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

[Marcus Daniels]

It is not necessary to put it into words.  A robot built on a deep neural net or a reinforcement learning system could have sensors across the electromagnetic spectrum of whatever resolution, and as it accumulated experiences it would learn to associate red with flowers, heating elements, blood of animals, decorative clothing, stop signs, etc.   Whatever latent representation it used to connect those experiences is not important, and different robots could have different latent representations.   However, each could learn bounds on the frequency range to classify what other agents called red.  If one saved the weights and biases of the neural nets to files and compared the two networks, one might find a topologically similar pattern that arose from the frequency range.  That shared topology, if any, could be called the qualia of red.

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Friday, July 26, 2024 3:35 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Writing and Civilization and AI, oh my!

 

>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 <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com> > wrote:

Which of this cannot be encoded digitally by a robot?

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, July 26, 2024 12:12 PM
To: friam at redfish.com <mailto: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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