[FRIAM] More meat for the metavores

[glen]

Wasn't me, was Roger who used "metavore". And I agree, it's a cool word. Lovecraftian? Maybe. It's appropriate for those of us who think there's something *more* going on in humans than what's going on in machines. Lovecraft's horrible void is nearly identical to the TESCREALs' singularity, hypercomputation, or McGilchrist's "right brain" stuff ... but with a negative affect ... horror in the stead of wonder.

I figure biology is reasoning and reasoning is biology. Also life is mechanism and vice versa. But those mappings are way too sloppy. Biology is a type of reasoning. The reasoning that happens atop/within biology may be of a different type. But different how? You gesture to a bunch of stuff, which is fun. But can you temporarily role-play 1 and run with it?

On 5/21/26 11:03 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> Metavores Я Us
> 
> Not only is this good meat for the metavores, it is well marbled and cooked to just the right degree to sear and lightly carbonize the surface, remain juicy but hot enough to kill most encysted parasites.
> 
> As a vegetarian with a taste for fungi, I'm likely to be more meta mycorrhizal here:
> 
> We are scaffolded all the way down: language, diagrams, fingers, notebooks, peer review, instruments, equations, institutions?  All the way down and all the way out (Levin's multi-scale cognition/competencies?)
> 
> affective-homeostatic, and metabolic scaffolding as well?  Origin-Of-Life folks probably consider the "floor" a little more carefully than we do here...  EricS?
> 
> Thermodynamic, dynamical systems styled scaffolding?
> 
> Conceptual->Viable->Possible manifold stacking?
> 
> Is reasoning, then, not suspended above biology. A late, symbolically elaborated layer of a much older process: *systems finding constrained paths through state-space while preserving enough coherence to continue?*
> 
> Apologies to the metaphobes on-list, assuming any actually read past the subject line?
> 
> A nod to glen for invoking "metavore" it has a very Lovecraftian flavor to it?  Does it have precedence there?  Not my playground...
> 
> 
> On 5/21/26 9:28 am, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> I don't understand why this continues to be a concern.    It is only of academic interest, it seems to me, to wonder how good native LLM reasoning is.
>> Yes, there is a small cost to dispatch from the LLM for MCP.  Tokens need to be generated, and tokens need to be absorbed.  But for anything that is deep reasoning it is a vanishingly small overhead.   It is exactly what computational scientists would do too.   They'd reach for their Matlab or at least a chalkboard.   Let the LLM write the Lean 4, the Answer Set Programming, the Mathematica, the Matlab, the Magma, whatever.  If they do a bad job, there will be correction cycles, if they do a good job, there won't.   But frontier models are good coders now.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Friam<friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
>> Sent: Thursday, May 21, 2026 8:13 AM
>> To:friam at redfish.com
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] More meat for the metavores
>>
>> What is "reasoning" if not a sequence of tokens, the latter depending on the former in some way? I'd like to offer up 3 links that might help us understand where the "reasoning" of LLMs is only kindasorta reasoning:
>>
>> •https://logicalintelligence.com/kona-ebms-energy-based-models
>> •https://github.com/SkyworkAI/Matrix-Game/tree/main/Matrix-Game-2
>> •https://github.com/facebookresearch/vjepa2
>>
>> The 1st one isn't quite like the other 2. But it's in the same vein, I think. There's some kind of something to be said about cumulative puzzles or meta-games. But I don't know quite what I'm trying to say. Although I loathe the term, Systemic Games<https://the-artifice.com/systemic-games-philosophy/> comes to mind.
>>
>> Reasoning engines have (at least) 2 modes, maybe akin to Kahneman's systems 1&2, where some input simply clicks or doesn't and is tossed away, but other inputs*modify* the lattice ... change the game. I say "at least" because there's a distinction between something like self-modifying code - where an execution can modify, add, or delete axioms or even the language - and "emergent play" where nothing fundamental changes, but one plays games atop or within the base game. So I guess there are at least 3 modes.
>>
>> All 3 are appropriately called "reasoning". But along with the gist of Hullman's post, failing to distinguish them is lazy. But we need generalized, non-jargonal nicknames for them, otherwise every mention requires a detailed glossary ... or perhaps an entire, pickled runtimeworldclosure, attached to every message passed.
>>
>> On 5/14/26 8:54 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
>>> https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/05/14/as/ <https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/05/14/as/>
>>>
>>> "Previously it didn’t feel like such a crime to talk about intelligence or learning in machines because nothing really worked that well, so the labels were clearly aspirational. But now it’s much easier to believe the simulacra. And so it becomes harder to tell when we are using human-oriented terms as a predictive convenience versus a scientific claim versus a marketing device."
>>>
>>>
>>> "Too much casualness with words is unscientific. There was no good reason in the first place to call the token sequences a model produces when we ask it to “explain its reasoning” reasoning, other than that’s what we wish we could see."
>> -- 8647 ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω. .- .-.. 
-- 
8647 ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.