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

Fri Jul 26 19:40:00 EDT 2024

But this seems to me like the challenge of all qualia-talk.  How to try to say this…:

By the time you say anything to me, about anything, what you are handing me is some construct within the bounds of some formal system.  If it is within math, maybe it is a formal system whose origin and construction we can somewhat retrace.  If it is in common language, it is no less a formal system; just one that has come from an antiquity we can’t witness, an origin we don’t have access to, and thus a reason for being whatever it is, through whatever combination of necessity of human nature and arbitrariness of history, that we cannot given an account of.

The fact that we use such constructs to say things to one another adds, to whatever is the architecture of formal things like language, the sector of experience that encompasses “use” or “adoption” of language.  Taking on the habit that one or another formal locution “stands for” something in lived acts and experiences, or has an “interpretation” in the sense that somewhat-regular acts or responses from experience are given in answer to receiving that token from the formal system.  I take all those bindings of lived acts and experiences, to the more systematic but tiny things in the formal realms, to be the epitome of “knowing-how” in Brandom’s account of Pragmatism.  

But if all you have is a knowing-how that binds some feeling, or maybe thought, in you to receiving some sentence about qualia, out of which you send some sentence to somebody else, what do you even have to work with?  You said that the experience you are (quite literally) “invoking” is a thing about you, and not a thing realized within the formal system.  Okay; quite plausible.  And you use a language formulation of it, the origin or reason for which you don’t have access to, and the way you came into “using” you also don’t have an account of.  So how can you say that any one-or-another thing “is or isn’t” equally-rightly referred to with this language-token qualia?  It seems you have already denied yourself the structures that would be needed to make any claims one way or another.

This same umbrella seems to give protective shade to talk about qualia or talk about God.  The interesting thing is: I have been steeped enough in some parts of English and academic whatever-it-is, that I somehow imagine I am tracking you when you say stuff about qualia.  If you start in about God, I will be equally convinced I have no idea what you think you are saying or why you think there is a reason to say it.  But in fact, the role of speech in the two cases is indistinguishable, I think.  So it lets me know that I am also an unreliable analyst of any of this, in that for one case, I recognize plainly that I have no idea why the speech even exists, whereas in the other case I imagine I am tracking it.  Bad me.

Eric

> On Jul 27, 2024, at 7:34 AM, Russ Abbott <russ.abbott at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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