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<p>Glen, et al. -</p>
<p>Here is my throwdown...<br>
</p>
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For convenience, the 12 questions are:
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And I hope others will weigh in here...<br>
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<br>
<blockquote type="cite">1. Why is there a major chasm with the
minimal cognitive capabilities necessary for survival by
pre-Holocene hominids on one side, and on the other side, all
those cognitive capabilities that Kurt Gödel, Albert Einstein,
and Ludwig van Beethoven called upon when conjuring their
wonders?
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<p>I have been dancing back and forth across those general
borderlands/shadowlands myself. Kim Stanley Robinson's book
"Shaman" made for an interesting speculation of what it might have
been like to have lived in the early pre-history period... at the
end of the ice-age. The emergence of neolithic technology and
language itself, one easiest to study (for it's persistent record
in the world) and the other quite hard (for it's ephemerality,
especially pre-written record).</p>
<p>My most/best ad-hoc thoughts on this seem to be using the analogy
(maybe more tight than a metaphor) of resonance. In my pursuit
of "what is consciousness, and how might it transcend a single
neural locus such as a human (or other) brain), I have focused a
lot on "holding and manipulating a model of the world" with
"including a model of the self within the model of the world" as
at least 'interesting' and probably deeply salient features of
such (self-other) consciousness. This suggests to me that the
very fundament of what I believe is "consciousness" is self-other
dualistic? Is there something unique about (our familiar form
of) consciousness that requires the self-other duality?<br>
</p>
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c<br>
2. Restricting attention to what are, in some sense, the most
universal of humanity's achievements, the most graphic
demonstrations of our cognitive abilities:
<br>
<br>
Why were we able to construct present-day science and
mathematics, but no other species ever did? Why are we uniquely
able to decipher some features of the Cosmic Baker's hands by
scrutinizing the breadcrumbs that They scattered about the
universe? Why do we have that cognitive ability despite its
fitness costs? Was it some subtle requirement of the ecological
niche in which we were formed — a niche that at first glance
appears rather pedestrian, and certainly does not overtly select
for the ability to construct something like quantum
chronodynamics? Or is our ability a spandrel, to use Gould and
Lewontin’s famous phrase — an evolutionary byproduct of some
other trait? Or is it just a cosmic fluke?
<br>
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<p>I am currently focused on the fact of language, with written
language as a special case and the "language" of made objects
(homo faber) which carry at least a shorthand understanding of
their construction (reverse engineering) with particular focus on
neolithics. If you have the facility with flaking stone to a
bifacial (or better) level, then finding a "clovis point" for
example very likely allows you to create your own, and through (at
the very least) randomized production "errors", the shape (and by
extension function) of the artifact will mutate with every
reproduction. This begs the question of whether the "maker"
might have a mental model of the resulting "tool" outside of the
image of the one in his hand/view and whether such a mental model
would allow an accelerated and *directed* series of changes in
form (with an eye to function). It would seem that "mashups"
would be an easy place to start... just noting the most desired
features of each of 2 artifacts and expressing them both as-best
in a new artifact.</p>
<p>The fitness payout vs the fitness cost, I would claim *is* tool
creation/use... both physical artifacts (e.g. neolithic cutting
tools) and mental constructs (models and logic, no matter how
limited) which could be *shared* (communicated).<br>
</p>
<p>This still leaves a huge leap to quantum chromodynamics, but it
is maybe not unfair to mention that Feynman's virtual particle
diagrams, as an abstraction and as a boundary object went a long
way to broadening the number of people interested in and
able-to-discuss things just above the level of QED.<br>
</p>
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3. Are we really sure that no other species ever constructed
some equivalent of present-day SAM? Are we really sure that no
other apes — or cetaceans or cephalopods — have achieved some
equivalent of our SAM, but an equiva- lent that we are too
limited to perceive?
<br>
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</blockquote>
As with the human archaelogical record, we only have recognizeable
(to our sensibilities) artifacts and preserved (if from another era)
or transported (if from another locale) to apprehend/interpret.
Our own Richard Lowenberg has spent some time studying/<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.richardlowenberg.com/blog/koko-the-gorilla">co-creating
with Koko</a>... his stories expand my idea of interspecies
"communication" in a way that may be responsive (if only mildly) to
this question. I don't know if our current understanding of the
Cetacean or Cephalopod world hints strongly one way or another, but
I'd not be surprised if either/both were to be "dreaming" in
something like SAM as they go about what sometimes seems like
mundane business (singing songs that travel halfway around the world
in one case while changing colors and
flowing/dancing/fiddling-with-stuff in the other).<br>
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4. If the evidence of the uniqueness of our SAM is the
modifications that we, uniquely, have wreaked upon the
terrestrial biosphere, should the question really be why we are
the only species who had the cognitive abilities to construct
our SAM and were able to build upon that understanding, to so
massively re-engineer our environment? To give a simple example,
might some cetaceans even exceed our SAM, but just do not have
the physical bodies that would allow them to exploit that
understanding to re-engineer the biosphere in any way? Should
the focus of the inquiry not be whether we are the only ones who
had the cognitive abilities to construct our cur- rent SAM, but
rather should the focus be expanded, to whether we are the only
ones who had both those abilities and the ancillary physical
abilities (e.g., opposable thumbs) that allowed us to produce
physical evidence of our SAM?
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I do think the physical-evidence is part of it, I also think that
this is an extension of the point of "our sensibilities" and "our
values". Wengrow and Graeber offer good anecdotes in Dawn of
Everything about how the Jesuits and more aptly French Military had
a hard time recognizing the "genius" of the <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondiaronk">Wendat (familiarly
known by the perjorative "Huron") Natives</a>. To re-iterate,
the Cetacea are not obviously equipped to manipulate artifacts in
the world as we recognize them, though the spatiotemporal nature of
their "whalesongs" spread over vast distances of ocean may well
represent something at least as interesting/sophisticated as
Australian Aboriginal Songlines which are also held only
(traditionally) in oral culture (and by definition become "dead" if
they are not constantly "used"). Cephalopods may well be more
"familiar" in their expressions... my knowledge of the current
research with them is dated as well as a bit scant. I am also
interested in the *emergent collective* capabilities that exist
*only* in groups... the obvious area of study are the overtly
eusocial creatures but the human experiment seems rather rife with
(if not dominated by) activities and artifacts which are truly
"standing waves" of information set up and maintained by collectives
of human activity. The Libertarian chide about "Fiat Currency" is
the perfect example, IMO... they insist it is a transient illusion,
but I think it is more like one of Feynman's Virtual Particles at
the very least.<br>
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5. Ancillary abilities or no, are we unavoidably limited to
enlarging and en- riching the SAM that was produced by our
species with the few cognitive abilities we were born with? Is
it impossible for us to concoct wholly new types of cognitive
abilities — computational powers that are wholly novel in kind —
which in turn could provide us wholly new kinds of SAM, kinds of
SAM that would concern aspects of physical reality currently
beyond our ken?
<br>
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</blockquote>
"Hypercomputation" in this context would be but one example? Not
just computing the extra-computable, or effing the ineffable but
qualitatively new structures that transcend that which we all
consider to be the limits to our conceptual universe? This is an
area where I am hopeful for CT becoming the language that allows us
(maybe not me, but many people) to express the fullness of what our
limited conceptions can express so that we *can* recognize where
they might be lacking or where a meta-construct can be laid atop?<br>
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<br>
6. Is possible for one species, at one level of the sequence of
{computers run- ning simulations of computers that are running
simulations of ...}, to itself simulate a computer that is
higher up in the sequence that it is?
<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
This might be argumentative or arbitrarily constraining? You (Glen)
stated early on that many examples of "hypercomputation" have been
debunked. If the very (f)act of human consciousness (individual
and collective) does not *gesture* toward hypercomputation, then I
don't know what else would. I accept that creating controlled
(physical or thought) experiments in this domain is slippery. I
look forward to seeing what comes "next"... Before Kurt Godel
flipped the world of math/philosophy, I don't think Russel/Whitehead
(or much anyone else) had a hint that there was something beyond the
"boundaries" of knowledge they had circumscribed around themselves?<br>
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7. Is the very form of the SAM that we humans have created
severely con- strained? So constrained as to suggest that the
cognitive abilities of us hu- mans — those who created that SAM
— is also severely constrained?
<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
this is where I become more interested in the abstractions of "what
is life?" "what is intelligence?" "what is consciousness"...
because at the very least those questions look to hop over the
limits of "mere extrapolation" from what we are most familiar
with. the very terms life/intelligence/consciousness may likely be
the epitome of those constraints? Deacon's "Teleodynamics" feels
to me to be one of those terms that might help us peek around the
edge of the constraints we already have (mostly) given over to?<br>
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<br>
8. Is this restriction to finite sequences somehow a necessary
feature of any complete formulation of physical reality? Or does
it instead reflect a lim- itation of how we humans can formalize
any aspect of reality, i.e., is it a limitation of our brains?
<br>
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</blockquote>
It does seem to be a limitation of our primary modes of conception
of "what means reality". <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler#Participatory_Anthropic_Principle">Wheeler's
Participatory Anthropic Principle</a> rears it's pretty head
about this time?<br>
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<br>
9. In standard formulations of mathematics, a mathematical proof
is a finite sequence of “well-formed sentences”, each of which
is itself a finite string of symbols. All of mathematics is a
set of such proofs. How would our per- ception of reality differ
if, rather than just finite sequences of finite symbol strings,
the mathematics underlying our conception of reality was
expanded to involve infinite sequences, i.e., proofs which do
not reach their conclu- sion in finite time? Phrased concretely,
how would our cognitive abilities change if our brains could
implement, or at least encompass, super-Turing abilities,
sometimes called “hyper-computation” (e.g., as proposed in com-
puters that are on rockets moving arbitrarily close to the speed
of light [1])? Going further, as we currently conceive of
mathematics, it is possible to em- body all of its theorems,
even those with infinitely long proofs, in a single countably
infinite sequence: the successive digits of Chaitin’s omega
[69]. (This is a consequence of the Church — Turing thesis.)
How would mathe- matics differ from our current conception of it
if it were actually an uncount- ably infinite collection of such
countably infinite sequences rather than just one, a collection
which could not be combined to form a single, countably infinite
sequence? Could we ever tell the difference? Could a being with
super-Turing capabilities tell the difference, even if the
Church — Turing thesis is true, and even if we cannot tell the
difference?
<br>
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<p>Godel Numbering/Church-Turing seem to constrain this ideation
pretty solidly. Even though I'm a big fan of Digital Physics ala
Fredkin/Tofolli/Margoulis I think their formulation only
reinforces this constraint? I'd like to say that I understand <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory">Tononi's
IIT </a>well enough to judge whether it offers an "end run"
around this or not. More cud to gurge and rechew... <br>
</p>
<p>I'm also left reflecting on a very strange series of events
around Penrose where he asserted to me in private correspondence
in 1985 that "the key to consciousness was in the infinities of
a-periodic tilings". This was in response to <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://experts.arizona.edu/en/publications/cellular-automata-in-cytoskeletal-lattices">a
simulation I built with Stuart Hameroff in 1984</a>
demonstrating how information processing might occur on the
surface of microtubulin structures (Cytoskeletal Membrane) which
were only *mildly* non-traditional CA geomotry/topology (sqewed
hexagonal local geometry on a 13 unit diameter/3-off helical
lattice). He went on *later* (see Emperor's New Mind) to invoke
Quantum effects, but in 1985 he seemed quite adamant that the
magic dust of complexity-cum consciousness was in aperiodic
tilings. I dismissed this as "one-trick-pony-ism". I was young
and naive and arrogant.... now I'm old. I wish I had engaged.
As you probably know he and Hameroff <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-consciousness/#PenrHameQuanGravMicr">climbed
into the same bed later</a>.</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>I JUST found this strangely formulated (but recent) tangent to
the MT aspect of the topic:<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.texaspowerfulsmart.com/tunneling-microscopy/mt-automata-holographyhameroff-watt-smith.html"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.texaspowerfulsmart.com/tunneling-microscopy/mt-automata-holographyhameroff-watt-smith.html</a></p>
<p><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.texaspowerfulsmart.com/tunneling-microscopy/the-microtrabecular-lattice-mtl.html"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.texaspowerfulsmart.com/tunneling-microscopy/the-microtrabecular-lattice-mtl.html</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I don't know if any of this offers a possible "end run" around
the finiteness-problem.<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
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<br>
Going yet further, what would mathematics be if, rather than
countable sequences of finite symbol strings, it involved
uncountable sequences of such symbol strings? In other words,
what if not all proofs were a dis- crete sequence of well-formed
finite sentences, the successive sentences being indexed by
counting integers, but rather some proofs were contin- uous
sequences of sentences, the successive sentences being indexed
by real numbers? Drilling further into the structure of proofs,
what if some of the “well-formed sentences” occurring in a
proof’s sequence of sentences were not a finite set of symbols,
but rather an infinite set of symbols? If each sentence in a
proof consisted of an uncountably infinite set of sym- bols, and
in addition the sentences in the proof were indexed by a range
of real numbers, then (formally speaking) the proof would be a
curve — a one-dimensional object — traversing a two-dimensional
space. Going even further, what would it mean if somehow the
proofs in God’s book [5] were inherently multidimensional
objects, not reducible to linearly ordered sequences of symbols,
embedded in a space of more than two dimensions? </blockquote>
</blockquote>
I'm not sure why the Space Filling Curve conception (e.g. Peano
Curve) does not map away the arbitrarily high (yet still finite?)
idea of "not reducible" to a linearly ordered sequence... "?<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:9fb87efe-e014-c6bb-87ae-cfaccd0ca2af@gmail.com">
<blockquote type="cite">Going further still, as mathematics is
currently understood, the sequence of symbol strings in any
proof must, with probability 1, obey certain con- straints.
Proofs are the outcomes of deductive reasoning, and so certain
sequences of symbol strings are “forbidden”, i.e., assigned
probability 0. However, what if instead the sequences of
mathematics were dynamically generated in a stochastic process,
and therefore unavoidably random, with no sequence assigned
probability 0 [106, 32, 44]? Might that, in fact, be how our
mathematics has been generated? What would it be like to inhabit
a physical universe whose laws could not be represented unless
one used such a mathematics [39, 53, 54]? Might that, in fact,
be the universe that we do inhabit, but due to limitations in
our minds, we cannot even conceive of all that extra stochastic
structure, never mind </blockquote>
recognize it? As a final leap, note that all of the suggested
extensions of the form of cur- rent human mathematics just
described are themselves presented in terms of ... human
mathematics. Embellished with colloquial language, I de- scribed
those extensions in terms of the formal concepts of uncountable
in- finity, multidimensionality, Turing machines, and stochastic
processes, all of which are constructions of human mathematics
involving finite sets of finite sequences of symbols. What would a
mathematics be like whose very form could not be described using a
finite sequence of symbols from a finite alphabet?
<br>
</blockquote>
And to those of us who (want to believe we) "gesture" at whatever is
hidden "between" or "beyond" those constraints, where do we find
traction? I often defer to the practical bisection that the mighty
Mississippi river posed to the early European explorers
(exploiters). If you waited for someone to build a bridge (or
ferry service) across the river, you would never get around to
finding the seven cities of gold or the grand canyon or the great
salt lake or a route to the pacific.. someone had to throw
themselves (maybe on a raft or in a canoe) into the river and
clamber out downstream possibly exhausted, or at least a little
disoriented on the other side and forge west to "see what they could
see". I realize this is a weak analogy in at least one way. On the
*other side* the explorers still wore the same deerhide mocassins
and coonskin caps and weilded their same swords and muskets and ate
(for a few days anyway) whatever jerky and pemmican they were able
to keep dry as they crossed. And they kept their journals in
notebooks manufactured in the East, writing in French or Spanish or
English "from the old countries", and told stories using the same
old idioms (gold and fountains of youth, and dragons and ...) when
they got back. <br>
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10. Is it a lucky coincidence that all of mathematical and
physical reality can be formulated in terms of our current
cognitive abilities, including, in par- ticular, the most
sophisticated cognitive prosthesis we currently possess: human
language? Or is it just that, tautologically, we cannot conceive
of any aspects of mathematical and physical reality that cannot
be formulated in terms of our cognitive capabilities?
<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
REminds me of the bad joke I can never tell right which starts with
a traveler asking a local how to get to a spot on the other side of
a natural barrier (river, mountain range, canyon, etc.) and after
the local tries to pick a route he can describe to the traveler in
language the traveler can understand without having "been there" he
gives up and says "well, you just can't get there from here!" which
we agree is patently not true. I get this feeling whilst speaking
with (familiars of) convincing "mystics" of the caliber of the Dalai
Lama or Thich Nat Hahn (RIP)... I feel like these folks have
traveled these realms and if only I had already been into those
realms myself, could I understand some of their more nuanced
descriptions?<br>
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<br>
11. Are there cognitive constructs of some sort, as fundamental
as the very idea of questions and answers, that are necessary
for understanding physical re- ality, and that are forever
beyond our ability to even imagine due to the limitations of our
brains, just as the notion of a question is forever beyond a
paramecium?
<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
I suspect the answer is in the analogy here... If we believe that
the paramecium (or something of similar caliber) made the long climb
of becoming a complex multicellular multi-organ complex capable of
abstract language and logic and SAM through a torturous series of
intermediate evolutionary steps (mutation as well as mashup), then
perhaps the "magic dust" is (also?) in emergence? Or if we defer
to Bohm or Penrose/Hameroff or even our beloved Pearce, then the
magic dust is also quantum? I know I'm just kicking the can down
the road and under the rug here. Just maundering speculatively.<br>
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12. Is there any way that we imagine testing — or at least
gaining insight intowhether our SAM can, in the future, capture
all of physical reality? If not, is there any way of gaining
insight into how much of reality is forever beyond our ability
to even conceive of? In short, what can we ever know about the
nature of that which we cannot conceive of?
<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p>I do believe that there is a forward chain of
hindsight-about-foresight that might well have us (well, not us,
but some crazy hyper-consciouses/hypercomputable thing) looking
back at our proto-hyper-consciousness and wondering how we ever
missed what was dead-obvious to anyone with half a
hypercomputing-brain.</p>
<p>All good questions Mr. Wolpert and I look forward to others here
offering yet-more concise, complete, or at least pithy
observations on them!</p>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
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