[FRIAM] the arc of ai (was Re: Whew!)

[glen ☣]

FWIW, I would try not to over-parse "rhetoric" any more than I over-parse "abstract".  All informational language is persuasive and all persuasive language is informative.  The distinction is false, I think.  We see this most egregiously in the saying: If you want to learn something, read about it. If you want to understand something, write about it. If you want to master something, teach it.

As in the argument with Vladimyr, I take the same position.  There is no stable "you".  There is no such thing as the "mind".  What does exist, however, is the real stuff around you, including your fingers, your tongue, your ears, etc.  As you write down your rhetoric, you (as Eric suggested) reconfigure yourself.  In my own personal experience, the act of saying or writing something can either verify or decohere whatever physiological state I was in before.  (Note these acts address logical validity, not soundness.  That has to be done interpersonally, through a more isotropic medium.)  Another example is when you, say, write code and then have to read that code 10 years later.  The writing is both persuasive and informative.  In fact, to emphasize the false distinction is to engage in the very abstraction I'm ranting against.  Yes, Steve, you are as evil as the rest of us. 8^)

Similarly, in direct response to Marcus' "listeners bear responsibility" ... I was reared to avoid stating the obvious.  But as I die, it becomes more obvious that one person's obvious is another's occult.  So, to be clear, I'm arguing that all these things are tightly coupled.  Soooo ... yes, of course the listener bears some responsibility.  If a listener abstracts their self, they are just as evil as a speaker abstracting their self.

And you're right that it bears directly on the obvious false equivalence between intelligence and AI, specific or general.  It would be great fun to use AI to craft a new political philosophy.  Of course, I like stochasticity, so I'd simply train an Eddington typewriter on Marx, Ghandi, Hitler, Roosevelt, etc. and see what popped out.  That would probably be as effective as any body of rhetoric that popped out of any one "mind".



On 05/05/2017 10:55 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> As usual, I am enjoying watching your semantic and conceptual fencing match here.  The flash of parry, riposte, counter-riposte can be blinding but engaging.   The content, when I feel I have parsed it down all the way is usually enlightening and informative.
> 
> Rather than try to join in and thus create a bit of a melee, I will try to stand back and lob a few things onto the ground of the discussion.
> 
> Firstly, my own throwdown of "rhetoric" was intended to be very specific.  I believe that you both took it to be a bit more broad than intended.  I specifically meant rhetoric as "language intended to persuade".  I hold this specifically distinct from "language intended to inform" and "language used to think or contemplate".  Unfortunately I discovered that in fact the formal definition of rhetoric includes "to inform" as well as "to persuade"
> 
> I believe that both of you are primarily using language intended to inform in this (and most if not all) discussions in this forum.   But I also believe that MOST public discourse is fundamentally rhetorical.   Noam Chomsky might be the closest to a public figure outside of hard sciences who seems able to refrain from deliberately conflating persuasive and informational language.
> 
> My point in this pivots around Marcus' point here of "Listeners, bear some responsibility too".  In my general experience, but acutely informed by our recent elections, MOST listeners seek out persuasive rhetoric which supports their existing beliefs... and ignore or at least are fairly unaware of the difference of that from informational rhetoric.   They are not seeking to understand or even learn more, they are seeking to confirm existing biases and to adopt convincing rhetoric to flail their opponents with.
> 
> I particularly appreciate the discussions the two of you share with the rest of us here, but there are many (or at least several) others who seem to maintain a similar level of honest intent to inform and/or explore rather than simply persuade.
> 
> Touching briefly onthe OP or is it OT, I thnk that both SAI and GAI may be a severe travesty in our culture to whatever extent we "listeners" don't take responsibility.   Will AI become the new speechwriters?   Have they already?   I think that Artificial Wisdom will come much later than effective Artificial Intelligence and would seem to need to grow out of GAI rathr than SAI.

-- 
☣ glen