[FRIAM] Wolpert's 12 questions

[Steve Smith]

Glen, et al.  -

Here is my throwdown...

>
> For convenience, the 12 questions are:
And I hope others will weigh in here...
>
>> 1. Why is there a major chasm with the minimal cognitive capabilities 
>> necessary for survival by pre-Holocene hominids on one side, and on 
>> the other side, all those cognitive capabilities that Kurt Gödel, 
>> Albert Einstein, and Ludwig van Beethoven called upon when conjuring 
>> their wonders?

I have been dancing back and forth across those general 
borderlands/shadowlands myself.   Kim Stanley Robinson's book "Shaman" 
made for an interesting speculation of what it might have been like to 
have lived in the early pre-history period... at the end of the 
ice-age.  The emergence of neolithic technology and language itself, one 
easiest to study (for it's persistent record in the world) and the other 
quite hard (for it's ephemerality, especially pre-written record).

My most/best ad-hoc thoughts on this seem to be using the analogy (maybe 
more tight than a metaphor) of resonance.   In my pursuit of "what is 
consciousness, and how might it transcend a single neural locus such as 
a human (or other) brain), I have focused a lot on "holding and 
manipulating a model of the world" with "including a model of the self 
within the model of the world" as at least 'interesting' and probably 
deeply salient features of such (self-other) consciousness.  This 
suggests to me that the very fundament of what I believe is 
"consciousness" is self-other dualistic?   Is there something unique 
about (our familiar form of) consciousness that requires the self-other 
duality?

>> c
>> 2. Restricting attention to what are, in some sense, the most 
>> universal of humanity's achievements, the most graphic demonstrations 
>> of our cognitive abilities:
>>
>> Why were we able to construct present-day science and mathematics, 
>> but no other species ever did? Why are we uniquely able to decipher 
>> some features of the Cosmic Baker's hands by scrutinizing the 
>> breadcrumbs that They scattered about the universe? Why do we have 
>> that cognitive ability despite its fitness costs? Was it some subtle 
>> requirement of the ecological niche in which we were formed — a niche 
>> that at first glance appears rather pedestrian, and certainly does 
>> not overtly select for the ability to construct something like 
>> quantum chronodynamics? Or is our ability a spandrel, to use Gould 
>> and Lewontin’s famous phrase — an evolutionary byproduct of some 
>> other trait? Or is it just a cosmic fluke?

I am currently focused on the fact of language, with written language as 
a special case and the "language" of made objects (homo faber) which 
carry at least a shorthand understanding of their construction (reverse 
engineering) with particular focus on neolithics.   If you have the 
facility with flaking stone to a bifacial (or better) level, then 
finding a "clovis point" for example very likely allows you to create 
your own, and through (at the very least) randomized production 
"errors", the shape (and by extension function) of the artifact will 
mutate with every reproduction.   This begs the question of whether the 
"maker" might have a mental model of the resulting "tool" outside of the 
image of the one in his hand/view and whether such a mental model would 
allow an accelerated and *directed* series of changes in form (with an 
eye to function).  It would seem that "mashups" would be an easy place 
to start... just noting the most desired features of each of 2 artifacts 
and expressing them both as-best in a new artifact.

The fitness payout vs the fitness cost, I would claim *is* tool 
creation/use... both physical artifacts (e.g. neolithic cutting tools) 
and mental constructs (models and logic, no matter how limited) which 
could be *shared* (communicated).

This still leaves a huge leap to quantum chromodynamics, but it is maybe 
not unfair to mention that Feynman's virtual particle diagrams, as an 
abstraction and as a boundary object went a long way to broadening the 
number of people interested in and able-to-discuss things just above the 
level of QED.

>>
>> 3. Are we really sure that no other species ever constructed some 
>> equivalent of present-day SAM? Are we really sure that no other apes 
>> — or cetaceans or cephalopods — have achieved some equivalent of our 
>> SAM, but an equiva- lent that we are too limited to perceive?
As with the human archaelogical record, we only have recognizeable (to 
our sensibilities) artifacts and preserved (if from another era) or 
transported (if from another locale) to apprehend/interpret. Our own 
Richard Lowenberg has spent some time studying/co-creating with Koko 
<http://www.richardlowenberg.com/blog/koko-the-gorilla>... his stories 
expand my idea of interspecies "communication" in a way that may be 
responsive (if only mildly) to this question.   I don't know if our 
current understanding of the Cetacean or Cephalopod world hints strongly 
one way or another, but I'd not be surprised if either/both were to be 
"dreaming" in something like SAM as they go about what sometimes seems 
like mundane business (singing songs that travel halfway around the 
world in one case while changing colors and 
flowing/dancing/fiddling-with-stuff in the other).
>>
>> 4. If the evidence of the uniqueness of our SAM is the modifications 
>> that we, uniquely, have wreaked upon the terrestrial biosphere, 
>> should the question really be why we are the only species who had the 
>> cognitive abilities to construct our SAM and were able to build upon 
>> that understanding, to so massively re-engineer our environment? To 
>> give a simple example, might some cetaceans even exceed our SAM, but 
>> just do not have the physical bodies that would allow them to exploit 
>> that understanding to re-engineer the biosphere in any way? Should 
>> the focus of the inquiry not be whether we are the only ones who had 
>> the cognitive abilities to construct our cur- rent SAM, but rather 
>> should the focus be expanded, to whether we are the only ones who had 
>> both those abilities and the ancillary physical abilities (e.g., 
>> opposable thumbs) that allowed us to produce physical evidence of our 
>> SAM?
I do think the physical-evidence is part of it, I also think that this 
is an extension of the point of "our sensibilities" and "our values".   
Wengrow and Graeber offer good anecdotes in Dawn of Everything about how 
the Jesuits and more aptly French Military had a hard time recognizing 
the "genius" of the Wendat (familiarly known by the perjorative "Huron") 
Natives <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondiaronk>.   To re-iterate, the 
Cetacea are not obviously equipped to manipulate artifacts in the world 
as we recognize them, though the spatiotemporal nature of their 
"whalesongs" spread over vast distances of ocean may well represent 
something at least as interesting/sophisticated as Australian Aboriginal 
Songlines which are also held only (traditionally) in oral culture (and 
by definition become "dead" if they are not constantly "used").   
Cephalopods may well be more "familiar" in their expressions... my 
knowledge of the current research with them is dated as well as a bit 
scant.   I am also interested in the *emergent collective* capabilities 
that exist *only* in groups...   the obvious area of study are the 
overtly eusocial creatures but the human experiment seems rather rife 
with (if not dominated by) activities and artifacts which are truly 
"standing waves" of information set up and maintained by collectives of 
human activity.   The Libertarian chide about "Fiat Currency" is the 
perfect example, IMO... they insist it is a transient illusion, but I 
think it is more like one of Feynman's Virtual Particles at the very least.
>>
>> 5. Ancillary abilities or no, are we unavoidably limited to enlarging 
>> and en- riching the SAM that was produced by our species with the few 
>> cognitive abilities we were born with? Is it impossible for us to 
>> concoct wholly new types of cognitive abilities — computational 
>> powers that are wholly novel in kind — which in turn could provide us 
>> wholly new kinds of SAM, kinds of SAM that would concern aspects of 
>> physical reality currently beyond our ken?
"Hypercomputation" in this context would be but one example?  Not just 
computing the extra-computable, or effing the ineffable but 
qualitatively new structures that transcend that which we all consider 
to be the limits to our conceptual universe?   This is an area where I 
am hopeful for CT becoming the language that allows us (maybe not me, 
but many people) to express the fullness of what our limited conceptions 
can express so that we *can* recognize where they might be lacking or 
where a meta-construct can be laid atop?
>>
>> 6. Is possible for one species, at one level of the sequence of 
>> {computers run- ning simulations of computers that are running 
>> simulations of ...}, to itself simulate a computer that is higher up 
>> in the sequence that it is?
This might be argumentative or arbitrarily constraining?  You (Glen) 
stated early on that many examples of "hypercomputation" have been 
debunked.   If the very (f)act of human consciousness (individual and 
collective) does not *gesture* toward hypercomputation, then I don't 
know what else would.  I accept that creating controlled (physical or 
thought) experiments in this domain is slippery.   I look forward to 
seeing what comes "next"...   Before Kurt Godel flipped the world of 
math/philosophy, I don't think Russel/Whitehead (or much anyone else) 
had a hint that there was something beyond the "boundaries" of knowledge 
they had circumscribed around themselves?
>>
>> 7. Is the very form of the SAM that we humans have created severely 
>> con- strained? So constrained as to suggest that the cognitive 
>> abilities of us hu- mans — those who created that SAM — is also 
>> severely constrained?
this is where I become more interested in the abstractions of "what is 
life?" "what is intelligence?" "what is consciousness"... because at the 
very least those questions look to hop over the limits of "mere 
extrapolation" from what we are most familiar with.   the very terms 
life/intelligence/consciousness may likely be the epitome of those 
constraints?   Deacon's "Teleodynamics" feels to me to be one of those 
terms that might help us peek around the edge of the constraints we 
already have (mostly) given over to?
>>
>> 8. Is this restriction to finite sequences somehow a necessary 
>> feature of any complete formulation of physical reality? Or does it 
>> instead reflect a lim- itation of how we humans can formalize any 
>> aspect of reality, i.e., is it a limitation of our brains?
It does seem to be a limitation of our primary modes of conception of 
"what means reality". Wheeler's Participatory Anthropic Principle 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler#Participatory_Anthropic_Principle> 
rears it's pretty head about  this time?
>>
>> 9. In standard formulations of mathematics, a mathematical proof is a 
>> finite sequence of “well-formed sentences”, each of which is itself a 
>> finite string of symbols. All of mathematics is a set of such proofs. 
>> How would our per- ception of reality differ if, rather than just 
>> finite sequences of finite symbol strings, the mathematics underlying 
>> our conception of reality was expanded to involve infinite sequences, 
>> i.e., proofs which do not reach their conclu- sion in finite time? 
>> Phrased concretely, how would our cognitive abilities change if our 
>> brains could implement, or at least encompass, super-Turing 
>> abilities, sometimes called “hyper-computation” (e.g., as proposed in 
>> com- puters that are on rockets moving arbitrarily close to the speed 
>> of light [1])?  Going further, as we currently conceive of 
>> mathematics, it is possible to em- body all of its theorems, even 
>> those with infinitely long proofs, in a single countably infinite 
>> sequence: the successive digits of Chaitin’s omega [69].  (This is a 
>> consequence of the Church — Turing thesis.) How would mathe- matics 
>> differ from our current conception of it if it were actually an 
>> uncount- ably infinite collection of such countably infinite 
>> sequences rather than just one, a collection which could not be 
>> combined to form a single, countably infinite sequence? Could we ever 
>> tell the difference? Could a being with super-Turing capabilities 
>> tell the difference, even if the Church — Turing thesis is true, and 
>> even if we cannot tell the difference?

Godel Numbering/Church-Turing seem to constrain this ideation pretty 
solidly.   Even though I'm a big fan of Digital Physics ala 
Fredkin/Tofolli/Margoulis  I think their formulation only reinforces 
this constraint?  I'd like to say that I understand Tononi's IIT 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory>well enough 
to judge whether it offers an "end run" around this or not.  More cud to 
gurge and rechew...

I'm also left reflecting on a very strange series of events around 
Penrose where he asserted to me in private correspondence in 1985 that 
"the key to consciousness was in the infinities of a-periodic 
tilings".   This was in response to a simulation I built with Stuart 
Hameroff in 1984 
<https://experts.arizona.edu/en/publications/cellular-automata-in-cytoskeletal-lattices> 
demonstrating how information processing might occur on the surface of 
microtubulin structures (Cytoskeletal Membrane) which were only *mildly* 
non-traditional CA geomotry/topology (sqewed hexagonal local geometry on 
a 13 unit diameter/3-off helical lattice).   He went on *later* (see 
Emperor's New Mind) to invoke Quantum effects, but in 1985 he seemed 
quite adamant that the magic dust of complexity-cum consciousness was in 
aperiodic tilings.   I dismissed this as "one-trick-pony-ism".  I was 
young and naive and arrogant....  now I'm old.  I wish I had engaged. As 
you probably know he and Hameroff climbed into the same bed later 
<https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-consciousness/#PenrHameQuanGravMicr>.


I JUST found this strangely formulated (but recent) tangent to the MT 
aspect of the topic:

    https://www.texaspowerfulsmart.com/tunneling-microscopy/mt-automata-holographyhameroff-watt-smith.html

    https://www.texaspowerfulsmart.com/tunneling-microscopy/the-microtrabecular-lattice-mtl.html

I don't know if any of this offers a possible "end run" around the 
finiteness-problem.


>>
>> Going yet further, what would mathematics be if, rather than 
>> countable sequences of finite symbol strings, it involved uncountable 
>> sequences of such symbol strings? In other words, what if not all 
>> proofs were a dis- crete sequence of well-formed finite sentences, 
>> the successive sentences being indexed by counting integers, but 
>> rather some proofs were contin- uous sequences of sentences, the 
>> successive sentences being indexed by real numbers? Drilling further 
>> into the structure of proofs, what if some of the “well-formed 
>> sentences” occurring in a proof’s sequence of sentences were not a 
>> finite set of symbols, but rather an infinite set of symbols? If each 
>> sentence in a proof consisted of an uncountably infinite set of sym- 
>> bols, and in addition the sentences in the proof were indexed by a 
>> range of real numbers, then (formally speaking) the proof would be a 
>> curve — a one-dimensional object — traversing a two-dimensional 
>> space. Going even further, what would it mean if somehow the proofs 
>> in God’s book [5] were inherently multidimensional objects, not 
>> reducible to linearly ordered sequences of symbols, embedded in a 
>> space of more than two dimensions? 
I'm not sure why the Space Filling Curve conception (e.g. Peano Curve) 
does not map away the arbitrarily high (yet still finite?) idea of "not 
reducible" to a linearly ordered sequence... "?
>> Going further still, as mathematics is currently understood, the 
>> sequence of symbol strings in any proof must, with probability 1, 
>> obey certain con- straints. Proofs are the outcomes of deductive 
>> reasoning, and so certain sequences of symbol strings are 
>> “forbidden”, i.e., assigned probability 0.  However, what if instead 
>> the sequences of mathematics were dynamically generated in a 
>> stochastic process, and therefore unavoidably random, with no 
>> sequence assigned probability 0 [106, 32, 44]? Might that, in fact, 
>> be how our mathematics has been generated? What would it be like to 
>> inhabit a physical universe whose laws could not be represented 
>> unless one used such a mathematics [39, 53, 54]? Might that, in fact, 
>> be the universe that we do inhabit, but due to limitations in our 
>> minds, we cannot even conceive of all that extra stochastic 
>> structure, never mind 
> recognize it?  As a final leap, note that all of the suggested 
> extensions of the form of cur- rent human mathematics just described 
> are themselves presented in terms of ... human mathematics. 
> Embellished with colloquial language, I de- scribed those extensions 
> in terms of the formal concepts of uncountable in- finity, 
> multidimensionality, Turing machines, and stochastic processes, all of 
> which are constructions of human mathematics involving finite sets of 
> finite sequences of symbols. What would a mathematics be like whose 
> very form could not be described using a finite sequence of symbols 
> from a finite alphabet?
And to those of us who (want to believe we) "gesture" at whatever is 
hidden "between" or "beyond" those constraints, where do we find 
traction?   I often defer to the practical bisection that the mighty 
Mississippi river posed to the early European explorers (exploiters).   
If you waited for someone to build a bridge (or ferry service) across 
the river, you would never get around to finding the seven cities of 
gold or the grand canyon or the great salt lake or a route to the 
pacific..  someone had to throw themselves (maybe on a raft or in a 
canoe) into the river and clamber out downstream possibly exhausted, or 
at least a little disoriented on the other side and forge west to "see 
what they could see".  I realize this is a weak analogy in at least one 
way.  On the *other side* the explorers still wore the same deerhide 
mocassins and coonskin caps and weilded their same swords and muskets 
and ate (for a few days anyway) whatever jerky and pemmican they were 
able to keep dry as they crossed.  And they kept their journals in 
notebooks manufactured in the East, writing in French or Spanish or 
English "from the old countries", and told stories using the same old 
idioms (gold and fountains of youth, and dragons and ...) when they got 
back.
>>
>> 10. Is it a lucky coincidence that all of mathematical and physical 
>> reality can be formulated in terms of our current cognitive 
>> abilities, including, in par- ticular, the most sophisticated 
>> cognitive prosthesis we currently possess: human language? Or is it 
>> just that, tautologically, we cannot conceive of any aspects of 
>> mathematical and physical reality that cannot be formulated in terms 
>> of our cognitive capabilities?
REminds me of the bad joke I can never tell right which starts with a 
traveler asking a local how to get to a spot on the other side of a 
natural barrier (river, mountain range, canyon, etc.) and after the 
local tries to pick a route he can describe to the traveler in language 
the traveler can understand without having "been there" he gives up and 
says "well, you just can't get there from here!"  which we agree is 
patently not true.   I get this feeling whilst speaking with (familiars 
of) convincing "mystics" of the caliber of the Dalai Lama or Thich Nat 
Hahn (RIP)...   I feel like these folks have traveled these realms and 
if only I had already been into those realms myself, could I understand 
some of their more nuanced descriptions?
>>
>> 11. Are there cognitive constructs of some sort, as fundamental as 
>> the very idea of questions and answers, that are necessary for 
>> understanding physical re- ality, and that are forever beyond our 
>> ability to even imagine due to the limitations of our brains, just as 
>> the notion of a question is forever beyond a paramecium?
I suspect the answer is in the analogy here...  If we believe that the 
paramecium (or something of similar caliber) made the long climb of 
becoming a complex multicellular multi-organ complex capable of abstract 
language and logic and SAM through a torturous series of intermediate 
evolutionary steps (mutation as well as mashup), then perhaps the "magic 
dust" is (also?) in emergence?   Or if we defer to Bohm or 
Penrose/Hameroff or even our beloved Pearce, then the magic dust is also 
quantum?   I know I'm just kicking the can down the road and under the 
rug here.  Just maundering speculatively.
>>
>> 12. Is there any way that we imagine testing — or at least gaining 
>> insight intowhether our SAM can, in the future, capture all of 
>> physical reality? If not, is there any way of gaining insight into 
>> how much of reality is forever beyond our ability to even conceive 
>> of? In short, what can we ever know about the nature of that which we 
>> cannot conceive of?

I do believe that there is a forward chain of hindsight-about-foresight 
that might well have us (well, not us, but some crazy 
hyper-consciouses/hypercomputable thing) looking back at our 
proto-hyper-consciousness and wondering how we ever missed what was 
dead-obvious to anyone with half a hypercomputing-brain.

All good questions Mr. Wolpert and I look forward to others here 
offering yet-more concise, complete, or at least pithy observations on them!

- Steve

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