4 ms·

I don't know why I expected this to be about Self, that one language with prototypes. https://selflanguage.org https://selflanguage.org

slushh 3y ago
It's kind of related, isn't it? > “Romantic poetry was unruly, dynamic, alive and forever changing, they believed, and should not be corseted by metric patterns because it was a ‘living organism.’” According to Friedrich Schlegel, “it should forever be becoming, never perfected.” The idea of having prototypes and no classes rhymes with forever becoming whereas classes are aligned with reasoning. >The Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason rather than feeling, Schiller claimed, had led to the excesses of the French Revolution. The french revolution being driven by class consciousness. The following sentence is strange, though: >“Utility is the great idol of our time, to which all powers pay homage.” Beauty, on the other hand, leads to ethical principles, and art, as its vessel, makes us better people as well as wiser ones. When beauty is truth, how is it distinct from reasoning? >He was a key figure in the Jena thinkers’ attempt to fuse the scientific and the emotional, art and nature; he preceded Keats in judging truth to be beauty, beauty truth. I would love to see an approach to build AI programmatically. Instead of training NN, why not use the analytical foundations of the philosophers to create it? A language like Self, or its relative Javascript, could be the tool to create a self in a machine.
- tinideiznaimnou 3y ago
  >I would love to see an approach to build AI programmatically. But they've been trying to do that since (at least) the 1950s! And indeed moving the goalposts further and further as our own ideology of "what is intelligence" evolves. The evolution of programming languages and programmed systems goes hand in hand with that. Until we get to the present situation where someone invented a program so generic and all-encompassing (a language model, ffs!) that it turns out all "meaning" and "reasoning" is just a moderately illusory effect induced by correlations between morphological tokens: to a large language model, things that "rhyme" (more like "appear in proximity within a corpus of text" - but that's a criterion of similar complexity to "sound alike or have similar morphological origin") are the things that make sense. And a lot of people can't tell the difference. > Instead of training NN, why not use the analytical foundations of the philosophers to create it? A language like Self, or its relative Javascript, could be the tool to create a self in a machine. You could imagine Human Language alike to a cellular automaton of virtually infinite complexity, serving as the substrate for all thought; programming languages, and indeed any formal language, such as mathematics and its subsets used in different sciences, are abstractions over that infinite field of possible patterns: they hide the messy details and provide idioms of varying (but not infinite) complexity, for achieving particular goals (such as making webpages dance). While a neural network could be said to "see everything simultaneously", in JavaScript you can't even be sure what the keyword "this" refers to (from context - you gotta trust the docs or look under the hood). Vastly different scopes aside, AFAIK you can't beat the notion of "selfhood" into neither a program nor a NN, because neither actually has to fend for itself in order to keep thinking. >When beauty is truth, how is it distinct from reasoning? One of those is a subset of another, and for many people the need for "intelligence" and "reasoning" never went any further than knowing how to operate the right machine. (There exist unimaginably many beautiful and useful things that each one of us fails to grasp, because we're busy parroting the opinions of whoever reached the opinion-parroting machine first.) But it inevitably turns out that when beauty does not figure into the equation, there remains very little in this world worth reasoning about - other than ensuring adequate caloric intake and that sort of thing. It would be interesting to see what GPT has to say to your question though. Anyone feel like asking it? I dropped my barge pole in the swamp
  - slushh 3y ago
    >moving the goalposts further and further as our own ideology of "what is intelligence" evolves We have moved the goalpost for intelligence but not for self. There are also programs to model the units of the human brain but I am not aware of programs that model the self.
    - tinideiznaimnou 3y ago
      Here's where things get slightly creepy. I addressed the concept of "self" in a couple other walls of text over the past few days and, sure enough, I get this thread on my front page. In short, do we even know where that goalpost is? The "self" is kind of a linguistic phantom: we talk about it as if we know what it is, we even sometimes attribute "selfhood" to non-human animals, inanimate objects with complex behavior, the words of a long-dead author - yet I still don't know of a technology that lets you experience anyone else's "self" but your own. Maybe with Neuralink-type brain-to-brain stuff we could convince ourselves we are experiencing another person's perceptions - but how can we ever be certain that we are experiencing their perception of selfhood in the same way that they do? In the present day, the related question of how consciousness (with all its bells and whistles, including qualia and selfhood) arises from brain activity is only seriously engaged with by some fringe theorists, with predictably unsatisfactory results; while mainstream authors just handwave the whole thing away. Thinkers fundamental to our cultural tradition, like Plato and Descartes, pondered these matters in two completely different ages, and came to the same conclusion that this is somehow beyond the knowable, and indeed if you poke too much at it you end up having to reconstruct your cognition from first principles. This is why I posit the "school of hard knocks" theory to the "hard problem of consciousness": for a thing to have a self, it has to have to fend for itself. It's how we've producing "selves" for millenia without being able to model them. But this still has very low explanatory power (beyond giving someone a hard knock when they ask a hard question) so I'm not really planning to make any YouTube videos about it. Personally, I'm partial to Julian Jaynes' yarn, but it's still an outside view - a history of the cultural concept of consciousness, but still not of consciousness itself. One interesting thing that one may derive from it is that the ancient pagan gods were "China brain" consciousnesses running as background processes on the brains of entire nations, and the founding fathers of monotheistic religions perpetuated the greatest "white hat" hacks in history. (Also the JavaScript ecosystem may be conscious in a "China brain" sense, and laughing at us.) I suspect that, if "the self" is not just a word, some neural network may end up containing an accidental model of "selfhood" itself, and not just of the usage of the world "self", and we would still be incapable of knowing such a model when we see it. If you have any ideas about how you would even model a thing that contains all your perceptions, and is not observable from the outside, I'm eager to hear them. Maybe you see something I don't.

slushh 3y ago

It's kind of related, isn't it? > “Romantic poetry was unruly, dynamic, alive and forever changing, they believed, and should not be corseted by metric patterns because it was a ‘living organism.’” According to Friedrich Schlegel, “it should forever be becoming, never perfected.” The idea of having prototypes and no classes rhymes with forever becoming whereas classes are aligned with reasoning. >The Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason rather than feeling, Schiller claimed, had led to the excesses of the French Revolution. The french revolution being driven by class consciousness. The following sentence is strange, though: >“Utility is the great idol of our time, to which all powers pay homage.” Beauty, on the other hand, leads to ethical principles, and art, as its vessel, makes us better people as well as wiser ones. When beauty is truth, how is it distinct from reasoning? >He was a key figure in the Jena thinkers’ attempt to fuse the scientific and the emotional, art and nature; he preceded Keats in judging truth to be beauty, beauty truth. I would love to see an approach to build AI programmatically. Instead of training NN, why not use the analytical foundations of the philosophers to create it? A language like Self, or its relative Javascript, could be the tool to create a self in a machine.

tinideiznaimnou 3y ago
>I would love to see an approach to build AI programmatically. But they've been trying to do that since (at least) the 1950s! And indeed moving the goalposts further and further as our own ideology of "what is intelligence" evolves. The evolution of programming languages and programmed systems goes hand in hand with that. Until we get to the present situation where someone invented a program so generic and all-encompassing (a language model, ffs!) that it turns out all "meaning" and "reasoning" is just a moderately illusory effect induced by correlations between morphological tokens: to a large language model, things that "rhyme" (more like "appear in proximity within a corpus of text" - but that's a criterion of similar complexity to "sound alike or have similar morphological origin") are the things that make sense. And a lot of people can't tell the difference. > Instead of training NN, why not use the analytical foundations of the philosophers to create it? A language like Self, or its relative Javascript, could be the tool to create a self in a machine. You could imagine Human Language alike to a cellular automaton of virtually infinite complexity, serving as the substrate for all thought; programming languages, and indeed any formal language, such as mathematics and its subsets used in different sciences, are abstractions over that infinite field of possible patterns: they hide the messy details and provide idioms of varying (but not infinite) complexity, for achieving particular goals (such as making webpages dance). While a neural network could be said to "see everything simultaneously", in JavaScript you can't even be sure what the keyword "this" refers to (from context - you gotta trust the docs or look under the hood). Vastly different scopes aside, AFAIK you can't beat the notion of "selfhood" into neither a program nor a NN, because neither actually has to fend for itself in order to keep thinking. >When beauty is truth, how is it distinct from reasoning? One of those is a subset of another, and for many people the need for "intelligence" and "reasoning" never went any further than knowing how to operate the right machine. (There exist unimaginably many beautiful and useful things that each one of us fails to grasp, because we're busy parroting the opinions of whoever reached the opinion-parroting machine first.) But it inevitably turns out that when beauty does not figure into the equation, there remains very little in this world worth reasoning about - other than ensuring adequate caloric intake and that sort of thing. It would be interesting to see what GPT has to say to your question though. Anyone feel like asking it? I dropped my barge pole in the swamp
- slushh 3y ago
  >moving the goalposts further and further as our own ideology of "what is intelligence" evolves We have moved the goalpost for intelligence but not for self. There are also programs to model the units of the human brain but I am not aware of programs that model the self.
  - tinideiznaimnou 3y ago
    Here's where things get slightly creepy. I addressed the concept of "self" in a couple other walls of text over the past few days and, sure enough, I get this thread on my front page. In short, do we even know where that goalpost is? The "self" is kind of a linguistic phantom: we talk about it as if we know what it is, we even sometimes attribute "selfhood" to non-human animals, inanimate objects with complex behavior, the words of a long-dead author - yet I still don't know of a technology that lets you experience anyone else's "self" but your own. Maybe with Neuralink-type brain-to-brain stuff we could convince ourselves we are experiencing another person's perceptions - but how can we ever be certain that we are experiencing their perception of selfhood in the same way that they do? In the present day, the related question of how consciousness (with all its bells and whistles, including qualia and selfhood) arises from brain activity is only seriously engaged with by some fringe theorists, with predictably unsatisfactory results; while mainstream authors just handwave the whole thing away. Thinkers fundamental to our cultural tradition, like Plato and Descartes, pondered these matters in two completely different ages, and came to the same conclusion that this is somehow beyond the knowable, and indeed if you poke too much at it you end up having to reconstruct your cognition from first principles. This is why I posit the "school of hard knocks" theory to the "hard problem of consciousness": for a thing to have a self, it has to have to fend for itself. It's how we've producing "selves" for millenia without being able to model them. But this still has very low explanatory power (beyond giving someone a hard knock when they ask a hard question) so I'm not really planning to make any YouTube videos about it. Personally, I'm partial to Julian Jaynes' yarn, but it's still an outside view - a history of the cultural concept of consciousness, but still not of consciousness itself. One interesting thing that one may derive from it is that the ancient pagan gods were "China brain" consciousnesses running as background processes on the brains of entire nations, and the founding fathers of monotheistic religions perpetuated the greatest "white hat" hacks in history. (Also the JavaScript ecosystem may be conscious in a "China brain" sense, and laughing at us.) I suspect that, if "the self" is not just a word, some neural network may end up containing an accidental model of "selfhood" itself, and not just of the usage of the world "self", and we would still be incapable of knowing such a model when we see it. If you have any ideas about how you would even model a thing that contains all your perceptions, and is not observable from the outside, I'm eager to hear them. Maybe you see something I don't.