[FRIAM] Writing and Civilization and AI, oh my!

[Russ Abbott]

>From a consciousness perspective, what (so-far) cannot be encoded digitally
by a robot are qualia. A robot can encode light frequencies, but not, for
example, what red looks like. I can't think of a way to put
what-red-looks-like into words. From a subjective experience perspective,
it seems like a sort of primitive. How would you do it? What words would
you use to express what red looks like?

-- Russ Abbott
Professor Emeritus, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles


On Fri, Jul 26, 2024 at 12:13 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
wrote:

> Which of this cannot be encoded digitally by a robot?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
> Sent: Friday, July 26, 2024 12:12 PM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Writing and Civilization and AI, oh my!
>
> I agree with one small caveat. Artifacts; tangible, written, stigmergic,
> ... are but a small part of what is "cooperatively constructed and
> kneaded." The vast majority of what an individual "knows" and the vast
> majority of what the 'collective' "knows" is tacit, 'in-the-mind' and
> transmitted orally and/or by non-formal means.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 26, 2024, at 12:18 PM, glen wrote:
> > Similarly, but a bit larger in scope, humans (and other animals) are
> > merely small parts of a larger system. The extent to which any one
> > person actually knows anything (much less is wise about anything) is
> > negligible, on the same order as that which a chimpanzee knows or is
> > wise about something. What's *valuable*, worth preserving, are the
> > cooperatively constructed and kneaded stigmergic cultural artifacts.
> >
> > But unlike Plato's straw man, suggesting the artifacts are somehow
> > fixed and repetitive, what's interesting about them is a) their
> > re-interpretation through successive generations and b) the
> > derivations spawned from them. Decay and derivation are more
> > informative than preservation. No single artifact (including flora and
> > fauna, knowledge or wisdom) matters. What matters is the milieu,
> > co-mediated by artifacts like math and painting.
> >
> > On 7/26/24 09:14, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> >> *< *Particularly galling to me is the deprecation and dismissal of
> >> any human knowledge, wisdom, experience ... that cannot be reduced to
> >> mere words and abstract symbols. The epitome of this is the conceit
> >> that AI—which is nothing more than the algorithmic manipulation of
> >> abstract meaningless tokens is somehow "equivalent" to human
> >> intelligence.>
> >>
> >> The conceit of humans, thinking their low energy, low frequency, lossy
> biochemical system can compete with tens of thousands of 80
> billion-transistor GPUs each running a billion operations a second.
> >
> >
> > --
> > ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
> >
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