[FRIAM] the inequities of uniquity
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Fri Mar 22 13:26:11 EDT 2024
Expositions and Explanations of Exemplifications
/Apologies for the inline/included images, I tried (and failed) to
link them from my google-docs/AI-Hallucinations folder and failed...
I will try to work that out before loading down the remailer and
your inboxes in the future./
I fed Guerin's GPT discussion of the into my own instance of GPT4 and
asked it to try to generate an image representing the concepts under
discussion. True to form (in my experience), GPT reported that DALL-E
failed at the effort based on conflicting with content policies. When I
asked for clarification on which aspects of the prompt or content
policies were at odds, it apologized and revised it's analysis to be
essentially "too complex" so I then asked it to rephrase the discussion
to be within it's capacity. It responded by dumbing it down a lot to
essentially hyperspherical space time. I asked it to try to render
with the TIQM concepts included and it came up with this:
As with many of it's imaginings, I find the representations highly
notional and not particularly helpful for explanation or exposition.
The "cosmic" backdrop is somewhat specious to me, but not surprising
when I think of the imagery it was likely trained on.
I then asked it to replace TIQM with Wheeler-Feynman and it choked
again, citing over-complexity, at which point I asked for the following:
ME: let's reduce the conception to a space-time hypersphere with where
causality extends in all temporal directions, allowing for a more
holistic understanding of interactions at the quantum level. In this
framework, the concept of time is not a barrier but a connective fabric
that binds the cosmos in a complex web of cause and effect,
which then yielded the following:
I found this more interesting and relevant to my own conception but
again not particularly explanatory nor expository. I like the
"connective fabric" gesture but feel like the idea itself was a little
specious in the first place?
At this point I thought of DaveW and asked it to convolve the former
with a conception of the Vedic "Indra's Net" which we have summarized
here before as "all contextualizes all" which yielded the following.
I don't find the invocation of a "web of jewels" to be particularly
helpful for the most part, but can see how in the culture(s) it arose
from it was a motivated image or metaphor to work with. I do like the
idea that the "net" itself is not necessarily the tension-compression of
physical connections but more like optical/light paths with the "nodes"
or "Jewels" being reflectors/refractors of the information
"resonating". Again, words fail. As do images. Oh well.
Attempting to make this at least a little relevant to Glen's latest
point I can only re-invoke the generalization 'all contextualizes all"
which I suppose reduces to something even more trite than the new-age
renderings above?
> Prompt:
> Express a unique concept. Make it as profound as possible
>
> https://chat.openai.com/share/649bd4ca-f856-451e-83a2-01fc2cfe47fb
>
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 22, 2024, 6:50 AM glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I guess the question returns to one's criteria for assuming
> decoupling between the very [small|fast] and the very
> [large|slow]. Or in this case, the inner vs. the outer:
>
> Susie Alegre on how digital technology undermines free thought
> https://freethinker.co.uk/2024/03/interview-susie-alegre/
>
> It would be reasonable for Frank to argue that we can generate the
> space of possible context definitions, inductively, from the set
> of token definitions, much like an LLM might. Ideally, you could
> then measure the expressiveness of those inferred
> contexts/languages and choose the largest (most complete; by
> induction, each context/language *should* be self-consistent so we
> shouldn't have to worry about that).
>
> And if that's how things work (I'm not saying it is), then those
> "attractors" with the finest granularity (very slow to emerge,
> very resistant to dissolution) would be the least novel. Novelty
> (uniqueness) might then be defined in terms of fragility, short
> half-life, missable opportunity. But that would also argue that
> novelty is either less *real* or that the
> universe/context/language is very *open* and the path from fragile
> to robust obtains like some kind of Hebbian reinforcement, use it
> or lose it, win the hearts and minds or dissipate to nothing.
>
> I.e. there is no such thing as free thought. Thought can't
> decouple from social manipulation.
>
> On 3/21/24 13:38, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> > In the LLM example, completions from some starting state or
> none, have specific probabilities. An incomplete yet-unseen
> (unique) utterance would be completed based on prior probabilities
> of individual tokens.
> >
> > I agree that raw materialist uniqueness won't necessarily or
> often override constraints of a situation. For example, if an
> employer instructs an employee how to put a small, lightweight
> product in a box, label it, and send it to a customer by UPS, the
> individual differences metabolism of the employees aren't likely
> to matter much when shipping more small, lightweight objects to
> other customers. It could be the case for a professor and
> student too. The attractors come from the instruction or the
> curriculum. One choice constrains the next.
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
> > Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2024 11:50 AM
> > To: friam at redfish.com
> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the inequities of uniquity
> >
> > I was arguing with that same friend yesterday at the pub. I was
> trying to describe how some of us have more cognitive power than
> others (he's one of them). Part of it is "free" power, freed up by
> his upper middle class white good diet privilege. But if we allow
> that some of it might be genetic, then that's a starting point for
> deciding when novelty matters to the ephemerides of two otherwise
> analogical individuals (or projects if projects have an analog to
> genetics). Such things are well-described in twin studies. One
> twin suffers some PTSD the other doesn't and ... boom ... their
> otherwise lack of uniqueness blossoms into uniqueness.
> >
> > His objection was that even identical twins are not identical.
> They were already unique ... like the Pauli Exclusion Principle or
> somesuch nonsense. Even though it's a bit of a ridiculous
> argument, I could apply it to your sense of avoiding non-novel
> attractors. No 2 attractors will be identical. And no 1 attractor
> will be unique. So those are moot issues. Distinctions without
> differences, maybe. Woit's rants are legendary. But some of us
> find happiness in wasteful sophistry.
> >
> > What matters is *how* things are the same and how they differ.
> Their qualities and values (nearly) orthogonal to novelty.
> >
> >
> > On 3/21/24 11:29, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> >> If GPT systems capture some sense of "usual" context based on
> trillions of internet tokens, and that corpus is regarded
> approximately "global context", then it seems not so objectionable
> to call "unusual", new training items that contribute to
> fine-tuning loss.
> >>
> >> It seems reasonable to worry that ubiquitous GPT systems reduce
> social entropy by encouraging copying instead of new thinking, but
> it could also have the reverse effect: If I am immediately aware
> that an idea is not novel, I may avoid attractors that agents that
> wrongly believe they are "independent" will gravitate toward.
> >>
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
> >> Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2024 7:49 AM
> >> To: friam at redfish.com
> >> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the inequities of uniquity
> >>
> >> A friend of mine constantly reminds me that language is
> dynamic, not fixed in stone from a billion years ago. So, if you
> find others consistently using a term in a way that you think is
> wrong, then *you* are wrong in what you think. The older I get,
> the more difficult it gets.
> >>
> >> But specifically, the technical sense of "unique" is
> vanishingly rare ... so rare as to be merely an ideal,
> unverifiable, nowhere, non-existent. So if the "unique" is
> imaginary, unreal, and doesn't exist, why not co-opt it for a more
> useful, banal purpose? Nothing is actually unique. So we'll use
> the token "unique" to mean (relatively) rare.
> >>
> >> And "unusual" is even worse. Both tokens require one to
> describe the context, domain, or universe within which the
> discussion is happening. If you don't define your context, then
> the "definitions" you provide for the components of that context
> are not even wrong; they're nonsense. "Unusual" implies a usual.
> And a usual implies a perspective ... a mechanism of action for
> your sampling technique. So "unusual" presents even more of a
> linguistic *burden* than "unique".
> >>
> >> On 3/20/24 13:14, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> >>> What's wrong with "unusual"? It avoids the problem.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 1:55 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com
> <mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com>> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> I'm hung up on the usage of qualified "uniqueness" as
> well, but in perhaps the opposite sense.
> >>>>
> >>>> I agree with the premise that "unique" in it's purest,
> simplest form does seem to be inherently singular. On the other
> hand, this mal(icious) propensity of qualifying uniqueness
> (uniqueish?) is so common, that I have to believe there is a
> concept there which people who use those terms are reaching for.
> They are not wrong to reach for it, just annoying in the label
> they choose?
> >>>>
> >>>> I had a round with GPT4 trying to discuss this, not
> because I think LLMs are the authority on *anything* but rather
> because the discussions I have with them can help me brainstorm my
> way around ideas with the LLM nominally representing "what a lot
> of people say" (if not think). Careful prompting seems to be
> able to help narrow down *all people* (in the training data) to
> different/interesting subsets of *lots of people* with certain
> characteristics.
> >>>>
> >>>> GPT4 definitely wanted to allow for a wide range of
> gradated, speciated, spectral uses of "unique" and gave me plenty
> of commonly used examples which validates my position that "for
> something so obviously/technically incorrect, it sure is used a lot!"
> >>>>
> >>>> We discussed uniqueness in the context of evolutionary
> biology and cladistics and homology and homoplasy. We discussed
> it in terms of cluster analysis. We discussed the distinction
> between objective and subjective, absolute and relative.
> >>>>
> >>>> The closest thing to a conclusion I have at the moment is:
> >>>>
> >>>> 1. Most people do and will continue to treat
> "uniqueness" as a relative/spectral/subjective qualifier.
> >>>> 2. Many people like Frank and myself (half the time)
> will have an allergic reaction to this usage.
> >>>> 3. The common (mis)usage might be attributable to
> conflating "unique" with "distinct"?
> >
>
>
> --
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>
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