[FRIAM] Clocks

[steve smith]

Jon -

Great and timely framing of the meta-question.

I've been reading David Abram's "Becoming Animal" which among many other 
things draws clear attention to the myriad ways that every organism is 
defined not just "socially" or even "nutriently" by it's complex 
embedding in an ecosystem or something more robust in it's implications...

Clocks, IMO are such a good symbol of "engineering" much the way I feel 
that the "Lever" is a good standin for all technology?

Switching from nouns (clocks) to verbs (coupled resonance?) maybe throws 
a new light on the question.

- Steve

PS.  There are a handful of folks here I'd recommend Abram to. Spell of 
the Sensous - circa 1995 and Becoming Animal - 2007ish ...     
reminiscent of Glen's various points about how deeply/implicitly 
interconnected everything is (or that we default to reductionism to a 
fault?) and DaveW's general East/West Rational/Mystic dualities and 
perhaps SGs catholic/Catholic Immanence/Transcendence?  For those who 
don't read, there is an audiobook version.

> Reflecting on recent conversations (both here and abroad), Michael 
> Levin's developments of polycomputing, and in preparation for my new 
> role as career coach to a GPT model, I have come to wonder:
>
> How might one productively set out to architect an unsupervised 
> learning machine capable of discovering what all can be reliably used 
> as a clock?
>
> I am imagining a machine with sensory organs that is able to (though 
> not necessarily) generalize its learnings. I imagine it successful if 
> it decides to not rely on a broken clock, nor an image of a clock 
> face, nor one programmed to move its arms at random. I imagine it is 
> successful if it learns to track the sun, the circadian rhythms of 
> animals or plants, if it recognizes the masing pulses of water in star 
> forming galaxies, cellular clocks, etc...
>
> Would such a machine necessarily be/have a clock itself?
>
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