[FRIAM] narrative

[Prof David West]

"the best way to predict the future is to create it". 
most often attributed to Abraham Lincoln and Peter Drucker.


On Thu, Jan 9, 2025, at 3:06 PM, steve smith wrote:
> 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!
>>>>>>>
>>
>>
>
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