memories, dreams and reflections

vision vs. touch/kinesthetics

2008-12-20T12:25:00.000-08:00

I have long been perplexed at the obsession with so many AI folks with vision processing.

I mean: yeah, it's important to human intelligence, and some aspects of human cognition are related to human visual perception

But, it's not obvious to me why so many folks think vision is so critical to AI, whereas other aspects of human body function are not.

For instance, the yogic tradition and related Eastern ideas would suggest that *breathing* and *kinesthesia* are the critical aspects of mind. Together with touch, kinesthesia is what lets a mind establish a sense of self, and of the relation between self and world.

In that sense kinesthesia and touch are vastly more fundamental to mind than vision. It seems to me that a mind without vision could still be a basically humanlike mind. Yet, a mind without touch and kinesthesia could not, it would seem, because it would lack a humanlike sense of its own self as a complex dynamic system embedded in a world.

Why then is there constant talk about vision processing and so little talk about kinesthetic and tactile processing?

Personally I don't think one needs to get into any of this sensorimotor stuff too deeply to make a thinking machine. But, if you ARE going to argue that sensorimotor aspects are critcial to humanlike AI because they're critical to human intelligence, why harp on vision to the exclusion of other things that seem clearly far more fundamental??

Is the reason just that AI researchers spend all day staring at screens and ignoring their physical bodies and surroundings?? ;-)

anton webern

2008-12-02T06:55:00.000-08:00

this mini-biography of composer Webern, from Rhapsody.com, is just too good ... such perfect dry humor w/ so much of the human condition in it...

"Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge," said Igor Stravinski of Anton Webern. A member of the Second Viennese School, Webern's diamonds appear mostly in geometric twelve-tone technique and serialism, a compositional technique based on the manipulation of a set of musical elements, stemming from twelve-tone technique.

Born in Vienna in 1883, he was a dedicated pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, and, in one of his early tonal works, produced 1908's Passacaglia. He left tonality altogether with his songs of 1908-'09, though, and his instrumental pieces between1909-'14 were very short due to technical limitations on thematic development. The songs of 1910-'25 show a reintroduction of traditional formal patterns which prelude his late-career serialism. On September 15, 1945, during the occupation of Austria, he was accidentally shot and killed by an American Army soldier while smoking a cigar after curfew.

- Nate Cavalieri

arguments with thoughtless anti-transhumanists...

2008-12-02T06:47:00.000-08:00

Some excerpts I've pasted for future reference from a very silly dialogue at

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=23400750&postID=9133136415007870265&page=1

that I uselessly got involved in... basically someone wrote an annoying blog post stating that transhumanists are fuckups because they're gripped by fear of death. A number of us transhumanists replied, to the great irritation of themselves and their followers.

*****

Hi,

I am one of the transhumanists mentioned in this post, and I wrote an article on open-source robotics for the first issue of H+. I'm an AI researcher aimed at creating human-level AI: see novamente.net, goertzel.org, opencog.org, singinst.org.

In your post you say What I don't like about transhumanists is the fact that they simply refuse to understand certain arguments of their opponents - like the idea, best advanced by Bernard Williams, about boredom not with the things of the world but with oneself, or, as Roger Scruton puts, the soul grows tired of inhabiting the body.

What I don't like is this sort of glib generalization about large groups of people. Transhumanism is not a cult any more than, say, democratism or spiritualism is a cult. There is a lot of diversity.

My father has sometimes expressed the attitude you cite: he's said he wouldn't want to live forever because life can be kind of a pain, and from his view, the finitude of human life gives it some of its meaning. That's fine for him, though it saddens me, and I hope he changes his attitude.

I have also explored Zen fairly deeply, and enjoyed its approach that experiencing the present moment is what is important, rather than focusing on thoughts of the past or future. From this perspective, whether I live forever or become transhuman or whatever is basically irrelevant: what's relevant is the depth of the Now I'm experiencing. The me who wakes up tomorrow morning will be a different guy anyway.

Having said all that, though, I remain a dedicated transhumanist, both in my attitudes and my actions.

It's not about the technology: in fact I too get a bit worn-out with quasi-fetishistic blurbs and glossy photos of shiny gadgets, though I appreciate their importance for marketing new ideas to the uninitiated.

It's about mind and experience: about the embracing of Becoming as well as Being ... about the feeling of becoming something more than I am now, something more than I can even conceive now. While doing my best to embrace each Now along the way.

No doubt many others will run out of curiosity and ambition, and choose death. That's OK. As for me, I'm not a quitter.

And it's also about suffering. Yes, as the Buddha said, "all existence is suffering" -- but Buddhists also do practical work to reduce suffering. Transhumanist technology can drastically reduce suffering among humans and other sentient beings.

I watched my grandfather die a few months ago, at age 92. Even if he would have chosen to die given the option not to, it's obvious he wouldn't have chosen to die in the manner he did. Dying in the midst of disease and dementia is part of the human condition, and it's a part that I feel an ethical duty to help us transcend, by enabling possibilities for living that are generally-human but not precisely legacy-human.

He also would have liked to transfer more of the understanding he'd gained during his life to me and his other family and friends. Transhumanist technology will enable this eventually.

So it's not just about living forever as a human, and it's not just about the possibility of transitioning to something far beyond humanity -- though both of these possibilities interest me intensely. It's also about drastically reducing the level of suffering of those who choose to remain generally-human but not precisely legacy-human.

Most likely some nonzero level of suffering is intrinsic to the condition of any generally-human-type being -- but I strongly suspect this level of suffering is far lower than what many of us currently experience ... even those of us with the good fortune to be living in the middle or upper classes in developed parts of the world.

The only intellectually and ethically respectable argument I have heard against the transhumanist perspective is that the development of transhumanist technologies could lead to grave dangers, perhaps even to the extinction of the human species.

I think this is a possibility that needs to be taken very seriously, and am pleased that organizations such as the Lifeboat Foundation and the Singularity Institute (both of which I'm involved with) exist precisely to understand these issues more fully.

However, my strong intuition is that the human race is facing a lot worse dangers than technologies that improve the mind and body. I'm a lot more worried about chemical and biological weapons, runaway nanotech, or good old fashioned nukes. In my view we will be far more able to wisely handle the risks of these other technologies we've developed, if we can improve the fundamental basis of our thought and judgment processes -- which means improving the human mind and body.

Susan B, in her comment, wrote

People think they want it, but really they don't. The fear is of old age and suffering, not death per se.

Give me a break, please! I am 41 years old and have been thinking hard about these topics for most of my life (while, yes, also conducting a normal life, with a successful career, 3 kids, a lot of travel, and various assorted other accomplishments and hobbies). I have read plenty of relevant literature and philosophy and theology and am aware of the various perspectives out there. I am not driven by naivete, and I am not driven by fear. I am driven above all by curiosity and a desire for more and more interesting, pleasurable, growth-inducing experiences. I'm not afraid of death, I just prefer it not to happen ... and I'm not afraid of remaining a legacy-human, but I would prefer a more interesting future if possible (and amazingly, it does seem this may be possible).

It is unfortunate (but typically human) for people to lampoon and summarily dismiss perspectives they have not thought-through carefully and do not deeply understand.

***********
Someone nicknamed Brit wrote:

I'm all for re-thinking concepts of the self, Guilio, I just don't see a replica as giving me immortality. I don't give a hoot if everybody, including the replica, thinks it's me.

Here's another thought experiment for you. (Assume for the purposes of the thought experiment that the science is all bona fide and you have complete confidence that the doctors can do what they say that can do, and that you like the idea of being rich).

You get an offer from a scientist: when you go to sleep tonight we’re going to kill you in a painless manner. But don't worry, we've backed up all your memories and personality onto a microchip. Eight hours after you die, we'll remove your body, upload the data into a new brain in an identical body and put it in your bed. The new brain will think it was you, and will think it just went to sleep - we'll erase the memory of this whole conversation. For doing this, we'll put £1million in your bank account every year from now on.

Do you accept?

Brit: not surprisingly, I would make the same choice as Giulio in the situation you mention.

This really comes down to philosophy of mind. So far as I can tell, "I" consists of a certain system of dynamic patterns, that happen at this time to be associated with a particular physical system (my body).

If my body were replaced by another physically-nearly-identical one, then the same system of dynamic patterns constituting "me" would be there.

Note that many of the cells in my body are dying and being replaced every minute.

Do you believe that your "I" is some sort of extraphysical soul that is attached to your current, particular body, and wouldn't reattach itself to the new body in your thought-experiment?

Or, do you believe that your "I" is somehow immanent in the small percentage of cells in your body (e.g. most neurons) that don't get turned over through natural biological processes?

What philosophy of mind does your attitude derive from? Or is your attitude more of a non-theoretical, instinctual bias/reaction?

****

(in reply to a comment by Max More, someone named Mildred wrote)

Max, let's face it; you will not be alive in 5250. I'm sorry you can't deal with that, but it's the reality.

Mildred: if it happens that Max and I don't live to 5250, we can certainly "deal with that." Not only in the sense that dealing with being dead is easy ... but also in the sense that we are both people who enjoy our lives in the here-and-now very much: so if either of us found out we were to die soon (in 5 minutes or 50 or 5000 years or whatever) we'd have no major regrets except not having more of life to enjoy.

However, I find your narrowmindedness and hubris somewhat absurd. How can you propose to know what's going to happen? Your way of thinking seems to be the same as the one that led people, 150 years ago, to say a man would never walk on the moon.

Not to mention: even in the 1960s when Ted Nelson suggested the Xanadu project, nearly all the pundits (let alone the common person) bloviated confidently that nothing like the Internet could ever exist. Yet, here you are, polluting it with your overconfidently pessimistic yabblings....

The mainstream media is now reporting that within decades biologists will be able to regenerate a Neanderthal from old DNA. I'm sure quite recently a lot of folks would have called that impossible too.

I regret the combination of genetics, upbringing and chance that has caused you to grow into a person with such a lack of imagination and vision. Too bad for you, my friend....

email about possible importance of differences btw empirically equivalent theories

2008-12-01T08:36:00.000-08:00

> If two theories give identical predictions under all circumstances
> about how the real world behaves, then they are not two separate
> theories, they are merely rewordings of the same theory. And choosing
> between them is arbitrary; you may prefer one to the other because
> human minds can visualise it more easily, or it's easier to calculate,
> or you have an aethetic preference for it.
>
> --
> Philip Hunt,

However, the two theories may still have very different consequences
**within the minds of the community of scientists** ...

Even though T1 and T2 are empirically equivalent in their predictions,
T1 might have a tendency to lead a certain community of scientists
in better directions, in terms of creating new theories later on

However, empirically validating this property of T1 is another question ...
which leads one to the topic of "scientific theories about the sociological
consequences of scientific theories" ;-)

ben g

greed post singularity?

2008-11-29T05:05:00.000-08:00

> The question of whether to allow drugs and/or wireheading is not really interesting. The fact is that cultures that prohibit overriding the evolved motivational systems that keep us alive have more children, thus explaining current attitudes.
>
> We should similar attitudes among reproducing AIs capable of reprogramming themselves to live in simulated worlds with magic genies, or that just directly increment their utility registers. They will succumb to the AIs that aren't happy all the time because they hunger for computing resources.
>
> -- Matt Mahoney, matmahoney@yahoo.com

Matt,

I'm very skeptical of assuming that post-Singularity society will be dominated by a competition for resources.

This view of organismic evolution has been rightly questioned by Stephen Jay Gould, A. Lima de Faria and many others ... most of these folks don't doubt that competition-based selection exists, but they argue that

a) selection is mostly not about competition for the same resources, but rather about the creation of complementary niches

b) self-organizing dynamics acting complementarily to, and orthogonally to, the dynamics of differential reproduction also have a huge impact

In short, the "nature, red in tooth and claw" vision of organismic evolution is in itself an idealized oversimplification which approximates reality better in some cases and worse in others ... and, it may approximate post-Singularity society even worse...

Even if one posits that "the surviving post-singularity minds will be the ones that want to survive", that doesn't tell you anything about reproduction or the drive thereof, or the drive of agents to accumulate more and more resources.

How do you know some kind of "post-singularity steward" won't get put into place, with the specific job of preventing greedy agents from accumulating more and more resources -- but NOT asking for anything in return ... and not trying to accumulate excessive resources for itself ... and proceeding in this manner because **that's how it was programmed**

I believe this is closely related to what a previous version of Eliezer Yudkowsky called the Sysop Scenario...

ben g

on wiring stuff into AGI systems

2008-11-29T04:54:00.000-08:00

On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 9:21 PM, Abram Demski wrote:
>
> Ben,
>
> If I were running an AI company I might not be down-to-earth enough to
> admit the necessity of so much preprogrammed bias... I'd want the
> thing to learn about physics on its own :).
>
> --Abram

Actually, if you were running an AI **company**, you might feel huge commercial pressure to hard-wire as much behavior as possible into your AI system, so as to enable it to achieve commercially valuable functionality as quickly as possible

The same might hold if you were running a grant-funded AI project within academia: getting your grant renewed would depend on your system's functionality at the end of a 1-3 year period, and the quickest way to get impressive observable functionality is to hard-wire a bunch of stuff

;-)

Of course, as a mathematician, I feel the pull toward pure learning systems that have a minimal set of innate biases and built-in structures.

And yet, as a scientist, I observe the human brain and see that this is **not** what it is. The brain has *so much* special-purpose built-in structure, and its general intelligence is a fairly small layer built atop a bunch of special-purpose built-in structure.

Logically, it would seem the computational resource requirements for creating a "pure learning system" would be far greater than for creating a system with a conceptual architecture more like the brain. So then, which approach is going to get to the end-goal earlier along the Moore's Law curve?

ben

email dialogue on entheogens and singularity

2008-11-28T03:36:00.000-08:00

> also because set & setting continue to change. Even when the setting
> is clinically identical, the subject has a prior experience with which
> to anticipate experience.

Yes, but shamanic uses of psychedelics try to minimize this variation
via making the setting really intense and using psychological force to
influence set (mindset).

For instance, the "Union of the Vegetable" church in Brazil allows
ayahuasca use only in the midst of highly structured, highly intense
rituals involving music, dancing, preaching and so forth. In this context,
it's presumably hard *not* to experience the ayahuasca roughly the
same way as the other folks around you...

> I'm curious - what do you think would be a more "right" use of
> psychedelics ...or other mind-altering substances?

There are many "right" uses, of course...

But what's bizarre is that in modern culture psychedelics are mostly
relegated to the category of "party drugs" to take in rock concerts and
dance clubs and such ... which is not bad, but misses most of the
potential they have for leading to interesting mind-states...

> Can/should we allow the individual freedom to alter brain chemistry
> enough to literally leave the "normal" world for another? Consider
> how this answer applies to the use of neural-integrated hardware to
> directly access electronic/digital "other" worlds.

that's an easy one: yes ;-)

I would add that I found psychedelics more interesting before the
possibility of Singularity in my lifetime became palpable. Psychedelics
offer a greater variety of inner experience than most people can achieve
without years or decades of effective meditation ... but, even with the
help of these drugs, there are going to be strict limits to what the human
mind can experience ... whereas various transhuman technologies promise
the possibility of actually extending the human mind in much more dramatic
ways...

In short, although psychedelics offer way more than our culture generally
recognizes [visionaries like Huxley, Leary, McKenna, Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, etc.
being exceptions ;-) ] ... the Singularity will offer way more, if we conduct
it properly

It does seem plausible that use of psychedelics can provide some modest
insight into post-Singularity realities, in that it allows exploration of a wider
space of mind-states than we experience in ordinary waking life. But I wouldn't
assume the space of mind-states accessible using psychedelics comes close
to touching the full variety of post-singularity mind-states, of course....

Psychedelics push us to see beyond some of the implicit assumptions we
make in conducting our everyday mental lives. For instance this book asks
"Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion"

http://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Journal-Consciousness-Controversies-Humanities/dp/0907845231

and anyone who has taken a lot of psychedelics will know the answer is YES,
without needing to look at the neuroscience and psychology data (though perhaps
with answer in the latter). However, once these assumptions are dropped
(e.g. the assumption of the objective reality of the constructed subjective visual
world) ... then what? An awful lot of possibilities present themselves, and human
minds can only scratch the surface....

In fact, many psychedelic mind-states explicitly point at these limitations: for instance,
the aliens one talks to on DMT (read Terrence McKenna or Google "machine elf")
explicitly present themselves to the mind as lower-dimensional projections of
some higher-dimensional reality inaccessible within the constraints of legacy
human consciousness...

Whining about obstacles facing medical AI

2008-11-26T05:28:00.000-08:00

In the category of "things that will seem really absurd in a couple decades," I thought I'd write down a few recollections of a consulting job Novamente had for a medical data management company, which I'll here call ABCD.

I started the ABCD project with high hopes of using AI to help hospitals optimize their processes and cure people better. It hasn't worked out that way yet.

As a couple examples

1)
We wanted to try to predict which medical therapies tend to lead to best outcomes for patients, contingent on various properties of the patient and their diagnosis. Oops. Hospitals don't really keep data on the quality of patient outcome. They measure outcome by LOS, length of stay in the hospital after a procedure is done ... but this tends to be determined by how long the patient's insurance will pay for them to stay in the hospital. There are also typically some handwritten notes by the doctor reporting something about the patient's condition, but in an unsystematic way...

2)
The different hospitals serviced by ABCD store data about the products they use (scalpels, gloves, EEGs, whatever) in their databases in unsystematic ways, without indexing them by any kind of universal product ID. So ABCD wound up using our AI tech to **guess the product ID** for a product, based on looking at its corresponding database record in a hospital database. This is a really irritating AI application because the AI is doing a lot of work to make a 90% accurate guess of something that some human really should have just typed into the DB in the first place (the product ID).

Eventually these sorts of problems will go away, I'm sure ... but right now they mean that real-world medical AI is bloody hard to do.

If there were a hospital that were committed to collecting data in a manner conducive to medical AI (or to serious statistical analysis, for that matter ... the requirements are largely the same), then a worthwhile partnership could be undertaken. They would need to actually record information in a database in a manner useful for AI analysis using current tools, e.g.

identify products by their universal product IDs
have each doctor make some kind of assessment of a patient's outcome in machine-readable format

etc.

This seems elementary but based on our experience with ABCD (which serves many major hospitals) it is not standard practice.

In a couple decades all this stuff will be systematized and these issues will seem absurd ... like Babbage having trouble building his Analytical Engine because the screws were all slightly different sizes. But in the actual moment these sorts of "minor technical issues" can loom really large.

An analogous issue is the current lack of any technology combining virtual worlds and robot simulators. This is obviously a "minor issue" in the big picture: both of these technologies exist, so it's "just" a matter of software integration. But in real life, in the thick of doing real work, 5 man-years of software integration work becomes a big deal and prevents great things from happening, or causes them to happen 5-10 years later than would otherwise be the case...

cruelty to cellphones?

2008-11-24T10:52:00.000-08:00

My cellphone keyboard now and then seizes up and needs to get brutally beaten in order to be restored to functionality ... but i don't want to get it replaced because i enjoy having a good reason to beat it...

How can we extrapolate this to the future of human-robot relationships?

Delirious (Meta)mind Tunes

2008-11-18T05:45:00.000-08:00

A Work of Fiction (aren't we all ;-)

They started out by taking over my mouth: it started, all of a sudden, making expressions of a sort it would never normally make ... expressing odd varieties of not-quite-thoughts/not-quite-emotions from some unidentified source. (My wife complains about the looks on my face sometimes; I wonder what she would have made of these??). Some of them reminded me somehow of the looks on the face of my friend/colleague Dr, Matthew Ikle', whose mouth spreads wide and stretches around sometimes ... but even Matt's lips can never vibrate in nonlinear resonances like these ... they quickly passed beyond Matt into non-human dimensions...

It soon became tempting to lie on my back, as holding my body up became a distraction. I could have moved around if I'd wanted to, but there would have been no point to it. The stench of burnt plastic had made itself irrelevant. Cells throughout the body felt very odd, almost as if interacting sexually with each other, but never reaching a climax, always pulling back at exactly the right moment to save up their energy for the next near-explosion....

Then there was purple fractal webbing sprawling out in many directions (more than the usual 3+1 directions of our habitual spacetime), especially visible if I angled my eyes toward the light bulb. Then angling my eyes became irrelevant and I wasn't really aware I had eyes or a body. Murilo said "Nice!" as is his habit when speaking English, and on first thought I was surprised he wasn't physically there, and there was no second thought because the webbing started humming ... I wondered for a moment if anything else was going to happen, and then I relaxed this stupid expectation and implicitly realized that happening wasn't the point ... the important thing was the sounds ... I thought they were coming from some appliances in the room around me but there wasn't really a room just a web, and that thought quickly somehow vaporized ... so many sounds on so many levels ... sort of like psytrance music but without the repetitive beat (if that makes any sense, or not) and on multiple frequencies (that weren't exactly frequencies, but were anyhow orthogonal in a way that let them multiply coexist without confusing interference) ...

And there were certainly discrete creatures there, generating the music -- which was identical to the strands of the purple webbing, which was going out into various domains where various structures were being created...

I was aware I could visualize the creatures in various forms if I wanted to, and for fun I made myself visualize them like Terrence McKenna's machine-elves ... but this was kind of a joke to me at the time, because I realized they had no visual form in their own reality, this was just a game I (and other humans, though I wasn't thinking of them at the moment) liked to play...

I remembered meeting these high-dimensional friends in Amsterdam, on a vacation with my wife ... this time the frequencies were higher and more mathematical and complex and the musicality was clearer ... that time in Holland the manufactury-aspect of their behavior was more prominent ...

What exactly the music was "saying" (not the right word at all, but of course none of these are; except that they all are in another sense...), was clear at the time, but projects poorly into language and 3+1 dimensions ... but it was intricately patterned and the song on each of the "frequency" channels gave rise to multiple emergent patterns when considered in combinations with other songs on other channels .. and of course all the channels were there at once, positioned in the same non or multi dimensional space, moving forward in different directions but in the same one....

Certainly, everything from my stupid human life was there in the music, made to appear trivial yet oddly beautiful, and perfectly harmonious (in a way incorporating of discord) via being matched with so many complementary patterns that my mind would never normally understand ...

One thing that was clear is that the creatures are always there inside every sound, as a kind of mode of vibration (not the right phrase).

I didn't think about these philosophical things in the moment -- there were only "their" minds and the music and the fractal webbing -- but after my mind left the aliens' Yverse (or regained the illusion of being separate from it ... or whatever ...) I started to project them into my normal conceptual categories ... and I started thinking about their minds and their music and time. I've thought a lot about the problem of time lately.

From our limited view, these elfy-beings are logically/conceptually/emotionally contradictory -- they cannot be consistently captured in our limited mental logic. And one way to un-contradiction-ize a contradiction is to unravel it over time (as in Varela/Kauffman/Spencer-Brown's Brownian forms ... X=~X becomes {..., True, False, True, False,...} and so forth). So what seems like music to us, like patterned unfolding over time, occurs all at once to them, without the need to spread it out along a line and divide it among different moments ... this spreading-out through time is just something we need to do to fit some approximation of them into our mind/brains...

This might, I mused as they faded, seem like a kind of teleology, where the destination is already there in the trajectory (of the song, the life, the history) from the very beginning ... but that's not the point ... the point is that the whole extent of the timeline/music/whatever is there as a whole thing, and even has life as one of these beings some want to call elves, but we roll it out into a timeline to fit it into our brains which can't handle seeing all-that-stuff-at-once without perceiving it as a contradiction...

And as I formulated these thoughts they seemed so absurd and overcomplicated and misdirective: the whole network of WHAT was very clear as an image, yet overcomplex and tangled in words ... and even the visuals and audials that the brain uses to comprehend it (purple, webs, sounds and melodies) are also limiting and misdirective unless they're taken in the right way (i.e. the way they want to take themselves...)

I can see where McKenna got his TimeWave thing ... complex interlocking patterns unfolding over time in a sequence, with the end implicit in the beginning and the beginning implicit in the end ... the cross-time-point connectedness occurring because in the transhuman world where the elfy/sound-things live and create, the timeline doesn't exist anyway, it's all one transcoherent transconsistent existent ...

... but I don't see why Terrence thought these transdimensional beings would care if the end of the particular wave of human history (which is but one among many other waves in their song/meta-song) is 2012 or 2222 or whatever ... they exist as abstract forms without being governed by the notion of time anyway .. then we project them (parts of them) into time so we can understand them ... and we get a form that seems to build toward some climax which you might call a singularity ... or you might just call the part of the music where the various themes come together, like the end of Beethoven's 9th symphony or "Axis, Bold as Love" or whatever ... but it's hard to imagine the elfy-things would care about quantitating this time-pattern of ours, since the temporality we see in it is ours not theirs anyway...

What a phenomenal (punny, huh?) directness: right into the meta-mind of these beings to hear the music of their thoughts, and then right out again -- without, as in other contexts in my past, wandering through all sorts of other scenes before, and then maybe eventually wandering into the same meta-mind ...

... and then, sitting at the piano with the sustain pedal constantly pressed down, involuntarily following a pattern of crudely/approximately emulating the combination of discreteness and continuity in their non-songs/meta-songs, and almost settling into it but never-quite except for a brief escaping moment (and another, and another) ... and then off to sleep for the night, expecting interesting dreams though if there were any, by the morning my reflective mind failed to remember any of them ... but when I wandered into another human's abode after waking up (he was still awake from the previous night) I had an interesting sensation of hearing the electricity in his brain coursing around in 3+1 and more dimensions ... I wish I could play it as a song but I'm limited by these 10 fingers and 100 billion neurons ... and all sounds seem a little peculiar today, as if there are layers, webs and mazes underneath them, as if you could dive through them into that other place where they occur all-at-once not through-time and are actually alive mindplexal mental societal things building structures our limited human minds can only grok partially through lower-dimensional projections that capture bits of the magic but never really the essences of the things ... (and of course these limitations, and the process of projection, are right in there as part of the song...)

36 year old musing

2008-11-14T14:10:00.000-08:00

Remembering a story one of my great-uncles used to tell about my 5-year-old incarnation.

He was watching me play with toys, and then my little sister Rebecca came up and asked for one of the toys I was most enjoying.

After a moment of reflection, I gave it to her, and then I commented to him that "Sometimes it feels good to do something for someone else that you don't want to do."

What about this ... a step beyond perhaps:

X = thinking Y makes me feel good

Y = thinking X makes me feel bad

ramblings of a perplexed old man

2008-11-12T05:12:00.000-08:00

41 is a strange age ...

Sometimes the body feels young and full of energy like that of a teenager (wait, maybe that's just because I had a strong cup of coffee this morning, which I don't usually drink ;-) ... sometimes old and worn out like it's on the verge of collapse due to too many years of relentlessly doing stuff too many hours per week (hmm, often that happens after a red-eye flight or a night of working on research till 2AM then getting up at 7AM to drive a kid to school...)

And sometimes when I'm walking down the street or just sitting and thinking, I feel like a weird over-thoughtful kid, just like I did 30 years ago ... and start wondering how I somehow accumulated all these trappings around me: wife, kids, companies, house, projects?? All stuff that is very rewarding and largely very pleasant.

I wonder how much of the psychological change that comes with aging is actually change in one's mind, versus change imposed by the different situation that one's life-course (directed by society) imposes on one. Having so many responsibilities makes it hard for me to think/act like I did 25 years ago even when my brain feels like it. Yet the responsibilities are all tied to sources of reward that I didn't have back then either....

What it comes down to it, it sucks for time to be such a scarce resource. Which means I need to work harder at creating AGI, immortality and all that stuff. Which leads to more time-allocation problems such as balancing research versus other responsibilities and versus being-myself ;-O

existenz and ancientness

2008-11-11T18:20:00.000-08:00

In a conversation with a younger friend going through an extended moment of existential malaise , I realized the extent to which I've come to systematically delegate existential disorientation and frustration to a certain region of my brain where it just keeps on iterating semi-permanently (except for the odd interval of total joy that comes at random) ... so that it very rarely overtakes me completely anymore ... maybe this is what being 40+ is about (at least for some of us), you kinda get reconciled to the absurdity of existence and stop getting worked up about it ....

Galbraith, economics, math, psi, consciousness, silly monkeys

2008-11-11T05:46:00.001-08:00

I've been reading off-and-on the autobiography of the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and one thing struck me: he was treated dismissively by much of the academic economics establishment for using commonsense logical reasoning instead of formal mathematical reasoning ... and at the time the formal math reasoning of economists was largely based on linear systems theory ... but in recent decades a lot of his ideas from the early and mid 20th century have been significantly validated by the introduction of more advanced math such as nonlinear dynamics and the game theory of not-fully-rational actors.

Just like the parable of the guy who searches for his lost item under the lamp because it's easy to see it there ... even though he dropped it somewhere else ... scientists have a strong tendency to assume that aspects of the world that are not rigorously study-able using the tools they have at their disposal, are somehow unimportant or even nonexistent.

Question: in what ways are we currently being similarly shortsighted? In what ways does our current mathematical and scientific toolset excessively bias our view of reality?

Psi is the most obvious example: in spite of compelling data, most people reject the phenomenon because our current scientific theoretical framework rejects it.

Consciousness is another: people declare it does not exist, or isn't amenable to science ... or is identical to neuroscience ... even though commonsense clearly says differently. We often find it hard to believe that reality isn't captured by our current theoretical frameworks ... even though history shows that, over and over, theoretical frameworks have expanded dramatically to encompass new aspects of reality.

Even in economics, people still dramatically underestimate the importance of mass psychology and culture in markets and governments. Numerical indicators like "consumer confidence" barely scratch the surface. We lack models to study these effects analytically in detail ... so we unconsciously minimize their reality....

Silly monkeys...

Nietzsche and the leech's brain

2008-11-04T05:52:00.001-08:00

I'm often reminded of how Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, parodied the scientific mentality by presenting a scientist who devoted his life to understanding the brain of the leech.

I wonder what Nietzsche would have said if he had lived long enough to see the study of the single-neuron brain of Aplysia, the sea squid, turn out to have so many profound consequences for neuroscience and even psychology.

What often strikes me in science and math is that it's an equal amount of thinking, tedium and effort to explore a technical issue that's of critical and fundamental importance at a certain stage, from one that isn't. Choice of what problem to work on, is incredibly important.

Naturally you can build your skills by working on any problem at all, so long as it's not too trivial ... but that's a different issue.

And it's a sad fact that the research funding establishment often has a terrible intuition regarding what's critical and fundamental at a certain point, and what isn't. So you often have a choice between studying what's going to make a difference, and studying what society thinks is important for its own reasons (which are often just politics ... i.e. self-organizing dynamics in the social group of scientists ... some influential person liked X and a community built around it and just keeps going of its own momentum, etc.).

Nietzsche was right in general that most scientists are obsessed with the process and the tedious details and don't try to orient them toward the bigger picture as they should ... but it's funny that he chose an example so close to something that *did* turn out to be so fundamental, and such a *good* choice of problem to focus on...

My manner

2008-11-04T05:50:00.001-08:00


A snippet of dialogue that I'm reminded of very often in my everyday life,
from the film Lawrence of Arabia:



                     LAWRENCE
       Good morning, sir.
    
                       MURRAY
       Salute! If you're insubordinate of me,
       Lawrence, I shall put you under arrest.
    
                       LAWRENCE
       It's my manner, sir.
    
                       MURRAY
       Your what?
    
                       LAWRENCE
       My manner, sir. It looks insubordinate,
       but it isn't really.
    
                       MURRAY
       No, I can't make out whether you're
       bloody bad-mannered, or just half-witted.
    
                       LAWRENCE
       I have the same problem, sir.
    
                       MURRAY
       Shut up!
    
                       LAWRENCE
       Yes, sir.
    
                       MURRAY
       Now, the Arab Bureau seem to think you
       would be of some use to them in Arabia.
       Why? I can't imagine! You don't seem able
       to perform your present duties properly.
    
                       LAWRENCE
       I cannot fiddle, but I can make a great
       state from a little city.
    
                       MURRAY
       What!
    
                       LAWRENCE
       Themistocles, sir. A Greek philosopher.
    
                       MURRAY
       I know you've been well educated,
       Lawrence. It says so in your dossier.
       You're the kind of creature I can't
       stand, Lawrence, but I suppose I could be
       wrong. All right, Dryden, you can have
       him for six weeks. Who knows? Might even
       make a man of him. Come in. Yes? What is
       it, Hallon?



That's it....  Many people have gotten sick of my manner ;-p ...
but fortunately not everybody.
As with Lawrence, it's who I am.

But making a great state from a small city
isn't nearly enough for me ;-)

silly argument about art, from an email list

2008-11-03T20:16:00.000-08:00

Hmmm...

My remark was only intended to point out that if it is permitted for
everyone who has interests outside their 9-to-5 employment to call
themselves an 'artist' because they can do a little dance, or sing a
song, or put some paint on canvas, etc, then you grossly devalue the
term 'artist'.

And it seems to me that if you restrict the concept of "artist" to people
who get paid for doing art, or spend the vast majority of their time doing
art, then you grossly devalue the artworks created by other people ... and
grossly overvalue the lousy artworks created by many art professionals ;-)

How about Henry Miller ... he wrote a lot of his stuff while working odd jobs
to pay the rent, had no professional training in writing, and his stuff was
roundly rejected as crap by the literary establishment of his time. Yet many
have greatly appreciated his work by now.

How about Vernor Vinge, who wrote most of his work during summers ...
i.e. outside his "9 to 5" employment as a math/CS professor. Did he somehow
become a greater artists when he retired to write full-time? He noted himself
that his productivity as a writer did not increase after he retired from his day
job.

Etc. etc. etc. etc.

How about Ramanujan, who proved great math theorems without any professional
training or contact with the international math community. Was he less of a
"real mathematician" than a salaried math prof with a PhD, even if the latter churned
out mediocre, useless theorems?

It seems to me, personally, there are two useful ways of judging a creator:

1) the actual qualities of the work produced

2) the psychology in the mind of the creator while they produce the work

Of course, both of these are hard to measure and define.

But both seem much more meaningful to me than judging a creator based on whether
they have a day job, or whether they earn a living from their creations. These other
factors you seem to favor, have a lot more to do with the creator's social context and
the non-creative-arts related aspects of the creator's personality, than with the artistic
creation itself.

If you wish to call virtually every human an 'artist', then certainly
you are allowed that usage, but it is a bit pointless, don't you
think?

Yes, that would be pointless.

There is a special psychology of serious artistic creation ... and there are
certainly some artistic works that seem to have more lasting appeal than
others.

However, I don't think this psychology, nor this lasting appeal, are as closely
tied to the daily-schedule, social-role or income-source of the creator as you
seem to think.

How about 'amateur artist' or 'novice artist' or 'wanna-be artist' or
'hobby artist', and so on? And save the 'professional artist' term for
those whose life is their art.

I don't intend any value judgment here. In my worthless artistic
opinion, some amateurs produce wonderful work and some professionals
produce rubbish. Art is one of those fields where judgment is very
subjective.

Yes, but IMO the error of your position is irrelevant to the fact that you're talking about
art.

Your criteria also rule as Ramanujan as a "real mathematician."

For that matter, they rule out nearly all the great scientists in history as "real scientists."

Because, science as an income source and/or professional job role is quite a new thing.

For instance, Leibniz earned his living largely researching family histories for
aristocrats. He did his science and math work mainly on the side. So, by your
analysis, he was an "amateur", as were essentially all his contemporary scientists
and mathematicians ... such as Isaac Newton....

I am not just harping on this because it's a pet peeve ;-) ... but also because it seems
relevant to the point of this thread.

The social roles played by artists, scientists and mathematicians have changed
drastically and frequently throughout history.

However, I claim that the **psychological process of creation** is intrinsic to human
psychology, and is mostly irrelevant to these shifting social roles.

As long as there are humans with mind-structure roughly similar to the current
mind-structure, a certain percentage of humans will become obsessively creative,
in the manner that "creative people" always have throughout history.

It's even possible that a greater percentage of people will become this way, if
someone develops a "creative inspiration" pill and it catches on ;-)

The profession of artist will die, along with all other professions, as scarcity
vanishes. Who cares? Who needs professions?

objectivity/intersubjectivity/subjectivity

2008-11-03T20:08:00.000-08:00

The "objective" ... objectively real, whatever ... is a joke, of course...

But perhaps dynamical systems theory hints at how to reconstruct its shadow.

Perhaps the shadow of the nonexistent objective lies in the notion of: something that is a near-inevitable attractor of the self-organizing dynamics of intersubjective systems?

I discovered yesterday that my dad believes in an objective "universal morality", which perplexes me.

To me the notion of objectivity just doesn't make sense. It's intrinsically unverifiable, as well as aesthetically unpleasant...

But, maybe, some kinds of moral principles inevitably emerge when you put together a sufficient number/variety of subjective perspectives, all perceiving each other and interpenetrating?

This would provide them with a kind of mathematical objectivity.

A less than half formed speculation, obviously ... but perhaps worthy of more musing...

poverty, culture, technology, scarcity

2008-11-03T09:49:00.000-08:00

I have lived in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the US (though I live in a nice suburb now), in New York, Philly and New Mexico ... and my mother runs social-service programs helping poor women and children in inner-city Philadelphia ... so I have seen a lot of US-style poverty. I can tell you that these people have TVs and video games and cellphones and MP3 players ... many of them have cars (though often in poor repair) ... they have plenty of junk food to eat ... and generally seem to have beer money, etc. They don't live as nicely as I do. And there are real difficulties: for instance the cost of daycare is sufficiently high that working is sometimes not an economical option for a mother with children ... commute time on public transport to get to work can be objectionable because the US public transport system generally sucks ... etc. But, I don't think we should overlook the steady rise in qualitative standard of living that technology has provided even for this underclass. Compared to the wealthy of 30 years ago, the US poor of today are dramatically better off in many ways: MP3 players, cellphones, the internet, 500 channels of wonderful TV, and on and on. Even if the gap btw rich and poor is increasing, as it is according to some measures, technology is lifting everyone up in a lot of meaningful ways.

It's also notable how technology flattens the real gap between rich and poor. I remember a friend with $100M+ net worth who was unable to find expensive toys his kids wanted -- all they really wanted were Gameboy games. Which were the same games being played by kids of the same age in the ghetto. And which were genuinely more fun than the expensive toys he'd bought his kids, which sat there unused.

The "culture of poverty" is another question, and how it's impacted by the magnitude of the rich-poor gap (according to some measures) versus the equalizing effect of technology is a subtle question...

I stress that I am talking here specifically about the urban US poor. Similar observations apply to many of the poor I have seen in Brazil: but not to the poorest of the poor in Brazil, who are living in truly horrible conditions, in some cases effectively in slave-labor camps on rural plantations. And of course folks in the Congo, Zimbabwe, etc. are in a wholly different situation, and not reaping the benefits of the technology revolution in the way that the US urban poor are.

But the "culture" issue is a serious one...

I remember one guy I knew (my mother's partner's nephew), who was from a very rough inner-city Philly neighborhood, who was very smart and quantitatively talented. He did study on his own outside of school, in spite of lack of much encouragement from his family, and he won a scholarship to a college across the country from his family. He moved there and got an apartment off-campus ... but he relied on his roommate's car to get to classes, and so when his roommate committed suicide, he wound up transport-less and returned home to Philly, where he eventually wound up becoming a "numbers runner" and making good money applying his quantitative bent to help run an illegal gambling operation....

In this case, we had someone with uncommon ability and initiative, who could easily have wound up contributing in a positive way to society and technology and science ... and wanted to ... and would have, if we'd had *slightly* better support systems in place for people like him...

And yet, he certainly *could* have returned to that college the following year ... if he'd made the right pleas to the university administrators etc. But he didn't really know how to do that, and his family probably didn't either ... and he was upset about the situation ... and I was 18 at the time, without the skills to really help him out either, though I did tell him he should try to go back...

What one wonders is, what kind of consequence will the often inept, uncompassionate nature of our society have in the years running up to the Singularity.

Once scarcity is abolished once and for all, things will be totally different in ways that are hard for us to imagine.

But what happens along the way, when scarcity is partly abolished ... how erratically will the Singularity-enabling technologies come about ... how will they be distributed across different socioeconomic strata as they emerge ... I have a feeling things will go more smoothly if there is less inequity involved and broader education and awareness, but that doesn't exactly seem to be the way things are evolving... and it's hard to say what impact these aspects will have...

2008-11-03T07:09:00.000-08:00

On the topic of the experience of stopping time, a friend asked

***
oh yeah - and of course, the obvious question is that 1) how could we EVER
encapsulate this kind of stuff in a man-made thinking machine
***

what I said is...

to me, it's no more mysterious how experience could come out of a computer, than how it could come out of a 3-pound hunk of fibrous cells (the brain), ...

my views on consciousness and experience are pretty eccentric for the AI community ... maybe there will be some good discussions on this at the machine consciousness workshop in hong kong in june ... I don't exactly view consciousness as produced by the artifact that it's associated with (the brain, the computer). I think of it more like: consciousness is always there, and different sorts of physical structures can amplify or present it in different ways.... The brain leads to one kind of manifestation of universal consciousness, a computer leads to another ... but if you look for the consciousness in the nerve cells or the semiconductors, that's vaguely like looking for the musicians in the radio antenna while you're listening to music ;-) ... yeah, the specific thoughts and structures are in the brain (or the computer), but what makes them really be *experience* is not created by these physical media ... it's an underlying part of the universe that is just amplified by these physical media...

but, this strange view of things is too weird for AI people to handle so I generally keep my mouth shut about it!

music and time

2008-11-03T06:20:00.000-08:00

and, interestingly, one of the best ways to stop time is to play music (on the keyboard ... i'm not good enough at any other instrument to get into that state w/ it...)

music is all about time and the flowing of time. but, playing music seems to so fully occupy the parts of my mind that are absorbed with the flowing of time, that the other parts of my mind are freed from the need to perceive this flowing, and can just float there outside of time, looking forwards and backwards or perceiving time as a whole in the same manner as one perceives regions of space...

after all the logic of music does flow both forwards and backwards, and time-interval-criss-crossing and time-traveling wildly ... sometimes a triumph of time over pattern but sometimes a triumph of pattern over time...

movement of time

2008-11-03T05:54:00.000-08:00

the "movement of time" is in the same category as "free will" -- a simplification
of reality that's built into our brains to allow the relatively-simple systems that are our
brains, to deal with a reality that is massively more complex and interconnected than
we can appreciate ...

it's all very well to say this intellectually, but, to appreciate this phenomenologically is a different thing. try to stop experiencing time as moving. just experience each moment as its own entity. the moments can be arranged in a linear order, but they could also be arranged in other ways too. each moment gains some meaning from the ones before and after it, but also from other moments that are distant in time.

does perceiving time in this way make life any different? the problem is that many of our cognitive heuristics don't work with this mode of perception. so we are unable to employ the handy inductive biases built into our brains unless we accept the illusion of time moving and flowing.

but still, it's amusing to stop time now and then.

breaking up with my second girlfriend

2008-11-03T05:45:00.001-08:00

a random memory that visited me as a dream last night ... in september 1983 i went back to simon's rock college for my sophomore year and then my girlfriend from the previous semester came into my dorm room ... a very short, politically-obsessed Jewish girl named Rachel Gordon .. i had talked to her on the phone a number of times during the summer but hadn't seen her; and had gotten a bit annoyed with her over the summer, probably not for any good reason (we never fought or argued or anything as she was a mellow person; but i think i felt more strongly toward her than she did toward me, which was the root of my annoyance) ... anyway she came into the room and i just stared at her while she talked, and I refused to say anything ... not because I was trying to be obnoxious; everything just seemed too complicated and i couldn't find any suitable words ... so eventually she left and I never have talked to her since!!!

random memories and notes

2008-11-03T05:42:00.000-08:00

I got the urge to write down random recollections of past thoughts and situations in my life ... with no strong purpose, but a vague inkling I may someday edit and weave them together into some coherent form ... so, this is a blog that is basically written only for my own purposes, but it will be easier for me to organize it as a blog than as a file on my hard drive... most likely it will be of no interest to anybody else, but hey, bits are cheap these days and blogger is a free service...