[FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

[glen∈ℂ]

Ha!  Reading and comprehension are 2 different things. I read a lot and understand almost nothing. So, there's that. But thanks for acknowledging whatever effort I do put in.

Let me try a more pragmatic rhetoric. Marcus' story about debugging a GGC is useful, here. I spend all day, every day, mapping whatever nonsense I (or my client's grad students) programmed into a simulation. The task of "verification", ensuring you programmed in what you intended to program in, is wrenchingly debilitating, I think. I don't know if you can replicate this "lived experience" elsewhere, with other tools/products. But I assume you can. I mentioned my friend and his foray into fermentation food/drink. One of the reasons fermenting bread was so interesting was because bread making is (apparently, I wouldn't really know) chock full of folk knowledge, with LESS science embedded than, say, beer fermenting. Of course, I'm talking about artisinal bread and artisanal beer, not the macro stuff like Wonder and Coors, where their maker experience is probably something like Unilever, with huge vats of various types of sauces, engineered to tight specifications. In any case, I long ago abandoned 5 gallon batches of beer because the turn-around time for making and drinking was too long. To get good at small batches, you need to iterate A LOT... and fast.

Cellular Automata are similar. Sure, there's a disconnect between the rules you program in and the pretty pictures you see in the output. But anyone who does it a lot, will develop this ENGINEER homunculus. The result is no less marvelous. But it's a different kind of marvelous, a manipulate-observe, manipulate-observe ... engineering marvelous ... and definitely *not* "emergent*, whatever that may mean.

On 5/4/19 12:07 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> You are a hero in the reading department.  I don't think anybody on the list reads as much of what is sent him as do you.  I am very grateful for it.  The Alphabet Soup Model is for fun, so you can skip that.  Or, it would take you 3 minutes of looking at the illustrations and grabbing the premise to get the meat out of it.
> 
> I am still puzzled by your response concerning cellular automata.  Maybe it's my response I am puzzled by.  Or Lee's aphoristic analogy.  It just seems to me any mystery of consciousness can wait until we have figured out how we feel about emergence in cellular automata.   Does the fact that we feel we understand it affect the fact that we are amazed by it?  Does the fact that we are amazed by it mean that we really don't understand it?  Would we be less amazed by Stonehenge if we knew how it was constructed?