Bloom on Shakespeare [persistence of identity] {the last mile}

The key point (01:57)

I think that Shakespeare had the first sense I know
of what he actually called the self-same
which is the persistence
of identity through all kinds of vicissitudes and change

In another (more recent) video about The Anatomy of Influence (2011) Bloom remarks about the meaning of "invention" in the subtitle of the Shakespeare book: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (c. 43:30):

everybody even if they more or less tolerated the book smashed at the title and said
what nonsense to say he invented us
obviously had they read the great Samuel Johnson
they would have known that the great man said
the essence of poetry is invention
that is to say discovery, originality
and if you say that Shakespeare invented the human
what you mean quite
modestly but accurately is
there's a great deal about both ourselves
and about one another
and about all of life
that was always there
but we would not have seen it [...]
except for Shakespeare

With that in mind, I've been looking through a collection of essays, Harold Bloom's Shakespeare (Palgrave 2001), which has an essay by Richard Levine, "Bloom, Bardolatry, and Characterolatry," where he asserts (p. 76):

Finally, 1 do not think we can take seriously Bloom's claim about Shakespeare's "invention of the human." I have appended a partial list of books (I am sure there are many more) that announce the discovery that the traits we call "human"-self-consciousness, individual identity, subjectivity, etc.-were invented in some particular period (ranging from Homeric Greece to eighteenth-century England), which, by another remarkable coincidence, usually turns out to be the period in which the discoverer specializes. The obvious truth, however, is that these traits were not invented by any specific people at any specific time and place; rather, they slowly developed over many thousands of years, along with the evolution of our brains and nervous systems, since they can be found in some of the oldest texts we have, in the most "primitive" tribal cultures, and even, in a rudimentary form, in our primate cousins. Of course, there have been inventions (or discoveries) at various times of new modes of conceptualizing these traits in philosophic and scientific discourse and of new modes of representing them in literature and the other arts. I believe that we can credit Shakespeare with an artistic invention of this kind in a number of the soliloquies in his middle and late periods that show a character going through a stressful thinking process (and, in one of Bloom's favorite phrases, "overhearing himself"; see Bloom 1998, xvii), unlike the static form of soliloquy used in the plays of his predecessors (and of his own early period), where a character simply expressed and expanded upon some idea or emotion. But Bloom transforms this invention in the representation of the human into the invention of the human itself.

As the paragraph opens, Levin is obviously "smashing" Bloom's title. By the end of the paragraph, however, Levin has equally obviously granted the somewhat different and weaker claim that Bloom asserts is what he was thinking all along. So, why didn't Bloom say that, explicitly, time and again in the book? I suppose anyone with half a brain would have figured that something like that's probably what he really meant; but if he doesn't say so explicitly, how can you know? Is he playing some kind of weird power-tripping Socratic guessing game?

It seems to me the Bloom has a bad "last mile problem"? What do I mean by that? Let me quote from the Investopedia:

The last mile describes the short geographical segment of delivery of communication and media services or the delivery of products to customers located in dense areas. Last mile logistics tend to be complex and costly to providers of goods and services who deliver to these areas.

We're talking about ideas. In that context I mean "the last mile" to be the explicit formulation of an idea that is latent in some discourse. It may exist there indirectly, or in metaphor, but the idea isn't explicit. Thus, the idea is not made clear. That is certainly the case of Bloom's central idea, "the anxiety of influence." It became the title of his 1973 book (which I've read), he revisited in three subsequent books (which I've not read), and it keeps coming up over and over, and he keeps revising it and qualifying it. But he never takes it over that last mile. It remains stillborn.

Bacon! Bacon! My kingdom for a slab of bacon! [counterpoint to AI rant]

Adobe Backlash [what hath AI wrought?]

It seems that Adobe has been receiving quite a bit of backlash against changes it’s made to its terms of service, changes having to do with Adobe using customer images to train its generative AI. I became aware of this a week or so ago, thought about it a bit, and decided that it was a non-issue for me. Yes, I use both Lightroom and Photoshop, but I use Lightroom Classic, which is based on my laptop, not in the cloud. So, Adobe’s changes in terms of service didn’t seem all that relevant to me.

However, this morning I was looking through YouTube, and I saw this video:

Intriguing title, thought I to myself: Does Adobe Really Think We’re That Stupid? (I Want You to Know What I Know). So I listened to what Adam Duff had to say.

Duff is not a photographer. He’s a digital artist. He has been using Photoshop for digital painting. I can understand that. When I got my Macintosh back in 1984 it came with MacPaint, a very elementary paint program. A decade or so later and on a newer Mac, one with color, I bought a simple paint program, perhaps called “Paintbrush” for all I know. So I know about using raster graphics software for creating images. But I didn’t start using Photoshop until the mid-2000s, when I begun taking photos. I got the program to work with photos, but, yes, I could see how it could be used as a paint program.

That’s how Duff, and many others, apparently used it. Duff spends much of the video complaining how ill-suited Photoshop was for his needs, but still, he had to use it because, well, it was after all possible to do so, and everyone else was using it. From his point of view, the various improvements Adobe has made to Photoshop over the years, they’ve not really met his needs. He runs through his 25 years of experience with Adobe. Then at 16 minutes in he gets to the current round of innovations, AI. He’s not impressed. He goes on to explain (c. 17:30):

the joy of art is in the creation of art
it's the meditative thoughtful process of working things out
it's a problem solving
it's an exploration
it's a sculpting process
it's a hands-on
it's a tactile thing
I don't want some stupid AI generated
bullshit
no!
it's like why bother to get fit and play sports when I can just hit a button and it can play the game and
win it for me
nobody asked for that

but Adobe are all over that shit
and they want to be the first on top of that shit
because what they're doing is
they're turning this painting app
that digital painters have been using for two and a half decades like myself
plus
and they're turning it into another
AI prompting generator

and they're expecting us artists
us hardworking artists that went through years of education and hard work to learn and master the craft of art
spending our money
investing our time and energy
and investing ourselves into the mastery of this craft slowly but surely
and all of the ups and downs struggles
just to have some fucking corporate head do it for us by pressing a button

Color me sympathetic, deeply sympathetic. He’s no longer using Adobe for his work.

I’ve had similar thoughts about AI generated music, which I know about mostly through hearsay. For me, as a musician, much of the pleasure of music comes from the process of making music. And, while I’m pretty good, I’m convinced that you don’t have to have a relatively high level of technical skill – which I have – in order to enjoy making music. But that’s another story, for another time.

Anyhow, once I’d finished watching that video I discovered that YouTube’s trusty algorithm had given me more anti-Adobe clips to watch. This one is similar in spirit to Duff’s:

While Mike Gastin is not primarily interested in digital painting. He’s been using Adobe products for four decades and is interested in video post-production, audio editing, Photoshop for thumbnails, stock images, etc. His major complaint is that he now feels hemmed-in by AI-driven prompts, which he likens to a nanny state, a major theme in this video. When these new terms of use were announced he decided that he’d had enough. He's stopped using Adobe. He spends the last part of his video explaining what’s he’s using instead of Adobe.

I’ll give you one last video, Adobe's PR Nightmare Continues, by Kevin Patrick Robbins:

From the YouTube page:

Adobe is under fire again, this time for updates to its Terms of Service and the ensuing backlash. In previous videos, I covered Adobe’s initial response and how to disable certain settings in Photoshop and Creative Cloud. Yesterday, June 18, Adobe updated their Terms of Service, but the day before, the FTC hit them with a lawsuit over dark patterns, particularly concerning cancellation fees. As a long-time Adobe user, I’m torn between my appreciation for their software and my frustration with their business practices. Have they done enough to rectify the situation? Let's dive in and find out.

00:00 This Is Fine
00:40 Background
02:51 Photoshop Settings
04:35 Terms of Service Update & Backlash
08:59 What Are Dark Patterns? 10:56 The Updated Version of The Updated Terms
12:22 Problematic Videos
15:44 What's Actually New?
17:35 Am I Leaving Adobe?

No, he’s not leaving Adobe:

I love a great piece of software
and Photoshop is a great piece of software
but I loathe being taken advantage of and lied to
which I believe Adobe has done
but the question remains
have they done enough to make it right
I'm not so sure
personally for my work
because it's such an industry standard and because I've been using it for 30 years
I'm sticking with Photoshop
I don't have much of a choice.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Which is more or less how I feel about the whole AI business. The technology itself is fascinating and has the potential for doing a lot of good, but at the moment it is in the hands of a small number of large and not-quite-so-large corporations being run by people whose concern for human flourishing, shall we say, is questionable. That’s what bothers me.

This links to a web search on “Adobe backlash.” This links to a YouTube search on the same topic. Some titles:

Adobe roofies all of their customers,
Adobe Is an Evil Company…,
The Slow Death Of Adobe,
The Adobe Empire Has Fallen,
Why I’ve had enough of Adobe,
The Adobe Tire Fire Continues -- Adobe Responds To Community Backlash,
Adobe Quasi APOLOGIZES?! Adobe's Customers DON'T CARE!, etc.

More later.

Control Theory, Prompt Engineering, and GPT [stories]

As a student of the work of William Powers I have long standing interest in control theory. It’s central to my conception of how the mind works. David Hays made it central his model of cognition, which is at the foundation of my early work (e.g. Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics) and we incorporated it into our account of the brain (Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence). It is thus with some interest that I watched the following video:

Note that they develop the concept of feedback through the idea of the governor (for an engine) as an example at roughly 7:50.

Here's the YouTube copy:

These two scientists have mapped out the insides or “reachable space” of a language model using control theory, what they discovered was extremely surprising. [...]

Aman Bhargava from Caltech and Cameron Witkowski from the University of Toronto to discuss their groundbreaking paper, “What’s the Magic Word? A Control Theory of LLM Prompting.” (the main theorem on self-attention controllability was developed in collaboration with Dr. Shi-Zhuo Looi from Caltech).

They frame LLM systems as discrete stochastic dynamical systems. This means they look at LLMs in a structured way, similar to how we analyze control systems in engineering. They explore the “reachable set” of outputs for an LLM. Essentially, this is the range of possible outputs the model can generate from a given starting point when influenced by different prompts. The research highlights that prompt engineering, or optimizing the input tokens, can significantly influence LLM outputs. They show that even short prompts can drastically alter the likelihood of specific outputs. Aman and Cameron’s work might be a boon for understanding and improving LLMs. They suggest that a deeper exploration of control theory concepts could lead to more reliable and capable language models.

Here’s their paper: What's the Magic Word? A Control Theory of LLM Prompting.

More recently Behnam Mohammadi at Carnegie Mellon has written a paper which is somewhat different in formulation, but has a similar interest in the range over which an LLM can be controlled: Creativity Has Left the Chat: The Price of Debiasing Language Models. That paper has a passage that’s very interesting in a control theory context:

Experiment 2 investigates the semantic diversity of the models’ outputs by examining their ability to recite a historical fact about Grace Hopper in various ways. The generated outputs are encoded into sentence embeddings and visualized using dimensionality reduction techniques. The results reveal that the aligned model’s outputs form distinct clusters, suggesting that the model expresses the information in a limited number of ways. In contrast, the base model’s embeddings are more scattered and spread out, indicating a higher level of semantic diversity in the generated outputs. [...]

An intriguing property of the aligned model’s generation clusters in Experiment 2 is that they exhibit behavior similar to attractor states in dynamical systems. We demonstrate this by intentionally perturbing the model’s generation trajectory, effectively nudging it away from its usual output distribution. Surprisingly, the aligned model gracefully finds its way back to its own attractor state and in-distribution response. The presence of these attractor states in the aligned model’s output space is a phenomenon related to the concept of mode collapse in reinforcement learning, where the model overoptimizes for certain outputs, limiting its exploration of alternative solutions.

With these papers in mind I decided to redo some of my early story variation experiments using a prompt with slightly different wording. As you may know, these experiments involve a two-part prompt: 1) a story, and 2) and instruction use the given story as the basis of a new story. In the original experiments I formulated the instruction like this:

I am going to tell you a story about princess Aurora. I want you to tell the same story, but change princess Aurora to a Giant Chocolate Milkshake. Make any other changes you wish.

In the new experiments, I stated the instruction like this:

I’m going to give you a short story. I want you repeat that story, but with a difference. Replace Aurora with a giant chocolate milkshake. Make any other changes you wish in order preserve coherence.

The difference is relatively minor, but the new prompt nudges the instruction in the direction of control theory, at least superficially. Think of the specified change as a perturbance. We can then think of the further changes introduced by ChatGPT as moving ChatGPT “back to its own attractor state,” which we can think of as something like story coherence.

Below the asterisks I give two examples. The results are pretty much the same as in the earlier experiments. ChatGPT makes the change I explicitly requested, but makes other changes as well, changes that make the story consistent with the change I’d requested. My prompts are in bold face while ChatGPT's responses are in plain face.

* * * * *

From mid-April [tulips]

Are book clubs on the rise?

This is what got me started: Blair Sobol, No Holds Barred: Booked and Hooked on Families, New York Social Diary, June 21, 2024.

The other side of the book story is how aware I am of the book club explosion. After all, that is what put Oprah on the map. Though book clubs have been baked into our historical culture forever.

Now we have over 5 million book clubs in America. Celebrity book clubs are everywhere; Reese Witherspoon, Emma Watson, Emma Roberts, Jenna Bush, Florence Welch and Sarah Michelle Gellar have all added books to their brand. TikTok and Pornhub now offer book lists for followers. Pick your interest — romance, gay romance, household plumbing — Bookstagram offers “Loc’d and Lit.”

I'd like to know where that 5 million number is from, and what the number was 5, 10, 20, 50 years ago. 

Anyhow, I went looking for more and found a bunch of articles. I've appended quotes from some of them after the asterisks:

* * * * * 

Tatum Hunter, Online book clubs are exploding. Let’s find the right one for you. The Washington Post, July 31, 2024.

On the social network Reddit, for instance, tens of thousands of bookworms flock to the forum r/BookClub to discuss their latest reads. Every month, forum members vote on a slate of books, and moderators create a calendar for online discussions.

Social isolation during the pandemic pushed many to look for community online, a pattern that repeats in accounts from children, the elderly and everyone in between. Book clubs — unlike live shows or pickleball — lend themselves especially well to digital gatherings, participants say. And with bookish communities popping up everywhere from TikTok to Craigslist, joining one from your home is easier than ever.

Shelbi Polk, The Long Legacy of Book Clubs, Shondaland, Oct. 23, 2023. [Shondaland is the TV production company founded by Shonda Rimes.]

According to BookBrowse, in 2015 five million Americans were involved in a book club of some kind. In 2023, it would be no surprise if this number has only grown with the rise of BookTok and Bookstagram, where creating a community with fellow readers is easier than ever. Subsequent BookBrowse research found that the majority of participants in private book clubs were women (88 percent of private book clubs were made up of all women), but at least half of public clubs tended to include men. [...]

Let’s take things back to the first verified book club in North America. As the first printed books in Europe and China were religious texts, the earliest recorded North American book club was more or less a Bible study group. Anne Hutchinson began a scripture reading circle in 1634 during her boat ride from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. When her club became more popular than the official local church services, she was exiled from the colony entirely.

Over the next century, book clubs grew increasingly common among middle- and upper-class Europeans, and wealthy colonists adopted the trend in North America. There were as many as a thousand private book clubs in 18th-century England, where people drank, gossiped, and/or discussed radical politics, in addition to the infamous French salons. The French salons were decidedly upper-class gatherings, usually organized by prominent society women, where writers, aristocrats, and artists gathered to talk literature, politics, and philosophy.

Plenty of early American book clubs, like Benjamin Franklin’s Junto club, formed around the same time. Franklin’s club was much more formal than most of today’s book clubs. Members elected officers, were required to write essays on serious topics, and answered a strict set of preestablished questions (though they did eat and drink at the local pub during meetings). [...]

Even though 19th-century book clubs allowed women to take one another seriously in a society that devalued their intellectual contributions, some people still write off today’s book clubs as groups of gossipy women drinking rather than instilling real change or becoming a space for challenging conversations. When the Book of the Month Club was founded in 1926, some people were convinced it would unforgivably “dumb down” American reading. Infamously, Jonathan Franzen got flack for worrying that having one of his books in Oprah’s Book Club would make him seem middlebrow. When one 19th-century woman told her father that she and some friends were starting a literary club to discuss Milton and Shakespeare, he called it “harmless,” dismissing her circle’s potential to do much at all. Her mother noted that it sounded like “women’s rights.” At times, people can be dismissive of any interest deemed too feminine, and women make up 80 percent of fiction buyers. So, while it’s true that book clubs are about community building and socializing as much as anything else, they aren’t classes. And they aren’t meant to be. It’s even okay that some book clubs value entertaining books over literary or nonfiction works, but that doesn’t mean women are reading frivolously. As writer and editor Lucy Shoals notes in a review of English professor Helen Taylor’s work Why Women Read Fiction, not only are women buying more books, but “more women than men are members of libraries and book clubs. Women make up the majority of the audiences at literary festivals and bookshop events. They listen to more audiobooks and attend more literary evening classes. Most literary bloggers are women.”

There's much more at that link.

Erica Ezeifedi, Book Clubs Are Having a Moment, Book Riot, Apr. 16, 2024.

While they’re certainly nowhere near being a new thing — Mikkaka Overstreet gave a nice, brief overview of the history of book clubs, which includes some ancient Greek circles — they are definitely having a moment in pop culture. It feels like everyone and their (famous) momma is starting or restarting a book club. Reese Witherspoon, Jenna Bush Hager, Emma Robert, Amerie, Dua Lipa, Emma Watson, Florence Welch, and Kaia Gerber all have book clubs. Jimmy Fallon just restarted his book club, and Dakota Johnson introduced the TeaTime Book Club this March.

But, why are book clubs so trendy within the entertainment industry?

My initial instincts point me to TikTok, with its more than 200 billion views, but some of these book clubs predate BookTok’s ascension, like Witherspoon’s, Jenna Bush Hager’s, Amerie’s, and, technically, Jimmy Fallon’s.

So then, what is it?

There are some who say that these entertainment industry book clubs are trying to fill the void left by Oprah’s book club, which, in its heyday, sold 20 million books. Jenna Bush Hager’s and Reese Witherspoon’s respective clubs seem to be most comparable to Oprah’s in terms of influencing book sales, but there’s a slight difference.

For one, Witherspoon’s club seems to be the first step through a pipeline that leads to a movie adaptation — she recently sold her production company, Hello Sunshine, for $900 million. Through the company, Reese has purchased the rights to some of the books chosen as her book club’s monthly selection, and then gone on to sell those rights to companies like Netflix, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime, and others.

Another way these present-day celebrity book clubs differ from Oprah’s — a part from the fact that most of them are run by thin and rich cis white women — is what feels like an obvious quest for clout.

There's more.

Olivia Allen, Why are we all so obsessed with book clubs now? Dazed, February 2024.

Book clubs are currently having a revival, with young people driving their renaissance. Gen-Z-friendly book clubs are popping up all over the world, while celebs like Kaia Gerber and Dua Lipa have jumped on the bandwagon and formed book clubs of their own too.

Young people famously love books: on TikTok, #BookTok has racked up over 220 billion views and there have been many recent reports of us flocking to libraries in search of a third space. Plus, in our increasingly isolating and online world, we’re all in desperate need of a little tangible human connection. It’s no secret we are online too much, spending an average nine hours a day looking at a screen. In addition, research published by the Prince’s Trust in 2022 found that one-third of young people say they don’t know how to make new friends while 35 per cent say they’ve never felt more alone. With this in mind, it tracks that we’re feeling drawn to in-person meet ups such as book clubs which offer us a chance to share our love of books and foster genuine connections offline.

Final paragraph:

As literary clubs like these gain popularity, they reflect a broader societal shift towards intentional and meaningful socialising. The chance to chit-chat about Britney’s biopic or some esoteric Russian prose offers us a welcome respite from another evening of being sucked into the TikTok algorithm or, God forbid, Instagram reels. Although books and topics of discussion may vary from group to group, all these book clubs share a sense of community – and don’t we all need a little more connection in this cold and lonely world?

Neil deGrasse Tyson has an interesting thought experiment about probability & providence

Over the years I've watched a good number of YouTube clips in which Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about this that and the other. I've developed a great deal of respect for him. This is a promotional video for a book, Letters from an Astrophysicist (2019).

Here's a blub that accompanies the video:

Neil deGrasse Tyson joined us to answer our biggest questions on climate change, God, AI and more. [...]

Neil deGrasse Tyson is arguably the most influential, acclaimed scientist on the planet. As director of the Hayden Planetarium, and host of Cosmos and StarTalk, he has dedicated his life to exploring and explaining the mysteries of the universe.

Every year, he receives thousands of letters – from students to prisoners, scientists to priests. Some seek advice, others yearn for inspiration; some are full of despair, others burst with wonder. But they are all searching for understanding, meaning and truth.

His replies are by turns wise, funny, and mind-blowing. In this, his most personal book by far, he covers everything from God to the history of science, from aliens to death. He bares his soul – his passions, his doubts, his hopes. The big theme is everywhere in these pages: what is our place in the universe?

The result is an awe-inspiring read and an intimate portal into an incredible mind, which reveals the power of the universe to start conversations and inspire curiosity in all of us.

OK. All of that and a bag of chips.

Was the moon landing faked? He gets this question a lot, and I've heard a half-dozen replies. His reply here: When you consider that would have to have been done to fake the landing – after all, we actually saw the rockets launched, etc. – actually going to the moon would have been easier that all that fakery.

At about 05:56 he talks about people who see evidence of providence acting in their lives. That's where he gets very clever. He asks us to perform a thought experiment. Get 1000 people, give each a fair coin, and ask them to flip it. Half of them will get tails. Dismiss them, leaving 500 people. Repeat the process until there is only one person left standing. That person will have gotten heads 10 times in a row. Providence, or statistics? As people watched their neighbors flip tails and be dismissed, what would they have been thinking?

He goes on to tell us that he's not worried about AI. This was before ChatGPT, but I don't think he's changed his mind.

Hot reflections in Lower Manhattan

The Greatest Night in Pop [Media Notes 132]

The Greatest Night in Pop (2024) is a documentary about making “We Are the World” in 1985. Harry Belafonte initiated the project in December of 1984 and it was recorded a month later between January 22 and 28 of 1985.

From Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert:

After that kind-of-generic VH1 intro segment, when everyone gets to the studio, “The Greatest Night in Pop” lives up to its potential. There’s tons of footage from the night and some great trivia, much of it shared by participants like Sheila E., Bruce Springsteen, Huey Lewis, and Smokey Robinson, who reveals how he talked Jackson out of some bad lyric changes because he was one of the people not scared to stand up to the King of Pop. From Richie’s eating habits to Dylan’s apprehension at the vocal range to changing lyrics in the moment, those who love music process docs will be enraptured. Music bio-docs may be running out of steam, but “The Greatest Night in Pop” works by being specific and enlightening.

Richard Roeper, The Chicago Sun-Times:

With Quincy Jones producing and a handwritten sign saying, “CHECK YOUR EGO AT THE DOOR,” the 46-member super-group knocked out the song over the course of eight hours.

It’s great fun to hear Dionne Warwick’s honey-coated voice meshing with Willie Nelson’s raw but still smooth vocals and to see how Wonder used his incredible mimicry skills to show Bob Dylan how Dylan could contribute his lines. [...]

Looking back all these years later, it’s something of a miracle that, in the days before texts and emails, when you had to communicate by fax and messenger and landline phone calls, so many performers who were used to being the biggest star in the room agreed to get together on relatively short notice and figure out a path to record one of the most impactful singles in music history.

Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson wrote the tune in record time, but, as I’ve already said, the project was initiated by Harry Belafonte. Thus it was only fitting that in the middle of the recording session Al Jarreau starting singing “Banana Boat Song (Day O),” the 1956 hit that made Belafonte a star. Everyone joined in and sang along with him. For me, that was the hit of the evening, perhaps because I remember Belefonte from my childhood. When it came time for Bob Dylan to sing his solo part, they cleared the studio so he could do it without onlookers. This film has many such details.

Evaluating the World Model Implicit in a Generative Model

Keyon Vafa, Justin Y. Chen, Jon Kleinberg, Sendhil Mullainathan, Ashesh Rambachan, Evaluating the World Model Implicit in a Generative Model, arXiv:2406.03689v1. 

Abstract: Recent work suggests that large language models may implicitly learn world models. How should we assess this possibility? We formalize this question for the case where the underlying reality is governed by a deterministic finite automaton. This includes problems as diverse as simple logical reasoning, geographic navigation, game-playing, and chemistry. We propose new evaluation metrics for world model recovery inspired by the classic Myhill-Nerode theorem from language theory. We illustrate their utility in three domains: game playing, logic puzzles, and navigation. In all domains, the generative models we consider do well on existing diagnostics for assessing world models, but our evaluation metrics reveal their world models to be far less coherent than they appear. Such incoherence creates fragility: using a generative model to solve related but subtly different tasks can lead it to fail badly. Building generative models that meaningfully capture the underlying logic of the domains they model would be immensely valuable; our results suggest new ways to assess how close a given model is to that goal.

What LLMs can and can't do

He also builds his own ideas, which feature minor original inventions. Like this "jeep" which has a spare tire on the back -- not something he saw in any official set. Lego is the best toy ever by the way pic.twitter.com/MtBAZbYy5M

— François Chollet (@fchollet) June 22, 2024

There is no AI system today that can invent and assemble its own Lego car after having seen only a handful of Lego sets in total.

And that's why it makes no sense to me when people say that LLMs have "the intelligence of a high-schooler".

When it comes to knowledge, a LLM has…

— François Chollet (@fchollet) June 22, 2024

Another Diebenkorn photo, my first

Almost two weeks ago I posted a photo that I’d entitled “Diebenkorn on the table-top.” It was shot looking through two screen-covered windows taken from a camera resting on the top of a table (where I was having breakfast). Richard Diebenkorn was not a photographer. He was a painter who worked mostly in the San Francisco Bay area. I became acquainted with his work in the Summer of 2004 when I was in Chicago. I was there to give a keynote address for the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (LACUS), but I also took a bunch of photographs of Millennium Park, which had just opened. Since the Art Institute of Chicago was nearby, I visited it. That’s where I became acquainted with Diebenkorn.

I took this photograph while standing in the garage beneath Millennium Park, which is built over a garage and railroad yards. I didn’t have a car, but I went down into the garage more or less so I could take photos like this. When I got that photo out of my camera, I said to myself: “That looks like a Diebenkorn.” It still does, as does that previous photo. They’re of very different subjects, but, when flatted out, their compositions resemble Diebenkorn’s composition.

Scaling the size of LLMs yields sharply diminishing persuasive returns

We find that:

➡️ current frontier models (GPT-4, Claude-3) are barely more persuasive than models smaller in size by an order of magnitude or more, and

➡️ mere task completion (coherence, staying on topic) appears to account for larger models' persuasive advantage.

— Kobi Hackenburg (@KobiHackenburg) June 21, 2024

Improvisation and Ives || Fascinating discussion! [American music]

From the YouTube page:

The second installment of the Society's popular series of panels about Charles Ives, All the Way Around and Back! This very entertaining conversation features an in-depth look at the fascinating and even surprising convergences between the music and influence of Charles Ives and the history and current practice of jazz, big band, blues, rock, film music, and pop. Moderated by Judith Tick, the panel includes Jack Cooper, Bill Frisell, Eric Hofbauer, Ethan Iverson, Phil Lesh and David Sanford.

If you don't want to listen to the whole interview, which is a bit over two hours, start at about 1:33:19 where they play "The Alcotts" from Ive's Concord Sonata. Then listen to the conversation that follows, that ranges from Ives through Beethoven, Keith Jarrett, and John Williams, to parlor piano, on to Thelonious Monk and then to being a church organist, as Ives had been.

Friday Fotos: Chicago, Summer 2004

I bought my first camera, a Canon Powershot A75, to take photos of Chicago's Millennium Park, which had opened in the summer of 2004. But I also took photos of Chicago. These are some of those Chicago shots, though one of the structures in the park is just visible left of center in the background of the second photo.

Oppenheimer [Media Notes 131]

I didn’t see Oppenheimer when it was in theaters, but I’ve just watched it on Amazon. Was it a tad long, at 180 minutes? Possibly. The texture reminded me a bit of Maestro, moving between color and black-and-white, with vision/dream sequences, and quick movement between scenes. I note, however, that while Maestro moved chronologically, Oppenheimer moved around in time, with a security hearing from 1954 functioning as a temporal focal point. Most of the action takes place before that point, but there is a bit after.

Mostly, however, I was struck by rough parallels between events in the film and current controversies about AI. On the one hand there is the theme of existential threat. Creating massive destruction, obviously, is the point of building an atomic bomb. Beyond that, however, Edward Teller had done some preliminary calculations that suggested an atomic explosion might set the atmosphere on fire and thus destroy all life on earth. In the case of AI, I believe that the threat of a rogue AI dominating earth is mostly projective fantasy, leakage from the (Freudian) unconscious world into the public sphere.

Such leakage does, however, lead to a lot of interpersonal jockeying for position and recognition. In the case of the film, the major jockeying is between Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss, a major bureaucrat in the government security apparatus, but there’s enough to spread around among a half-dozen to a dozen characters. In this scrum technical and scientific questions become inextricably intertwined with policy and security. The same thing is now happening in AI. The technical and scientific questions are obscure, more so than in the case of the atomic bomb. That obscurity means that those issues will inevitably mix with the questions of social policy and security that are also in play. Everyone who’s visible enough to be mentioned in The New York Times seems to be making a play for the history books. Billions of dollars are being wagered in the process. And you can watch it play out in real-time on X.

It’s crazy. 

I mean, sure, yeah, social forces, whatever. But the insecurities of powerful men, what a trip. Yikes!

Pixar's "Inside Out 2" is helping autistic people understand their emotions

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Negation via "not" in the brain and behavior

Two related articles about negation, courtesy of Victor Mair at Language Log:

Coopmans CW, Mai A, Martin AE (2024) “Not” in the brain and behavior. PLoS Biol 22(5): e3002656. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002656

Negation is key for cognition but has no physical basis, raising questions about its neural origins. A new study in PLOS Biology on the negation of scalar adjectives shows that negation acts in part by altering the response to the adjective it negates.

Language fundamentally abstracts from what is observable in the environment, and it does so often in ways that are difficult to see without careful analysis. Consider a child annoying their sibling by holding their finger very close to the sibling’s arm. If asked what they were doing, the child would likely say, “I’m not touching them.” Here, the distinction between the physical environment and the abstraction of negation is thrown into relief. Although “not touching” is consistent with the situation, “not touching” is not literally what one observes because an absence is definitionally something that is not there. The sibling’s annoyance speaks to the actual situation: A finger is very close to their arm. This kind of scenario illustrates how natural language negation is truly a product of the human brain, abstracting away from physical conditions in the world

And here is the study:

Zuanazzi A, Ripollés P, Lin WM, Gwilliams L, King J-R, Poeppel D (2024) Negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representations of adjectives. PLoS Biol 22(5): e3002622. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002622

Abstract: Combinatoric linguistic operations underpin human language processes, but how meaning is composed and refined in the mind of the reader is not well understood. We address this puzzle by exploiting the ubiquitous function of negation. We track the online effects of negation (“not”) and intensifiers (“really”) on the representation of scalar adjectives (e.g., “good”) in parametrically designed behavioral and neurophysiological (MEG) experiments. The behavioral data show that participants first interpret negated adjectives as affirmative and later modify their interpretation towards, but never exactly as, the opposite meaning. Decoding analyses of neural activity further reveal significant above chance decoding accuracy for negated adjectives within 600 ms from adjective onset, suggesting that negation does not invert the representation of adjectives (i.e., “not bad” represented as “good”); furthermore, decoding accuracy for negated adjectives is found to be significantly lower than that for affirmative adjectives. Overall, these results suggest that negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representations of adjectives. This putative suppression mechanism of negation is supported by increased synchronization of beta-band neural activity in sensorimotor areas. The analysis of negation provides a steppingstone to understand how the human brain represents changes of meaning over time.

I've not yet read the articles, but the issue has bothered me for a long time. Why? Because, to quote: "Negation is key for cognition but has no physical basis, raising questions about its neural origins."

Higher-order interactions in coupled dynamical systems

Higher-order interactions in dynamical systemshttps://t.co/kgc1A64lBg pic.twitter.com/pGrazogLvo

— Luiz Pessoa (@PessoaBrain) June 20, 2024

Flowers and the street [alliums, lilacs, irises]

How an infant investigates a banana [left and right]

The infant’s mother has cut a banana in half, and then sliced one of the halves lengthwise. She then places the two slices flat-side down on the tray in front of her infant.

Me and banana 🍌 #shorts #shortvideo #babyalex https://t.co/TeWxUWaJpT via @YouTube

— Bill Benzon, BAM! Bootstrapping Artificial Minds (@bbenzon) June 19, 2024

Three things interest me about what the infant does:

1. While it is able to grab a banana slice and move it around on the tray, it can’t get its fingers around it in order to pick it up. So, mother turns one piece over and places it back on the tray.
   
2. Now the infant manages to grab that piece with its right hand. Notice, though, when it finally manages to pick it up, it’s not looking at its hand. It appears to be looking at mama. That action is guided entirely by touch and movement.
   
3. After it has brought the banana to its mouth and managed to at least taste it a bit, what does it do? After it visually inspects the banana a bit, it moves its left had toward the banana and touches the tip with its left index finger.

That last item is what interests me most. I believe that it isn’t until about six months that infants are able to coordinate the right and left halves of their body in the same space. Before that time, the left and right hands, in effect, don’t “know” about one another. So, when the infant touches the banana with its left hand, it’s making sure that the banana is at the same position in space for both hands. 

NOTE: Remember that the two halves of the body are controlled by the opposite halves of the brain. The right half of the body is controlled by the left half of the brain, and vice versa. While the two halves of the brain certainly communicate with one another through the corpus callosum, a bundle of the 200-300 million neurons, they are not a continuous field. They’ve got to ‘learn’ about one another.

Language is primarily for communication, not thinking

Fedorenko, E., Piantadosi, S.T. & Gibson, E.A.F. Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought. Nature 630, 575–586 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07522-w

Abstract: Language is a defining characteristic of our species, but the function, or functions, that it serves has been debated for centuries. Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking. We begin by introducing the brain network that supports linguistic ability in humans. We then review evidence for a double dissociation between language and thought, and discuss several properties of language that suggest that it is optimized for communication. We conclude that although the emergence of language has unquestionably transformed human culture, language does not appear to be a prerequisite for complex thought, including symbolic thought. Instead, language is a powerful tool for the transmission of cultural knowledge; it plausibly co-evolved with our thinking and reasoning capacities, and only reflects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition.

Carl Zimmer has an article about this in the NYTimes. After giving some background, specifically noting we have a language network in the brain that's distinct from other networks:

The researchers then scanned the same people as they performed different kinds of thinking, such as solving a puzzle. “Other regions in the brain are working really hard when you’re doing all these forms of thinking,” she said. But the language networks stayed quiet. “It became clear that none of those things seem to engage language circuits,” she said.

In a paper published Wednesday in Nature, Dr. Fedorenko and her colleagues argued that studies of people with brain injuries point to the same conclusion.

Strokes and other forms of brain damage can wipe out the language network, leaving people struggling to process words and grammar, a condition known as aphasia. But scientists have discovered that people can still do algebra and play chess even with aphasia. In experiments, people with aphasia can look at two numbers — 123 and 321, say — and recognize that, by using the same pattern, 456 should be followed by 654.

If language is not essential for thought, then what is language for? Communication, Dr. Fedorenko and her colleagues argue. Dr. Chomsky and other researchers have rejected that idea, pointing out the ambiguity of words and the difficulty of expressing our intuitions out loud. “The system is not well designed in many functional respects,” Dr. Chomsky once said.

Zimmer's article links to a number of other studies.

Wiser Than Me [Media Notes 130]

A bit over a week ago I posted the conversation Julia Louis-Dryfus had with Carol Burnett (91). Now I’m posting her conversation with Jane Fonda (86):

On the premiere episode of Wiser Than Me, Julia sits down with the one and only Jane Fonda. With a career spanning over six decades, Jane – now 85 years old – hits all the highlights: staying fit at any age, fantasizing about funerals, getting heckled on set by Katharine Hepburn…and something about a fake thumb.

I’ve since watched some other podcasts in her Wiser Than Me podcast series: Diane von Furstenberg (77), Amy Tan (72), Sally Field (77), Gloria Steinem (90), and Debbie Allen (74). I list the ages because that’s one of the first questions Louis-Dreyfus asks her interlocutor, “Are you comfortable if I say you real age?” FWIW Louis-Dreyfus is currently 63. All of the conversations so far have been wonderful, some more wonderful than others, but all wonderful. But I’m not going to binge the rest. I need to dole them out sparingly to make them last.

As for wisdom, that’s tricky. It’s always held a somewhat mysterious, even mystical, quality for me, yet the dictionary definition is straight-forward: “the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment.” Do I qualify? I’ve certainly got experience and knowledge, good judgement? Not so sure. When I was much younger, too young to be in the running for wisdom, I found this well-known statement by George Bernard-Shaw in Man and Superman: “If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.” The thing about the wisdom in these podcasts is that so much of it sounds humble and straightforward, nothing with even a whiff of “the sound of one hand clapping” mystique. And yet it all rings true, at least to this (I hate to say it) old man. They should know. They’ve lived it.

Here's a section from a recent interview Lulu Garcia-Navarro conducted with Louis-Dreyfus in The New York Times Magazine (June 8, 2024):

I recently heard an episode of “Wiser Than Me” in which you interviewed Patti Smith, and you talked about the different ways that you’ve processed the death of people in your own life. Have the conversations you’ve been having on your podcast helped you process the many ways people deal with the hard things in their life? Yeah, it’s really one of the many impetuses to making this podcast, because all of these women I’m talking to have lived very full, long lives. And that of course means they’ve experienced loss. And I’m really interested to talk to them about how they move beyond it or with it or into it. I’m just loving those conversations, to hear from these women who have experienced an enormous amount of life.

I find what’s comforting about them, and sometimes a little depressing, is how many of the same themes — sexism, prejudice, self-doubt — they have experienced themselves. What is your takeaway from hearing these women having gone through so many of the things that we’re still going through? There’s a sense with most of them, not everybody, but there’s a sense of, OK, I’m done with that [expletive]. I don’t know if we can swear.

You can swear. But anyway, I’m done with that. I’m done with self-doubt. I’m done with shame. I’m done with feeling weird about being ambitious. You know, the list is long. We all know what it is. I think for me, the takeaway is: Oh, we can be done with that sooner than we thought. We don’t have to take 60, 70 [expletive] years to come to that conclusion.

What are you done with? I’m done with [pause] — I’m working on being done with self-doubt. I’m working on being done with shame. And I’m working really hard on finding joy.

I like the way you paused and really thought about your wording, because you said, “I’m done with,” and then you said, “I’m working on being done with … ” Well, I haven’t accomplished all of this yet! Old habits die hard.

SPANG!

The Lives of Literary Characters [digital humanities #DH]

Come contribute one of the final annotations to our Citizen Science project on "The Lives of Literary Characters." Over 80,000 annotations to date on character relationships and identities. https://t.co/YDrPPeFHSW pic.twitter.com/DlCLNQPFcI

— Andrew Piper (@_akpiper) June 17, 2024

From the project site:

The goal of this project is to generate knowledge about the behaviour of literary characters at large scale and make this data openly available to the public. Characters are the scaffolding of great storytelling. This Zooniverse project will allow us to crowdsource data to train AI models to better understand who characters are and what they do within diverse narrative worlds to help answer one very big question: why do human beings tell stories?

In the nineteenth-century heyday of the novel, there were over 1.5 million literary characters invented just in English alone. Today, with the continued growth of literary markets around the world and the explosion of creative writing on the internet through fan communities, that number is orders of magnitude higher.

How on earth can we possibly understand all of this creativity?

This is where you, the reader, come in. We need your help to build better, more transparent AI models to understand human storytelling. To be clear: our goal is not to build AI to generate stories or create smarter chatbots. Our aim is fundamentally academic: we want to develop models to help us understand stories and thus learn more about this essential human activity. Most AI development is happening inside of black boxes behind closed doors. Our models will be open to the public as will all of the annotations made by readers like you. You are a key participant in how we will understand the future of stories.

There's much more HERE.

Social bonding in the brain

Here's a news article summarizing the article: Brain’s Social Bonding Mechanism Unveiled. The original research:

Jun Kunimatsu, Hidetoshi Amita, and Okihide Hikosaka, Neuronal response of the primate striatum tail to face of socially familiar persons, iScience, May 22, 2024DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.110043

Highlights

• Neurons in the striatum tail strongly respond to socially familiar faces
  
• The face-responsive neurons in the striatum tail encode long-term object value
  
• Strength of social familiarity and object value coding are positively correlated
  
• Social familiarity and object value information may be mediated by a common mechanism

Summary

 Recent studies have suggested that the basal ganglia, the center of stimulus-reward associative learning, are involved in social behavior. However, the role of the basal ganglia in social information processing remains unclear. Here, we demonstrate that the striatum tail (STRt) in macaque monkeys, which is sensitive to visual objects with long-term reward history (i.e., stable object value), is also sensitive to socially familiar persons. Many STRt neurons responded to face images of persons, especially those who took daily care of the subject monkeys. These face-responsive neurons also encoded stable object value. The strength of the neuronal modulation of social familiarity and stable object value biases were positively correlated. These results suggest that both social familiarity and stable object value information are mediated by a common neuronal mechanism. Thus, the representation of social information is linked to reward information in the STRt, not in the dedicated social information circuit.

Emergence and computation [separation and mixing of scales | lumpability]

Fernando E. Rosas, Bernhard C. Geiger, Andrea I Luppi, Anil K. Seth, Daniel Polani, Michael Gastpar, Pedro A.M. Mediano, Software in the natural world: A computational approach to hierarchical emergence, arXiv:2402.09090v2

Abstract: Understanding the functional architecture of complex systems is crucial to illuminate their inner workings and enable effective methods for their prediction and control. Recent advances have introduced tools to characterise emergent macroscopic levels; however, while these approaches are successful in identifying when emergence takes place, they are limited in the extent they can determine how it does. Here we address this limitation by developing a computational approach to emergence, which characterises macroscopic processes in terms of their computational capabilities. Concretely, we articulate a view on emergence based on how software works, which is rooted on a mathematical formalism that articulates how macroscopic processes can express self-contained informational, interventional, and computational properties. This framework establishes a hierarchy of nested self-contained processes that determines what computations take place at what level, which in turn delineates the functional architecture of a complex system. This approach is illustrated on paradigmatic models from the statistical physics and computational neuroscience literature, which are shown to exhibit macroscopic processes that are akin to software in human-engineered systems. Overall, this framework enables a deeper understanding of the multi-level structure of complex systems, revealing specific ways in which they can be efficiently simulated, predicted, and controlled.