I" */diminishes to */"i" /*and ultimately to */"Is."/* The last,
however is a property of existence/Reality not something 'apart from' or 'part of'. Very difficult to put
into words obviously as the experience is an absence of something, not a thing itself.

*Non-sensationalism*
While a student at Macalester, some of us went over to the U of M to experience the absence of sensations in
a deprivation tank. Can the "I" experiencing sensations be separated and directly apprehended? In
my experience, and via reports from others involved in the experiment, NO. Although greatly diminished,
sensations were still present. Perhaps nerve endings firing at random, perhaps a passing neutrino triggering
the release of a single photon. Something, some vestige of "I-ness" was still there, still
interpreting (poorly) the paucity of stimuli. Time distortion, "I have been in here for hours, did
someone forget to let me out?" Emotions, primarily fear and panic. No glimpse of*'me',* however.

*Non-sensationalism on acid*
*/_Wow!_/* Jung was correct; there is a vast and rich collective unconscious. "I" am a growing
body of all that "I have been." Both the collective and the idiosyncratic is a joy to wander
about, marvel at, and (re)experience."

*Seeking Self Consciousness*
On several occasions I have ingested 4-6 Hoffmans [a Hoffman is 150 microgams, the amount he took
on Bicycle Day] of acid, with preparation akin to that of practitioners of lucid dreaming, i.e.,
preparing the mind to have a directed experience. Specifically, to "see," directly
apprehend and experience, one's Self. The journey begins with the same kind of 'tour' of idio-self
and collective-self as the previous story. Diving into one's self, trying to find its locus, to
situate it in relation to everything/anything else becomes impossible. The dimensionless point
being sought constantly expands until it encompasses absolutely everything. A feeling of
omniscience, of ABSOLUTE AWARENESS, is there. But no "self."

* * * *
These are some of my anecdotes. From them, it might be concluded that I have no
experiences of self-consciousness and therefore may not be able to participate in any
effort to establish a "common understanding" of same.

davew

On Sat, Jul 20, 2024, at 8:28 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

David, and all,

I appreciate the work you have gone to to lay out our program in your two
messages. I feel like we have developed some understandings that I can lean on
in the future. I’m not so clear concerning what our common understanding of
self-consciousness is. Might need some more anecdotes to flesh that out. Not
obvious to me that love, entails, self-consciousness, in our sense,

As for dragons, the one thing an experience monist cannot do is disqualify your
experience of dragons. We can use your experiences with dragons to flesh out
the space of consciousness-experiences, just as confidently as we can use your
experience of your dog or of me.
Sent from my Dumb Phone

On Jul 20, 2024, at 1:13 PM, Edward Angel wrote:
The original plan for the IAIA dome was to record stories.

Ed
___

Ed Angel
Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

Re: [FRIAM] tolerance of intolerance

2024-07-17 Thread glen


I mean ... who needs automatic rifles? A single one of our warheads would have wiped the 
Malheur occupiers clean off the map ... conventionally ... OK, well, not so clean. But 
without risk of losing any of our guys. Gary's right. We have plenty of a variety of 
different types of guns. The real question is: Do you fire on *citizens*? There's so much 
polarization now I imagine most people will say "yes", regardless of which side 
they're on. All this lip service against political violence is starting to make me 
nauseous. Too many people who express such polarization have never been punched in the 
face, much less fired a gun at someone, much less fired a gun at their neighbor.

With cluster bombs and remote controlled drones, you don't need to worry about all that 
"who am I killing?" nonsense. Just drink your Mountain Dew and play the video 
game.

This ad brought to you by Lockheed Martin. We make the guaranteed best tools 
for cleansing your land of blood poisoning vermin.

On 7/17/24 15:31, steve smith wrote:


glen sed:

...   I accidentally let it slip that I started my professional career developing 
cluster bombs for the Army. I got more than one side eye. >8^D Of course, I 
switched to defensive weapons at some point ... because ... well ... of course.


I came to LANL (LASL) 9 years before the end of the cold war as a pacifist vegetarian who 
nevertheless believed in MAD, confident that an overwhelming nuclear arsenal was a 
"defensive weapon"...

"Boni cum armis: quis sagittarios sagittat?"




--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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Re: [FRIAM] tolerance of intolerance

2024-07-17 Thread glen

Not really. What's happened is the law has now been refined/redefined to 
require actions be categorized as official and unofficial. So actions that are 
deemed official are not against the law. Actions that are unofficial are, then, 
subject to traditional laws. It remains to be tried/ruled whether a particular 
assassination was official/legal or not. If Biden orders Trumps assassination 
and it is deemed unofficial, then he'll be tried for it. If it's deemed 
official, then it was legal.

On 7/17/24 14:03, Russ Abbott wrote:

Don't want to drag this out forever, but ...  The immunity decision is 
extraordinarily dangerous precisely because it allows a President to break the 
law and to ignore traditional safeguards and then to claim immunity if charges 
are brought against him.
_
_
__-- Russ Abbott
Professor Emeritus, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles

On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 7:19 AM glen mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:

Well, OK. It seems pretty clear that there are laws protecting citizens (that don't 
protect non-citizens). Situations like arresting a citizen and holding them for a very 
long time before charging them are the in-between wiggle room. And we have things like 
opening investigations into them, etc. And it would be pretty easy to 
"disappear" a nobody like me. I think it's not so easy to disappear Trump. 
Anyway, there are some pretty hard constraints like due process, posse comitatus, and 
such. The only way the President could make an assassination of a citizen plausible is to 
deem them an enemy of the state, revoke their citizenship, present some flimsy 
justification for that revocation, etc. And even then, as long as they're on US soil, 
(again, to be legitimate) you'd want to use the ATF, FBI, ICE, or something, not the Navy 
or CIA.

IDK. This scenario just feels like spy novel fantasy to me. It was a good 
quip in the SCOTUS hearing. But there are too many holes in the mechanics to do 
it with the appearance of legitimacy. (This says nothing of doing it Nixon- or 
Hoover- style, of course.)

I am kinda on pins and needles to see what Chutkan makes of some of this, 
though.

On 7/16/24 19:34, Russ Abbott wrote:
 > I think it's an official act if it involves the use of powers designated 
by the Constitution as Presidential. As I understand the SCOTUS ruling, the 
motivation for that use is not relevant. That's one of the things that's so 
terrible about the immunity decision. Seal Team 6 and all that.
 >
 > -- Russ
 >
 > On Tue, Jul 16, 2024, 11:17 AM glen mailto:geprope...@gmail.com> 
<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>>> wrote:
 >
 >     It's pretty hard for me to see how that would stand up in court. If 
assassination of citizens, much less a fully cleared and daily int-briefed President-elect, 
is ultimately ruled an "official" action, we've already lost the Republic and 
committing the actual deed would be futile. No need to worry about losing the Republic if 
the Republic is already lost.
 >
 >     On 7/16/24 10:47, Russ Abbott wrote:
 >      > Why has no one pointed out the possibility that if Trump wins, 
Biden could take advantage of his newly declared immunity and have him assassinated?
 >      >
 >      > -- Russ
 >      >
 >      > On Tue, Jul 16, 2024, 6:24 AM glen mailto:geprope...@gmail.com> 
<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com 
<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com> <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>>>> wrote:
 >      >
 >      >     Yeah. It's one thing to wish it or want it. It's another to 
think more in Marcus' terms and come up with a more complex strategy not involving 
stupid 20 year olds and no violence at all. I still hold out hope for my own personal 
conspiracy theory. Biden becomes the nominee. After the convention fades, the 
Admnistration announces Biden has gone to the hospital for bone spur surgery. Kamala 
takes over temporarily and campaigns furiously for Biden-Harris. Biden is re-elected. 
Biden recovers and gets through the Oath (fingers crossed). Then he goes back to the 
hospital with some minor thing like a dizzy spell. Kamala takes over again. Biden's 
condition worsens. First Female President. Biden recovers and becomes America's 
Grandpa.
 >      >
 >      >     Come on Deep State. Make it happen. 8^D
 >      >
 >      >     On 7/15/24 17:30, Russ Abbott wrote:
 >      >      > I wonder what Scott's response would have been to those of 
us who, in response to the shooting, thought: better luck next time.
 >      >

Re: [FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought

2024-07-15 Thread glen


Exactly. A good answer to these questions would come in the form of a matrix 
with

columns: speak to, expect understanding, directionality of behavior, receipt of 
p&p, designed delivery of p&p
rows: turnip, car, computer, spider, dog, Republican, Democrat, human, ...

Here are my answers:

,"speak to","expect understanding","directionality of behavior","receipt of 
p&p","designed delivery of p&p"
turnip,0,0,1,1,0
car,1,0,1,0,1
computer,1,1,1,1,1
spider,1,0,1,1,1
dog,1,1,1,1,1
Republican,1,1,1,1,0
Democrat,1,1,1,1,1
human,1,1,1,1,1


On 7/15/24 15:34, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Why this distinction for dogs?   These things would apply to people too.

  


From: Friam  On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson
Sent: Monday, July 15, 2024 3:29 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought

  


Oh, so, for instance,

  


Would you speak to your dog?

Would you expect your dog to under stand you when you speak, some of the time?

Would you see your  dog's behavior as going in a direction?

Would you believe that some things give your dog pleasure and others pain..

Would you see your dog as having behaviors designed to convey pleasure and pain.

  


etc, etc.

  


NIck

  


On Mon, Jul 15, 2024 at 6:26 PM Nicholas Thompson mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> > wrote:

Hi, Jochen,

  


I haven't read the paper, so grain of salt, here.  Anybody who has dealt with a 
 bittersweet vine knows that plants can do plenty.   The question about plants 
seems to me to be more one of whether each plant is a unit.  We tend not to 
attribute consciousness to things we eat, so, to that extent, I am suspicious 
of the assertion that all plants are not at all conscious.  (H.  I wonder 
if the Chinese think that dogs are conscious.}

  


But I am not so much interested at the moment in the boundaries of attrribution 
as I am in its heartland.  What are we getting at when we make these 
attributions in ordinary day to day talk.

  


Imagine both you and I  had dogs.   I imagine that we would behave toward our 
dogs in very similar ways.  Yet, on your earlier comments, you would see them 
as non-conscious and I would seem them as conscious.  What difference does this 
attribution make in our behavor, do you suppose.  If there is no difference, 
then the Pragmatist would accuse us of arguing over  metaphysics.

  


Nick

  


On Sun, Jul 14, 2024 at 5:58 PM Jochen Fromm mailto:j...@cas-group.net> > wrote:

Good point. Since plants have no brains and no neurons and no muscles and do not move 
they have no "patterns of doings" and therefore no consciousness. There is a 
paper from Taiz et al. which argues plants neither possess nor require consciousness.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Plants-Neither-Possess-nor-Require-Consciousness.-Taiz-Alkon/ba409ce6518883973eb585c9cda1714b1c44707d

  


I found a reference to the paper in the book "Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man 
Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why It Matters" from Marlene Zuk

https://wwnorton.com/books/dancing-cockatoos-and-the-dead-man-test

  


-J.

  

  


 Original message 

From: Nicholas Thompson mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> 
>

Date: 7/13/24 3:34 AM (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:friam@redfish.com> >

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought

  


I  have no trouble stipulating that consciousness is a degree-thing so long as 
we understand it with reference to patterns of doings rather than in terms of 
the equipment organisms carry around.

  


Nick

  


On Fri, Jul 12, 2024 at 7:21 PM Jochen Fromm mailto:j...@cas-group.net> > wrote:

The dictionary defines intelligence as the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or 
trying situations. H.G. Wells says in his book "The Time Machine" that "There is no 
intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of 
intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers." LLMs are the result of 
endless training cycles and they show amazing levels of intelligence. Apparently there is a 
relation between learning and intelligence.

  


I think languages and codes are more essential to understand self-awareness and 
consciousness because consciousness and self-awareness are a side effect of 
language acquisition which allows to bypass the blind spot of the inability to 
perceive the own self.

  


Maybe Steve and Dave are correct that there is a spectrum of consciousness: 
plants have 1 bit of consciousness because they are aware of sunshine and water 
levels in the environment. Animals have 2 bits of consciousness because they 
are additionally aware of predators and food sources in the environment. 
Primates have 3 bits of consciousness because they are aware of injustice and 
inequalities (e.g. by being jealous). Humans have the most bits of 
consciousness because

Re: [FRIAM] Does Dusty Love Dave, and VV.

2024-07-15 Thread glen

I don't have a dog. So maybe this is bending the thread too far for Nick. But when Dusty expresses
self-awareness by behaving similar to Jackson, this is the self-as-other or other-as-self
reflection concept. Dusty could merely be "conscious of" Jackson, not herself. Perhaps
mimicry is upstream of consciousness. And perhaps classification/similarity, more recognizable
doings versus less recognizable doings, is upstream of mimicry, which is more fodder for the
argument that an LLM will eventually be able to do this, though perhaps not "by itself".

On 7/15/24 10:50, Prof David West wrote:

I agree that each is conscious of each other.

Yes, the second one is tricky, so i will take it in parts.

Dusty is conscious of Dusty. One reason: I give Jackson (my other dog) a treat and
observe body language and facial expressions exhibited by Dusty that I interpret as,
"where's mine?" This indicates to me some kind of Dusty
self-awareness/consciousness of self.

Dave is conscious of Dave.
1) Naive but evident: bullet clips ear—immediate utterance, "*_I'm_* hit."
(utterance is observable behavior)
2) Muddled: noise emanates between navel and spine, sometimes utterance is *_I'm_*
hungry; sometimes "stomach empty," sometimes no utterance at all.
3) Contrarian: extended mediation using the Koan "Who Am I" with each posited answer
rejected until no "I" remains. (A state of existence with zero differentiation between
'observer' and 'observed' // 'conscious' and 'conscious-of'.)
4) Meta: [various ways to achieve, but most blatant is LSD]:
conscious/aware of consciousness and ITS-BEING-CONSCIOUS. (A program is
aware/conscious of itself as ephemeral sequence of [voltage | voltage-not]
?)

Tricky bits:
A-Cases 1) and 2) can quickly devolve into a kind of circular reasoning:
dave is conscious of dave because dave seems to be conscious of dave; or some
kind of argument by authority: dave is conscious of dave because Nick heard
utterances that are interpretable as dave is conscious of dave; or, blaming
language because of the centrality of the verb to-be.

Cases 3) and 4) represent the kind of point-of-departure I warned about earlier—excluded
from the conversation because they are not shared, not logical, not
"scientific."

davew

On Mon, Jul 15, 2024, at 11:43 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Hi, Prof Dave n all,

I would like us to come back to this point:

/*Is Dusty (Dave) conscious of Dave (Dusty).*/
/*Is Dusty (Dave) conscious of Dusty (Dave).*/
Using our progress around the word Love, I feel like we ought to be able to
agree on the first two propositions. We agree that the two particiants are
consciouus of one another.

So, if I am correct about that, could we move on to dis cuss the second pair,
whether each of the two is conscious of themself.

This is really truicky and, to be honest, I have no idea where it comes out.

Nick

On Fri, Jul 12, 2024 at 12:59 PM Nicholas Thompson mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>> wrote:

[Please, Friammers,, if you join this discussion, stay close to this or
other closely related down-to-earth experiences.

Dave, you offer as data:

/*Dave is sleepy and calm.*/
/*Dusty is anxious and afraid.*/
/*Dusty crawls onto Dave's shoulder and finds reassurance and security.*/
/*Dave is tolerant and does not shove Dusty off bed.*/
/*Dave senses Dusty's need for reassurance and rests his arm across her
back and lets her stay as she is.*/
/*Dusty relaxes and goes to sleep.*/
/**/
You then offer the following guide to interpretation:

/*Love is not present in this transaction, unless you presume that a series
of prior interactions created a kind of meta-state of Lovingness between the
two*/

I agree with you that love is a meta state in the sense that it is an
arrangement of other behavioral states. So I will leave that alone. Having so
stipulated, I think it is reasonable to say, on the basis of the data you set
forth, that a meta-state of lovingness exists between you. (I would prefer to
say you love one another, but partly in deference to SG, I will adopt your
lingo.] To call your joint behavior loving is to perform an abduction. The
test of an abduction is to examine the deductions that flow from it:

So, if Dave and Dusty have a loving relationship, then, on my
understanding, the following would be true:

/*You would protect one another against harm.*/
/*You would attend to one another if either was sick, injured, or
depressed.*/
/*You would become uneasy if you were separated for an unexpectedly long
time.*/

Are these things true?

Nick

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

Re: [FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought

2024-07-15 Thread glen


Ouch. I thought I was going to agree with you through the 3rd sentence. But then you did [⛧] the 
4th. Brains, muscles, and neurons *are* doings just like Barry's invocation of the hypothalamus and 
pituitary glands and their handling of oxytocin induced through stare contests. Nick's ontological 
lifting of the boundary between humans as "inside" versus "outside" is an 
oversimplification.

The same oversimplification can be seen in our conception of "LLM" (cf "by itself"). When 
Marcus mentions prompt overlapping and Steve mentions integrated/interactive simulation, it opens the door to 
allow for the "LLM" to breach the limits Russ and Stephen talked about. These boundaries 
(int[er|ra]-human or int[er|ra]-algorithm) present the continual risk of reification - ontological lifting, 
pretending an abstract thing is real/actual.

And this reification extends, I think, to Jochen's conception that "language" is necessary for reflection or 
self-awareness. If we allow "language" to include, say, contented staring and the induction of oxytocin, aka "body 
language" ... or if we allow other forms of paracrinal or endocrinal signaling to be considered "language", then 
OK. Sure. "Language" is required for self-awareness.

⛧ Yes, your sentence is a "doing", from the thinking to the electrons back to 
the thinking. It's doings all the way down. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling 
snake oil.

On 7/14/24 16:20, Prof David West wrote:

I believe this is the opposite of what Nick was ceding. Plants most certainly 
do have 'patterns of doings'. Brains and muscles and neurons are 'things 
organisms carry around' and, according to Nick, cannot be the grounds for 
stipulating consciousness.

On Sun, Jul 14, 2024, at 4:58 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote:

Good point. Since plants have no brains and no neurons and no muscles and do not move 
they have no "patterns of doings" and therefore no consciousness. There is a 
paper from Taiz et al. which argues plants neither possess nor require consciousness.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Plants-Neither-Possess-nor-Require-Consciousness.-Taiz-Alkon/ba409ce6518883973eb585c9cda1714b1c44707d

I found a reference to the paper in the book "Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man 
Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why It Matters" from Marlene Zuk
https://wwnorton.com/books/dancing-cockatoos-and-the-dead-man-test

-J.


 Original message 
From: Nicholas Thompson 
Date: 7/13/24 3:34 AM (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought

I  have no trouble stipulating that consciousness is a degree-thing so long as 
we understand it with reference to patterns of doings rather than in terms of 
the equipment organisms carry around.

Nick

On Fri, Jul 12, 2024 at 7:21 PM Jochen Fromm mailto:j...@cas-group.net>> wrote:

The dictionary defines intelligence as the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new 
or trying situations. H.G. Wells says in his book "The Time Machine" that "There is 
no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of 
intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers." LLMs are the result of 
endless training cycles and they show amazing levels of intelligence. Apparently there is a 
relation between learning and intelligence.


I think languages and codes are more essential to understand self-awareness 
and consciousness because consciousness and self-awareness are a side effect of 
language acquisition which allows to bypass the blind spot of the inability to 
perceive the own self.


Maybe Steve and Dave are correct that there is a spectrum of consciousness: 
plants have 1 bit of consciousness because they are aware of sunshine and water 
levels in the environment. Animals have 2 bits of consciousness because they 
are additionally aware of predators and food sources in the environment. 
Primates have 3 bits of consciousness because they are aware of injustice and 
inequalities (e.g. by being jealous). Humans have the most bits of 
consciousness because of language and self-awareness. Wheeler's it from bit 
comes to mind.


-J.



 Original message 
From: Pieter Steenekamp mailto:piet...@randcontrols.co.za>>
Date: 7/12/24 11:25 AM (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We 
Thought

Jochen,

Thank you for your thoughtful and engaging post! It's never too late for a 
good discussion, even if we sometimes get distracted by the call of daily life 
(or perhaps the allure of a particularly captivating cat video).

Your points on the necessity of language for meta-awareness and the intriguing idea 
of the "blind spot" of self-perception are fascinating. However, I’d like to 
suggest a slight pivot in our focus. Ra

Re: [FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought

2024-07-07 Thread glen

And what would we make of the oral vs written traditions? Are geometers more or 
less conscious than algebraists? >8^D


On July 7, 2024 5:58:12 PM PDT, Prof David West  wrote:
>why do you assume cats, dogs, and horses lack language? Elephants call each 
>other by name, octopi definitely appear to communicate symbolically 
>(language), whales and dolphins seem to have "language" and use it to 
>communicate. Did proto-humans lack language because the means of communication 
>were gestures, paintings, song and not dictionary words grammatically parsed? 
>cats dogs and horses definitely 'communicate' using sound, body language scent 
>(their pee smells quite different when they are conveying "I was here" and 
>"this is mine."
>
>davew
>
>On Sun, Jul 7, 2024, at 6:28 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
>> I would say cats, dogs and horses don't have meta-awareness because they 
>> lack language. They live in the present moment, in the here and now. Without 
>> language they do not have the capability to reflect on their past or to 
>> think about their future. They can not formulate stories of themselves which 
>> could help to form a sense of identity. Language is the mirror in which we 
>> perceive ourselves during "this is me" moments. Animals lack this mirror 
>> completely. One dimensional scents trails do not count as language.
>> 
>> Large languages models lack consciousness because they do not have a body 
>> which is embedded as a actor in an environment. These two things are 
>> necessary: the physical world of bodies, and the mental world of language. 
>> When both collide in the same spot we can get consciousness.
>> 
>> -J.
>> 
>> 
>>  Original message 
>> From: Nicholas Thompson 
>> Date: 7/6/24 5:05 AM (GMT+01:00)
>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We 
>> Thought
>> 
>> Well, that's because Socrates claimed not to know what he thought, and since 
>> I genuinely don[t know what I think until I work it out, the conversation 
>> has the same quality.  I apologize for that.  my students found it truly 
>> distressing.
>> 
>> So, if you will indulge me, why don't  you think your cat has 
>> meta=awareness?   Authority, ideology, or is there some experience you have 
>> had that leads you to think that.   It would be kind of odd if it she didn't 
>> because animals have all sorts of ways of distinguishing self from other. 
>> They have ways of knowinng that "I did that".  (e.g., scent marking?)
>> 
>> 
>> On Fri, Jul 5, 2024 at 3:19 PM Jochen Fromm  wrote:
>>> Well yes, if meta-awareness is defined as acting in response to one's own 
>>> awareness then I would say animals like a cat don't have it but humans 
>>> have. As an example I could say this almost feels like I am a participant 
>>> in a dialogue from Plato...
>>> 
>>> I would be surprised if it can be described in simple terms. If the essence 
>>> of consciousness is subjective experience then it is indeed hard to 
>>> describe by a theory although there are many attempts. Persons who perceive 
>>> things differently are wired differently. And what is more subjective than 
>>> the perception of oneself? 
>>> 
>>> https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/what-is-consciousness/
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> If we can describe it mathematically then probably as a way an information 
>>> feels if it is processed in complex ways, ad infinitum like the orbits of a 
>>> strange attractor.
>>> 
>>> https://chaoticatmospheres.com/mathrules-strange-attractors
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -J.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  Original message 
>>> From: Nicholas Thompson 
>>> Date: 7/5/24 6:56 PM (GMT+01:00)
>>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We 
>>> Thought
>>> 
>>> ,
>>> 
>>> Great!  Baby steps. "If we aren't moving slowly, we aren't moving."   So, 
>>> can I define some new terms, tentatively, *per explorandum* ? Let's call 
>>> acting-in-respect-to-the-world, "awareness".   Allowing this definition, we 
>>> certainly seem to agree that the cat is aware.  Lets define meta-awareness 
>>> as acting i respect to one's own awareness.  Now, am I correct in assuming 
>>> that you identify meta-awareness with consciousness and that you think that 
>>> the cat is not meta-aware and that I probably am?  And further that you 
>>> think that meta-awareness requires consciousness?
>>> 
>>> Nick
>>> 
>>> On Fri, Jul 5, 2024 at 12:17 PM Jochen Fromm  wrote:
 I would say a cat is conscious in the sense that it is aware of its 
 immediate environment. Cats are nocturnal animals who hunt at night and 
 mostly sleep during the day. Consciousness in the sense of being aware of 
 oneself as an actor in an environment requires understanding of language 
 which only humans have ( and LLMs now )
 https://www.quantamagazine.org/insects-and-other-animals-have-con

Re: [FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought

2024-07-05 Thread glen


I feel like y'all have lost an important part of the conversation, stemming from your 
invocation of multi-modal interaction. Whether we start with only 5 modes (see, smell, 
taste, hear, feel) or a very high dimensional one (including all the various signals 
across the various membranes (humidity, heat, absorption of chemicals through the skin, 
intake of exobiotics, etc.) each dimension can support a derivation (a meta-*: 
meta-sight, meta-taste, etc.) in a "linear" way. And each dimension can be 
fused in an n-ary function (f(taste,smell), g(sight,feel), h(hear, see), i(taste, smell, 
feel), etc.).

Oversimplifying this into aware versus meta-aware is going to lead you down a primrose 
path. Even if you admit the combinatorial explosion of multi-modal derivation and 
re-derivation of higher and higher order functions, you still have to include the fact 
that the functions operate at various rates of interaction with each other and the 
environment. And that the "environment" of each function is co-constructed by 
all the other functions, as well as the world outside the organism.

And even if you admit that, these orders may not complete. The ordering may be 
partial, where for example an Operator, O, might operate over a zeroth order 
signal from the environment combined with a 2nd order derivation. E.g.

O{taste, f(taste), g(f²(taste))), where f²() is something like f() applied 
twice either in time (like a wine that changes as you swish it in your mouth) 
or space (like a food that has chemicals inducing both salty and sweet).


On 7/5/24 12:18, Jochen Fromm wrote:

Well yes, if meta-awareness is defined as acting in response to one's own 
awareness then I would say animals like a cat don't have it but humans have. As 
an example I could say this almost feels like I am a participant in a dialogue 
from Plato...

I would be surprised if it can be described in simple terms. If the essence of 
consciousness is subjective experience then it is indeed hard to describe by a 
theory although there are many attempts. Persons who perceive things 
differently are wired differently. And what is more subjective than the 
perception of oneself?

https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/what-is-consciousness/


If we can describe it mathematically then probably as a way an information 
feels if it is processed in complex ways, ad infinitum like the orbits of a 
strange attractor.

https://chaoticatmospheres.com/mathrules-strange-attractors


-J.



 Original message 
From: Nicholas Thompson 
Date: 7/5/24 6:56 PM (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought

,

Great!  Baby steps. "If we aren't moving slowly, we aren't moving."   So, can I define 
some new terms, tentatively, /per explorandum/ ? Let's call acting-in-respect-to-the-world, 
"awareness".   Allowing this definition, we certainly seem to agree that the cat is 
aware.  Lets define meta-awareness as acting i respect to one's own awareness.  Now, am I correct 
in assuming that you identify meta-awareness with consciousness and that you think that the cat is 
not meta-aware and that I probably am?  And further that you think that meta-awareness requires 
consciousness?

Nick

On Fri, Jul 5, 2024 at 12:17 PM Jochen Fromm mailto:j...@cas-group.net>> wrote:

I would say a cat is conscious in the sense that it is aware of its 
immediate environment. Cats are nocturnal animals who hunt at night and mostly 
sleep during the day. Consciousness in the sense of being aware of oneself as 
an actor in an environment requires understanding of language which only humans 
have ( and LLMs now )

https://www.quantamagazine.org/insects-and-other-animals-have-consciousness-experts-declare-20240419/
 


-J.


 Original message 
From: Nicholas Thompson mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>>
Date: 7/5/24 5:02 AM (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We 
Thought

Jochen,

/I think the first step in any conversation is to decide whether your cat is 
conscious.  If so, why do you think so; if not, likewise.  I had a facinnationg 
conversation with  GBT about  whether he was conscious and he denied it 
"hotly", which, of course, met one of his criteria for consciousness.
/
/
/
/So.  Is your cat  connscious?
/
/
/
/Nick
/



--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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Re: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

2024-07-02 Thread glen


Well, maybe. But a significant part of The Plan is indoctrination and 
court-packing through the Federalist Society. So maybe Thomas is a useful 
idiot. But maybe Gorsuch, ACB, and Alito are purposeful. I'm not clear on 
Kavanaugh. He's a political operator rather than a court-side purist. That 
could put him in either camp. The linguistic gymnastics Alito went through on 
Roe v Wade seems to put him squarely in the category Eric outlined.

On 7/2/24 10:20, Marcus Daniels wrote:

I think SCOTUS might be useful idiots too.   Easily bribed like with a motor 
home and free vacations.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, July 2, 2024 10:11 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

Right. MAGA are the useful idiots being exploited by the conservative arm of SCOTUS to push through 
the Unitary Executive, which, in turn, is the "useful idiot" being exploited by the 
wealthy to achieve the oligarchy as a stepping stone. And to some extent, this is Thiel's 
"Straussian Moment" or Yarvin's return to a kindasorta Monarchy. And the Pew data you 
pointed to demonstrate that, like in France, *we* don't mind that lukewarm authoritarianism ... 
Thiel's a bit like Plato's Philosopher King ... or maybe a better analogy is Thiel is like our 
Supreme Leader while Trump is like Ebrahim Raisi.

On 7/2/24 07:15, Marcus Daniels wrote:

The MAGAs aren't the wealthy, they are envious of the wealthy.   DJT included.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, July 2, 2024 6:28 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

I worry this is too conspiratorial. The only way I can see it sustaining is if we take selfishness 
as a core human trait in the same way we take reason/rationality as a core human trait. Both are 
false as crisp categories. But there's enough of either (and their inverses - self-sacrificing and 
embodied cognition, respectively) to wax and wane. Assessing whether or not, say, an oligarchy can 
maintain in the face of such a diverse and distributed system requires us to define relatively 
objective measures of selfishness (or "corruption" - but I'd argue defining that well is 
fraught). And a good measure of selfishness has to include, as you mention with Cannon's family, a 
measure of the size of the various tribes. My guess is the even if the wealthy recognize that other 
wealthies are in their tribe to some extent, there'll be more in-fighting amongst those elephants 
than there will be solidarity. Say what you want about capitalism, it encourages intra-tribal rifts 
and inter-tribal exchange. And that allows bursts of altruism or "universalist" beliefs. 
If the successive oligarchies are disrupted often enough, in complex enough ways, we may be able to 
continue approximating a democracy.

On 7/1/24 14:00, Santafe wrote:

I have an impression that the pattern of this and many other decisions is an 
acknowledgment — front brain or mid-brain; don’t know — that a 
second-government that isn’t the institutional one is now fully up and running.

Many years ago, when I was working with Shubik, he gave me a paper by one of 
his colleagues who had been active in trying to support the Aquino government 
in the Philippines as a realization of the constitutional system set up 
(whenever that was done).  The paper’s theme was that having laws on the books 
that nominally seem to “uphold” democratic governance in one place may be worth 
not-much someplace else, where the whole social culture — all the skills, 
networks of relation, expectations — are built on generations-long histories of 
what we would call corruption (but for them, is just how things get done).

scotus repeatedly disaggregates and ambiguously states the criteria for 
something, rather than taking any concrete and intelligible stand, and when 
there is a law that does take an intelligible stand, they make up some story 
that it doesn’t really say what it plainly says, and put an ambiguous dictum in 
its place.  (Weird; like the inverse of “painting over rot”; it is taking sound 
wood and somehow painting rot over it).

Now, if there were not a sophisticated enough system to put compliant apparatchiks 
in a very broad swath of lower courts, lawmaking houses, etc., that ambiguation 
would do limited good.  But when money is very concentrated, communication very 
modern, and markets very very efficient in centralizing power, and there are a few 
decades to work, that kind of broad installation of corrupt actors can get done.  
There is enough machinery in place to micro-manage them if needed (amicus briefs or 
even individual threat and bribery), but there probably are enough collaborators 
that a lot of the micro-managing isn’t even needed.  It’s like a system of 
“alternative laws" (next term for KAC to coin) that mostly

Re: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

2024-07-02 Thread glen


Right. MAGA are the useful idiots being exploited by the conservative arm of SCOTUS to push through 
the Unitary Executive, which, in turn, is the "useful idiot" being exploited by the 
wealthy to achieve the oligarchy as a stepping stone. And to some extent, this is Thiel's 
"Straussian Moment" or Yarvin's return to a kindasorta Monarchy. And the Pew data you 
pointed to demonstrate that, like in France, *we* don't mind that lukewarm authoritarianism ... 
Thiel's a bit like Plato's Philosopher King ... or maybe a better analogy is Thiel is like our 
Supreme Leader while Trump is like Ebrahim Raisi.

On 7/2/24 07:15, Marcus Daniels wrote:

The MAGAs aren't the wealthy, they are envious of the wealthy.   DJT included.

-----Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, July 2, 2024 6:28 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

I worry this is too conspiratorial. The only way I can see it sustaining is if we take selfishness 
as a core human trait in the same way we take reason/rationality as a core human trait. Both are 
false as crisp categories. But there's enough of either (and their inverses - self-sacrificing and 
embodied cognition, respectively) to wax and wane. Assessing whether or not, say, an oligarchy can 
maintain in the face of such a diverse and distributed system requires us to define relatively 
objective measures of selfishness (or "corruption" - but I'd argue defining that well is 
fraught). And a good measure of selfishness has to include, as you mention with Cannon's family, a 
measure of the size of the various tribes. My guess is the even if the wealthy recognize that other 
wealthies are in their tribe to some extent, there'll be more in-fighting amongst those elephants 
than there will be solidarity. Say what you want about capitalism, it encourages intra-tribal rifts 
and inter-tribal exchange. And that allows bursts of altruism or "universalist" beliefs. 
If the successive oligarchies are disrupted often enough, in complex enough ways, we may be able to 
continue approximating a democracy.

On 7/1/24 14:00, Santafe wrote:

I have an impression that the pattern of this and many other decisions is an 
acknowledgment — front brain or mid-brain; don’t know — that a 
second-government that isn’t the institutional one is now fully up and running.

Many years ago, when I was working with Shubik, he gave me a paper by one of 
his colleagues who had been active in trying to support the Aquino government 
in the Philippines as a realization of the constitutional system set up 
(whenever that was done).  The paper’s theme was that having laws on the books 
that nominally seem to “uphold” democratic governance in one place may be worth 
not-much someplace else, where the whole social culture — all the skills, 
networks of relation, expectations — are built on generations-long histories of 
what we would call corruption (but for them, is just how things get done).

scotus repeatedly disaggregates and ambiguously states the criteria for 
something, rather than taking any concrete and intelligible stand, and when 
there is a law that does take an intelligible stand, they make up some story 
that it doesn’t really say what it plainly says, and put an ambiguous dictum in 
its place.  (Weird; like the inverse of “painting over rot”; it is taking sound 
wood and somehow painting rot over it).

Now, if there were not a sophisticated enough system to put compliant apparatchiks 
in a very broad swath of lower courts, lawmaking houses, etc., that ambiguation 
would do limited good.  But when money is very concentrated, communication very 
modern, and markets very very efficient in centralizing power, and there are a few 
decades to work, that kind of broad installation of corrupt actors can get done.  
There is enough machinery in place to micro-manage them if needed (amicus briefs or 
even individual threat and bribery), but there probably are enough collaborators 
that a lot of the micro-managing isn’t even needed.  It’s like a system of 
“alternative laws" (next term for KAC to coin) that mostly don’t need to be 
enforced if a few occasions serve to keep the precedent live in people’s minds.

So in New York or Washington the cases will be weakened by picking around the 
edges, but in florida cannon can just throw it all out, and know her family 
will remain safe (and maybe even her personal beliefs will be followed; who 
knows re. that).

Likewise bible teaching in schools, banniing of abortifacients and eventually 
contraceptives through the mail within their territory, and so on.

Because I have to (as the only form of employment I am for the moment holding) 
unfortunately do a lot of flying back and forth, I am aware what a nuisance it 
is to have Russian airspace unavailable.  11 time zones.  I wonder when the 
various red-captured states

Re: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

2024-07-02 Thread glen

es” and “movements”. In her system, “parties” seek to control the state,
on behalf of particular interests, in contrasts to “movements” which seek to
destroy it. So the Fascists were fundamentally still a party-type
organization; only the Nazis and the Bolsheviks were real movements. And the
Nazis and Bolsheviks saw each other as true peers, and looked with contempt on
the mere Fascists. Much follows from that distinction. Authoritarians have
stable goals, even if not overtly admidded outside those running them;
movements need not have any particular goals, save to keep the movement moving,
so becoming more fluid and cult-like over time — one reads about the
supervention of the SA by the SS and then the conuous invention of new inner
layers within the SS, each more detached from specific skills than the ones
before — until they collapse because they aren’t really organized around
getting anything particular done. She argues that the parties and the
movements co-travel early on, and that the parties fail to recognize the
difference in what they are dealing with, until eventually they get eaten up
and didn’t see it coming. When I read or hear Stuart Stevens I have a strong
sense of that. All that reads very comfortably with the situation at the
moment. It’s odd; a bad analogy: I think of disregulated cell populations pre-
and post-metastasis. The authoritarian parties are mere tumors, taking up
residence within the normal rules of organ development. The movements spread
to everything, and eventually undermine all rules except their own. Most of
the educated, luxuried, bribed, etc. operators now are still party-men.
scotus, the non-MTG-type elected officials, and such. The movement characters
are a different category. MTG is just the front wave of cannon-fodder for
them, and trump is too unfocused (or am I wrong; is he focused-enough on one
goal?) to really be a longer-term builder of anything (though not by too much).
I am not yet seeing who has the combination of delusion and focus to fill the
Hitler or Stalin role. But the social structure seems to have laid out the
throne, and we try to figure out who occupies it and for how long.

On Jul 1, 2024, at 11:58 PM, glen wrote:

https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.theguardian.com%2fus-news%2flive%2f2024%2fjul%2f01%2fsupreme-court-trump-immunity-claim-decision-updates%23top-of-blog&c=E,1,HjPSPMDt8Wf8_2t6B5NRgPS6eQoM9ERREUVJg7-qQgIoTykx-HMc4-VJ15LWXlArv7k86lDYDmnX0_MAvUEwQTGSEpHEshTJjBa28-h5oxQZa8k,&typo=1

Anyone care to take a stab at explaining why the ruling doesn't simply kick the
can down the road a bit? I mean, how could (say) hiding secret documents, riot
incitation at a campaign event, etc. be considered official acts of the Office
of the President? I suppose I can see some of the evidence being thrown out,
like claims about POTUS not getting involved in protecting the Capitol
building. But is this ruling really that damaging to the prosecution's case?

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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Re: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

2024-07-01 Thread glen


OK. I guess I can see how [un]official is a lawyerism, thereby routing more 
disambiguation into the court system, where the lower courts act as a sieve. But for that 
to work, they're gonna need some competence from the legislature. New laws (and executive 
orders, for that matter) have to be constructed so as not to overwhelm the courts. Unless 
we step back and consider the "them", here, is rich people, including justices 
who can curry favor from other, richer, people. Only rich people have the inertia to 
sustain a chain of appeals. And if that's the case, the collapse will only come as an 
effect of the overproduction of elites. They'll eat each other, trampling the grass all 
the while.

On 7/1/24 10:21, Marcus Daniels wrote:

The conservative arm of SCOTUS is just optimizing their lifestyle for the rest 
of their lives by giving power to themselves (Chevron) and to their friends.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Monday, July 1, 2024 10:02 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

An interesting edge case is Sotomayor's comment. If Biden ordered the 
assassination of Trump via Seal Team 6, would that be an official act of that 
office? No. I can't imagine even Cannon or Chutkan would suggest it was. I 
wonder, though, if Biden ordered the assassination of, say, Iran's Supreme 
Leader, would that be an official act? I think maybe, yes. But it's against our 
foreign policy. So we'd expect a chain of actions, first an Executive Order 
allowing it. But it's against international law. Right? So while I agree with 
the gist that this ruling helps place us in the same category as every other 
state governed by some tin-pot dictator, it also smells a bit like a neoliberal 
move to a World Order. If we can't rein in our President, we have to empower 
the UN (or maybe Google and Palantir?) to do so. The ruling surrenders our 
ability to govern ourselves and hands that power over to some as-yet 
un-resolved agent.

It's difficult for me to believe the conservative arm of SCOTUS is so 
completely stupid as to surrender their ability to check the admin's power. So 
I have to assume I simply don't understand their long game.

On 7/1/24 09:32, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Besides the heroic act of following LBJ, another one could be to deal with 
Trump.  Hard to punish an old person with threat of incarceration.  His defense 
could last years until he died, and meanwhile they argue diminished capacity.   
Let's go Dark Brandon.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Monday, July 1, 2024 9:25 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

I don't think so. E.g. Trump's threat to fire the AG for not opening investigations seems 
official, if a bit unethical. So the righties' rhetoric about "Biden's persecution 
of Trump" is nonsense. It would (now) be a clearly official act for Biden to 
threaten the AG for refusing to open an investigation into Trump. But the conclusions of 
that investigation are another matter. The effects of such acts percolate down through 
the admin, then back up through the courts. What's missing in action is the 3rd branch, 
here. And I think it's safe to claim the Senate bears most of the responsibility for a 
defunkt legislature.

Anyway, the hysteria on all sides to this ruling seem similar to the Dems' 
hysteria w.r.t. Biden's debate performance. It's like everyone's lost their 
executive function. I'm starting to think we need to send every citizen through 
pilot training so they can learn to stay calm under duress ... and I'm normally 
the first to insult the Rationalists. 8^D

On 7/1/24 08:49, Marcus Daniels wrote:

The "outer perimeter" would allow Biden to through Trump in a dungeon, etc.  No?

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Monday, July 1, 2024 7:59 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/jul/01/supreme-court-trump-immunity-claim-decision-updates#top-of-blog

Anyone care to take a stab at explaining why the ruling doesn't simply kick the 
can down the road a bit? I mean, how could (say) hiding secret documents, riot 
incitation at a campaign event, etc. be considered official acts of the Office 
of the President? I suppose I can see some of the evidence being thrown out, 
like claims about POTUS not getting involved in protecting the Capitol 
building. But is this ruling really that damaging to the prosecution's case?




--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
to (un)subscribe ht

Re: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

2024-07-01 Thread glen


An interesting edge case is Sotomayor's comment. If Biden ordered the 
assassination of Trump via Seal Team 6, would that be an official act of that 
office? No. I can't imagine even Cannon or Chutkan would suggest it was. I 
wonder, though, if Biden ordered the assassination of, say, Iran's Supreme 
Leader, would that be an official act? I think maybe, yes. But it's against our 
foreign policy. So we'd expect a chain of actions, first an Executive Order 
allowing it. But it's against international law. Right? So while I agree with 
the gist that this ruling helps place us in the same category as every other 
state governed by some tin-pot dictator, it also smells a bit like a neoliberal 
move to a World Order. If we can't rein in our President, we have to empower 
the UN (or maybe Google and Palantir?) to do so. The ruling surrenders our 
ability to govern ourselves and hands that power over to some as-yet 
un-resolved agent.

It's difficult for me to believe the conservative arm of SCOTUS is so 
completely stupid as to surrender their ability to check the admin's power. So 
I have to assume I simply don't understand their long game.

On 7/1/24 09:32, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Besides the heroic act of following LBJ, another one could be to deal with 
Trump.  Hard to punish an old person with threat of incarceration.  His defense 
could last years until he died, and meanwhile they argue diminished capacity.   
Let's go Dark Brandon.

-----Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Monday, July 1, 2024 9:25 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

I don't think so. E.g. Trump's threat to fire the AG for not opening investigations seems 
official, if a bit unethical. So the righties' rhetoric about "Biden's persecution 
of Trump" is nonsense. It would (now) be a clearly official act for Biden to 
threaten the AG for refusing to open an investigation into Trump. But the conclusions of 
that investigation are another matter. The effects of such acts percolate down through 
the admin, then back up through the courts. What's missing in action is the 3rd branch, 
here. And I think it's safe to claim the Senate bears most of the responsibility for a 
defunkt legislature.

Anyway, the hysteria on all sides to this ruling seem similar to the Dems' 
hysteria w.r.t. Biden's debate performance. It's like everyone's lost their 
executive function. I'm starting to think we need to send every citizen through 
pilot training so they can learn to stay calm under duress ... and I'm normally 
the first to insult the Rationalists. 8^D

On 7/1/24 08:49, Marcus Daniels wrote:

The "outer perimeter" would allow Biden to through Trump in a dungeon, etc.  No?

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Monday, July 1, 2024 7:59 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/jul/01/supreme-court-trump-immunity-claim-decision-updates#top-of-blog

Anyone care to take a stab at explaining why the ruling doesn't simply kick the 
can down the road a bit? I mean, how could (say) hiding secret documents, riot 
incitation at a campaign event, etc. be considered official acts of the Office 
of the President? I suppose I can see some of the evidence being thrown out, 
like claims about POTUS not getting involved in protecting the Capitol 
building. But is this ruling really that damaging to the prosecution's case?




--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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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/
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 1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/

Re: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

2024-07-01 Thread glen


I don't think so. E.g. Trump's threat to fire the AG for not opening investigations seems 
official, if a bit unethical. So the righties' rhetoric about "Biden's persecution 
of Trump" is nonsense. It would (now) be a clearly official act for Biden to 
threaten the AG for refusing to open an investigation into Trump. But the conclusions of 
that investigation are another matter. The effects of such acts percolate down through 
the admin, then back up through the courts. What's missing in action is the 3rd branch, 
here. And I think it's safe to claim the Senate bears most of the responsibility for a 
defunkt legislature.

Anyway, the hysteria on all sides to this ruling seem similar to the Dems' 
hysteria w.r.t. Biden's debate performance. It's like everyone's lost their 
executive function. I'm starting to think we need to send every citizen through 
pilot training so they can learn to stay calm under duress ... and I'm normally 
the first to insult the Rationalists. 8^D

On 7/1/24 08:49, Marcus Daniels wrote:

The "outer perimeter" would allow Biden to through Trump in a dungeon, etc.  No?

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Monday, July 1, 2024 7:59 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/jul/01/supreme-court-trump-immunity-claim-decision-updates#top-of-blog

Anyone care to take a stab at explaining why the ruling doesn't simply kick the 
can down the road a bit? I mean, how could (say) hiding secret documents, riot 
incitation at a campaign event, etc. be considered official acts of the Office 
of the President? I suppose I can see some of the evidence being thrown out, 
like claims about POTUS not getting involved in protecting the Capitol 
building. But is this ruling really that damaging to the prosecution's case?




--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
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[FRIAM] [un]official disambiguation?

2024-07-01 Thread glen


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/jul/01/supreme-court-trump-immunity-claim-decision-updates#top-of-blog

Anyone care to take a stab at explaining why the ruling doesn't simply kick the 
can down the road a bit? I mean, how could (say) hiding secret documents, riot 
incitation at a campaign event, etc. be considered official acts of the Office 
of the President? I suppose I can see some of the evidence being thrown out, 
like claims about POTUS not getting involved in protecting the Capitol 
building. But is this ruling really that damaging to the prosecution's case?

--
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/

Re: [FRIAM] AI art

2024-06-25 Thread glen


I was teaching a couple of kids (8 and 6, I think) at the pub the other night. I don't 
like kids. But it is an interesting task to try to draw out their "look ahead" 
skills. The 8 yr old definitely has them already. But from conversations with their mom, 
it seems clear they're high on conscientiousness and neuroticism: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits The 6 yr old seems to have more 
of the open and extravert traits.

On 6/24/24 20:26, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:

Jon and Nick,

How do I like this!

I'm sure there are AI resources that can technically outperform Nick in 
teaching Jon how to play chess - but that will miss the human relationship 
component. It's okay to play chess against AI, but it surely is not the same as 
to play with other humans!

On Tue, 25 Jun 2024 at 05:10, Nicholas Thompson mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>> wrote:

Jon,

I will teach you chess (};-)]

I have played the game for 81 years.   I play it the way I do most things 
in my life, sloppily and with inordinate  reflection.  For me, the game is a 
conversation about the accumulation and exercise of power  That conversation 
can go on at any level and is best played by people of roughly equal skill.  
When played repeatedly with the same person, it's like a long running 
conversation between good friends. It's delicious.

Nick

On Mon, Jun 24, 2024 at 2:07 PM Jon Zingale mailto:jonzing...@gmail.com>> wrote:

Chess tends to have a pretty specific culture relative to other similar 
games. Often whenever I find chess happening in public spaces I will stop to 
watch a game and occasionally a player will ask if I play. I don't play chess, 
but I know enough of the rules that I enjoy speculating as to what I might do 
in a given board position or what the players might be thinking themselves. 
Typically, my response is that I do not play, that I would love to learn and I 
would love a teaching game. Players almost never take me up on the offer. I get 
the feeling that teaching games are not part of the culture, at least not here 
in the United States. I get the strong feeling that this is because chess 
players tend not to see the game as beautiful, something to be intimate with 
and share. The only teaching game I have received to date was from a Georgian 
who I believe does see the game as beautiful. While I am not a chess player, my 
love of go gives me an appreciation for strategy
games and I find that the audience for public displays of these games 
are typically others who engage in speculation similarly.

It really doesn't matter to me whether or not I am watching a human 
game or not. My go server, for instance, is deep in the Turing challenge. The 
server offers not only the opportunity to play mostly anonymous games with 
others, but also to be a spectator to live games on the server. It is often 
completely unclear as to the ontological status of the players and lines of 
differentiation can be drawn nearly everywhere. There are degrees of cyborg, 
degrees of experimentation versus repertoire, degrees of deception at nearly 
every level. My go playing friends and I will sometimes attempt to guess the 
nature of the bot we are witnessing, the degree to which it is MCMC or DCN or 
simply someone's idea of an entertaining and completely top down rules based 
engine.

When I watch games between strong professionals online (sometimes on 
servers, NHK, or Twitch) there can sometimes be a significant difference in the 
rankings of both players. The stronger player is in effect giving a teaching 
game to the weaker. Often both players are part of the same study group within 
their organization and while both are interested in winning the match, they 
both have a dedication to a kind of scientific discovery of the game. They are 
helping each other to see further. I have no hope of seeing what they see, but 
in my engagement with their game I am hoping to also see further.

Perhaps a year ago now, I mentioned on this forum a discussion I had 
with Michael Redmond 9-dan on his twitch stream, late one night. He made it 
clear to me that while the strongest AI bots on the planet are very good, they 
likely can only see 10-15% into the game of go. At the time of Lee Sedol's 
retirement games (in which he chose to play a specially made AI), the strongest 
players on the planet were 30 points weaker than AI. Today, with AI study and 
related narrative construction, humans have reduced the gap to 10 points. 
Further, AlphaGo discovered new joseki by exploring directions long thought 
(200 years or more) to be deadends. Strong players have since learned to 
understand these openings and those that play them tend to win more often than 
those that don't. This suggests to me that the AI is capable of finding large 
scale optimizations that we can leverage beyond being simply local, tactical 
and narrowly defined computational advantage.

The Go comm

Re: [FRIAM] AI art

2024-06-24 Thread glen

It would be useful if you were able to nudge the perspective from "simply" to something a
little more formal. The toolchains for these self-attending transformer models allow for
interactivity, including memory and "online" processing (allowing for the bot to sit
alone, iterating over its input and output, gathering new data as needed, kneading old data as
needed, etc.). I'm not suggesting we see many bots doing such so far. But some come close.

What you seem to be implying requires some sense of locality, a containment boundary for
the human/bot, that cloud-based bots don't have. A little meat (or silicon) bag of skin
running around in space, acquiring information from its trajectory through space provides
such a build-up of a "story", a history, a Markovian provenance for their
*next* expression, whether in interaction with another (like chess) or a seemingly novel
piece of art (or testable scientific hypothesis).

Cloud-based bots could have such. What a trajectory through space define for
each of us bags of meat is a set of stable/coherent constraints guiding which
information we see (and the construal through our sensory-motor boundary and
into our inertial learning machinery). Were the bots also given a well-formed
set of training constraints that we humans could understand, we would begin
thinking of them as autonomous agents, as opposed to oracles in the temple. And
*then*, as autonomous agents, it would start to be interesting to see them
interact with one another in the same way we might enjoy watching humans
interact.

On 6/22/24 20:32, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:

AI will never fully replace humans in the realm of pure art. While AI has made
impressive strides in generating art, humans inherently gravitate towards
creations by fellow humans. This preference stems from our deep-seated
connection to human experiences and emotions.

Consider the analogy of chess: AI can easily outplay the human world chess
champion, yet we remain uninterested in AI-exclusive tournaments. The reason is
simple—our fascination lies with human competitors and their stories, not with
machines. This extends beyond chess to all forms of art. Whether it’s music,
literature, or visual arts, the knowledge that a human mind and soul crafted
the piece adds a unique layer of significance.

It's not that humans are disinterested in non-human phenomena such as AI, the
stars, or mathematics. There is a wide spectrum of interests among individuals,
with some drawn more to human-centered pursuits and others to abstract or
scientific endeavours. However, as a collective, human-related creations
consistently hold a special place in our hearts.

When a human plays chess, the essence of the game is enriched by knowing the
opponent is also human. Similarly, when we listen to music, read a novel, or
admire a painting, the awareness that it was created by another human being
adds depth to our appreciation. This connection to the human aspect of art is,
in my opinion, irreplaceable by AI.

I can't prove this definitively; it is simply my perspective.

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

Re: [FRIAM] new math of complexity

2024-06-14 Thread glen

IDK. If by "discussion", you mean co-constructing reality, then I'd agree. But that would
contradict the dichotomy of explanatory vs. exploratory (perhaps even render the concept of
"mind" incoherent). There are machines that derive things from other machines. Some
machines are larger than other machines (https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.03886). Etc.

One of the intriguing situations I often find myself in is being presented with seemingly
batshit nonsense and wondering *where* it came from. If Marcus is right, then, for
example, the garbage spoken by Terrence Howard has a (or several) cause(s). Or if you're
a political animal, there are reasons someone might parrot Trumpian bullshit as if it's
true. In other words, their "high order" macros cannot be decoupled
(completely) from reality even though it sure seems decoupled from reality.

I.e. Marcus' rhetoric is an argument for the existence of God ... hedging
however much we need to on the definition of God.

On 6/14/24 09:49, steve smith wrote:

Marcus wrote:

The double slit experiment demonstrates what appears to be nondeterminism, but
that hasn't prevented development of an accurate model of the phenomena that
deterministic computers can simulate. I don't have to believe a deterministic
interpretation of the double slit experiment, but Occam's Razor encourages me
to. (I can't control the initial conditions of the universe.) What is the
point of discussions about things that cannot be modeled?

Some modeling is explanatory, other is exploratory. Modeling is a high-order mode of
"discussion" building and testing hypotheses in an abstract space where (most?) human
minds are unable to rigorously keep track of all the details of the "discussion", but
instead defer to a mechanical device and process which manages all that for us in a manner we
believe we can understand (a given computational/simulation method and framework)?

These discussions belong in a church. They are not inquiry.

What is FriAM if not a church whose main sermons reflect various inquiries
built on top of the entire(many overlapping subsets actually) canon
math/science and for some philosophy, semiotics, linguistics?

On Jun 14, 2024, at 6:20 AM, glen wrote:

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

Re: [FRIAM] Perplexity Pages as morph of Search (e.g. Google), Generative Text (e.g. GPT) and crowd sourced Encyclopedia (Wikipedia)

2024-06-14 Thread glen


Yes. We've explored perplexity in the context of validating proto-theories 
against literature in specific [sub]domains. We haven't made much progress 
toward anything publishable, though. We kinda got sidetracked.

On 6/14/24 10:25, steve smith wrote:

anyone tracked/investigated this?

https://www.perplexity.ai/


https://generativeai.pub/perplexity-introduces-pages-the-most-powerful-ai-article-generator-0e8c522e091b





--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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Re: [FRIAM] new math of complexity

2024-06-14 Thread glen


Well, I agree that the implications of mapping coarser with finer grained ∈-machines 
belong in a church. But the actual mappings (and any attempts to characterize the 
expressive scope of those machines) are a kind of math inquiry, however obscure. What 
irritates me is that people shunt the concept of orders with that of levels. We don't 
need the concept of "leak" if we stick to the tried and true concept of higher 
order languages where the macros are mixed in with the primitives, not somehow 
independent of them.

For example, if we talk about a freezing event, where the "physics" after the 
event are constrained in such a way that we can ignore large swaths of possible events 
because they're vanishingly unlikely, then in a higher order language, those lower order 
operators are still available, just rarely/never executed. While it's true that we could 
instantiate a model that re-created the freeze from first principles, it's efficient to 
launch the system from (second?, derived?) principles instead and watch it play out from 
the freeze onward.

But the higher order language is *open* to thawing the macros, a devolution 
back to a dynamic dominated by the primitives. That won't happen in these 
(strictly) leveled, independent machines.

On 6/14/24 07:25, Marcus Daniels wrote:

The double slit experiment demonstrates what appears to be nondeterminism, but 
that hasn't prevented development of an accurate model of the phenomena that 
deterministic computers can simulate.  I don't have to believe a deterministic 
interpretation of the double slit experiment, but Occam's Razor encourages me 
to.  (I can't control the initial conditions of the universe.)  What is the 
point of discussions about things that cannot be modeled?   These discussions 
belong in a church.  They are not inquiry.


On Jun 14, 2024, at 6:20 AM, glen  wrote:

But the trouble is that controlled experiments are our gold standard for 
testing such. Control is the default. It seems like at least confirmation bias. 
Of course control demonstrates determinism. It's petitio principii. In order to 
demonstrate a counter exmaple, we have to control everything we could possibly 
*ever* control, being left with only that we can't control ... like proving a 
negative.

In that context, those of us who believe there exists some thing we can't 
control act a bit like theists. Whenever they manage to concretely define the 
process they claim is uncontrollable, we demonstrate it's controllability. Then 
they move the goalposts and we start all over again. It's tiresome and even if 
we want to be charitable, allowing that maybe there's something uncontrollable 
out there (or there is something we might call God), at every turn, as soon as 
it's defined concretely, it's eventually falsified. That leads some of us to 
tire out, give up, and just flip the faith and assume there is no 
uncontrollable thing.


On 6/13/24 19:13, Marcus Daniels wrote:
What’s odd is this idea there is something about nature that can’t be 
described in a repeatable way, such that a digital computer could simulate it, 
in principle.Paradoxically, to defend that idea, one would have to describe 
an experiment that could illustrate counter examples -- concepts that could not 
be said.   It is obfuscation by construction.



--
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Re: [FRIAM] new math of complexity

2024-06-14 Thread glen


But the trouble is that controlled experiments are our gold standard for 
testing such. Control is the default. It seems like at least confirmation bias. 
Of course control demonstrates determinism. It's petitio principii. In order to 
demonstrate a counter exmaple, we have to control everything we could possibly 
*ever* control, being left with only that we can't control ... like proving a 
negative.

In that context, those of us who believe there exists some thing we can't 
control act a bit like theists. Whenever they manage to concretely define the 
process they claim is uncontrollable, we demonstrate it's controllability. Then 
they move the goalposts and we start all over again. It's tiresome and even if 
we want to be charitable, allowing that maybe there's something uncontrollable 
out there (or there is something we might call God), at every turn, as soon as 
it's defined concretely, it's eventually falsified. That leads some of us to 
tire out, give up, and just flip the faith and assume there is no 
uncontrollable thing.

On 6/13/24 19:13, Marcus Daniels wrote:

What’s odd is this idea there is something about nature that can’t be 
described in a repeatable way, such that a digital computer could simulate it, 
in principle.    Paradoxically, to defend that idea, one would have to describe 
an experiment that could illustrate counter examples -- concepts that could not 
be said.   It is obfuscation by construction.



--
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Re: [FRIAM] new math of complexity

2024-06-12 Thread glen

Without looking at an actual publication by Rosas et al, I can't be optimistic or pessimistic. But
I can object to Ball's examples of the 1st 2 types of closure: information and causal. The examples
he lists: predictability of laptop output and controllability of laptop output are obviously
flawed. The former is fairly easy to disprove. The typical aphorism is that all software contains
bugs (barring the infrequently used formal methods). We have this entire, I think dominant,
conceptual category of "bug" that should demonstrate a lack of that kind of
"informational closure" ... at least in the wild if not in the lab.

The objections for the latter are more persnickety. Again, in the lab where the unprofessional techie can get
away with saying things like "Well, it works for me" because there are detailed, documented
methods. And if "it doesn't work for you", then you're just doing it wrong. But in the wild,
"it works for me" is entirely inadequate. So, again, we have an entire conceptual category grown
from the lack of causal closure in laptop controllability.

Maybe, though, this is simply validation of Ball's suggestion that life (or
deeply interactive computation) is leaky ... maybe even very leaky such that
any mathematical definition of computational closure we compose, it's Platonic,
merely a useful fiction.

On 6/12/24 12:43, steve smith wrote:

Speaking of emergence, any takes on Phillip Ball's article in Quanta?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-math-of-how-large-scale-order-emerges-20240610/

I really liked his summary of the current non-explanations for emergence, but I
haven't had time to read further.

-- rec --

As a member of a group here roughly described as "Complexity Groupies" I am heartened to hear Ball's
acknowledgement that "nobody" really seems to have a good explanation of "what emergence is". It
feels parallel to art and pornography in the sense of "I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it".

Terrence Deacon's classifications of dynamic systems seems to provide some insight or fine structure to
emergence, though I don't know if it is widely interesting or helpful to others. He applies it primarily to
life unto consciousness studies. It seems particularly apt to Ball's references to "heirarchical"
systems while his references to "leaky" emergence rhymes (a little for me) with Herb Simon's
"partially decomposable" systems.

As an aside, I don't think I would have recognized Crutchfield... I haven't
seen him in person since about 2009 when he was doing an art-project with Woody
Vasulka and microphone/speaker/ambient-space dynamical systems at the old bank
building downtown? Or maybe it was a few years earlier...

Deacon's classification system:

*homeodynamic:*A system is homeodynamic if its spontaneous, natural or unforced
path leads towards equilibrium. Homeodynamics erases differences (e.g., in
temperature or pressure).

*morphodynamic:*A system is morphodynamic if it tends to spontaneously increase
in order. This generally involves external perturbations, but does not involve
external design or imposition of form. Morphodynamics subsumes many standard
examples of self-organization. Morphodynamics amplifies differences.

*teleodynamic:*A system is teleodynamic if its organization becomes
spontaneously end-directed. Teleodynamic systems employ homeodynamic and
morphodynamic processes in the service of a self. Terms like ‘self-maintenance’
and ‘self-repair’ become natural and unavoidable in teleodynamic systems.

--
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Re: [FRIAM] what is a poor behaviorist (Nick) supposed to do?

2024-06-12 Thread glen

Although the Atlantic article has little to do with the C-word, I was happy to
find my point already in it:

"We struggle enough to see the perspectives of other people;"

The extent to which we "other" things is a difference of degree, not kind. This
is, again, why analogical thinking is more useful than metaphorical thinking. I am
analogous to both my sibling and my cat. The important point is not *that* there is an
analogy to be made. The important points are the strength and type (structural and/or
behavioral) of that analogy.

From the PopMech article: "By studying their motivations and decision-making, we’ll
find more ways to manipulate cells, such as interrupting their processes."

What they're talking about, in what I think are more useful words, are high order languages or
perhaps "emergent behavior", where things like "decision-making" are high order
processes comprised of low order or primitive processes. It's often useful to include those macros
as convenient shortcuts for the code that's closer to the metal (or chemistry, here). But to what
extent are those high order operators extant/real such that they can *cause* effects? ... a
causation that's not reducible to merely complicated causation of the lower orders?

That's the crux of the argument between those who claim scales of psychism and
those who argue the higher order constructs are different in an
actionable/effective way.

On 6/11/24 13:06, Prof David West wrote:

animals are conscious? The author studies birds as did/does Nick (when not
obsessed with dry lines).

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/06/new-anthropomorphism/678611/

are humans conscious; as well as every cell of their body?

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a61059424/every-cell-in-your-body-could-be-conscious/

--
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Re: [FRIAM] Unpleasant dreams

2024-06-04 Thread glen

Evolutionary psychology is one of those disciplines where you see whatever you want to see. Now, I haven't
read Nesse. But wherever anyone tries to reduce a high dimensional, dynamic space like whatever it is
evolution operates over and within to a single cause-effect narrative, I get suspicious. Do bad feelings
prevent "us" from doing things bad for us? My friends who've committed suicide might disagree. E.g.
in one case of bipolar disorder, the bad (and good) feelings seemed purely cyclic and physiological. The
highs caused him to do "bad" things. And the lows clearly did not prevent him from doing bad
things. Of course, stories don't make for good science. So it's a wash either way. I suppose a charitable way
to reword it is "bad feelings emerged from the milieu as a way to bias behavior toward self-sustenance
and away from self-dissolution" ... like an amoeba extending a pseudopod along a gradient. But we
already knew that without the sophisticated story telling in EvoPsych.

Re: dreams - I had a dream last night where I was living in an unfamiliar house
with a bunch of people I didn't know. The house caught on fire. My cat Scooter
was there. There was fire coming down the chimney and in through the back door
... like it was more the outside was on fire than the house, I guess. Scooter,
confused, tried to run up the chimney and all his fur burnt off, after which he
came back out and I tried and failed to grab him. Then he ran out the door,
into the fire, and burnt up the rest of the way. Does this dream help me
prepare for unknown danger? I doubt it.

What's more likely is that it's an artifact of predictive processing where your brain is a random
number generator (rng) and, while sleeping, there's no reality against which to impedance match. So
the random numbers it generates can just propagate on however long, to whatever sequence obtains.
Such exercises help with the rng's expression, making it more active and robust so that, while
awake, one can think more energetically about, within, and around one's world of constraints.
Again, charitably, I might restate Rvonsuo as "dreams help us find the nooks and crannies in
the hull of constraints presented to us by reality - the edge cases - by exercising our random
number generator brain". But this doesn't imply "danger" so much as interestingness
... or something like a fractal or a space-filling curve.

On 6/3/24 22:44, Jochen Fromm wrote:

I do not find Paul's book completely convincing. Randolph M. Nesse's book "Good
Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry"
shows much more clearly that bad feelings prevent us from doing things which are bad for
us. They are threat avoidance programs from our genes.

His remark about dreams are interesting nevertheless. He mentions for instance this paper
from Antti Revonsuo, "The reinterpretation of dreams: An evolutionary hypothesis of
the function of dreaming" in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(6) (2000). 877–901;
904–1018; 1083–1121.

http://behavioralhealth2000.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/The-reinterpretation-of-dreams-An-evolutionary-hypothesis-of-the-function-of-dreaming.pdf

Revonsuo argues one function of dreams may be to simulate threatening events.
They may help to improve threat prevention by predicting dangerous situations
and preparing us for unkown dangers. Some fears seem to be hardcoded but this
method has limits. For example we are much more afraid of spiders and snakes
than of cars and fast food which are more dangerous to us in the modern world

https://nautil.us/how-evolution-designed-your-fear-236858/

Re: [FRIAM] Objective Reality Doesn’t Exist. We’ve Known This for a Century. It’s Time to Embrace It and Move On. | by Casper Wilstrup | Machine Consciousness | Medium

2024-06-03 Thread glen


I don't think "extreme" is the right concept. I think a concept like "insubstantial but high influence" ... something 
like "sensitive" or "agile". For that, I like canard: https://www.etymonline.com/word/canard, which I learned in the 
context of missiles. But "government by canard" seems close to "wag the dog". So that's where I'd start my search.

On 6/3/24 15:59, Santafe wrote:

Is there a Greek root to build a word for Government by the Extremes?


On Jun 4, 2024, at 6:42 AM, Frank Wimberly  wrote:

This is the article I had in mind

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-gen-z-wont-show-their-feet_l_64cd1b52e4b01796c06c0cc4


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Re: [FRIAM] Objective Reality Doesn’t Exist. We’ve Known This for a Century. It’s Time to Embrace It and Move On. | by Casper Wilstrup | Machine Consciousness | Medium

2024-06-03 Thread glen


The privileged are always surprised when their privilege is called out.

On 6/3/24 14:42, Frank Wimberly wrote:

This is the article I had in mind

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-gen-z-wont-show-their-feet_l_64cd1b52e4b01796c06c0cc4
 



--
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Re: [FRIAM] Unpleasant dreams

2024-06-03 Thread glen

I had a conversation with a psychiatrist friend of mine wherein she assumed the dichotomy between
"good feelings" and "bad feelings" (e.g. an angry or relieved reaction to some
thing like the Trump verdict). Through about an hour of conversation, I'd tried to convince her
that dichotomy is false. Bad things are good and good things are bad. The valence we assign is
post-hoc. I failed, of course. But...

I feel the same way about phobias. It's a bit trite to suggest that we like
exploring our fears in a safe environment like at a movie theater with a friend
or two. But it's testament to the milieu that monsters vs treasures is a false
dichotomy. And it goes beyond some complementarity like banking present pain
for future pleasure. It's truly a dual. The highs *are* the lows and vice
versa. If there is such a thing as free will, your assignment of valence might
be the only freedom you have.

I don't know if Bloom explores this aspect. But the body of work spawned from Friston and
the minimization of surprisal targets it directly. It's reasonable to believe that
*agency* is what provides the common substructure for an explanatory model of the
ascription of valence to an experience. The hypothetical to explore is whether those
experiences that promote agency are more often ascribed as (or felt like)
"good" ones, whether painful, pleasurable, fearful, triumphant, or whatever the
token ascribed.

On 6/3/24 13:15, Jochen Fromm wrote:

Did you notice that some of the most successful movies from Spielberg are about
our deepest fears? Jurassic Park is about monsters from the past. Jaws is about
monsters which lurk in the deep blue sea. Indiana Jones is about monsters (and
treasures) hiding in dark tombs.

Paul Boom remarks in his book "The Sweet Spot" that psychologists have long
known that unpleasant dreams are more frequent than pleasant ones. Why is that so? Do
unpleasant dreams prepare us for possible dangers or are we just relieved that the are
over if they end?

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-sweet-spot-paul-bloom?variant=40262533840930

--
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Re: [FRIAM] Objective Reality Doesn’t Exist. We’ve Known This for a Century. It’s Time to Embrace It and Move On. | by Casper Wilstrup | Machine Consciousness | Medium

2024-06-03 Thread glen

IDK. Were we to allow that

a) X merely means a singular, mostly atomic, thing, and
b) "determine" means what most of us think it means,

then you'd be right. A better way to state it would be:

In the US, our collection of mechanisms for selecting the most powerful, but not
all-powerful, person in our federa[l|ated] and hierarchically composed government carries
too much structural/systemic bias for a reasonable person to describe it as
"democratic". Nick's gloss was way too vague for one to use that more refined
statement to contradict his. If we allow democracy to be a spectrum, some more, some
less, democratic, then Nick's statement stands well enough. But as my Gen Z friends are
telling me on a daily basis, they're not going to vote in November because it doesn't
matter. Biden and Trump are the same person. Both lie. And even if/when they're not
lying, whatever they intend to do will be subverted by or enervated with the noxious
intentions of the oligarchs or self-aggrandizing agendas of the rest of the politicians,
including SCOTUS.

But even that sentiment (that the whole system is Borked) contradicts one of the normal interpretations of the word
"determined". Such a frothing mess my be deterministic. But if it is, it's chaotic; so much so that morons
like Trump wouldn't be capable of "determining our common reality". And even if we broaden the conception of
"determine" out to mean something Rawlsian like the veil of ignorance, that which of Trump or Biden is
elected will (or not) somehow affect the power status on the other side of the veil, my Gen Z friends would say it does
not. The Musks and Thiels will still be the most powerful people on the planet come next year, regardless of who is
elected. So neither Biden nor Trump "determine" our common reality in any meaningful sense, though they may
well add a tiny little bias in some very large space.

On 6/1/24 08:28, Prof David West wrote:

Nick said,

/"In democracy, we find some way to blend our experiences into a common view."/

If the "democracy" of which you speak is that of the New England Town Hall, or
that of tribal societies of long ago, you are probably reasonably accurate.

However, that sense of "democracy" no longer exists, at least here in the US.
Regardless of how one votes, the result is absolutely and completely *assigning X the
job of determining our common reality*.

davew

On Fri, May 31, 2024, at 9:58 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

This (see below) got served up to me out of the blue this morning. The way
it's put here, Frank and Bruce might actually agree with it. Still, it's
straight Peirce. I have no idea who the author is; do any of you?

Here's crucial passage.

/Our understanding of reality needs a complete overhaul. Rather than viewing it
as a fixed, external stage upon which events play out, we should consider it as
a dynamic interplay between observers and their environment [/experiences/].
Reality, in this view, doesn’t reside out there, independent of us. Instead,
reality is our interactions with the world [/one another/], shaped and defined
by our observations [/experiences/]. Reality is nothing but [/the telos of/]
those interactions between subjects./

I had to make those little changes because the author, like so many aspiring monists,
after arguing against observer independence for a hundred words, slips up by implying
that the "environment" is anything but something else that we have to agree
upon, if we are ever going to get on with life.

By the way, I stipulate that nothing in his argument has ANYTHING to do with
quantum mechanics. The argument would be sound even if the idea of a quantum
had never been thought. However, I like the idea of physics as some kind of
language of convergent belief.

By the way, In history there seem to have been two ways for people converge on
a common experience, charisma and democracy. In charisma, we pick some idiot
(usually a psychopath) and share his or her experience. In democracy, we find
some way to blend our experiences into a common view. Sometime in the next few
months we will decide which way we want to go. Do we want to assign Trump the
job of determining our common reality, or do we want to continue to work it out
amongst ourselves through experiment and argument.

Weather gorgeous here in the mosquito infested swamp. Garden thriving. A much
better year.

Watch that dry line in TX. It's truly amazing. Can it really be true that I
am the only weather fanatic on a list that is devoted to complexity? How can
that be?

NIck

https://medium.com/machine-cognition/objective-reality-doesnt-exist-it-is-time-to-accept-it-and-move-on-7524b494d6af

Objective Reality

Re: [FRIAM] words

2024-05-30 Thread glen


I disagree completely. Joe Rogan's podcast is the single most successful podcast (as far 
as I remember) in the world. And he platforms so many batshit people. There's plenty more 
evidence of the upward trend in viral bullshit. We're awash in "contrarianism". 
Of course, we should put glue on our pizza! And eat some rocks while we're at it.

On 5/30/24 11:58, Prof David West wrote:

There is little need to call bullshit, at least in the modern Western world, 
because sufficient forces already exist to marginalize any contrarian, in 
almost every aspect of life.


--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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Re: [FRIAM] words

2024-05-30 Thread glen


Hm. I suppose it's worth a shot. If we prompt with "All energy in the universe is expressed in 
motion. All motion is expressed in waves. All waves are curved. So where do the straight lines come 
from to make the Platonic solids?" Then it's possible the LLM would complete that with 
"There are no straight lines. So when I took the flower of life and opened it properly, I 
found all new wave conjugations that expose the in-between spaces. It's the thing that holds us all 
together." But I sincerely doubt it.

But maybe by "have to have", you mean that an LLM *could* be trained (and/or 
structured) to bias toward rare expressions/concepts in its training set instead of more 
common ones.

On 5/30/24 09:01, Marcus Daniels wrote:

I'm not going to watch Joe Rogan, 😊 but I think LLMs don't have to have this 
homogenous mean problem.  They capture a distribution, so it is a question of 
the inference procedure to sample from it.  What is the (beam) search 
algorithm, how deep does it go, and what is the sampling temperature.

-----Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2024 1:09 PM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] words

Terrence Howard | Full Address and Q&A | Oxford Union 
https://youtu.be/ca1vIYmGyYA?si=vhbtA5WUX1CV8LZH

Joe Rogan Experience #2152 - Terrence Howard
https://youtu.be/g197xdRZsW0?si=kFTa7lQJI1lKA6R1

I just can't help but wonder how many people, while listening to Howard talk, 
realize they're interacting with a sick individual (who deserves compassion but 
does not deserve gullibility). Or how many people are (like Rogan seems to have 
been) ... uh ... hypnotized by Howard's well-crafted word salad. In this LLM 
era, where many people, including some on this list, are enthralled by random 
bullshit, it seems like a reasonable thing to wonder about. Luckily, the clear 
cognitive power Howard exhibits puts him in some kind of rare quantile. So our 
LLMs, being driven mostly to a homogenous mean, their random bullshit will, by 
definition, match those of us within 1 or a few sigma and suppress the weirdest 
among us.

Being a fan of steel-manning, I'm having a bit of a crisis. The paradox of tolerance 
tells me that we absolutely must call bullshit at some point, even if it's not ruthless. 
Those Oxford Union attendees danced around egging him on and calling him out. Is this 
what the kids call "cringe"? Do we just cringe and tolerate it? Or, like Rogan, 
pretend to credibility relying on his weirdness to be so weird that it'll disappear into 
the tails? Or should we be deplatforming the bullshit?




--
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[FRIAM] words

2024-05-29 Thread glen


Terrence Howard | Full Address and Q&A | Oxford Union
https://youtu.be/ca1vIYmGyYA?si=vhbtA5WUX1CV8LZH

Joe Rogan Experience #2152 - Terrence Howard
https://youtu.be/g197xdRZsW0?si=kFTa7lQJI1lKA6R1

I just can't help but wonder how many people, while listening to Howard talk, 
realize they're interacting with a sick individual (who deserves compassion but 
does not deserve gullibility). Or how many people are (like Rogan seems to have 
been) ... uh ... hypnotized by Howard's well-crafted word salad. In this LLM 
era, where many people, including some on this list, are enthralled by random 
bullshit, it seems like a reasonable thing to wonder about. Luckily, the clear 
cognitive power Howard exhibits puts him in some kind of rare quantile. So our 
LLMs, being driven mostly to a homogenous mean, their random bullshit will, by 
definition, match those of us within 1 or a few sigma and suppress the weirdest 
among us.

Being a fan of steel-manning, I'm having a bit of a crisis. The paradox of tolerance 
tells me that we absolutely must call bullshit at some point, even if it's not ruthless. 
Those Oxford Union attendees danced around egging him on and calling him out. Is this 
what the kids call "cringe"? Do we just cringe and tolerate it? Or, like Rogan, 
pretend to credibility relying on his weirdness to be so weird that it'll disappear into 
the tails? Or should we be deplatforming the bullshit?

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Re: [FRIAM] Potential Vorticity and the Dynamic Tropopause

2024-05-16 Thread glen


How about "downward biasing"? Is that less ridicul[ous|e-deserving]? If I'm a high order 
Markov process and my historicity heavily biases me toward a subspace of behaviors, isn't that 
reasonable labeled "downward causation"?

On 5/16/24 08:32, Marcus Daniels wrote:

I'd like to take a moment to ridicule the notion of downward causality as I'm 
reading this.  😊


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Re: [FRIAM] Potential Vorticity and the Dynamic Tropopause

2024-05-16 Thread glen

I suppose the problem is that LLMs aren't really about language at all. They're about the
"rolling up" of sequential data into a lossy memory device that can later be queried for
those (somewhat mutated) memories. Those sequential streams are of different types (vision,
hearing, touch, etc.), all of which can be memorized by "LLMs", much the same way various
streams are memorized and recalled by an ecology of autocatalytic cycles in living systems.

The analogy breaks down both structurally (DNA, RNA, autocatalysis, etc. are different
from the transformer architecture) and behaviorally (multidimensional stimulus-response
vs aspect-oriented reinforcement learning). But when considering "life as it could
be", Nick's right to consider the analogy.

I suppose the most important reason I don't care to encourage the flippant interaction with
cloud-based bots like GPT has to do with the part of the structural breakdown in energetics. In
line with the skeptical aphorism "exceptional claims require exceptional evidence",
exceptional "intelligence" requires exceptional energetics. Living systems have found
(through an ecology of ACs) an exceptional way to produce and maintain themselves. Sequential
learning transformers also have an exceptional way of extracing energy from the world, massive
world-destroying data centers. From 50k feet, it's the mainframe vs. the personal computer all over
again. DaveW's liberal sensibility that True computation happens more in the leaves, less in the
hubs, aligns with life as we know it, an exquisite composition of energy processors from the very
tiny to the very large. The massive energy centralization mechanism is fragile and bears little
resemblance to life as we know it.

On 5/15/24 12:16, Prof David West wrote:

Nick,

I hesitate to respond to your post because:

1) my interest in the weather is nominal, although I am bemused that here in
St. Paul MN, we had more 50+ degrees in the December-February time frame than
below 0 days (almost three times as many). Most unusual.

2) the response I wish to make is marginally related to the theme of your
recent communications.

But, you said, "/Why is it so hard the grasp the thought that we are all of us, each
of us, nothing but large language models in training?"/

To which I must respond, /Why do so many insist that programs capable of emulating the
most trivial of human abilities are "intelligent?" /Or the inverse, /reducing
humanity to the latest clever trick performed by a machine?/

LLM versions of AI are exemplars of the Mechanical Turk—whatever "intelligence" they exhibit is
directly and solely derivative of the human intelligence of "LLM Tutors" and "Prompt
Engineers." Both are six-figure salary professions that arose in the last year.

davew
(personal note: I sorely miss the conversations we once enjoyed, both in person
in Santa Fe and online.)

On Tue, May 14, 2024, at 2:01 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Dear Stephen, n all.

I am sure you all will join me in condemning the practice of calling somebody
at the crack of dawn. So, you will no doubt praise me (as I praise myself) for
my generosity and flexiibility in taking the call from stephen, which came at
the ungodly hour of 11.30 this morning. Only to have him me scold for not
responding to the Gupta, Tucker,Thompson, and Guerin paper, kindly drafted by
him, which will no doubt make us rich and famous some day. First, let clarify
that my collaborator's name is not Tucker, but is *G*eorge *P*hillipe
*T*remblay. George (pronounced /jorj) /both forgives you and sends his regards.

Second, I am profoundly grateful to any one who would join me in this geriatric
weather fantasy that I am going to update my 1980/WeatherWise Gardener/. I
need ever nerd I can get. Please don't treat what follows as churlish.

Third, allow me once again to express my gratitude to Stephen for introducing
me to Gupta and Tremblay. They have an uncanny power to clabbor together
plausible first drafts which are extraordinarily helpful in getting me started
in thinking about a problem. That these drafts are often hideously wrong
enhances, rather than dilutes their usefulness.

Second, I don't doubt that weather models and financial models might have
something to contribute to one another. As you all know, I love metaphors, and
believe them to be at the root of science. But to be honest, I can't see any
reason to believe it either. For one thing, unlike everything else in the
world, money flows uphill. But really, I shouldn't give reasons, because the
truth is that I have my hands utterly full learning the weather stuff, and it
will be a long time before I am competent to metaphorize from it to anywhere
else.

As to Steve Smith's comments, I feel on much safer ground. He wrote

/GuPTa, et al.'s "accent" is very subtle and powerful in this regard, tricking
me often into imputing personality... your example here was a wonderful satirical
p

Re: [FRIAM] Potential vorticity and financial markets Fwd: CDS Friday seminar (CSI 899, CSS 898) for 26 April, 3 PM

2024-04-26 Thread glen


https://people.brandeis.edu/~blebaron/classes/agentfin/

On 4/26/24 07:44, Stephen Guerin wrote:

Nick,

If you have time, beam into Blake Lebaron's talk today and let the "depth of the 
order book relating volatility and liquidity" wash over you like some one was 
describing potential vorticity or other dynamic of the weather.

  The order book with zero intelligence traders has been a central research 
focus of the econophysicists and Doynes group and Blake's early related SFI 
stock market model.

Marcus did a bunch of work on this when he was at SFI. any comments?

Stephen




CEO Founder, Simtable.com
stephen.gue...@simtable.com 

Harvard Visualization Research and Teaching Lab
stephengue...@fas.harvard.edu 

mobile: (505)577-5828

-- Forwarded message -
From: *CDS Department at GMU* mailto:c...@gmu.edu>>
Date: Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 9:25 AM
Subject: CDS Friday seminar (CSI 899, CSS 898) for 26 April, 3 PM
To: mailto:cds-seminar-colloquium-announ...@listserv.gmu.edu>>


_Speaker_: Blake LeBaron, Brandeis University

__ __

_Title_: Dynamic Order Dispersion and Volatility Persistence in a Simple Limit 
Order Book model


_Abstract_: This preliminary paper extends the dynamics of a basic stylized limit 
order book model introduced in Chiarella & Iori (2002). The original model is 
capable of generating some key market microstructure features, but it cannot 
recreate longer range persistence in volatility. We explore a very simple and 
intuitive addition to the stylized, near zero intelligence behavior of traders that 
is capable of delivering persistent volatility. We also show that this strategy 
depends critically on certain key features in the dynamics of supply and demand for 
liquidity and depth in the limit order book. We believe this is fundamental to 
understanding both the dynamics of volatility in financial time series, along with 
variations in liquidity in financial markets. We contribute a parsimonious 
agent-based model to the literature that may be used as a test bed or sandbox for 
developing agents with more complex behavior.

__ __

Joint work with Andrew Hawley (Federal Reserve), Mark Paddrik (Office of 
Financial Research), and Nathan Palmer (Federal Reserve)

__ __

The views expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily 
reflect the position of the Office of Financial Research (OFR), the U.S. 
Department of Treasury, or the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

__ __

_Date_: Friday, 26 April 2024



_Time_: 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM EST



_Location_: Center on Social Complexity Suite (3rd floor, Research Hall), where 
light refreshments will be served, and  online (use the Zoom link below).





You are invited to a scheduled Zoom meeting



Topic: Friday CDS/CSI/CSS Seminars/Colloquia

Time: Apr 26, 2024 03:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

         Every week on Fri, until May 3, 2024

Please download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your 
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Weekly: 
https://gmu.zoom.us/meeting/tJMpduquqzMiH9wHevniVsU-366oxXMVsbfq/ics?icsToken=98tyKuCvqjopHNGduByPRowEBoj4b-7wmFxHgvpKtBrzDSllcTa7ZbQUPapHPe7D
 




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Re: [FRIAM] rip Dennett

2024-04-25 Thread glen

Both Knox (who's back in Italian court) and Robinson are atheists, but I guess practice Zen. This
leads to an interesting inside vs outside conception of who they "are". It strikes me
that no amount of studying a person (or, more accurately, the detritus they've left behind and the
dissipating wake their behavior dredged through the ambient goo) can capture that duality. I feel
this despite my arguments in favor of a kind of holographic principle for behaviorism where
whatever information is inside must be encoded on the outside. Even if we buy such a principle,
perhaps including a kind of information loss through radiation, the "studying" of the
person would be biased by when the studying occurs. A year that starts right after they die? A year
that starts according to a validated [pre|retro]diction algorithm so that the studying is finished
when they die? A temporally fenestrated study that happens in little bursts over one's entire
lifetime, but cumulatively sums to a year?

In the podcast episode, they publicly ask each other "how do you want to die?"
Robinson's waffle is interesting. Would a Zen person want to die while in some mushin
state?

Back to Dennett, OS Card, Lovecraft, and all the wonderfully productive people with
an Evil facet: Skeptoid had a recent episode on EMDR
<https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4928>, where Dunning concludes it has its roots
in the thoroughly debunked neuro-linguistic programming tradition. Yet it may
accidentally have some clinical benefit. But again, I'm skeptical of the skeptics.
This rationalist *need* we have for a fully grounded, trustworthy map from inside to
outside, thoughts to actions, mind to body, just feels like arrogance ... an
unjustified confidence in our own brain farts. People are complex enough that we can
harvest what we want, cafeteria style, and leave the rest to disappear into the
amnesiac void. We neither need nor want a *complete* understanding of anyone or any
thing.

On 4/24/24 20:26, Steve Smith wrote:

I am lead by Glen's response to think of Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead"
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_for_the_Dead>

In Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead," the main and titular theme revolves
around understanding and compassion through the truthful telling of one's life. The novel
introduces the concept of a "Speaker for the Dead," someone who tells the unvarnished
story of a person's life at their death in a way that aims to present all aspects of the
individual—their good and bad traits, their successes and failures—in a balanced and empathetic
manner.

This role of the Speaker is designed to allow those who are left behind to
truly understand the deceased, fostering forgiveness and a more profound
comprehension of the complexities of human nature. This practice contrasts with
traditional eulogies that often gloss over a person’s flaws or reduce their
life to a series of highlights.

The theme extends to broader philosophical and ethical questions about how
societies deal with truth and reconciliation, the nature of forgiveness, and
the possibility of understanding different forms of life. This is particularly
explored through the interaction between humans and the alien species called
the Pequeninos on the planet Lusitania. The novel challenges characters and
readers alike to consider the ways in which understanding and compassion can
lead to healing and peace, even across the divides of culture and species.

"Speaker for the Dead" thus delves into the necessity and challenge of
empathy, advocating for a more comprehensive and compassionate approach to understanding
both the living and the dead. This thematic focus on empathy and understanding is what
drives the narrative and the development of its characters.

A spiritual woo-woo treatment might imply that a person's soul would not be fully free to
"move on" until such a full accounting was done. In the book, the "Speaker"
would spend a full year fully researching the person's life and relations to achieve this
thorough/blunt eulogy on the anniversary of the Dead's passing... I don't remember how this was
supported/funded but the idea moved me when I encountered it.

On 4/24/24 8:26 PM, glen wrote:

I could only wish I'd be criticized this well when I die:
"Dennett’s text is full of tirades wrought from petty grievances, is disorganized to
the point of being unreadable, and like the rest of his books, will undoubtedly not have
much influence."
<https://jacobin.com/2024/04/daniel-dennett-social-darwinism-philosophy>

There's this fantastic podcast by Amanda Knox called Labyrinths
(https://antennapod.org/deeplink/subscribe/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.megaphone.fm%2FDONSN6255278021&title=Labyrinths+with+A

[FRIAM] rip Dennett

2024-04-24 Thread glen

I could only wish I'd be criticized this well when I die:
"Dennett’s text is full of tirades wrought from petty grievances, is 
disorganized to the point of being unreadable, and like the rest of his books, 
will undoubtedly not have much influence."


There's this fantastic podcast by Amanda Knox called Labyrinths 
(https://antennapod.org/deeplink/subscribe/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.megaphone.fm%2FDONSN6255278021&title=Labyrinths+with+Amanda+Knox)
 where one episode is about death and things like 'how you want to die'. My 
best hope is that all the ppl who think I was a hack, or an idiot, or whatever 
would gather to trash me. The milquetoast accolades we present when a person 
dies are literally disgusting.-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
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Re: [FRIAM] Comparing negative numbers

2024-04-12 Thread glen

It seems like the relative stability argues for a translation from Ess space to 
the origin (0). So regardless of sign, you want to translate from absolute 
space (step number) to Ess space, which, in some cases, results in Russ' math. 
But would extend to negative steps as well.

On April 12, 2024 2:48:00 PM PDT, Russell Standish  
wrote:
>On Fri, Apr 12, 2024 at 12:00:06PM -0600, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> My Dear Phellow Phriammers, 
>> 
>> Over the years I have asked you some doozies.  Still, I am pretty sure this 
>> the
>> stupidest question I have ever asked this forum, so I am at your mercy.
>> 
>> I am in one of those situations where language and mathematics are rubbing
>> together and driving crazy. 
>> 
>> Let say that my patio is ten steps down from my back door.  I have two cats, 
>>  
>> Dee and Ess, and  Dee is dominant to Ess.  So, if I go out to let them in, 
>> and
>> I find  Ess on step -2   and  Dee on step -8,  I know I have an unstable
>> situation. I fear that I will have a cat fight as Dee rushes past Ess to 
>> claim
>> his rightful position by the preferred cat bowl.  Intuitively, I would  rate
>> the degree of instability as a positive 6.  How would I compare the two 
>> numbers
>> mathematically to get +6?
>> 
>> But let’s say that for theoretical reasons I now want to conceive of the
>> situation as a degree of stability, with negative stability corresponding  to
>> instability.   Now, according  to my index, the situation is a minus 6.  How
>> would I compare the two numbers mathematically to get  a -6?
>> 
>> The situation I am trying to model here is the origin of the notion of static
>> stability in meteorology.  Static Stability has a lot to do with differential
>> lapse rates, the degree to which temperature declines with increasing 
>> altitude.
>>   Lapse rates are minus numbers.  So a parcel is unstable if it has a lower
>> lapse rate (a less minus lapse rate?) than surrounding parcels, and the 
>> greater
>> the absolute value the difference between them, the greater the instability.
>> 
>> I asked “George” (GPT) to help me with this, but he (?) suggested I just take
>> absolute values and give them whatever sign I want.  However, somebody told 
>> me,
>> way back when, that taking absolute values was not kosher in mathematics.  
>> (Why
>> else would the variance be the mean SQUARED deviation about  the mean?).  
>
>I don't know about kosher, but abs is not differentiable at zero,
>which may or may not be an issue.
>
>In terms of what you're looking for, -8-(-2) = -6.
>
>Take their difference - it accords with your intuition. George speaks shit.
>
>
>
>-- 
>
>
>Dr Russell StandishPhone 0425 253119 (mobile)
>Principal, High Performance Coders hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
>  http://www.hpcoders.com.au
>
>
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Re: [FRIAM] move fast, break things

2024-04-02 Thread glen


I'm sure there are heuristics like the rule of large numbers. I like 80/20 for 
most things. If we assume we will, within some space and time window, see 20% 
of what's there, then there are ~4 of these exploits sitting on your system 
right now, active or sleeping.

On 4/2/24 09:35, Marcus Daniels wrote:

And how many similar exploits are out there, sponsored by GCHQ, NSA, etc.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, April 2, 2024 8:52 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] move fast, break things


What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world 
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/04/what-we-know-about-the-xz-utils-backdoor-that-almost-infected-the-world/


almost immediately, a never-before-seen participant named Jigar Kumar joined 
the discussion and argued that Lasse Collin, the longtime maintainer of xz 
Utils, hadn’t been updating the software often or fast enough.




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[FRIAM] move fast, break things

2024-04-02 Thread glen



What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/04/what-we-know-about-the-xz-utils-backdoor-that-almost-infected-the-world/


almost immediately, a never-before-seen participant named Jigar Kumar joined 
the discussion and argued that Lasse Collin, the longtime maintainer of xz 
Utils, hadn’t been updating the software often or fast enough.


--
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Re: [FRIAM] death by ubiquity

2024-04-02 Thread glen


Fantastic! I try to be a little absurd [‡] invoking aliens and the dark side of 
the moon, and Steve finds a way to make it seem reasonable. You clearly 
out-meta'd me on that one.

[‡] Can one be a little absurd? A↛(B⇒A) and B↛(A → A), despite what 'they' tell 
you.

On 3/28/24 16:37, Steve Smith wrote:

REC sed:


but the "dark side" of the moon is sunlit for half of every month?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer




On Thu, Mar 28, 2024 at 11:33 AM glen  wrote:

Bandwidth might be a problem. But the dark side of the moon seems like an option ... assuming you can negotiate with the aliens that live over there. 

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Re: [FRIAM] A hundred words for swindle

2024-04-01 Thread glen


Why do you list KBJ as "less savory"?

On 3/31/24 12:40, Steve Smith wrote:

... even the less savory ( to my pinko-liberal palate) of the high bench 
(Thomas/Alito/Kavanaugh/Brown, in descending order?) are as able and serious as 
Breyer came across in this interview...



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Re: [FRIAM] death by ubiquity

2024-03-28 Thread glen


I feel like what we really need are wet computers 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_computing> ... we have all this 
peri-computation going on around us all over the place, in cells, chemistry, protein 
morphogenesis, etc. But we're just so ignorant and ham-handed w.r.t. that 
computation, we have to plow it down and and pave it over with our own conception of 
computing ... like some myopic 18th century biological control strategy.

I mean... I guess we're getting there. But. It's. S. Slw.

On 3/28/24 12:51, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Way offshore in some cases, but also deep.   Maybe the underwater mass could 
help hold the platform in place?

https://www.aegirinsights.com/offshore-wind-in-california-faces-four-main-challenges-depth-waves-ports-and-grid-connection
 
<https://www.aegirinsights.com/offshore-wind-in-california-faces-four-main-challenges-depth-waves-ports-and-grid-connection>

The moon idea reminds me of this center:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Region_Supercomputing_Center 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Region_Supercomputing_Center>

*From: *Friam  on behalf of glen 

*Date: *Thursday, March 28, 2024 at 10:33 AM
*To: *friam@redfish.com 
*Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] death by ubiquity

Bandwidth might be a problem. But the dark side of the moon seems like an option ... 
assuming you can negotiate with the aliens that live over there. The best thing about 
coral is you don't have to negotiate for their "land". You can just take it and 
let them die like the stupid little creatures they are.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/22/asia/south-china-sea-philippines-coral-reef-damage-intl-hnk/index.html
 
<https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/22/asia/south-china-sea-philippines-coral-reef-damage-intl-hnk/index.html>

On 3/28/24 10:17, Marcus Daniels wrote:

It's not really my thing, but I noticed there were several very large exhibits 
at Supercomputing 23 for cooling technology.   Even immersive cooling 
solutions.  I think that could be improved a lot.   Without superconducting 
processors, I don't see how energy use can be dramatically reduced though.  For 
that there will just need to be new generation.    Could put these near large 
off short windfarms..

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/china-deploys-1400-ton-commercial-underwater-data-center/
 
<https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/china-deploys-1400-ton-commercial-underwater-data-center/>

I suppose there are some that would say gentrification is genocide -- a slow 
coerced displacement.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2024 9:49 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] death by ubiquity

Maybe. But way before that happens, it will(has) force(d) the disaffected 
(people, animals, plants) of any such region to die, move, or adapt.

In the Gaza kerfuffle, I've heard some describe coerced displacement as "genocide". I guess the more 
reasonble term is ethnic cleansing. The settlers seem mostly fine with their ethnic cleansing agenda. But, by 
analogy, how would we describe the coercive adaptation put upon a region by a massive water-sucking data center? 
Biology cleansing? If there really were an AI, would they worry about the forced displacement caused by their 
silicon incubators? ... or maybe "incubator" isn't a good word. How about "galls": 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall> Yeah, that might be a good analogy. 
The machines are parasitic. They hijack the iDNA (information generators) of the local biology to form galls within 
which they grow and thrive.

On 3/28/24 07:51, Marcus Daniels wrote:

It will force innovation on energy-efficient microarchitecture (e.g. Groq) and 
on renewable power generation near data centers.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2024 7:09 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] death by ubiquity


As we frivolously replace meatspace conversation with obsequious chatbots, the 
world burns.

The industry more damaging to the environment than airlines 
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/05/30/silicon-valley-data-giants-net-zero-sustainability-risk/
 
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/05/30/silicon-valley-data-giants-net-zero-sustainability-risk/>

https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering-source/civil-engineering-magazine/issues/magazine-issue/article/2024/03/engineers-often-need-a-lot-of-water-to-keep-data-centers-cool
 
<https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering-source/civil-engineering-magazine/issues/magazine-issue/article/2024/03/engineers-often-need-a-lot-of-water-to-keep-data-centers-cool>





--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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Frid

Re: [FRIAM] death by ubiquity

2024-03-28 Thread glen


Maybe. But way before that happens, it will(has) force(d) the disaffected 
(people, animals, plants) of any such region to die, move, or adapt.

In the Gaza kerfuffle, I've heard some describe coerced displacement as "genocide". I guess the 
more reasonble term is ethnic cleansing. The settlers seem mostly fine with their ethnic cleansing agenda. 
But, by analogy, how would we describe the coercive adaptation put upon a region by a massive water-sucking 
data center? Biology cleansing? If there really were an AI, would they worry about the forced displacement 
caused by their silicon incubators? ... or maybe "incubator" isn't a good word. How about 
"galls": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall Yeah, that might be a good analogy. The machines are 
parasitic. They hijack the iDNA (information generators) of the local biology to form galls within which they 
grow and thrive.

On 3/28/24 07:51, Marcus Daniels wrote:

It will force innovation on energy-efficient microarchitecture (e.g. Groq) and 
on renewable power generation near data centers.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2024 7:09 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] death by ubiquity


As we frivolously replace meatspace conversation with obsequious chatbots, the 
world burns.

The industry more damaging to the environment than airlines 
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/05/30/silicon-valley-data-giants-net-zero-sustainability-risk/

https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering-source/civil-engineering-magazine/issues/magazine-issue/article/2024/03/engineers-often-need-a-lot-of-water-to-keep-data-centers-cool


--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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[FRIAM] death by ubiquity

2024-03-28 Thread glen



As we frivolously replace meatspace conversation with obsequious chatbots, the 
world burns.

The industry more damaging to the environment than airlines
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/05/30/silicon-valley-data-giants-net-zero-sustainability-risk/

https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering-source/civil-engineering-magazine/issues/magazine-issue/article/2024/03/engineers-often-need-a-lot-of-water-to-keep-data-centers-cool

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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Re: [FRIAM] the inequities of uniquity

2024-03-22 Thread glen


I guess the question returns to one's criteria for assuming decoupling between 
the very [small|fast] and the very [large|slow]. Or in this case, the inner vs. 
the outer:

Susie Alegre on how digital technology undermines free thought
https://freethinker.co.uk/2024/03/interview-susie-alegre/

It would be reasonable for Frank to argue that we can generate the space of 
possible context definitions, inductively, from the set of token definitions, 
much like an LLM might. Ideally, you could then measure the expressiveness of 
those inferred contexts/languages and choose the largest (most complete; by 
induction, each context/language *should* be self-consistent so we shouldn't 
have to worry about that).

And if that's how things work (I'm not saying it is), then those "attractors" 
with the finest granularity (very slow to emerge, very resistant to dissolution) would be 
the least novel. Novelty (uniqueness) might then be defined in terms of fragility, short 
half-life, missable opportunity. But that would also argue that novelty is either less 
*real* or that the universe/context/language is very *open* and the path from fragile to 
robust obtains like some kind of Hebbian reinforcement, use it or lose it, win the hearts 
and minds or dissipate to nothing.

I.e. there is no such thing as free thought. Thought can't decouple from social 
manipulation.

On 3/21/24 13:38, Marcus Daniels wrote:

In the LLM example, completions from some starting state or none, have specific 
probabilities.   An incomplete yet-unseen (unique) utterance would be completed 
based on prior probabilities of individual tokens.

I agree that raw materialist uniqueness won't necessarily or often override 
constraints of a situation.  For example, if an employer instructs an employee 
how to put a small, lightweight product in a box, label it, and send it to a 
customer by UPS, the individual differences metabolism of the employees aren't 
likely to matter much when shipping more small, lightweight objects to other 
customers.   It could be the case for a professor and student too.   The 
attractors come from the instruction or the curriculum.  One choice constrains 
the next.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2024 11:50 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the inequities of uniquity

I was arguing with that same friend yesterday at the pub. I was trying to describe how 
some of us have more cognitive power than others (he's one of them). Part of it is 
"free" power, freed up by his upper middle class white good diet privilege. But 
if we allow that some of it might be genetic, then that's a starting point for deciding 
when novelty matters to the ephemerides of two otherwise analogical individuals (or 
projects if projects have an analog to genetics). Such things are well-described in twin 
studies. One twin suffers some PTSD the other doesn't and ... boom ... their otherwise 
lack of uniqueness blossoms into uniqueness.

His objection was that even identical twins are not identical. They were 
already unique ... like the Pauli Exclusion Principle or somesuch nonsense. 
Even though it's a bit of a ridiculous argument, I could apply it to your sense 
of avoiding non-novel attractors. No 2 attractors will be identical. And no 1 
attractor will be unique. So those are moot issues. Distinctions without 
differences, maybe. Woit's rants are legendary. But some of us find happiness 
in wasteful sophistry.

What matters is *how* things are the same and how they differ. Their qualities 
and values (nearly) orthogonal to novelty.


On 3/21/24 11:29, Marcus Daniels wrote:

If GPT systems capture some sense of "usual" context based on trillions of internet tokens, and 
that corpus is regarded approximately "global context", then it seems not so objectionable to call 
"unusual", new training items that contribute to fine-tuning loss.

It seems reasonable to worry that ubiquitous GPT systems reduce social entropy by 
encouraging copying instead of new thinking, but it could also have the reverse effect:  
If I am immediately aware that an idea is not novel, I may avoid attractors that agents 
that wrongly believe they are "independent" will gravitate toward.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2024 7:49 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the inequities of uniquity

A friend of mine constantly reminds me that language is dynamic, not fixed in 
stone from a billion years ago. So, if you find others consistently using a 
term in a way that you think is wrong, then *you* are wrong in what you think. 
The older I get, the more difficult it gets.

But specifically, the technical sense of "unique" is vanishingly rare ... so rare as to be merely 
an ideal, unverifiable, nowhere, non-existent. So if the &qu

Re: [FRIAM] the inequities of uniquity

2024-03-21 Thread glen


I was arguing with that same friend yesterday at the pub. I was trying to describe how 
some of us have more cognitive power than others (he's one of them). Part of it is 
"free" power, freed up by his upper middle class white good diet privilege. But 
if we allow that some of it might be genetic, then that's a starting point for deciding 
when novelty matters to the ephemerides of two otherwise analogical individuals (or 
projects if projects have an analog to genetics). Such things are well-described in twin 
studies. One twin suffers some PTSD the other doesn't and ... boom ... their otherwise 
lack of uniqueness blossoms into uniqueness.

His objection was that even identical twins are not identical. They were 
already unique ... like the Pauli Exclusion Principle or somesuch nonsense. 
Even though it's a bit of a ridiculous argument, I could apply it to your sense 
of avoiding non-novel attractors. No 2 attractors will be identical. And no 1 
attractor will be unique. So those are moot issues. Distinctions without 
differences, maybe. Woit's rants are legendary. But some of us find happiness 
in wasteful sophistry.

What matters is *how* things are the same and how they differ. Their qualities 
and values (nearly) orthogonal to novelty.


On 3/21/24 11:29, Marcus Daniels wrote:

If GPT systems capture some sense of "usual" context based on trillions of internet tokens, and 
that corpus is regarded approximately "global context", then it seems not so objectionable to call 
"unusual", new training items that contribute to fine-tuning loss.

It seems reasonable to worry that ubiquitous GPT systems reduce social entropy by 
encouraging copying instead of new thinking, but it could also have the reverse effect:  
If I am immediately aware that an idea is not novel, I may avoid attractors that agents 
that wrongly believe they are "independent" will gravitate toward.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2024 7:49 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the inequities of uniquity

A friend of mine constantly reminds me that language is dynamic, not fixed in 
stone from a billion years ago. So, if you find others consistently using a 
term in a way that you think is wrong, then *you* are wrong in what you think. 
The older I get, the more difficult it gets.

But specifically, the technical sense of "unique" is vanishingly rare ... so rare as to be merely 
an ideal, unverifiable, nowhere, non-existent. So if the "unique" is imaginary, unreal, and doesn't 
exist, why not co-opt it for a more useful, banal purpose? Nothing is actually unique. So we'll use the token 
"unique" to mean (relatively) rare.

And "unusual" is even worse. Both tokens require one to describe the context, domain, or universe within which the 
discussion is happening. If you don't define your context, then the "definitions" you provide for the components of 
that context are not even wrong; they're nonsense. "Unusual" implies a usual. And a usual implies a perspective ... a 
mechanism of action for your sampling technique. So "unusual" presents even more of a linguistic *burden* than 
"unique".

On 3/20/24 13:14, Frank Wimberly wrote:

What's wrong with "unusual"?  It avoids the problem.


On Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 1:55 PM Steve Smith mailto:sasm...@swcp.com>> wrote:


 I'm hung up on the usage of qualified  "uniqueness"  as well, but in 
perhaps the opposite sense.

 I agree with the premise that "unique" in it's purest, simplest form does 
seem to be inherently singular.  On the other hand, this mal(icious) propensity of 
qualifying uniqueness (uniqueish?) is so common, that I have to believe there is a 
concept there which people who use those terms are reaching for.  They are not wrong to 
reach for it, just annoying in the label they choose?

 I had a round with GPT4 trying to discuss this, not because I think LLMs are the 
authority on *anything* but rather because the discussions I have with them can help me 
brainstorm my way around ideas with the LLM nominally representing "what a lot of 
people say" (if not think).   Careful prompting seems to be able to help narrow down 
 *all people* (in the training data) to different/interesting subsets of *lots of people* 
with certain characteristics.

 GPT4 definitely wanted to allow for a wide range of gradated, speciated, spectral uses of 
"unique" and gave me plenty of commonly used examples which validates my position that 
"for something so obviously/technically incorrect, it sure is used a lot!"

 We discussed uniqueness in the context of evolutionary biology and 
cladistics and homology and homoplasy.  We discussed it in terms of cluster 
analysis.  We di

Re: [FRIAM] the inequities of uniquity

2024-03-21 Thread glen

A friend of mine constantly reminds me that language is dynamic, not fixed in
stone from a billion years ago. So, if you find others consistently using a
term in a way that you think is wrong, then *you* are wrong in what you think.
The older I get, the more difficult it gets.

But specifically, the technical sense of "unique" is vanishingly rare ... so rare as to be merely
an ideal, unverifiable, nowhere, non-existent. So if the "unique" is imaginary, unreal, and doesn't
exist, why not co-opt it for a more useful, banal purpose? Nothing is actually unique. So we'll use the token
"unique" to mean (relatively) rare.

And "unusual" is even worse. Both tokens require one to describe the context, domain, or universe within which the
discussion is happening. If you don't define your context, then the "definitions" you provide for the components of
that context are not even wrong; they're nonsense. "Unusual" implies a usual. And a usual implies a perspective ... a
mechanism of action for your sampling technique. So "unusual" presents even more of a linguistic *burden* than
"unique".

On 3/20/24 13:14, Frank Wimberly wrote:

What's wrong with "unusual"? It avoids the problem.

On Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 1:55 PM Steve Smith mailto:sasm...@swcp.com>> wrote:

I'm hung up on the usage of qualified "uniqueness" as well, but in
perhaps the opposite sense.

I agree with the premise that "unique" in it's purest, simplest form does
seem to be inherently singular. On the other hand, this mal(icious) propensity of
qualifying uniqueness (uniqueish?) is so common, that I have to believe there is a
concept there which people who use those terms are reaching for. They are not wrong to
reach for it, just annoying in the label they choose?

I had a round with GPT4 trying to discuss this, not because I think LLMs are the
authority on *anything* but rather because the discussions I have with them can help me
brainstorm my way around ideas with the LLM nominally representing "what a lot of
people say" (if not think). Careful prompting seems to be able to help narrow down
*all people* (in the training data) to different/interesting subsets of *lots of people*
with certain characteristics.

GPT4 definitely wanted to allow for a wide range of gradated, speciated, spectral uses of
"unique" and gave me plenty of commonly used examples which validates my position that
"for something so obviously/technically incorrect, it sure is used a lot!"

We discussed uniqueness in the context of evolutionary biology and
cladistics and homology and homoplasy. We discussed it in terms of cluster
analysis. We discussed the distinction between objective and subjective,
absolute and relative.

The closest thing to a conclusion I have at the moment is:

1. Most people do and will continue to treat "uniqueness" as a
relative/spectral/subjective qualifier.
2. Many people like Frank and myself (half the time) will have an allergic
reaction to this usage.
3. The common (mis)usage might be attributable to conflating "unique" with
"distinct"?

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

Re: [FRIAM] The lies of Trump and ecDNA

2024-02-29 Thread glen


This is exactly why Trump needs to stay on the ballot(s) and be defeated by a 
"normal" election. Every cry of Martyr is more fuel for the much smarter 
younger traitors waiting in the wings. Or, if he is elected again, those of us in a 
position to bolster whatever Rule of Law we have left will need support.

On 2/28/24 20:11, Roger Critchlow wrote:

I went looking for depressing news in 1924, you know, lying politicians and 
cancerous social movements:

April 1 

  * Adolf Hitler  is sentenced to 5 years in 
Landsberg Prison  in Germany for his 
participation in the 1923  Beer Hall Putsch 
 (he serves less than 9 months).




--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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Re: [FRIAM] The lies of Trump and ecDNA

2024-02-28 Thread glen


If we reframe _angry & want more power_ from a peculiar ascription to a 
particular populist ethic, it makes more sense. Victimhood is a common part of 
populist ethics. And even if/when they get power, e.g. in Trump's case, they can 
maintain that ethic by relying on conspiracy theories about things like the deep 
state. Or in Putin's case, as Jochen points out, use such an ethic (cynically in 
his case) to manipulate a population by Othering.

While collections of facts/inferences might contradict each other, the bond is consistent. 
"The people" cohere as Us against the Them. It seems to me that, for example, Trump and 
Putin are starkly different populist leaders. Trump leads by some kind of intuition (or trial and 
error), whereas Putin leads by conscious executive function. It's unclear to me which is more 
stable in a society deeply awash in "content". If our experience with things like monte 
carlo simulation, evolution, and generative AI tell us anything, I think it is that the Putin's are 
on their way out and the Trump's are on the way in. It seems like bullshit generation, combined 
with aggressive and flexible selection strategies, will win out in less stable environments ... or 
in environments where it's not easy to estimate their moments or fixed points.

On 2/27/24 13:09, Marcus Daniels wrote:

I don't see a problem with mixing the ethic of a tribe with an ethic of an 
individual.  If the party fails worse things happen then if an individual ethic 
is violated.   There is the same sort of ethic of the tribe trumping (heh) 
individual ethic of evangelicals.   A reasonable person is simply aware of 
where, when, how, and why one steps away from the party line.The problem 
with populists is that there is no ethic.  Complaints are reinforced and 
corralled only for sake of creating political force.  If it starts out being 
for one thing and turns into something else that is contradictory, that's fine. 
  We see that daily with Trump, but my local left-leaning politicians do it 
too.  The peculiar thing is that the MAGA folks mostly seem to like that they 
are a tribe, even if the tribe isn't about anything.   They are the angry white 
rural voter, and they want more power.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2024 11:13 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The lies of Trump and ecDNA

Yeah, good point. MAGA was actually coined (?) by Ronald Reagan's campaign, I think. But the 
sentiments behind it (nostalgia, exceptionalism, jingoism, etc.) are age old. And they seem more 
nest/hive/collective oriented than individualist mandates like the Commandments. It would be less 
like "What would Jesus do?" and more like "What would the Catholic Church do?"

In some ways, right populism is a different phenomenon from the same generator 
as left populism. As irritating as it is to have to take Wokeism seriously as a 
concept, it rings true for me. Does one support Palestinians because it's right 
to support *everyone*? Or does one support them because the Other/They supports 
the Israeli state? Similarly, does support Israeli victims of Oct 7 because all 
asymmetric warfare is evil? Or does one support the Israeli state because it's 
ensconced as sovereign by Us/Ours? How does one balance the ethic of one's 
tribe against the ethic of oneself?

On 2/27/24 10:56, Jochen Fromm wrote:

Hmmm I am not sure. I'm still trying to understand cultural evolution better 
and how exactly fascism and authoritarianism fit into this picture.

One thing I just noticed is that Trump's slogans are actually very similar to commandments - which serve as cultural 
genes in religious contexts. For instance "Make America Great Again" is a political slogan and the name of 
Trump's MAGA movement, but it is also a commandment like "You shall not murder". A call to action and an 
abstract instruction how to act. It appeals to all those people who do not feel great - Hillary Clinton's deplorable 
people. "Build the wall" and "Lock her up" are similar political slogans which are also 
commandments to expel immigrants and to imprison opponents. These are the genes of Trump's primitive strongman ideology.

-J.


 Original message 
From: glen 
Date: 2/27/24 7:26 PM (GMT+01:00)
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The lies of Trump and ecDNA

IDK. It seems like ecDNA, in general, can be either good or bad. And
mitochondrial DNA feels like a boon, overall. Maybe a better analogy would be ecDNA 
<-> media and MAGA to the oncogenes being promoted. I think a useful foil for 
stressing the analogy is the difference between a filter bubble and an echo chamber. 
If we define a filter bubble as the sieve through which the ambience extrudes and an 
echo chamber as an agent-oriented

Re: [FRIAM] The lies of Trump and ecDNA

2024-02-27 Thread glen

Yeah, good point. MAGA was actually coined (?) by Ronald Reagan's campaign, I think. But the 
sentiments behind it (nostalgia, exceptionalism, jingoism, etc.) are age old. And they seem more 
nest/hive/collective oriented than individualist mandates like the Commandments. It would be less 
like "What would Jesus do?" and more like "What would the Catholic Church do?"

In some ways, right populism is a different phenomenon from the same generator 
as left populism. As irritating as it is to have to take Wokeism seriously as a 
concept, it rings true for me. Does one support Palestinians because it's right 
to support *everyone*? Or does one support them because the Other/They supports 
the Israeli state? Similarly, does support Israeli victims of Oct 7 because all 
asymmetric warfare is evil? Or does one support the Israeli state because it's 
ensconced as sovereign by Us/Ours? How does one balance the ethic of one's 
tribe against the ethic of oneself?

On 2/27/24 10:56, Jochen Fromm wrote:

Hmmm I am not sure. I'm still trying to understand cultural evolution better 
and how exactly fascism and authoritarianism fit into this picture.

One thing I just noticed is that Trump's slogans are actually very similar to commandments - which serve as cultural 
genes in religious contexts. For instance "Make America Great Again" is a political slogan and the name of 
Trump's MAGA movement, but it is also a commandment like "You shall not murder". A call to action and an 
abstract instruction how to act. It appeals to all those people who do not feel great - Hillary Clinton's deplorable 
people. "Build the wall" and "Lock her up" are similar political slogans which are also 
commandments to expel immigrants and to imprison opponents. These are the genes of Trump's primitive strongman ideology.

-J.

 Original message 
From: glen 
Date: 2/27/24 7:26 PM (GMT+01:00)
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The lies of Trump and ecDNA

IDK. It seems like ecDNA, in general, can be either good or bad. And mitochondrial DNA feels like a boon, overall. Maybe a better analogy would be ecDNA <-> media and MAGA to the oncogenes being promoted. I think a useful foil for stressing the analogy is the difference between a filter bubble and an echo chamber. If we define a filter bubble as the sieve through which the ambience extrudes and an echo chamber as an agent-oriented selection bias, we can classify MAGA cult members as victims (incompetent consumers of media) and perpetrators. The perpetrators might be like the Federalist Society, where they seek echoes of their beliefs and put them in power. Or they might be like Joe Rogan, where they promote/amplify toxic materials they find in the wild. The latter seem like trans-acting ecDNA ... and Rachel Maddow might be similar to Joe Rogan in that sense, only considered toxic based on what they promote, not promotion in itself. The former seem like oncogenes. The rest, 
like some random soccer mom at the Jan 6 riot, don't seem like either of those to me.

On 2/27/24 08:51, Jochen Fromm wrote:
 > The lies of Trump and his MAGA cult are a bit like extrachromosomal DNA that is 
apparently behind many malignant cancers. Both are normally part of selfish entities - 
single cell organisms or narcissistic con men -  and disrupt or distort the normal fabric of 
the world they live in. Interestingly ecDNA takes the form of tiny circles just like 
plasmids in bacteria. And it spreads faster than DNA in chromosomes, just as lies spread 
faster than the truth. As Jonathan Swift said "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping 
after it"
 > 
https://www.the-scientist.com/cancer-may-be-driven-by-dna-outside-of-chromosomes-68590

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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Re: [FRIAM] The lies of Trump and ecDNA

2024-02-27 Thread glen

IDK. It seems like ecDNA, in general, can be either good or bad. And mitochondrial
DNA feels like a boon, overall. Maybe a better analogy would be ecDNA <-> media
and MAGA to the oncogenes being promoted. I think a useful foil for stressing the
analogy is the difference between a filter bubble and an echo chamber. If we define a
filter bubble as the sieve through which the ambience extrudes and an echo chamber as
an agent-oriented selection bias, we can classify MAGA cult members as victims
(incompetent consumers of media) and perpetrators. The perpetrators might be like the
Federalist Society, where they seek echoes of their beliefs and put them in power. Or
they might be like Joe Rogan, where they promote/amplify toxic materials they find in
the wild. The latter seem like trans-acting ecDNA ... and Rachel Maddow might be
similar to Joe Rogan in that sense, only considered toxic based on what they promote,
not promotion in itself. The former seem like oncogenes. The rest, like some random
soccer mom at the Jan 6 riot, don't seem like either of those to me.

On 2/27/24 08:51, Jochen Fromm wrote:

The lies of Trump and his MAGA cult are a bit like extrachromosomal DNA that is
apparently behind many malignant cancers. Both are normally part of selfish entities -
single cell organisms or narcissistic con men - and disrupt or distort the normal fabric
of the world they live in. Interestingly ecDNA takes the form of tiny circles just like
plasmids in bacteria. And it spreads faster than DNA in chromosomes, just as lies spread
faster than the truth. As Jonathan Swift said "Falsehood flies, and truth comes
limping after it"
https://www.the-scientist.com/cancer-may-be-driven-by-dna-outside-of-chromosomes-68590

Re: [FRIAM] The problems of interdisciplinary research

2024-02-12 Thread glen

Discussions of curiosity are like discussions of side effects, spandrels, and the rest. The simple
conception of curiosity is information seeking to no purpose, no "instrumental benefit".
But that's clearly nonsense, barring some sophistry around "instrumental benefit".

Curiosity seems to me to be an affect(ation), i.e. it refers to some other
thing. Of course, that begs us to ask whether more curious people have a larger
domain for the curiosity operator than other people. So if you can call Sally
curious about nearly every topic and Bob only curious about particular topics,
then Sally is more curious than Bob. But that suffers from so many confounders
as to be meaningless. If Sally only engages with any particular topic for an
hour, whereas Bob, when he does engage, engages for decades, then which is more
curious?

And if curiosity is always about some (domain of) referent(s), then how is it
distinguishable from any other appetite (e.g. inquisitiveness, paraphilia,
obsessive-compulsion)?

I can't help but hearken back to our past exchanges on this list discussing concepts like
free will, consciousness, or qualia, all of which seem to me to occupy the same category
as curiosity. The distinguishing factor seems only to be "energy" and a
willingness to play others' games -- or any particular game that happens to plop down on
the table. If one has the energy, one can entertain whatever arbitrary game others
propose. But when you lack the energy, you're accused of incuriosity or whatever other
epithet the privileged find convenient.

On 2/12/24 08:30, Marcus Daniels wrote:

With a robot using a generative model, one way a curiosity could manifest is in
how it learns from experience. With a somewhat higher sampling temperature,
the performance of a skill would vary. At a much higher temperature, the skill
would not be evident. If the skill had not been mastered, or there were
equivalently good ways to perform it, random deviations might find these
variants. This sampling temperature doesn’t itself change the model, but the
feedback loop from the robot in its environment would lead to different losses,
that would then be corrected through the model, e.g. through back propagation.

An example for me is learning sculling -- finding a rhythm is as much about
feeling the consequences of a set of movements on the water, as water
conditions vary, as it is executing a specified set of moves in order.

*From:*Friam *On Behalf Of *Prof David West
*Sent:* Monday, February 12, 2024 7:15 AM
*To:* friam@redfish.com
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] The problems of interdisciplinary research

The notion of search brings to mind two different experiences:

1- traditional "searching" of the library via the card catalog (yes, I know I
am old) for relevant inputs; and,

2- the "serendipity of the stacks"—simply looking around me at the books I
located via search type 1 to see what was in proximity.

My experience: the second type of "search" was far more valuable, to me, than
the first.

Also, with the books found via search '1-', the included bibliography was
frequently of more ultimate use than the book containing the bibliography.

Computerized search—ala Google—has always seemed limited; precisely because it is
exclusively search type '1-'. (Even Google Scholar) Attempts to "improve"
search by narrowing it on the basis of prior searches makes it really, really, worse.

LLM based search seems, to me, to have some capability to approximate the
serendipity of the stacks.

davew

On Mon, Feb 12, 2024, at 6:12 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:

It’s kind of fascinating.

I imagine that one of the next concepts to come into focus will be
“curiosity”. I remember a discussion years ago (15? 18?), I think involving
David K., about what the nature of “curiosity” is and what role it plays in
learning.

Where the paper talks about supervision to train weights, but eschewing
“search” per se as a component of the capability learned, it makes me think of
the role of search in the pursuit of inputs, the ultimate worth of which you
can’t know at the time of searching. I can imagine (off the cuff) that
whatever one wants to mean by “curiosity”, it has some flavor of a non-random
search, but one not guided by known criteria, rather by appropriateness to fit
existing gaps in (something: confidence? consistency?).

This also seems like it should tie into Leslie Valiant’s ideas in Probably
Approximately Correct about how to formally conceptualize teaching in relation
to learning. I guess Valiant is now considered decades passe, as AI has
charged ahead. But the broad outlines of his argument don’t seem like they
have become completely superseded.

We already have “attention” as a secret sauce with important impacts. I
wonder when some shift of architectural paradigm will include a design that we
think is a good formalization of the pre-formal gestures toward curiosity.

Eric

Re: [FRIAM] 2000-year-old scrolls

2024-02-08 Thread glen

That's how I felt about Hanson's latest post:

Why Crypto
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/why-crypto

I suppose the basic point is that crypto has generated parasitic people just
like older financial instruments, but the parasites crypto generates are
*younger* and more energetic than older, slower instruments. So the diversity
of the new canals sloughed out by these younger parasites will be higher than
that of the old parasites.

Hanson's smart enough to think about (if not empathize with) those on the other
side of the asymmetry, the hosts/victims. But the post relishes the beauty of
the consequence of their suffering, largely leaving out the (perhaps short
half-life) suffering of the victims.

I kinda feel the same way when watching my friends "euthanize" bumble bees to
study them ... or in videos like this:
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-022-04507-5/MediaObjects/41586_2022_4507_MOESM6_ESM.mp4
I can't help but wonder how it must feel to wear one of those implants while trying to
compete with the dominant for food. Is the science really worth the (short half-life)
discomfort of the mice? If so, then you too might succumb to Effective Altruism. >8^D

On 2/8/24 09:38, Jochen Fromm wrote:

There is book by Cody Cassidy named "How to Survive History: How to Outrun a
Tyrannosaurus, Escape Pompeii, Get Off the Titanic, and Survive the Rest of History's
Deadliest Catastrophes".
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/668982/how-to-survive-history-by-cody-cassidy/

Sometimes escaping disasters is not what we want though. The Pompeii disaster
for instance conserved an ancient Roman city as it was 2000 years ago. And now
we can even hope to read their ancient texts. Julian Schilliger, Youssef Nader
and Luke Farritor have won the Vesuvius prize of $700,000 because they managed
to read an badly charred scroll.
https://scrollprize.org/grandprize

They have used AI and machine learning to decipher the text of 2,000-year-old
charred papyrus scripts. The deciphered scrolls contain musings on music, food
and life's pleasures.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00346-8

Will people in 2000 years discover books from our time beneath the ruble, for
instance Joyce Carol Oates or Craig Johnson, and desperately try to decipher
them?

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

[FRIAM] imputation

2024-02-06 Thread glen

https://retractionwatch.com/2024/02/05/no-data-no-problem-undisclosed-tinkering-in-excel-behind-economics-paper/#more-128696
In email correspondence seen by Retraction Watch and a follow-up Zoom call, Heshmati told the student he had used Excel’s autofill function to mend the data. He had marked anywhere from two to four observations before or after the missing values and dragged the selected cells down or up, depending on the case. The program then filled in the blanks. If the new numbers turned negative, Heshmati replaced them with the last positive value Excel had spit out.
[...]
But it got worse. Heshmati’s data, which the student convinced him to share, showed that in several instances where there were no observations to use for the autofill operation, the professor had taken the values from an adjacent country in the spreadsheet. New Zealand’s data had been copied from the Netherlands, for example, and the United States’ data from the United Kingdom.

Wow. I mean, I use different types of imputation all the time. And although they're
expressing shock about the process in that first paragraph, it's not outlandish (assuming
you disclosed it in the paper). That he used Excel at all makes me sad. 8^D And the
copying data between countries might even be considered reasonable for "synthetic
data", were it done carefully (described, and justified in the methods section).

We got all these chicken littles worried about AI generated content, when what
we really have to worry about is Excel Abuse. How is ChatGPT any different from
Autofill? Haptic prompting?

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

Re: [FRIAM] Bad news about the climate

2024-01-30 Thread glen


Yeah, I'm not so sure that's the right tack. I mean, airlines (and airplane 
mfgs) aren't the most earth friendly enterprises, at their core. Even if we 
could magically swap out a zero emissions fuel (which we can't: 
https://www.wri.org/insights/us-sustainable-aviation-fuel-emissions-impacts), 
we will still see door plugs popping out because we can't be bothered to check 
every little nook and cranny just to save a few measly human lives. (Why do we 
freak out so much when an airplane goes down? So many more people die horribly 
in other circumstances.)

This entitled fetish we have for synchronous meatspace interactions makes for a 
more efficient target. Powering your internet bandwidth with more sustainable 
electricity is way more likely to reduce emissions than biofuel ever will.


On 1/29/24 19:20, Leigh Fanning wrote:

At some point we'll have SAF at scale.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/bioenergy/sustainable-aviation-fuels



--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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[FRIAM] Policy Modeling

2024-01-30 Thread glen



I'm confident many of y'all have seen this. But each of the snippets below, from 
Roger & Merle's nihilistic takes to Leigh and Cody's optimistic takes, bounce 
around policy modeling. What can one estimate in the face of overwhelming 
uncertainty? And given one's high uncertainty estimates, what is there to *do* 
about it at an institutional scale?

cf the theme of the Humans, Societies and Artificial Agents at 
ANNSIM this year:

Taylor Anderson, George Mason University, USA and Petra Ahrweiler, Johannes 
Gutenberg University, Germany

Agent-based models (ABMs), cellular automata, and microsimulations model 
systems through the lens of complex systems theory. More specifically, such 
approaches simulate populations of possibly heterogeneous individuals as they 
utilize either simple behavioral rules or learning models to govern their 
interactions with each other and their environment, and from which system-level 
properties emerge. Such modeling and simulation approaches have supported a 
wide range of applications related to human societies (e.g., traffic and urban 
planning, economics, natural hazards, national security, epidemiology) and 
research tasks (e.g., exploring what-if scenarios, predictive models, data 
generation, hypothesis testing, policy formation and generation).
Despite the multitude of advancements in the last few decades, there remain 
longstanding challenges that limit the usefulness of such models in the policy 
cycle. Such challenges include but are not limited to: capturing realistic 
individual and collective social behaviors; basic issues in model development 
(calibration, scalability, model reusability, difficulties in generalizing 
findings); and making transparent the strengths and limitations of models. This 
track focuses generally on advancements in modeling and simulation approaches 
in application to human societies that seek to overcome these challenges, with 
a special interest in policy modeling and the inclusion of models in the policy 
cycle.



On 10/23/11 10:10, Roger Critchlow wrote:

No one knows where the slime mold will choose to extend its  pseudopodia, or 
which of the pseudopodia will thrive or wither, or what the novel beneficial or 
lamentable consequences will be.  Some of us worry about the suffering caused 
by the gold-goo-excrement, others worry about not killing the beast that makes 
the gold-goo, many just fight for the largest share they can get, and most of 
us could care less until the bucket of gold-goo-excrement lands in our 
neighborhood or the gold-goo pseudopod feeding our investments dries up.


On 1/28/24 16:55, Frank Wimberly wrote:

One of my father-in-law's best friends was a man named Eli Shapiro who was the Alfred P 
Sloan Professor of Economics at MIT.  My FIL asked him some question about stock 
investing.  Shapiro said, "Chuck, nobody knows anything."


On 1/29/24 08:29, Steve Smith wrote:

I think this is one of the reasons that an open-ended "growth economy" is so popular, it 
make everyone willing to take on the mantle, a /_"tide whisperer"_/, pretending their 
shamanic actions/words are lifting those boats?


On 1/29/24 19:20, Leigh Fanning wrote:

At some point we'll have SAF at scale.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/bioenergy/sustainable-aviation-fuels


On 1/29/24 19:35, Michael Orshan wrote:

so removing fossil fuels from power plants is the key. [snip] Still there are 
many political and resource bottlenecks.


On 1/29/24 22:36, Merle Lefkoff wrote:

Sorry, Jochen, just about everything you recommend will make things worse.  I 
also wrote about the failure of the climate models almost ten years ago.  You 
nailed one of the biggest problems, though: even really smart guys don't know 
shit about global warming.


On 1/30/24 00:59, Jochen Fromm wrote:

The basic facts seem to be simple. 8 billion people burning fossil fuels are 
causing global warming. Is there a point I have overlooked? What can we do to 
stop global warming?


--
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Re: [FRIAM] Bad news about the climate

2024-01-29 Thread glen


I feel like individual actions (like sorting recycling, buying/using EVs, etc.) 
are a tiny drop in the bucket compared to institutional actions. For example, 
the NIH recently held a meeting in Maryland explicitly stating a *preference* 
for in person attendance. This seemed egregious to me. I mean, I know they're 
not a department of ecology or biology ... or climate science or whatever. But 
surely ... shirley they know that institutional pressure to fly around the 
earth is a part of the problem, right? Like, how are we supposed to compete for 
federal funds ... social network wise, when all the flesh-pressing rich people 
fly around pressing the flesh in meatspace?

Similarly, ALife is in Copenhagen. Very cool. I've always wanted to go there. Luckily, IACAP (RussA mentioned) is in 
Eugene. I can take the train there. Maybe if we change your "life is at stake" to "career is at 
stake", we could make some interim progress. Anyone who flies to a conference is immediately spray-painted with a 
scarlet letter. But, really. It's not about us. It's about Amazon, Microsoft, P&G, Maybelline 
, Dupont, etc. ... and 
maybe even the NIH. We should make it about their "corporate life is at stake" and execute the bad actors.

Speaking of the death penalty for corporations:
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/politics/2024/01/29/taking-away-trump-s-business-empire-would-stand-alone-under-new-york-fraud-law

"An Associated Press analysis of nearly 70 years of civil cases under the law showed 
that such a penalty has only been imposed a dozen previous times, and Trump’s case stands 
apart in a significant way: It’s the only big business found that was threatened with a 
shutdown without a showing of obvious victims and major losses."

Freewill? Agency? Pffft. The real touchstone is "identify the victim".

On 1/29/24 14:41, Jochen Fromm wrote:

I saw this article mentioned by Eliot Jacobson on his X/Twitter profile which 
argues that our actions will most likely not be enough until there is a big 
shock which motivates real change. It also uses the Covid pandemic to 
illustrate that people are able to change if they are convinced their lives are 
at stake
https://time.com/6565499/apocalyptic-optimism-climate-change/

It fits to my own observations here in Europe: there are more and more EVs and charging 
stations, but not enough. There are more heat pumps replacing gas heatings, but not 
enough. There is more use of renewable energy but not enough. I fear people will only 
start to change fundamentally if they feel their life is at stake. Will it be too late 
then? I don't know. Let's be optimistic. "Keep your face always toward the sunshine 
- and shadows will fall behind you"
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/03/05/sunshine/

-J.


 Original message 
From: Steve Smith 
Date: 1/28/24 8:16 PM (GMT+01:00)
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Bad news about the climate

I love me a good dose of Sabine... her flat-delivery of equally serious and glib lines is killer IMO... and for the 
most part I feel compelled to defer to her facts and analyses (almost) without reserve. (/around 13:30 she said 
"so mind-f#%#%ingly stupid" /). I'm surprised she didn't actually invoke the biblical "four 
horsemen"!  Her closing statement with the "stop gluing yourself to things" sorta made Sabine the 
anti-Greta?  Both of those made me choke on my coffee .

The whole North-Atlantic circulation thing (AMOC tipping point) threatening to 
undermine the British Isles and Scandinavia's relatively mild winters 
(moderated by oceanic heat transport from the equator) is one of the things I 
expect to crash a lot of expectations (and economies and ???) around the 
industrial north.   New England is also implicated in a major/abrupt local 
climate change from this as well.

I did a short stint with a pre-climate (atmospheric-ocean model coupling) modeling team 
at LANL in the 90s and what I enjoyed most was the cognitive dissonance amongst the 
researchers who on one hand felt they couldn't predict *anything* confidently but 
recognized the incredibly high stakes and the emerging awareness of the implications of 
dynamical systems theory on the domain... how many bifurcation points likely surrounded 
the relatively linear "basin" the climate has been wandering in since the 
Younger Dryas.

Without exception, every scientist I worked with then privately declared "we have a 
problem!" even though they didn't feel they had anywhere near the evidence to say 
anything that strongly in their publications.

Anecdotally, I've been experiencing a fairly steady winter-warming at my 
high-desert location 20 miles outside Santa Fe at about 5400ft where I catch 
the cold-air flow off of both the Sangre de Christo and the Jemez mtns.   
Winters have gotten drier for the most part and while the lows still maintain 
(see above), the highs duri

Re: [FRIAM] Breaking Bad and Free Will

2024-01-29 Thread glen

 an opportunity for some “choice” or “will” term to get attached to 
those kinds of feelings.

But then what is all this “choice” and “free will” language doing, beyond just 
allowing us to label feelings?  Where does it come from?  What role is it 
playing?

I can imagine that it is something like a socially constructed prosthetic 
system.  There is lots of stuff that happens in mind-activity, which minds 
don’t carry out regularly (or maybe at all) in isolation, but which they can 
scaffold their way through by evolving external prosthetic systems.  So, game 
boards for playing combinatorial games.  Counting and rhythm for dealing with 
enumeration, time and other stuff.  Many structure of language for organizing 
thought patterns and images.  We wouldn’t say that the minds aren’t “thinking” 
or “solving” whatever the problem is because they employ a prosthetic system in 
doing so.  We can instead say that, like neoteny and like lots of other things 
that are extreme in human minds, they have taken on capacity for a lot of 
complexity by offloading the completion of many parallelizable tasks to 
constructed niches, which the minds as a community then generate, maintain, and 
evolve.

Likewise, one can imagine that these abstractions of “will” and “choice” get 
used by some of the resolving-activities, to direct attention or imagination 
(among the many places it could be directed at any moment) to images of others, 
social sanction, imaginations of fear of blame, guilt, reprisal, or whatever, 
and then one navigates through the language-mediated rules of that game, to 
results that feed back as part of the resolution-activity to send the hive to 
one place or another.  This would be consistent with thinking that a lot of 
freewill and choice language takes it most concrete form in legal and punitive 
institutionalism. There it is not only the hive of actions in individual minds 
that make some joint move; it is all of those in a population of people with 
yet further constructed niches (rules, roles, authorizations of force, etc.) 
that act collectively to serve inputs to the coordinating activities at the 
“times of choice”.

I don’t supposed I could weave a philosophical system out of such vague 
imagery, or even make it into anything psychological.  But at least it gives me 
some metaphors to attach the terms to that don’t seem completely unanchored (to 
me, by my admittedly arbitrary tastes).

Eric




On Jan 26, 2024, at 11:06 AM, Marcus Daniels  wrote:

LLMs are causal models.   Science is about building causal models.    It is 
bizarre to me that there are scientists that carve out a special case for their 
own mind.   Even people like Scott Aaronson talk this way.   As far as I can 
tell, it is just vanity.
*From:*Friam mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>>*On 
Behalf Of*Steve Smith
*Sent:*Friday, January 26, 2024 7:38 AM
*To:*friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com>
*Subject:*Re: [FRIAM] Breaking Bad and Free Will


Does ChatGPT have choices?

I "can't help myself", so here goes:

I've been reading Sopolsky's "Behave" which paves the runway (or exit ramp) for his 
recent "Determined".  His deep background in neuroendocrinology leads to some very 
compelling arguments which pretty much degenerate to:

"do you believe in causality? if so, then where do you suppose the spirit or soul 
intervene to break the chain dominoes that have been set up by everything that you are 
and has happened to you up to that instant?"

He does a fancy little mocking dance, three card monte style, of homunculii he 
contrives for the purpose of debunking any fanciful regression/recursion escape 
plans you might have in that direction.

To hear him tell it we (as are all AIs/LLMs/etc) essentially giant pachinko 
machines:

:

His arguments on the topic seem unassailable in spite of my own deep and abiding sense of 
"choice" at many levels.  It also doesn't help my cognitive dissonance that he 
speaks entirely colloquially using many words we all associate with choice...  he speaks 
_as if_ he makes choices and others do as well even if he seems to ignore the specific 
word, choice.

I like the conceit of:  "the universe is deterministic but not prestateable"

I guess this is why they call it "the HARD problem of consciousness"?

For those of you who read this far, it would seem you "couldn't help yourself" or as my mother used to quip 
"you must not have had anything better to do", and for those who have not, the same goes for hitting 
 or  (or having set up a spam-filter at an earlier time to avoid repeating the 
"decision" personally)...

PS re: Breaking Bad

I've only dropped a few Pachinko balls in my life, but I couldn't help agonizing over the trajectory of each one, 
feeling as if at every bounce they were at risk of "breaking bad" (or "good")...   sinc

Re: [FRIAM] Breaking Bad and Free Will

2024-01-26 Thread glen

Yeah, but it all boils down to what "same way" means. Addiction is canalized by
dopaminergic pathways, right? So if you're canalized to that, then even if there are
small effect differences in the way you react, they might be swamped by the large effect
sameness forced by the need for dopamine. I haven't looked into it. But I've heard that
psychopaths have higher levels of dopamine, whereas those of us with restless leg
syndrome don't have enough of it. Maybe the answer is to give everyone restless leg!
Yeah, that's the ticket.

On 1/26/24 11:35, Marcus Daniels wrote:

We don’t have the same molecular composition from identical histories, so there
is no reason to think we’d all react the same way.

*From:*Friam *On Behalf Of *Jochen Fromm
*Sent:* Friday, January 26, 2024 11:18 AM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Breaking Bad and Free Will

> The more one identifies with some (set of) narrative(s), the less free will
one has.

Interesting. Yes, probably.

I believe the question of free will is related to the question if we all
experience the world in the same way. This is also a question we have discussed
frequently here at FRIAM if I recall correctly. Do we all act in the same way
if we are confronted with a situation where we have to make a decision? In
general no, but all drug addicts act alike if they are confronted with a
situation which involves the stuff they are addicted to. The more addicted they
are, the less free will.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/02/the-big-idea-could-you-have-made-different-choices-in-life

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

Re: [FRIAM] Breaking Bad and Free Will

2024-01-26 Thread glen

The concept of causality is so irritating. It's like some kind of cafeteria
style religion, where you pick and choose whatever attribute you like and toss
all the attributes you dislike. So Marcus' identification of uncorrelated
observations speaks directly to SteveS' assignation of an independent
trajectory mutation at each pin in the game. The trajectory isn't random, but
each turn in the trajectory is random. Similar with the difference between
determinism and prestatability. Similar with the difference between causal
chains versus causal networks.

All this is simply to torque my arm out of place patting myself on the back
again. What matters is the *scope*, not some penultimate reduction to some
Grand Unified Theory/Philosophy of the world. Nobody can say anything coherent
without mentioning the scope of whatever it was they said ... the language
within which they said it, etc.

On 1/26/24 07:37, Steve Smith wrote:

I've only dropped a few Pachinko balls in my life, but I couldn't help agonizing over the trajectory of each one,
feeling as if at every bounce they were at risk of "breaking bad" (or "good")... since many here
are at least part-time simulants (as Glen I believe refers to himself), even the most aggressive attempts at
introducing "random" (noise, annealing, etc.) either degenerate to "pseudo-random" or engage with a
physical system (e.g. sample a pixel-value from a webcam trained on a lava lamp) which of course is deterministic if
arbitrarily complex.

On 1/26/24 08:14, Marcus Daniels wrote:

One of the usual claims is that science couldn’t occur without independent
observations. I would co-opt Glen’s rhetoric here about parallax. What’s
need is largely uncorrelated observations.

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

Re: [FRIAM] Breaking Bad and Free Will

2024-01-26 Thread glen


+1

Every failed communication effort I engage in is followed by my reaction to the 
failure. When I've been primed that day/week to be calm and collected, my 
reaction is to either try again or politely quit the effort. But when I've been 
primed to be reactionary and aggressive, my reaction matches that priming. The 
only difference between me and a dog is that my computer is slightly more 
universal than the dog's computer.

On 1/26/24 10:00, Marcus Daniels wrote:

For example, my dog has a sequence of actions she takes to indicate she would 
like to go outside and pee.   If I am asleep, I may not see or hear them.   
Nonetheless she appears to have guilt if there is a mistake.   Apparent guilt 
is just a thing that happens when her intent is not realized.


--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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Re: [FRIAM] "SSRN-id3978095.pdf" was shared with you

2024-01-22 Thread glen

Words matter: how ecologists discuss managed and non-managed bees and birds
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-022-04620-2

I'm continuing this thread because I really want to classify types of ad
hominem. The most obvious bifurcation is human vs. source ... so against the
human versus against the source. E.g. I've been using https://ground.news. And
this morning, they had some 100% right (as in political right, not correct)
article where all the sources were Mixed or Low Factuality. I found myself
trusting the Mixed Factuality Fox News more than any of the others. So ...
familiarity? I guess?

Re loaded language and the birds and the bees: I don't think it's possible to remove the loading
from loaded language. The best you can do is be aggressively transparent about your loading. And
that's what triggers my "ad hominem". It's a reaction to closed or obfuscated loading.
E.g. when some older white dude at the pub insists on using politically incorrect language that
makes the kids cringe, you have to do a little analysis and modeling of the speaker. Are they doing
it 'cause they're just too stupid? 'Cause it stirs up the kids? 'Cause it makes them feel
"free"? Etc. It's less *against* the person and more of an attempt to infer their loading.

On 1/8/24 11:06, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

I am particularly grateful for the ad hominem stuff.

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

Re: [FRIAM] diamond doping

2024-01-16 Thread glen

as a quick
reminder, alpha decay means that a large nucleus spits out chunks with two
neutrons and protons, which are helium nuclei. Beta decay means the nucleus
spits out electrons and gamma decay means that the nucleus spits out photons.
The Chinese company uses beta decay and calls itself betavolta after that.
They use nickel 63, which has a half-life of roughly 100 years, and layer it
between diamond semiconductors with a PN junction. This sounds kind of
technical, and I guess it is. But maybe it helps to know that this
semiconductor stuff is the same type of material that's normally used in solar
cells. In the solar cells, it's in falling light that creates a current. For
the nuclear battery, it's not in falling light, but the electrons emitted in
the beta decay that create the current. The company Betavolta won third prize
for their battery in a recent innovation competition by the China National
Nuclear Cooperation. The technology itself isn't new, but the push to the
consumer market is. The company's first product is called the BV100 battery. It
has a power of 100 microwatts and a voltage of 3 volts. It has about the same
size as the typical cell battery. The power is somewhat lower than what the
British company is aiming at, but the voltage they quote is somewhat higher. So
the Chinese battery looks plausible enough, but like the other nuclear
batteries, it's probably going to remain in niche technology for low power
devices that need to last a long time. It's a shame because if you had a phone
battery that lasted 20,000 years, you could watch all my videos in one go. Many
thanks to our sponsors on Patreon, especially those of you in tier 4 and
higher. This channel would not be possible without your help. And you too can
help us. Go check out our Patreon page or support us right here on YouTube by
clicking on the join button below. Thanks for watching. See you
tomorrow.

On 1/10/24 07:14, glen wrote:

I've been tricked before. Is this true? I find plenty of hits on diamond doping
and β-based batteries. And the Sri Lanka Guardian seems like a credible source.
But I can't help but doubt claims from https://www.betavolt.tech/

https://slguardian.org/chinese-firm-developed-nuclear-battery-that-can-produce-power-for-50-years/

Betavolt, however, has taken a different technical approach. They have
developed a unique semiconductor made of single-crystal diamond capable of
generating a current through the β particles (electrons) emitted from the
radioactive source nickel-63. By placing a 2 micrometer-thick nickel-63 thin
film between two diamond semiconductor converters, the decay energy of the
radioactive source can be converted into electrical current, creating an
independent modular unit.

https://www.betavolt.tech/359485-359485_645066.html via Google Translate

Beijing Betavolt New Energy Technology Co., Ltd. announced on January 8 that it has
successfully developed a miniature atomic energy battery. This product combines nickel 63
nuclear isotope decay technology and China's first diamond semiconductor (4th generation
semiconductor) module to successfully realize the miniaturization of atomic energy
batteries. , modularization and low cost, starting the process of civilian use. This
marks that China has achieved disruptive innovation in the two high-tech fields of atomic
energy batteries and fourth-generation diamond semiconductors at the same time, putting
it "way ahead" of European and American scientific research institutions and
enterprises.

Betavolt atomic energy batteries can generate electricity stably and
autonomously for 50 years without the need for charging or maintenance. They
have entered the pilot stage and will be put into mass production on the
market. Betavolt atomic energy batteries can meet the needs of long-lasting
power supply in multiple scenarios such as aerospace, AI equipment, medical
equipment, MEMS systems, advanced sensors, small drones and micro robots. This
new energy innovation will help China gain a leading edge in the new round of
AI technological revolution.

Atomic energy batteries, also known as nuclear batteries or radioisotope batteries, work
on the principle of utilizing the energy released by the decay of nuclear isotopes and
converting it into electrical energy through semiconductor converters. This was a
high-tech field that the United States and the Soviet Union focused on in the 1960s.
Currently, there are only thermonuclear batteries used in aerospace. This kind of battery
is large in size and weight, has high internal temperatures, is expensive, and cannot be
used by civilians. In recent years, miniaturization, modularization and civilian use of
nuclear batteries have been the goals and directions pursued by European and American
countries. China's "14th Five-Year Plan and 2035 Vision Goals" also propose
that the civi

Re: [FRIAM] Breaking Bad

2024-01-15 Thread glen


On 1/15/24 11:01, Don Lemons wrote:

"Virtue ethics" is a standard phrase in philosophy.


Yes, that's the way my friend intends to use it. He claims to have been 
formally trained in philosophy. But I don't care very much about the jargon. 
What I care about is what he says when he graduates from the jargon into 
authentic expressions of intent and behavior. I'll take Diogenes over the rest 
of 'em any day. 8^D

On 1/15/24 12:40, Steve Smith wrote:

My modern (most of my adult life) experience is that the 
progressive/enlightened amongst us lean toward the idea of having any E and P 
represent character flaws that should be at least concealed if not stifled in 
some way. I'm hooked on this myself.  I don't like having the scarlet E or P 
branded on my forehead, even (because?) the brand fits my circumstance.   Maybe 
it is more accurate to say the fact of P leads to an illusion of E which when 
exercised (free-will assumed) is where the C flaw resides?



Yeah, but in my conception of P&E, they are undoubtedly good things. When 
someone is entitled, it means they have a foundation of expectation ... like the 
expectation that trains run on time, that you can walk down the street without 
being mugged, that other drivers on the road have been through some kind of minimal 
certification process, that the food you buy isn't infected, that the drugs you 
take work, etc. This is entitlement. And it's a good thing. (I feel strongest when 
I hear grumpy old people complain about kids these days. Yes, they *should* be 
entitled. You *want* them to have a better life than you ... or you should anyway. 
They won't because you let the world go to shit on your watch. But you want them 
to.)

Of course, there are those of us who take E&P a little too far. And there are 
those of us who feel *overly* entitled. But that's the same with everything. Some 
of us drink too much. Some of us are mansplaining boors. Etc. But it's like the 
thickness of the earth's crust compared to its mantle. At least in developed 
countries, we have a mantle of laws and norms that bestow a warranted entitlement 
(like not having to hunt for food every damned day). And everybody complains about 
the very thin layer of too-much-entitlement that festers on the surface. Frankly, 
our myopia is very weird.

Walter White simply learned to see the E&P. And he responded accordingly.

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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[FRIAM] diamond doping

2024-01-10 Thread glen

https://slguardian.org/chinese-firm-developed-nuclear-battery-that-can-produce-power-for-50-years/

https://www.betavolt.tech/359485-359485_645066.html via Google Translate

Betavoltaic nuclear batteries develop a completely different technological
approach, generating electric current through the semiconductor transition of
beta particles (electrons) emitted by the radioactive source nickel-63. To do
this, Betavolt's team of scientists developed a unique single-crystal diamond
semiconductor that is just 10 microns thick, placing a 2-micron-thick nickel-63
sheet between two diamond semiconductor converters. The decay energy of the
radioactive source is converted into an electrical current, forming an
independent unit. Nuclear batteries are modular and can be composed of dozens
or hundreds of independent unit modules and can be used in series and parallel,
so battery products of different sizes and capacities can be manufactured.

Zhang Wei, chairman and CEO of Betavolt, said that the first product the
company will launch is BV100, which is the world's first nuclear battery to be
mass-produced. The power is 100 microwatts, the voltage is 3V, and the volume
is 15 X 15 X 5 Cubic millimeters are smaller than a coin. Nuclear batteries
generate electricity every minute, 8.64 joules per day, and 3153 joules per
year. Multiple such batteries can be used in series and parallel. The company
plans to launch a battery with a power of 1 watt in 2025. If policies permit,
atomic energy batteries can allow a mobile phone to never be charged, and
drones that can only fly for 15 minutes can fly continuously.

According to reports, the atomic energy battery is a physical battery, not an
electrochemical battery. Its energy density is more than 10 times that of
ternary lithium batteries. It can store 3,300 megawatt hours in a 1-gram
battery. It will not catch fire or explode in response to acupuncture and
gunshots. Because it generates self-generated electricity for 50 years, there
is no concept of the number of cycles of an electrochemical battery (2,000
charges

Re: [FRIAM] sui generis

2024-01-09 Thread glen

I agree almost completely. Where I may disagree goes back to a conversation we (I've forgotten who was
"there", though) had on vFriAM awhile back. There is something to uniqueness. An expression from
the Very Weird is different from expressions from the less weird. I tend to think of it in terms of
non-convex space and strictures in the manifold. If you've got a pathologically malformed space and
"we" are all meandering around in that space, then some proportion of us will end up in little
niches with few (or zero) neighbors. The puffs of "content" expressed by those weirdos will be more
unique than the puffs from those with many neighbors.

Of course, if you have zero neighbors, then your puffs may not be "remembered" at all by anyone. (I
prefer "recognized" to "remembered". But to each her own.) So, there's some λ parameter
for weirdness. Personally, although I appreciate, say, Frank Zappa's expressions, I don't enjoy many of them.
Similarly, I don't appreciate or enjoy the expressions of Taylor Swift. But without such large pockets of
convex space, where would our little white holes of weirdness be? We'd have no safe harbor at all.

On 1/9/24 08:47, Prof David West wrote:

Ancient Greek notions of "creativity" lacked any sense of egocentric novelty. To 'create'
was to 'remember'. This was grounded in the more general philosophy that denied the possibility of
"something-from-nothing."

In my Design Thinking book, there is a large section about this and about who
"creation" is akin to midwifery, assisting something to express itself.

Just as a midwife lacks "authorship" of a baby, so too do all "intellectuals"
lack authorship of novel, innovative, or creative work— despite the boilerplate prefacing every
Ph.D. thesis.

davew

On Tue, Jan 9, 2024, at 10:28 AM, glen wrote:

https://www.science.org/content/article/billionaire-launches-plagiarism-detection-effort-against-mit-president-and-all-its

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4392624-new-york-times-chatgpt-lawsuit-poses-new-legal-threats-to-artificial-intelligence/

I just can't help but analogize between Intelligent Design and these
arguments of ownership/novelty of [ahem] "content". It all feels like
the argument from design to me. For a paywalled for-profit like the NYT
to go after a for-profit like OpenAI and a rapacious
<https://www.thenation.com/article/society/william-ackman-harvard-donor/>
billionaire to go after prestige-mongering elite institutions seems
like a clear instance of elite overproduction
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction>. And to have it
all leveraged on the fantasy fulcrum of novelty and ownership is making
my head spin.

But deep down, there's something to be said about intuitionism. At our
last salon, someone asked how much ontological status we might give to
stories about the Astral Plane. My answer derives entirely from what
little I know about intersubjectivity and cross-species mind reading.
If there is a commonality to nootropic or psychonaut experience, it
derives from our common *structure*, including whatever deeply
historical things like genetic memory that may (not) exist.

It's fine to give lip service to intellectual humility. But such
rhetoric can't persuade ... uh ... "people" like Ackman. Surely ...
surely people like that are smart enough to grok things like gen-phen
maps, robustness and polyphenism, etc. Right? And if they do get it,
then we grass tufts can go on about our work, trying to be open, accept
and apply credit and blame to the best of our abilities and ignore
these fighting elephants. Right?

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

[FRIAM] sui generis

2024-01-09 Thread glen

https://www.science.org/content/article/billionaire-launches-plagiarism-detection-effort-against-mit-president-and-all-its

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4392624-new-york-times-chatgpt-lawsuit-poses-new-legal-threats-to-artificial-intelligence/

I just can't help but analogize between Intelligent Design and these arguments of ownership/novelty
of [ahem] "content". It all feels like the argument from design to me. For a paywalled
for-profit like the NYT to go after a for-profit like OpenAI and a rapacious
billionaire to go
after prestige-mongering elite institutions seems like a clear instance of elite overproduction
. And to have it all leveraged on the
fantasy fulcrum of novelty and ownership is making my head spin.

But deep down, there's something to be said about intuitionism. At our last
salon, someone asked how much ontological status we might give to stories about
the Astral Plane. My answer derives entirely from what little I know about
intersubjectivity and cross-species mind reading. If there is a commonality to
nootropic or psychonaut experience, it derives from our common *structure*,
including whatever deeply historical things like genetic memory that may (not)
exist.

It's fine to give lip service to intellectual humility. But such rhetoric can't persuade
... uh ... "people" like Ackman. Surely ... surely people like that are smart
enough to grok things like gen-phen maps, robustness and polyphenism, etc. Right? And if
they do get it, then we grass tufts can go on about our work, trying to be open, accept
and apply credit and blame to the best of our abilities and ignore these fighting
elephants. Right?

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

Re: [FRIAM] "SSRN-id3978095.pdf" was shared with you

2024-01-08 Thread glen


The argument seems pretty clear to me. "Officer" is jargonal, not intuitive. 
Were I to read it charitably, I'd agree. Appointees are not elected. Electees should have 
more leeway than appointees ... like the difference between an elected Sheriff and her 
deputies. But like all dichotomies, this one is a bit false, especially given that the 
[Vice]Presidents aren't really elected at all. The Electoral College process feels more 
like a complicated appointment mechanism than an election.

Anyway, everything that document says is monastery quality sophistry. Were the "rule 
of law" actually like an axiomatic system, running it forward from start to finish 
would be formal and automatic. But it's just not that formal. It's cafeteria/buffet 
style; you can make anything you want out of it. Beware the monks claiming it's axiomatic 
... and that they alone are qualified to turn the crank.

FWIW, I'm not familiar with Tillman. But Blackman's positions are one reason I 
unsubscribed from the Volokh Conspiracy RSS feed: cf. 
https://reason.com/people/josh-blackman/

At first, I read many of his posts with as much charity as I could. (Analyses 
and opinions, not so much the historical ones. He's a competent scholar.) Then 
I started skipping over them most of the time and focusing on the other posters 
that were more reason-able (Ha!). Then I finally couldn't take it anymore and 
removed the feed. [sigh] I'm not proud of that. My charity muscles are 
fatigued. Blackman's opinions feel, to me, similar the Johns' (Yoo and Rizzo) 
legal justification for waterboarding. It all makes me a bit queasy.

p.s. Here's a more reliable link: 
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3978095

On 1/6/24 10:16, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi, Everybody,

I have been curious about how (on earth!) the president could not be
considered to be an Officer of the United States.  After all, the
Constitution, Article II, tells us that "The President ...shall hold
office..."etc. This law review article  seems to be the source  I thought I
would post in in case anyone wants to read it. I won't get to it until later
today.
Nick



--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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Re: [FRIAM] The last Lighthouse Keeper in America

2023-12-28 Thread glen


I agree. Ever since this: 
https://bookshop.org/p/books/from-transgender-to-transhuman-a-manifesto-on-the-freedom-of-form-martine-rothblatt/8478365?ean=9780615489421
 I've been swayed that the reactionary stance of the JK Rowlings of the world look 
similar to that of the Trumpists (or Tea Party people). But the R in TERF is supposed to 
stand for "radical", right? People like Rowling don't seem that radical to me. 
So, I'd prefer if we use the R in TERF to stand for reactionary. (Now the NeoRx crowd 
like Yarvin and whatnot. They do seem radical, even though reactionary is in their name 
... radical reactionary, maybe?)

On a similar note, I notice both very "left" seeming people and very "right" seeming 
people are into tattoos. The number of tattoos these days is enough that they would have been called 
"radical" body modifiers in the past. But now, to be radical, you have to do even more than 
piercing ... like you have to install metal pieces under the skin, or engage in decorative scarring to be 
thought of as radical ... maybe CRISPR your genome or eat nothing but Soylent. IDK. I can't imagine any kind 
of radical anyone who wasn't pro-trans.

But, again, it's a field, not a particle zoo.

On 12/28/23 08:37, Marcus Daniels wrote:

It seems one informative interstitial space is populated by the TERFs.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2023 6:53 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The last Lighthouse Keeper in America

I thought about ... no, actually I crafted an entire post but deleted it ... posting this 
in response to Roger's "good old sci fi" (GOSF) arc. It's a fantastic TESCREAL 
narrative arc, reactive to such GOSF. And as allergic to narrative as I am, I still think 
it's a good story:

https://emilygorcenski.com/post/making-god/

Plus, they use one of my favorite words: apotheosis. I get a distinct scent of 
the feminist critique of artificial life [⛧] in there, somewhere ... a kind of 
cynical us versus them vibe. But it's a vibe with which I often resonate. Like 
Diogenes, I believe truth is found in the gritty interstitial, not the lofty 
isolate.

[⛧] Aggressively expressed as: artificial life is the (white|privileged) man's 
attempt to appropriate women's ability to rear children ... given that this 
list is prolly mostly (white|privileged) men, I can't help but wonder if any 
reaction to that concept is, would be, can be, authentic, including my own. But 
it's a bit sexist. Many women are fantastic analysts and can cut it up and 
isolate as well or better than any man. So the argument against TESCREAL isn't 
actually sexist. It just so happens to be that those of us who inhabit gritty, 
interstitial spaces recognize the phenomena better than those of us well 
ensconced in our silos.


On 12/27/23 15:28, Steve Smith wrote:

When we invented gods in our own image we did a bad job, I'm not sure we are 
doing any better with the AI?  Please gods, not in Elon's image!  But hope 
springs infernal.


--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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Re: [FRIAM] The last Lighthouse Keeper in America

2023-12-28 Thread glen


I thought about ... no, actually I crafted an entire post but deleted it ... posting this 
in response to Roger's "good old sci fi" (GOSF) arc. It's a fantastic TESCREAL 
narrative arc, reactive to such GOSF. And as allergic to narrative as I am, I still think 
it's a good story:

https://emilygorcenski.com/post/making-god/

Plus, they use one of my favorite words: apotheosis. I get a distinct scent of 
the feminist critique of artificial life [⛧] in there, somewhere ... a kind of 
cynical us versus them vibe. But it's a vibe with which I often resonate. Like 
Diogenes, I believe truth is found in the gritty interstitial, not the lofty 
isolate.

[⛧] Aggressively expressed as: artificial life is the (white|privileged) man's 
attempt to appropriate women's ability to rear children ... given that this 
list is prolly mostly (white|privileged) men, I can't help but wonder if any 
reaction to that concept is, would be, can be, authentic, including my own. But 
it's a bit sexist. Many women are fantastic analysts and can cut it up and 
isolate as well or better than any man. So the argument against TESCREAL isn't 
actually sexist. It just so happens to be that those of us who inhabit gritty, 
interstitial spaces recognize the phenomena better than those of us well 
ensconced in our silos.


On 12/27/23 15:28, Steve Smith wrote:

When we invented gods in our own image we did a bad job, I'm not sure we are 
doing any better with the AI?  Please gods, not in Elon's image!  But hope 
springs infernal.

--
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
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archives:  5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
 1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/

[FRIAM] arg

2023-12-27 Thread glen


British teenager behind GTA 6 hack receives indefinite hospital order
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/21/british-teenager-behind-gta-6-hack-receives-indefinite-hospital-order

One person's criminal is another's hero. Such pearl clutching by the 
capitalists.

--
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
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archives:  5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
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[FRIAM] institutional home for Rowena He

2023-12-20 Thread glen


I know some here have more than a passing interest in China and a peri-China 
network. So I thought I'd bump this post a bit:

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7694


This post has a practical purpose. Since her exile from China, Rowena has spent 
basically her entire life moving from place to place, with no permanent 
position and no financial security. In the US—a huge country full of people who 
share Rowena’s goal of exposing the lies of the CCP—there must be an excellent 
university, think tank, or institute that would offer a permanent position to 
possibly the world’s preeminent historian of Tiananmen and of the Chinese 
democracy movement. Though the readership of this blog is heavily skewed toward 
STEM, maybe that institute is yours. If it is, please get in touch with Rowena. 
And then I could say this blog had served a useful purpose, even if everything 
else I wrote for two decades was for naught.


--
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/

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