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

Sun Jul 28 16:22:52 EDT 2024

I believe Qualia can be encoded. How? If we take a look at Olympic sport events we can distinguish between sports where we can measure physical results objectively, like athletics or swimming where we can measure time, weight, height or distance, and sports where we judge beauty and aesthetics subjectively, like diving or gymnastics where we measure the results by a jury rating.https://www.reuters.com/graphics/OLYMPICS-2024/EXPLAINER/byprqrwmqve/explainers/Objective experience means something can be measured by an instrument, while subjective experience needs a judge or jury. What we need is therefore some kind of jury in the "society of mind" (to use Marvin Minsky's metaphor) which is able to rate events. During the course of life we have acquired - guided by our emotions - different tastes and preferences of likes and dislikes, as if each of us has assembled a different jury which decides if the perception is good or bad based on the compressed subjective knowledge gained in past events. Ultimately the emotions decide what is good or bad if no previous knowledge exists.The subjective experience of what-x-feels like boils down to what causes pleasure and pain, the control mechanisms our genes have created to ensure the well-being of the body. Obviously we do more of the things that feel good and avoid things that feel hurt. Eventually our subjective experience is formed in Nick's words by the slice of the world we have experienced. Thus the jury menbers can be seen as witnesses of past events that felt good or bad. The composition of the jury is path-dependent: Qualia can be encoded as preferential attachment of jury members for the society of mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment-J.
-------- Original message --------From: Russ Abbott <russ.abbott at gmail.com> Date: 7/27/24  12:36 AM  (GMT+01:00) 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 ScienceCalifornia State University, Los AngelesOn 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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