[FRIAM] A* and emulatoin

[Steve Smith]

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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