[FRIAM] narrative

[steve smith]

Glen -

Very well articulated, the images such as "where the cartoons don't 
weave together well" and "dog catches car" were particularly poignant.  
I am reminded of Scott McCloud's maxim about panel cartooning that "all 
of the action happens in the gutters".

I'm unclear on your first point regarding whether "the Transformer is 
categorically different from our own brain structures" (or not).   I'm 
not sure if the scope is the human brain or if it is somehow the larger 
"stigmergic culture within which said brains are formed and trained"?   
I'm looking for evidence to help me understand this.

Your distinction between (pure) Science and (practical?) Engineering is 
on point IMO.   While I have also burned plenty of muscular and neural 
calories in my life attempting to "form the world" around me, I believe 
those energies have significantly been applied more like the "running 
alongside the car" you evoke.   I also agree that many are biased 
heavily in the other direction. I'm not sure which of the SUN founders 
said something like: "the best way to predict the future is to create 
it".   I don't disagree with the effectiveness of such a plan, the likes 
of all the TechBros (billionaires or not) or more to the point of the 
moment, the Broligarchs (Billioned up as well as now MAGAed up) are 
playing it out pretty clearly right now.

The question is perhaps more what the "spiritual" implications of doing 
such a thing is?   At the ripe old age of 68 (in a month) and a few 
years into no longer seeking significant work-for-pay (retirement/failed 
career?) I can reflect on the nature of the many things I asserted 
myself against (work, homebuilding, tech innovation, travel, influencing 
others)  and have to say the very little if any of it feels like the 
kind of "right livelihood" I now wish it had been.   Having enough 
material (own my own home and vehicles and tools and ...) momentum to 
maybe coast on over the horizon of my telomeric destiny with access to 
enough calories (dietary and environmental), I can be a little less 
assertive at making sure the steep pyramid of Maslow is met than I did 
in my "prime".

I am currently focused on ideations about what the phase transition 
between homo-sapiens/habilus/technicus/??? and homo-hiveus/collectivus 
might look like.  Your (glen's) notion that we are collectively roughly 
a "slime mold" might be accurate but I think we might be at least 
Lichens or Coral Reefs, or even Colonial Hydrozoans?   Maybe I can do 
this merely out of "idle curiosity" or perhaps my inner-apex-predator is 
lurking to pounce and *force* things to fall "my way" if I see the 
chance.   It is a lifetime habit (engineering-technofumbling) that is 
hard to avoid...  hard not to want to "make things better" even when 
I've schooled myself well on the nature of "unintended consequences" and 
"best laid plans".

Mumble,

  - Steve

On 1/9/25 7:28 AM, glen wrote:
> OK. In the spirit of analog[y] (or perhaps more accurately "affine" or 
> "running alongside"), what you and perhaps Steve, cf Hoffstadter, lay 
> out seems to fall squarely into xAI versus iAI. I grant it's a bit of 
> a false dichotomy, perhaps just for security. But I don't think so.
>
> I don't see architectures like the Transformer as categorically 
> different from our own brain structures. And if we view these pattern 
> induction devices as narrators and the predicates they induce as 
> narratives, then by a kind of cross-narrative validation, we can 
> *cover* the world from which we induced the narratives. But that cover 
> (as you point out) contains interstitial points/lines/saddles/etc 
> where the cartoons don't weave together well. The interfaces where the 
> induced predicates fail to match up nicely become the focus of the 
> ultracrepidarians/polymaths. So the narration is a means to the end.
>
> The question is, though, to what end? I'm confident that most of us, 
> here, think of the End as "understanding the world", with little 
> intent to program in a manipulative/engineering agenda. Even though we 
> build the very world we study, we mostly do that building with the 
> intent of further studying the world, especially those edge cases 
> where our cartoons don't match up. But I believe there are those whose 
> End is solely manipulative. The engineering they do is not to 
> understand the world, but to build the world (usually in their image 
> of what it should be). And they're not necessarily acting in bad 
> faith. It seems to be a matter of what "they" assume versus what "we" 
> assume. Where "we" assume the world and build architectures/inducers, 
> "they" assume the architecture(s)/inducer(s) and build the world.
>
> In the former case, narrative is a means. In the latter, narrative is 
> the End.
>
> And the universality of our architecture (as opposed to something more 
> limited like the Transformer) allows us to flip-flop back and forth 
> ... though more forth than back. Someone like Stephen Wolfram may have 
> begun life as a pure-hearted discoverer, but then too often got too 
> high on his own supply and became a world builder. Maybe he sometimes 
> flips back and forth. But it's not the small scoped flipping that 
> matters. It's the long-term trend that matters. And what *causes* such 
> trends? ... Narrative and its hypnotic power. The better you are at 
> it, the more you're at risk.
>
> I feel like a dog chasing cars, running analog, nipping at the tires. 
> The End isn't really to *catch* the car (and prolly die thereby). It's 
> the joy of running alongside the car. I worry about those in my pack 
> who want to catch the car.
>
> On 1/8/25 12:54, Santafe wrote:
>> Glen, your timing on these articles was perfect.  Just yesterday I 
>> was having a conversation with a computational chemist (but more 
>> general polymath) about the degradation of content from 
>> recursively-generated data, and asking him for review material on 
>> quantifying that.
>>
>> But to Steve’s point below:
>>
>> This is, in a way, the central question of what empiricism is. Since 
>> I have been embedded in that for about the past 2 years, I have a 
>> little better grasp of the threads of history in it than I otherwise 
>> would, though still very amateurish.
>>
>> But if we are pragmatists broadly speaking, we can start with 
>> qualitative characteristics, and work our way toward something a bit 
>> more formal.  Also can use anecdotes to speak precisely, but then 
>> suppose that they are representative of somewhat wider classes.
>>
>> Yesterday, at a meeting I was helping to run, the problem of AI-based 
>> classification and structure prediction for proteins came up briefly, 
>> though I don’t think there was a person in the room who actually does 
>> that for a living, so the conversation sounded sort of like one would 
>> expect in such cases.  The issue, though, if you do work in the area, 
>> and know a bit about where performance is good, where it is bad, and 
>> how those contexts are structured, there is a lot you can see.  Where 
>> performance is good, what the AIs are doing is leveraging low-density 
>> but (we-think-) good-span empirical data, and performing a kind of 
>> interpolation to cover a much denser query set within about the same 
>> span.  When one goes outside the span, performance drops off in ways 
>> one can quantify.  So for proteins, the well-handled part tends to be 
>> soluble proteins that crystallize well, and the badly-handed parts 
>> are membrane-embedded proteins or proteins that are “disordered” when 
>> sitting idly in solution, though perhaps taking on order through 
>> interaction with whatever substrate they are evolved to handle.  (One 
>> has to be a bit careful of the word “good” here.  Crystallization is 
>> not necessarily the functional context in which those proteins live 
>> in organisms.  So the results can be more consistent, but because the 
>> crystal context is a rigid systematic bias.  For many proteins, and 
>> many questions about them, I suspect this artifact is not fatal, but 
>> for some we know it actively misdirects interpretations.)
>>
>> That kind of interpolation is something one can quantify.  Also the 
>> fact that there is some notion of “span” for this class of problems, 
>> meaning that there is something like a convex space of problems that 
>> can be bounded by X-ray crystallographic grounding, and other fields 
>> outside the perimeter (which probably have their own convex regions, 
>> but less has been done there — or I know so much less that I just 
>> don’t know about it, but I think it is the former — that we can’t 
>> talk well about what those regions are).
>>
>> But then zoom out, to the question of narrative.  I can’t say I am 
>> against it, because it seems (in the very broad gloss on the term 
>> that I hear Glen as using) like the vehicle for interpolation, for 
>> things like human minds, and the tools built as prosthetics to those 
>> minds.  But the whole lesson of empiricism is that narrative in that 
>> sense is both essential and always to be held in suspicion of 
>> unreliability.  To me the Copernican revolution in the empiricist 
>> program was to emancipate it from metaphysics.  As long as people 
>> sought security, they had tendencies to go into binary categories: a 
>> priori or a posteriori, synthetic or analytic, and so on.  All those 
>> framings seem to unravel because the categories themselves are parts 
>> of a more-outer and contingent edifice for experiencing the world.  
>> And also because the phenomenon that we refer to as “understanding” 
>> relies in essential ways on lived and enacted things that are 
>> delivered to us from the ineffable. One can make cartoon diagrams for 
>> how this experience-of-life interfaces with the various “things in 
>> the world”, whether the patterns and events of nature that we didn’t 
>> create, or our artifacts (including not only formalisms, but 
>> learnable progams of behavior, like counting out music or doing 
>> arithmetic in the deliberative mind).  The cartoons are helpful (to 
>> me) for displacing other naive pictures by cross-cutting them, but of 
>> course the my cartoons themselves are also naive, so the main benefit 
>> is the awareness of having been broken out, which one then applies to 
>> my cartoons also.  (I don’t even regard the ineffable as an 
>> unreachable eden that has to be left to the religious people; there 
>> should be lots we can say toward understanding it within cognitive 
>> psychology and probably other approaches.  But the self-referential 
>> nature of talk-about-experience, and the rather thin raft that 
>> language and conversation form over the sea of experience, do make 
>> these hard problems, and it seems we are in early days progressing on 
>> them.)
>>
>> In any case, the point I started toward in the last two paragraphs 
>> and then veered from was: when one isn’t seeking security and tempted 
>> by the various binary or predicate framings that the security quest 
>> suggests, one asks different questions, like how reliability measures 
>> for different interpolators can be characterized, as fields of 
>> problems change, etc.  The choice to characterize in that way, like 
>> all others, reduces to a partly indefensible arbitrariness, because 
>> it reduces an infinite field of choices to something concrete and 
>> definite.  But once one has accepted that, the performance 
>> characterization becomes a tractable piece of work, and the pairing 
>> of the kind of characterization and the characteristics one gets out 
>> is as concrete as anything else in the natural world.  It comes to 
>> exist as an artifact, which has persistence even if later we decide 
>> we have to interpret it in somewhat different terms than the ones we 
>> were using when we generated it.  All of that seems very tractable to 
>> me, and not logically fraught.
>>
>> Anyway; don’t think I have a conclusion….
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Jan 9, 2025, at 4:16, steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> Why language models collapse when trained on recursively generated 
>>>> text
>>>> https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14872
>>> Without doing more than scanning this doc, I am lead to wonder at 
>>> just what the collective human knowledge base (noosphere?) is if not 
>>> a recursively generated text?   An obvious answer is that said 
>>> recursive text/discourse also folds in sensori-motor engagement in 
>>> the larger "natural world" as it unfolds...  so it is not *entirely* 
>>> masturbatory as the example above appears to be.
>>>>
>>>> seems to make the point in a hygienic way (even if ideal or 
>>>> over-simplified). We make inferences based on "our" (un-unified) 
>>>> past inferences, build upon the built environment, etc. In the 
>>>> humanities, I guess it's been called hyperreality or somesuch. 
>>>> Notice the infamous Catwoman died a few days ago.
>>> I need to review the "hyperreality" legacy... I vaguely remember the 
>>> coining of the term in the 90s?
>>>>
>>>> It all (even the paper Roger just posted) reminds me of a response 
>>>> I learned from Monty Python: "Oh, come on. Pull the other one." And 
>>>> FWIW, I think this current outburst on my part spawns from this essay:
>>>>
>>>> Life is Meaningless: What Now?
>>>> https://youtu.be/3x4UoAgF9I4?si=7uVDeiDQ8STTJtv7
>>>>
>>>> In particular, "he [Camus] has to introduce the opposing 
>>>> concept—solidarity. This solidarity is a way of reconstructing 
>>>> mutual respect and regard between people in the absence of 
>>>> transcendent values, hence his argument for a natural sense of 
>>>> shared humanity since we are all forever struggling against the 
>>>> absurd."
>>>
>>> Fascinating summary/treatment of Camus and the kink he put in 
>>> Existentialism...  familiar to me in principle but in this moment, 
>>> with this presentation and your summary, and perhaps the 
>>> "existential crisis of this moment" (as discussed with Jochen on a 
>>> parallel thread?) it is particularly poignant.
>>>
>>> Thanks for offering some "solidarity" of this nature during what 
>>> might be a collective existential crisis.   Strange to realize that 
>>> it might be "as good as it gets" to rally around the 
>>> "meaninglessness of life"?
>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 1/7/25 09:40, steve smith wrote:
>>>>> Regarding Glen's article "challenging the 'paleo' diet 
>>>>> narrative".   I'm sure their reports are generally accurate and in 
>>>>> fact homo-this-n-that have been including significant plant 
>>>>> sources into our diets for much longer than we might have 
>>>>> suspected.  Our Gorilla cousins at several times our body mass and 
>>>>> with significantly higher muscle tone live almost entirely on 
>>>>> low-grade vegetation.    But the article presents this as if ~1M 
>>>>> years of hominid development across a very wide range of 
>>>>> ecosystems was monolithic? There are still near subsistence 
>>>>> cultures whose primary source of nourishment is animal protein 
>>>>> (e.g. Aleuts, Evenki/Ewenki/Sami)?
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm a fan of the "myth of paleo" even though I'm mostly 
>>>>> vegetarian.   I like the *idea* of living a feast/famine cycle and 
>>>>> obtaining most of my nutrition from fairly primary/raw sources. Of 
>>>>> course, my modern industrial embedding has me eating avocados 
>>>>> grown on Mexican-Cartel owned farms and almonds grown in the 
>>>>> central valley of California on river water diverted from the 
>>>>> Colorado river basin.   <sigh>.
>>>>
>>>>> On 1/7/25 06:21, glen wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Archaeological study challenges 'paleo' diet narrative of ancient 
>>>>>> hunter–gatherers
>>>>>> https://phys.org/news/2025-01-archaeological-paleo-diet-narrative-ancient.html 
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Renee' convinced me to eat fried chicken the other night. ... 
>>>>>> Well, OK. She just put it in front of me and my omnivorous nature 
>>>>>> took over. Fine. It's fine. Everything's fine. But it reminded me 
>>>>>> of the fitness influencers and their obsession with chicken and 
>>>>>> [ahem] "protein". Then I noticed the notorious non-sequitur 
>>>>>> science communicator Andrew Huberman is now platforming notorious 
>>>>>> motivated-reasoning through evolutionary psychology guru Jordan 
>>>>>> Peterson. Ugh. And Jan 6 is now a holiday celebrating those 
>>>>>> morons who broke into the Capitol. Am I just old? Or is the world 
>>>>>> actually going to hell in a handbasket? Get off my lawn!
>>>>>>
>
>