[FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

Mon Jun 5 12:31:27 EDT 2023

What expertise I have is often manifest by a gut instinct that something is a bad idea.   I’m curious what daydreaming or brainstorming is like with gut feelings informed by all the things GPT systems have seen.    To me that sounds much more efficient than trying to communicate with Siri or fumbling with a keyboard (even though I’m a fairly fast typist).   That’s a high latency connection that requires coding and decoding language.  What is dreaming like with an integrated GPT-like database?

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, June 5, 2023 8:13 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

Marcus -

Even though I play the Luddite most of the time, I am in fact fascinated with the possibilities of post/transhumanism, at least in the sense that it feels "inevitable".   With the implied magnitude of qualitative change in Homo this-n-that to Homo postHomo or maybe Homo Cyborgis or quite possibly Homo goneBabygoneNevertobeSeenAgain along with all mammalian/warm-blooded/vertebrate life, depending on our overshoot, it seems worth a second thought or two as to what we *might* have some control over.

We are about to enter a chaotic maelstrom of change, and while that can seem hopeless, I do believe that extreme sports enthusiasts are very precise about the line they enter their maelstroms from/on.  (Surfing, skiing, Niagra-Falls-Barrel-Diving... etc)

Regarding the augmentation of LLMs...  we were all born in a time of huge augmentation in the form of libraries and books and most saliently perhaps reference books for our language (dictionary, encyclopedia, etc) and reference books to our myriad specialties (Technical Libraries).  *IN* my lifetime I have participated in the digitization of most if not all of that matter as well as adapting the professional and plebian workplaces to those changes, whilst adapting our personal lives (e.g. handheld device connected to the "global brain" 24/7) to those changes.   We can all probably conjure a 1000 utopian/dystopian vignettes supporting/undermining any determination of whether this is "for the good" or not.   I'm almost completely habituated to this "modern era" but old enough to still have intellectual inertia making paper maps, newspapers, magazines, etc.  at least *quaint* items if I almost always defer to the other.  I recently gifted my 1903 Blackies Encyclopedia set to a HS History teacher to use in his classes to give his students a snapshot of time *in the original text and atoms* for whatever that is worth.

I'm not likely to be an early adopter of neural interfaces (unless I face an acute disability in that area) but I am already a fairly regular GPT4-whisperer.  I can't say it has improved any of the practical aspects of my life (yet), but it has been an interesting correspondent in the way I usually burden *this group* with my maundering speculations.   GPT4 is infinitely patient, broadly and deeply informed, and only occasionally fails to provide me with some interesting feedback.

I recently funded a Kickstarter for a powered exoskeleton (Lower extremety only) which may return to me a little more mobility than megadosing NSAIDS and velcro-strapped stabilization belts for my hips...   I don't know that this will be anything more than a novelty or if it will be as (relatively) good as the Oculus (I've been playing with VR since before it was called that and was totally blown away by the "value" Oculus represents).

<ramble off>

- Steve
I don't mean "we" as in FRIAM, I mean "we" as in nations.   A benefit of capturing knowledge with LLMs, or similar technology, is that people wouldn't need to be educated about the same material over and over, especially if these systems are integrated into our neural systems.  Why not have individuals inherit a common database so that their lives can be spent on differentiated activities?   There's so little that tie together individuals besides their fears and superstitions.  When I see chatGPT emit passable conversations like this, it seems kind of absurd to waste years of a young person's time covering the same old ground.  (Actually, it already seems that way to me.) Countries like Israel and Greece have mandatory military service.  Some believe this instills in them values greater than themselves.  In this case of the Borg, care of the collective is care of the self and vice versa.  The common practice in the open source LLM community of fine tuning pre-trained LLMs is so much more efficient than what humans do to educate.
________________________________
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com><mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net><mailto:jofr at cas-group.net>
Sent: Sunday, June 4, 2023 3:17 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com><mailto:friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

Discussions with large language models are new. But you are right, we had discussions of similar topics before. Maybe I was hoping I could inspire Nick and/or Eric to write a summary of their ideas and what we have discussed before ( such as the solution to the hard problem of consciousness, the nature of subjective experience and what it has to do with path dependence, complexity science and James' radical empiricism ).

-J.

-------- Original message --------
From: Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com><mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>
Date: 6/4/23 9:54 PM (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com><mailto:friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

The conclusion I draw is that these conversations have all occurred before.  So I wonder, why have them?

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com><mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Sunday, June 4, 2023 10:44 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com><mailto:friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

ChatGPT now allows sharing conversations. I've asked it about William James book "Essays in Radical Empiricism"

https://chat.openai.com/share/375aef4e-a8d6-467e-8061-bd85b341c46b

-J.

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