[FRIAM] Radical Empiricism

Steve Smith sasmyth at swcp.com
Mon Jun 5 14:13:45 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?
>
unfortunately you are singing my song here... or dreaming my dreams.  
This too compels me (or at least my ego?)...

For many years, I have felt that my own voracious appetite for the 
written, crafted, and produced creative constructions of others (aka 
literature, art, pop fiction, pop media, etc) has been "dreaming other 
people's dreams" and the nature of wireless streaming video into the 50" 
diagonal box in my living room, the 5" diagonal mobile phone in my hand, 
and the 360 degree stereographic sensorium of my Oculus  has jacked it 
up to a new level...

Our brains were (maybe) wired/evolved to stare into a flickering fire 
(or at the shadows thrown on the cave wall) and tell one another stories 
handed down and around, embellished, superposed, morphed, hyperbolized, 
personalized over a lifetime.   Surely Kokopelli's greatest gift to each 
village he entered was the gift of new ideas hidden in familiar but not 
stories?  That and (if the more salacious stories hold) the gift of an 
outsider's genetic material into the community.  The hard-goods or even 
seeds he might have carried in his Santa-esque backpack are 
qualitatively the same?

I am not *nearly* thoughtful enough about the schlock I consume... 
ranging from doomscrolling GoogleNews and YouTube to several 
high-production-quality Hollywood movies (blockbuster or not) a similar 
number of Indie flicks (often as high of quality surprisingly) and one 
or more ongoing Streaming Series.   In between all that passive "lean 
back" consumption (coupling?) I read a *lot* of long-form journalism and 
roughly as much Educated-Lay level professional sci/tech papers which 
impinge on my professional (and now more broadly personal) interests.

Following Piaget's theory of structural learning, I expect this either 
confronts my brain with regular "refactorings" or requires a lot of 
deprecation/pruning of things I "thought I knew".  I suspect if I were 
to go back and review the FriAM archives and my own (or anyone else's) 
text here I could find inflection points in the underlying "models" I 
was operating on at the time.  With enough time, the new models/patterns 
seem to be resolvable with the old ones in some kind of "meta-pattern* 
which can itself be a pattern worthy of abstracting/refactoring?

  Referencing Glen's references to "diachronic" vs "episodic" I am left 
with the feeling that these are "naturally" composed episodes with 
internal diachronicity but (for some more than others) also strung 
together diachronically to some extent?

Given that it is our "gut instincts", what if our AI were to engineer 
our gut biome to carry all that extra information and every meal is like 
a system update?


>
> *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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