[FRIAM] Wolpert - discussion thread placeholder

[Steve Smith]

Responding first to Marcus point:

    "I think there will be a transition toward a more advanced form of
    life, but I don’t think there will be a clear connection between how
    they think and how humans think.  Human culture won’t be important
    to how they scale, but may be relevant to a bootstrap."

I believe we are "in transition" toward a more advanced form of life, 
though it is hard to demarcate any particular beginning of that 
transition.  The post/trans-humanists among us often seem to have a 
utopian/dystopian urge about all this that I am resistant to. Kotler's 
<https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/10960.Steven_Kotler> works 
(Abundance, Rise of the Superman, Tomorrowland, Art of the impossible, 
etc.) are representative of this genre, but since I know him also to be 
a grounded, thoughtful, compassionate person, I try hard to listen 
between the lines of what normally reads to me as egoist utopian 
fantasy.   His works are always well researched and he's fairly good at 
being clear what is speculation and what is fact in his 
writing/reporting, even though his bias is still a very techno-utopian 
optimism.

I really liked Spike Jonze movie "Her" 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)> as a compassionate-utopian 
story of a fairly abrupt AI transition/emergence ...  a fantasy by any 
measure of course, but an interesting twist on compassionate abandonment 
by our "children".

With Glen's re-statements, I found specifically the following:

Simulation in place of Symbols -  I don't know all that Marcus intended 
or Glen imputes with this but I think it might be very important in some 
fundamental way.  I wonder at the possibility that this fits into Glen's 
stuck-bit about "episodic" vs "diachronic" identity (and experience?) modes.

I haven't been able to parse the following very completely and look 
forward to more discussion?

    - percolation from concrete, participative, perceptual intuition and
    imagination (or perhaps the inverse, a wandering from
    abstract/formal *toward* embodiment as we see with the rise of GANs,
    zero-shot, and online learning AI)

and in fact, all of these as well... good stuff.


    - a more heterarchical, high-dimensional, or high-order
    understanding of "fitness costs" - fitness of fitnesses
    - holes or dense regions in a taxonomy of SAMs - including my
    favorite: cross-species mind-reading
    - game-theoretic (infinite and meta-gaming) logics of cognition
    (including simulation of simulation and fitness of fitnesses)

I introduced "deictec error" because I think it is maybe core to *my* 
struggles with this whole topic, so I'm glad Glen referenced it, and 
also look forward to possibly more discussion of that in regard to the rest.

- Steve


On 9/16/22 10:25 AM, glen∉ℂ wrote:
> I do see us trying to identify the distinguishing markers of ... 
> "cognition we can't imagine". That's fantastic. I'll try to collate 
> some of them going backwards from Marcus':
>
> - novelty - dissimilarity from "cognition as we know it"
> - graded separation from human culture/sociality
> - simulation in place of symbols (I failed to come up with a better 
> phrase)
> - accelerated look-ahead
> - percolation from concrete, participative, perceptual intuition and 
> imagination (or perhaps the inverse, a wandering from abstract/formal 
> *toward* embodiment as we see with the rise of GANs, zero-shot, and 
> online learning AI)
> - a more heterarchical, high-dimensional, or high-order understanding 
> of "fitness costs" - fitness of fitnesses
> - holes or dense regions in a taxonomy of SAMs - including my 
> favorite: cross-species mind-reading
> - game-theoretic (infinite and meta-gaming) logics of cognition 
> (including simulation of simulation and fitness of fitnesses)
>
> It seems like all these are attempts to at least circumscribe what we 
> can know about what we can imagine. And if so, it's like a convex hull 
> beyond which is what we can't imagine. I wanted to place "deictic 
> error" in there. But it seems to apply to several of the other 
> categories. In particular, part of Dave and SteveS' irritation with 
> the arrogance of abstraction is that symbols only ever *hook* to their 
> groundings. Logics over those symbols may or may not preserve the 
> grounding. Like the rather obvious idiocy of classical logic 
> suggesting that anything can be concluded from inconsistent premises. 
> When/if an entity can fully replace all shunted/truncated symbols with 
> (perhaps participatory) simulations, it might reach the tight coupling 
> with the simulated (possible) worlds in the same way Dave implies we 
> couple tightly (concretely) with our (actual) world.
>
>
> On 9/15/22 21:16, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> I think there will be a transition toward a more advanced form of 
>> life, but I don’t think there will be a clear connection between how 
>> they think and how humans think.  Human culture won’t be important to 
>> how they scale, but may be relevant to a bootstrap.  I would be 
>> surprised if compression, deconstruction, and reductionism went 
>> unused by this species.  I would be surprised if such a species would 
>> struggle with quantification.   I would also be surprised if they did 
>> not use simulation in place of symbols.   I think they will have 
>> dreams of entire human lives, of the rise and fall of nations, and 
>> regard our aspirations like I regard my dog dreaming of her 
>> encounters at the park.
>>
>>> On Sep 15, 2022, at 4:11 PM, Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> 
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> 
>>> Just to be clear, I have zero antipathy towards Wolpert or his 
>>> efforts at steelmanning. I think Wolpert does an excellent job of 
>>> phrasing as questions what I perceive "Scientists" and 
>>> "Computationalists" to merely assert as Truth. I have long tilted at 
>>> that particular windmill and I applaud Wolpert, and glen for 
>>> bringing him to our attention, for exposing the assertions such that 
>>> counter arguments might be made.
>>>
>>> And when it comes to "computationalism" and AI; I know it is not the 
>>> 1970s and things have "advanced" significantly. And although I do 
>>> not comprehend the details as well as most of you, I do understand 
>>> sufficiently, I believe, to advance the claim that they are 
>>> suffering from the exact same blind spot (with variable details) as 
>>> Simon and Newell, et. al. who championed GOFAI. Plus you all have 
>>> heard of Simon and Newell but most of you are unfamiliar with 
>>> McGilchrist and similar contemporary critics.
>>>
>>> My antipathy toward "Scientists" and "Computationalists" arises from 
>>> what I perceive as an absolute refusal to credit any science, math, 
>>> or ways/means of acquiring/expressing knowledge and understanding 
>>> other than theirs. Dismissing neolithic and pre-modern science is 
>>> one example. Failing to acknowledge the intelligence (and probably 
>>> SAM) of other species—especially octopi—simply because they do not 
>>> build atomic bombs or computers, is another.
>>>
>>> A really good book that would inform a discussion of Wolpert's 
>>> questions, #4 in particular, is: /Other Minds: The Octopus, the sea, 
>>> and the deep origins of consciousness/, by Peter Godfrey-Smith.  A 
>>> blurb follows.
>>>
>>> /Although mammals and birds are widely regarded as the smartest 
>>> creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant 
>>> branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: 
>>> the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above 
>>> all the octopus. In captivity, octopuses have been known to identify 
>>> individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for food, turn off 
>>> light bulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains, and make daring 
>>> escapes. How is it that a creature with such gifts evolved through 
>>> an evolutionary lineage so radically distant from our own? What does 
>>> it mean that evolution built minds not once but at least twice? The 
>>> octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. 
>>> What can we learn from the encounter? /
>>>
>>> davew
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Sep 15, 2022, at 12:22 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>> >>There is some kind of diectic error in our response.
>>> >
>>> > Korrekshun - "deictic"
>
>
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