[FRIAM] From Merle--AI News

[Steve Smith]

glen wrote:
> IDK. The implication that we already have laws that cover (80%?) of 
> the use cases for new tech we, as a society, want to discourage, is a 
> good default. It resists the "there ought to be a law" sensibility 
> held by old people and curmudgeons everywhere. And it keeps our legal 
> system a little more adaptive than it would be were we to burden it 
> with even more persnickety case-by-case rulings.
>
>
I share your feeling that "there oughtta be a law!" is a red-herring, 
though I don't know about it being that tightly coupled with "old 
people"...  my experience is that people whose experiences and 
sensibilities which are much different from mine are more apt to express 
those sentiments, but I think this related to confirmation bias.  If 
they are shaking their fist with "there oughtta be a law!" sentiments 
about something I feel the same way about it goes right past me, but if 
it is somehow "off" from my alignments it grates.   I find young people 
(when I was in HS, my civics/history/government/etc classes were filled 
with them) full of the more egregious phrase "that's ILLEGAL!" in place 
of "that OFFENDS ME!".   I try to hear "there oughtta be a law" as 
pining for a new and relevant heuristic where the old one(s) don't work 
(well)?


> The point being that behaviorism is insidious. You are not a shallow 
> narrative comprising Instagram "stories" in the same way ChatGPT is 
> not an organism. But it's not merely behaviorism. There's a similar 
> problem with the concept of an integrated personality 
> <https://dictionary.apa.org/integration>.

I identify as a self-organized/ing complex adaptive system coupled with 
other complex systems in such a way as to be an all-subsuming (read 
panpsychic) system of systems (nearly-decomposable in Herb Simon's 
sensibilites).   Or in Schwietzer's sensibilities: "I am life which 
wills to live amongst life which wills to live".   Does the biosphere of 
Earth "will to live"? (and in the image of Gaia, does it nurture us, or 
in the image of Medea, does it seek to shed itself of the blight which 
is us?)   How about the solar system or the galaxies or galactic 
clusters?   Maybe not even as much as a jellyfish or an amoeba does... 
but not less than a grain of sand or am molecule or an interstellar photon?

Depending on the focus/locus of my awareness in a given moment, I am 
likely identified differently... like whether I'm having coffee with an 
old friend, looking through a telescope or microscope, or blathering on 
on FriAM...   an analog to glen's "homunculii"?   I think I can be 
episodic and diachronic, or is it only an episodic identity who can 
actually imagine both while diachronics are forever shut off from the 
experience of being episodic?  Or is it an illusion like "free will" 
(pervasive and undeniable, yet nevertheless an illusion)?

Is this not the point of holidays like Juneteenth (not formed but maybe 
exploited by Hallmark?), to focus our awareness (and therefore 
identity?) on a subset of "life which wills to live" that we normally do 
not (fathers day, juneteenth, independence day, thanksgiving, new years, 
etc.)?