[FRIAM] A* and emulatoin

Mon Jun 27 16:07:35 EDT 2022

Fascinating example, David!

George Duncan
Emeritus Professor of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University
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My art theme: Dynamic exposition of the tension between matrix order and
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"Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may
then be a valuable delusion."
>From "Notes to myself on beginning a painting" by Richard Diebenkorn.

"It's that knife-edge of uncertainty where we come alive to our truest
power." Joanna Macy.

On Mon, Jun 27, 2022 at 1:33 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
wrote:

> Syncretic might be a term of interest here. Usually applied in the area of
> religion, e.g., the fusion of Vudun and Catholicism, so that Legba is a
> black saint in his niche in the Catholic cathedral in Havana.
>
> My favorite example of syncretism was a nighttime pageant in Rio de
> Janeiro. A hill was covered in matte black so a spotlighted figure would
> appear to descend from heaven when walking down the hill. At the top of the
> hill, the figure was the Virgin Mary in immaculate white robes. As She
> descended clothing was shed and when she reached the bottom of the hill she
> was fully naked and 9 months pregnant, the personification of an
> Afro-Brazilian fertility goddess.
>
> dave west
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 27, 2022, at 11:04 AM, glen wrote:
> > Yeah, I don't like "synthetic" as much because it seems to rely on a
> > false dichotomy between us and the other animals. Is a termite mound
> > "synthetic"? Granted, "artificial" may hide some of that, too. But I
> > think it's reasonable to say there are, say, naturally occurring
> > (geological) mounds. Then there are artisan-generated, artificial,
> > termite mounds, where the termites are the artisans. [⛧]
> >
> > And none of that artisanal stuff *requires* the artisan to
> > reductionistically "understand" everything from first principles in the
> > way "synthetic" might. "Synthetic" also often carries another false
> > dichotomy between synthesis and analysis. It's false because nobody
> > ever does pure [synthe|analy]sis. They're always done together.
> > "Artificial" allows for that mode mixing. [We've had this discussion
> > before in the usage of terms like "naturfact".]
> >
> > And that targets artificial morality nicely, I think. I've never really
> > grokked the difference between morality and ethics, I think because
> > making the distinction is a kind of composition/division fallacy.
> > Ethics seems to carry the pretense of (or a slippery slope to)
> > universality/monism, whereas morals seem to carry the pretense of
> > individualism/relativism. If laid out on a spectrum, that's fine. But
> > to draw a sharp line seems like sophistry.
> >
> > While I'm a consultant on a project regarding the ethics of AI in
> > medicine, what interests me most is simulating the agency of an
> > individual practitioner ... similar to the way we used to play
> > red-blue-gray teams back at lockheed ... or the way you might simulate
> > modern [cough] cyberwarfare.
> >
> >
> > [⛧] Of course, you have to go all the way down to the 3rd defn in AH to
> > find the right one. So if "synthetic" might mean "cobbled together from
> > stuff you found lying around", then maybe it's better than
> > "artificial". What I mean by both terms is closer to "glitch" ... a
> > little bit of intent and a little bit of accident.
> >
> > AH "3. A phenomenon or feature not originally present or expected and
> > caused by an interfering external agent, action, or process, as an
> > unwanted feature in a microscopic specimen after fixation, in a
> > digitally reproduced image, or in a digital audio recording."
> >
> > On 6/27/22 09:54, Steve Smith wrote:
> >> 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.
> >>>>
> >
> >
> > --
> > ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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