[FRIAM] Wolpert - discussion thread placeholder

[Prof David West]

Regarding Wolpert's first four questions:

In my opinion, all four reflect a kind of arrogance that I have accused Scientists and Mathematicians of many times in the past—an attitude that modern formal and abstract math and science are a kind of ultimate achievement of our species. Any and all other forms/means of understanding are discounted or denied. This is analogous to the arrogance of Simon and Newell (mentioned previously) that a machine that thought like a university professor was necessarily intelligent.

Ignored in the AI instance is the learning ability of a new born child. Ignored in the case of SAM is the very real Science and Mathematics exhibited by our species beginning in the Neolithic. Metallurgy, agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, weaving, cooking, food preservation, etc.

Levi-Strauss writes extensively of two different kinds of science: concrete and abstract; the former grounded in perception and imagination, the latter divorced from same.  The object of all science is connections and explanations and based on experimentation and empirical evidence, but "concrete science" relies far more heavily on sensible intuition and not formal "proof."

SAM, for Wolpert, seems to be restricted to the that which came into being the past few hundred years. This fetish makes questions like—"Why do we have that cognitive ability despite its fitness costs?"—somewhat nonsensical. What fitness costs? Mutually assured destruction with nuclear weapons?" Certainly there were no evolutionary fitness costs; and, in fact, those cognitive abilities were essential and the prime mover of our species out of the neolithic.

A more reasonable question is what caused a small subset of our species to 'go beserk' and take a subset of the SAM that served our species so well for so long, to such abstract extremes? An answer might be found, and is argued, in the Ian McGilchrist works on recent  "left-brained" dominance. [left-brain is such a limited shorthand for what McGilchrist argues in some 700 pages of prose, that I am trepedatious  using it lest it evoke the wrong headed popularization of the notion.]

If we ignore the aberrant contemporary SAM and ask if we can find evidence that other species, e.g., cephalopods and cetaceans, have an equivalent to the concrete SAM that was widespread among our own species as far back as the neolithic. The answer is yes. Tool making, modification of environment, herding, even quasi-domestication of other species can be found.

The cognitive abilities of dolphins and octopi (et. al.) are well documented and include language, reasoning, knowledge of spatial relationships, planning, and even (when given LSD (famously the research by John Lilly with dolphins and more recently with octopi), altered states. There is little, or no, reason not to assume them to be SAM-sufficient for their environments and needs, just as humans were prior to, roughly, the Renaissance.

to be continued ...

davew


On Mon, Sep 12, 2022, at 6:29 AM, glen∉ℂ wrote:
> My question of how well we can describe graph-based ... what? ... 
> "statements"? "theorems"? Whatever. It's treated fairly well in List's 
> paper:
>
> Levels of Description and Levels of Reality: A General Framework by 
> Christian List
> http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21103/
>
> in section "6.3 Indexical versus non-indexical and first-personal 
> versus third-personal descriptions". We tend to think of the 3rd person 
> graph of possible worlds/states as if it's more universal ... a 
> complete representation of the world. But there's something captured by 
> the index/control-pointer *walking* some graph, with or without a 
> scoping on how many hops away the index/subjective-locus can "see".
>
> I liken this to Dave's (and Frank's to some extent) consistent 
> insistence that one's inner life is a valid thing in the world, Dave 
> w.r.t. psychedelics and meditation and Frank's defense of things like 
> psychodynamics. Wolpert seems to be suggesting a "deserialization" of 
> the graph when he focuses on "finite sequences of elements from a 
> finite set of symbols". I.e. walking the graph with the index at a 
> given node. With the 3rd person ... whole graph of graphs, the 
> serialization of that bushy thing can only produce an infinitely long 
> sequence of elements from a (perhaps) infinte set. Is the bushiness 
> *dense* (greater than countable, as Wolpert asks)? Or sparse?
>
> I'm sure I'm not wording all this well. But that's why I'm glad y'all 
> are participating, to help clarify these things.
>
> On 9/12/22 06:13, glen∉ℂ wrote:
>> While math can represent circular definitions (what Robert Rosen complained about), there are deep problems in the foundations of math ... things like the iterative conception of sets ... that are attempts to do what Wolpert asks for in the later questions. And it's unclear to me that commutative categories reduce to "finite sequences of elements from a finite set", prolly 'cause I'm just ignorant. But diagrammatic loops in graphs don't look to me like finite sequences.
>
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