[FRIAM] A* and emulatoin
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Mon Jun 27 12:54:46 EDT 2022
I appreciate your addition of the 'M' to the *-match and want to remind
myself out loud in front of you that I once (and maybe should again)
preferred *synthetic* to *artificial*.... in the early days of VR,
"Artificial Reality" was in the running as a term, but I felt *Synthetic
Reality* carried the assertive sense of intentionality. "Artificial"
felt more passive... an artifact of a willful creation with "Synthetic"
feeling closer to the dynamic act of *synthesizing*. And of course now
(maybe not then), the spirit OF a mashup vs a whole-cloth thing comes
through with "Synthetic". This of course before I came to learn the
terms artifice and artificer in this context.
Is "Ethics" not in some sense *artificed* or *constructed* morality? I
don't know, it is definitely an interesting tangent to all the other
tangents that we tangent on here (tangentially). As an aside, does a
tangent of a tangent (of a tangent) imply higher and higher derivatives,
it seems like it is precisely that?! but in what dimension?
On 6/27/22 4:16 PM, glen wrote:
> Thanks very much for that link to mental contagion. It targets a
> number of problems I have with intersubjectivity, even if the author's
> nowhere near as skeptical as I think they should be. >8^D
>
> I drafted and deleted a response to Marcus' point about simple or
> high-order prediction. My draft targeted the distinction between
> [si|e]mulation more directly than yours. But yours homesteads a much
> more aggressive territory. (Tangentially, one of the A*'s I've been
> most interested in lately is AM - artificial morality. It turns out
> that simulation has a huge role to play in spoofing biases.)
>
> I intended to end that deleted post with my old rant about the (lack
> of a) difference between verification and validation ... a standard
> pedantic stance of gray bearded simulationists. I was once laughed out
> of the room at an SCS meeting for suggesting they're foundationally
> the same thing. Pffft!
>
> But all this hearkens back to the long-running thread on
> [in|ex]tensional attributes and the ontological status of their
> distinction. When is mimicry sufficient and when is "from whole cloth"
> necessary? As someone quipped re: Lemoine's attribution of sentience
> to LaMDA, "I have met meat Beings I consider less than sentient."
>
> On 6/25/22 23:55, Steve Smith wrote:
>> This is what made it through my semi-permeable filter-bubble membrane
>> first thing this morning (CET):
>>
>> https://theconversation.com/googles-powerful-ai-spotlights-a-human-cognitive-glitch-mistaking-fluent-speech-for-fluent-thought-185099
>>
>>
>> which became grist for the mill we have been grinding with here of
>> late. It highlights interesting things like how flawed (but useful?)
>> the Turing Test is. The TT represents precisely "the glitch". I
>> think this idea points in the general direction of conscious
>> empathy... if we recognize language fluency *as* mental fluency,
>> then it is more obvious that we would grant others who present
>> language fluency as being similar to ourselves, possibly assuming
>> that "other" is closer to "not other" simply because of the familiar
>> language that flows out of us.
>>
>> In my (limited) EU travels this season I have heard only a half-dozen
>> languages with half as many accents/dialects each... In
>> english-speaking ireland, a little gaelic slipped out here and there
>> but the accent referenced it with every lilt. This was not
>> unfamiliar to my ear, so I mostly heard it as "same", but in Wales,
>> the Welsh was not nearly (at all?) familiar and the
>> romanisation/anglification of the written Welsh was overwhelmingly
>> unfamiliar. When I read a sign, I felt like I was left with a
>> mouthful of consonants and diacritics that I had to spit out just to
>> clear my vocal passage to start on the next phrase.
>>
>> It gave me more sympathy for my non Southwest colleagues
>> struggling with the various anglifications of the hispanification of
>> a dozen different native American languages (starting in my
>> neighborhood with Tewa/Tiwa/Towa and expanding out withe Keres and
>> Dine' and Zuni ...) The (nearly conventional/normalized) rendering
>> of most of these languages is for me familiar enough that I don't
>> struggle or wince, but after (especially Welsh)... "I get it". When
>> confronted with each British accent (I couldn't identify or
>> distinguish many if any) it took a few hours at least to become
>> habituated enough to not be disturbed (intrigued or put off,
>> depending) by the unfamiliar sound patterns and often idiomatic
>> constructions.
>>
>> I thought i would be able to "hear" French as comfortably as I did
>> Italian 10 years ago, but it seems the "Romance" connections between
>> Spanish and Italian and the plethora of Latin words/phrases in
>> science made it much more familiar than French. The tiny bit of
>> French I think I am habituated to are a few Americanized stock
>> phrases and maybe a very little bit of dialogue from movies... After
>> a week of hearing almost nothing *but* French it no longer felt
>> outrageously "Other" even if I couldn't hardly parse a thing out of a
>> run-together-spoken-phrase. Mary and I observed one another trying
>> to speak English to someone who did not speak much if any and we
>> realized that we were both prone to repeat the same sentence with a
>> word choice or two changed, but more emphatically (and therefore more
>> run-together) each time. Not helpful, and perhaps what the few French
>> who bothered to speak to us once it was established that we had no
>> language in common, were doing themselves. It was hard to recognize
>> even word-breaks in the word-salad coming at us. The little German
>> we were exposed to had a *different* set of familiar words and sounds
>> and I think the English and German might have a much stronger
>> phonemic overlap, making it not sound quite as foreign... though I
>> was left wanting to clear my throat after hearing much spoken
>> german... and then here in the Netherlands with *many*
>> English-speaking-with-Dutch-Accent we are much more comfortable...
>> and much of the written Dutch is familiar even when the pronunciation
>> is a git foreign.
>>
>> https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-cognitive-glitches-of-humans-laurie-santos-on-what-makes-the-human-mind-so-special
>>
>> In trying to (re)find the first article, I ran across this article
>> which was a bit more interesting to me. The point they make about
>> human cognitive bias against anyone who speaks differently (acutely
>> illuminated by the once-familiar term "deaf and dumb" or "dumb-mute"
>> for those who could not speak (due to deafness, aphasia, or perhaps
>> some trauma? The line from the Rock Opera "Tommy"s Pinball Wizard
>> comes to mind: "That deaf, dumb and blind kid, could sure play a
>> mean pin ballll!"
>>
>> A counter to the *negative* bias I recently heard was: "Don't
>> mistake an accent for a personality"...
>>
>> It is fascinating to me how many ways we can split a hair in
>> discussing AI, etc. A* really. Intelligence, Reasoning, Life,
>> Consciousness, etc. ad nauseum. And yet it is useful (I think) to
>> note that no one of them is really broad nor narrow enough at the
>> same time. Each is a facet or reflection of the other. The second
>> article seems to discuss "emotional intelligence" or I think more
>> aptly "emotional knowledge". My very first (and practically only)
>> published "artpiece" was a visual study on the distinction between
>> "knowing" and "knowing-about", with AI climbing the steep part of the
>> hill toward a pinnacle (or more likely series of false summits) of
>> "knowing about" without possibly getting at all any closer (at all)
>> to "knowing".
>>
>> This leads me back to Marcus' haunting suggestion that "is learning
>> anything more than imitation/emulation?"
>>
>> Following Glen's ideation about bureaucracy as a form of tech, I find
>> that a great deal of my daily interaction with other people is, in
>> fact, with their bureaucratic roles. I am seeking a transaction...
>> knowledge, information, material goods, a service. And given the
>> level of the mutual (mis)understanding I've been enduring for over a
>> month now in those transactions, It now feels like a luxury to expect
>> a service person to articulate their preferences and basis of their
>> preferences in a given baked good, bit of unfamiliar produce, or even
>> (gawdess forbid) Beer! But it has trained me to "listen for emotional
>> content" more than substance. If I ask for a "Blonde" or a "Bruun"
>> or a "Trippel" or a "Wit" and they rattle off something about one or
>> more of them, I will choose one based on the level of excitement in
>> their voice-eye over any imagined information content their response
>> implied. I am sometimes disappointed but almost always surprised.
>> The vocabulary of European Beers overlaps (up to language) what I am
>> familiar with amongst American Craft beers but my exploration is
>> wider (through clumsiness if nothing else). My best strategy is
>> simply to (try to) ask for "whatever is brewed locally". Also a good
>> strategy for food it seems.
>>
>
>
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