[FRIAM] Wolpert - discussion thread placeholder

Sat Sep 17 13:29:39 EDT 2022

On 9/16/22 12:44 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Given the how normal extreme inequality is, probably the they/us 
> distinction is already happening.  Technology could accelerate it, 
> though.
I think we are in agreement.   Technology *has* increased it... 
technology *IS* the basis of the increase.  It is not that homo sapiens 
is evolving, but rather our extended phenotype is. Whatever evolutionary 
event(s) equipped us to significantly extend our phenotype... (all 
toolmaking/using) and then to do it *collectively* (readin', 'ritin, 
'rithmatik) started this.
> Some people will have direct and indirect cognitive assists, some will 
> have designer babies and some won’t, etc.
And of course, the relatively new ability to modify the genome 
*directly* is yet another significant qualitative change in this. 
Selective breeding is probably at least as old in humans as it is in 
domestic animals.  I believe Sarbajit has spoken to this from his own 
personal heritage.
>  Over a few generations we might not really recognize one another.
We already have a hard time "recognizing one another" *without* any more 
technological enhancement than shared language, basic literacy, advanced 
education, access to advanced materials and tooling, economics as our 
"differences".    A great deal of our inability to "recognize one 
another", however seems to be a form of willful ignorance/ignorant 
willfulness...  and that I believe is something of a choice... not a 
simple one...   but a choice... a personal one and a (sub)cultural 
one.   In principle, I think this is the fundamental feature that 
distinguishes the "conservative" from the "liberal" in the US... maybe 
throughout the West (or across all "advanced civilizations")?
>  Whether that is utopian or dystopian or neither is subjective.

To "nationalists" and other stylizations of "chauvanists" it (inability 
to recognize one another) is likely utopian, to those 
seeking/celebrating diversity and inclusion it seems more complex.   The 
Nazis seemed to believe that the only way for humanity to move forward 
was to dominate and then exterminate everyone who didn't fit their 
narrow definition of "the ubermenchen".

In the spirit of "might makes right",  I am highly mistrustful of the 
"might" of technological leverage.   While I often present as a full-on 
luddite, those of you who know me well, also recognize that I've got a 
strong substrate of techno-utopian as the backdrop for that.  I can 
hardly hear of a new technology without getting excited at "all the ways 
this could make lives more better, or at least undermine the arbitrarily 
large suite of insults that we currently endure.   Unfortunately many of 
these are the unintended consequence of a previous turn of this very 
same crank and to turn the crank another time is to risk the Red Queen 
paradox, turning the crank faster and faster, just to keep ahead of the 
unintended consequences nipping at our heels (dragging us down and 
eating us).

So the (a) question is if it is "inevitable", how do we exercise our own 
agency to find our way through this rapidly changing landscape?  Do I 
defer to the Kurzweils/Diamandis/Musks to "lead me" into that landscape 
(and more to the point, push my grand/children forward into it)?  Who 
might I seek out who has a better vantage than I in such navigations?

My latest candidates for hints in this direction include Dietrich 
Bonhoeffer (anti-nazi theologian) and James Bridle 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bridle#cite_note-5> (contemporary 
artist/writer)

- Steve

PS.   Or is the landscape metaphor flawed?  I only see a "hellride" in 
the Zelazny-Amber sense...  riding across a multiverse manifold 
stretched roughly between the poles of Logos and Chaos?   probably an 
image only DaveW and Glen have references for?

>
>> On Sep 16, 2022, at 10:31 AM, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>>
>> 
>>
>> 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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