The Two Voices of Scott Alexander on Rogue AI

Back at the end of February, Tyler Cowen had a post entitled, “Are nuclear weapons or Rogue AI the more dangerous risk?” He linked to a long Scott Alexander post, “Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might or Might Not Work,” which was about some recent web discourse around and about predicting the emergence of human-level AI. Then, at the very end on his long post, seemingly out of nowhere, Alexander was fretting about danger of rogue AI.

I seem to have gotten trapped in Alexander’s post. I have read it several times, even taking notes. It’s a very interesting document and merits some discussion of how it is constructed. I’m not so much concerned about whether or not Alexander’s assessment of the prospects of human level AI is valid as I am about the convoluted nature of his post.

Two voices

Alexander writes the post in two voices. While I’ve not read a lot of his material, I’ve read enough to know that he’s a careful and skilled writer. If he spoke through two voices it must be because whatever he wants to convey arises from the interaction between them and cannot be stated within a single voice.

Let’s call one of the voices the Impersonal voice. Most of the post is written in that voice, which is the voice in which he’s written most of the posts I’m familiar with. Let’s call the other voice the Personal voice. By word-count it’s by far the lesser voice, but it packs a strong rhetorical punch.

Let’s look at the two strongest statements from the Personal voice. The first, and I believe longest, section of the report is Alexander’s account of Ajeya Cotra’s long report, Forecasting TAI with biological anchors, which I’ve not read (though I’ve read some of what Holden Karnofsky says about it). Very near the end of this section the Personal voice makes a strong statement (though this is not the first appearance of this voice):

One more question: what if this is all bullshit? What if it’s an utterly useless total garbage steaming pile of grade A crap?

Our second example comes near the end of the post, when Alexander begins his own assessment of things:

Oh God, I have to write some kind of conclusion to this post, in some way that suggests I have an opinion, or that I’m at all qualified to assess this kind of research. Oh God oh God.

Phrases like “total garbage,” “grade A crap” and “Oh God” are not appropriate to the work Alexander is doing through his (standard and) Impersonal voice. They signal us that we are listening to a different voice. This voice expresses a merely personal attitude and is quite different from the objectivity sought in the Impersonal voice.

Taken at face value the second quoted statement says Alexander doesn’t feel (technically) qualified to judge this material. As such, it also tells us why he’d made that first statement and in that voice. That first statement places the assertion, Cotra’s report is nonsense, into the record. By couching that assertion in the words and manner of the Personal voice Alexander separates it from his Impersonal summary of the report. In effect, The guy who summarized the report is not the guy who thinks it’s nonsense. The guy who summarized the report doesn’t feel competent to assess it, but happens to be closely coupled to the guy who has deep doubts.

From parody to grudging affirmation to confusion

So, Alexander has gotten a statement of deep doubt into the record. What happens next? He goes back into the Impersonal voice and invites us to

Imagine a scientist in Victorian Britain, speculating on when humankind might invent ships that travel through space. He finds a natural anchor: the moon travels through space! He can observe things about the moon: for example, it is 220 miles in diameter (give or take an order of magnitude). So when humankind invents ships that are 220 miles in diameter, they can travel through space!

He then spins out that tale and includes a helpful chart and a picture. It’s absurd – he does slip in a wink or two. It’s a parody of the methodology in Cotra’s report. A parody is not an argument, but it clarifies Alexander’s fears about the report.

Then he goes into his second major section, an account of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s critique, which takes the form of a long post in dialogue form. I’ve taken a look at the post, but haven’t read the whole thing. Alexander’s opens this section by asserting, “Eliezer Yudkowsky presents a more subtle version of these kinds of objection in an essay…” I won’t bother to say anything about that beyond noting the Yudkowsky thinks Cotra’s method is useless for estimating the arrival of Transformative AI. Alexander may not feel qualified to critique Cotra’s work, but Yudkowsky certainly does. And why not? As Alexander notes: “...he did found the field [AI alignment], so I guess everyone has to listen to him.”[1]

When he’s finished with Yudkowsky, Alexander discusses comments from other places (LessWrong, AI Impacts, and OpenPhil) and finally offers his own evaluation, which he opens with the “Oh God” statement I’ve already quoted. He says a thing or two and arrives at this:

Given these two assumptions - that natural artifacts usually have efficiencies within a few OOM [orders of magnitude] of artificial ones, and that compute drives progress pretty reliably - I am proud to be able to give Ajeya’s report the coveted honor of “I do not make an update of literally zero upon reading it”.

That still leaves the question of “how much of an update do I make?” Also “what are we even doing here?”

I take it that the passages he puts in quotes are being spoken though the Personal voice.

Let’s look at the first one. It’s stated in informal Baysian terms. It also feels arch and indirect. “I do not make an update of literally zero”? What’s that? He’s refrained from writing “0” in a ledger somewhere? Whereas if the report had been less convincing, he’d have

• opened up that ledger,
• added a line,
• placed “Ajeya’s report” in the Argument column, and
• written “0” in the Effect on Me column.

On the contrary, the report has had some non-zero effect on him. But then he attempts to run away: “what are we even doing here?”

A couple paragraphs later: “This report was insufficiently different from what I already believed for me to need to worry about updating from one to the other.” I’m not sure what to make of this. If his prior belief had been quite different from the report’s conclusion, then a decision to stick with that prior belief would represent lack of faith in the report (which he doesn’t feel competent to judge). In contrast, a decision to revise his belief in the direction indicated by the report would represent faith in Cotra (and her colleagues) despite his lack of (technical) qualifications for judging the report. So, he can’t judge the report, doesn’t think it’s wrong, but doesn’t think it’s right enough to lead him to change his mind.

It's as though he’s playing the role of Penelope in Odyssey. She tells her suitors she’ll pick one when she’s done weaving a burial shroud for Laertes. They see her diligently weaving during the day. But then at night, what does she do? She undoes the weaving she’d done during the day so that she can put off the day she has to pick one.

“I’m already scared”

And now, at long last, Alexander gets around to what was obviously on his mind from the very beginning, fear of a rogue AI. He‘s very little that up to this point, which is strange in itself, but now he comes out with it.

Alexander circles back to Yudkowsky: “The more interesting question, then, is whether I should update towards Eliezer’s slightly different distribution, which places more probability mass on earlier decades.” Yudkowsky, however, refuses to give dates: “I consider naming particular years to be a cognitively harmful sort of activity...” Incidentally, sounds like self-regarding grandstanding from Yudkowsky. Perhaps, as people surround him asking for the date, he passes out gilded fortune cookies as souvenirs.

Alexander:

So, should I update from my current distribution towards a black box with “EARLY” scrawled on it?

What would change if I did? I’d get scared? I’m already scared. I’d get even more scared? Seems bad.

That’s not the end. We’ve got two or three more paragraphs. But those paragraphs don’t change the fact that Alexander is scared. They just mix a bit of wit into the contemplation of doom.

Alexander and his community

What are we to make of all this?

I don’t quite know. But then neither does Alexander.

I note, however, that he wrote that post for a community he’s been cultivating for almost a decade. He’s written on a wide variety of topics. He’s conducted surveys, had book review contests, and interacted with that community in various says. That long ambivalent post, spoken through two voices, that’s the post he felt he owed that community. To what extent is Alexander’s ambivalence a reflection of attitudes in that community?

On the one hand there’s the apparent assumption that Transformative AI is on the way come hell and high water. That is coupled with interest in the arcane technical minutiae and leaps of epistemic faith required to issue a long report predicting that arrival by comparison with biological information processing in 1) the human brain, 2) a human life, 3) the evolution of life on earth, and 4) the genome, all measured in FLOPS (floating-point operations per second).[2] That’s one thing.

And there there’s the correlative assumption, perhaps not shared by all, but nonetheless widespread, that the arrival of Transformative AI brings with it the danger that that AI will turn against humanity and transform the earth into a paperclip factory, metaphorically speaking. To the extent that the rhetorical structure of his post is responding to what? a facture, ambivalence? in his audience, why does Alexander hold it in reserve until the end, like it is a shameful secret?

Notes

[1] That depends on what one thinks of the field of AI alignment. Color me skeptical. The idea that we are under not-so-distant threat from an AI hell-bent on our destruction strikes me as conspiracy theorizing directed at technology no one knows how to build.

[2] In his history of technology, David Hays tells us that

... the wheel was used for ritual over many years before it was put to use in war and, still later, work. The motivation for improvement of astronomical instruments in the late Middle Ages was to obtain measurements accurate enough for astrology. Critics wrote that even if the dubious doctrines of astrology were valid, the measurements were not close enough for their predictions to be meaningful. So they set out to make their instruments better, and all kinds of instrumentation followed from this beginning.

I feel a bit like that about the topics of Ajeya Cotra’s report. They are interesting and important in themselves for what they tell us about the world. The need not be yoked to the task of predicting future technology.

Don't take legal advice from an AI, at least not if your name is Inigo Montoya.

Definitely a case for @BadLegalTakes

— mcmillen (@mcmillen) June 22, 2022

Yellow, White, Red

Some Post-Publication Thoughts on the RNA Primer [Design for a Mind]

I’m talking about:

Relational Nets Over Attractors, A Primer: Part 1, Design for a Mind, https://www.academia.edu/81911617/Relational_Nets_Over_Attractors_A_Primer_Part_1_Design_for_a_Mind

While I’ve got some ideas about what might go into Part 2, some of which I’ve mentioned in a Coda to Part 1, I have no definite plans to go to work on it.

What I’ve been thinking about is the scope of the piece. It’s not the first time I’ve written seriously about the brain. I’ve got a good bit of material in my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil, and in several articles. The most important of those, by far, is the one David Hays and I published in 1988, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence. That article is about the whole brain, developing five principles and relating them to: behavior, computational principle, neuroanatomy, phylogeny, and ontogeny.

I bring that up three times in the primer. The first time is in the introduction, where I introduce Mirian Yevick’s work, which is the basis of our fourth principle (figural). Then I mention it in discussing language, the fifth principle (indexing). Finally I introduce the modal principle (first) while discussing types of minds in order to make that point that, while the primer is about the cortex, it does not assume that the cortex is somehow isolated or autonomous. On the contrary, activity in the cortex is affected by the whole brain, with the modal principle being the deepest example. For it is implemented in the reticular formation, which is the phylogenetically oldest part of the brain. And yet it affects, in a broad way, what areas of the cortex are active during any given stretch of time.

So, the paper implies the action of the whole brain, not just the cortex. What does the primer add to what Hays and I did in Principles? It provides a way of thinking about how the cortex implements highly differentiated cognitive processes and, in particular, natural language semantics. And natural language semantics is the lever through which the mind develops abstract concepts and elaborates on them over the long-haul of cultural evolution. That’s what’s new in the primer.

And that, it seems to me, “closes the space” on how the mind works, at least informally. The burden of working out how abstract concepts are developed will not, of course, fall directly on neural analysis. We’ll need other mechanisms for that. That’s why I introduced the relational network notation. That’s how we’re going to have to understand the mind’s construction of concepts. There is the logic inherent in the notation itself, and there are the implications of that logic for neurodynamics.

On the one hand we have global neurodynamics, something Freeman talked about. But then we have the local neurodynamics of the cortical neurofunctional areas (NFAs). I am assuming that the the dynamics of each NFA have a measure of autonomy from both global dynamics and from adjacent NFAs. Otherwise it makes no sense to select them as units for analysis. Sure, each cortical NFA receives inputs from other cortical NFAs and sends outputs to them (to and from subcortical NFAs as well). But the activity with an NFA is dominated by signals passed between neurons within it.

And then we have grand mal epileptic seizures, which often start locally in one hemisphere, but then engulf the entire brain. Local autonomy is lost. But then so is consciousness.

More later.

Latour's Modes of Existence [the return of LSD to discourse]

I'm bouncing this from 30 May 2012 to the top of the queue because the subject came up today in the Twitterverse, more or less.  

LSD should be legal, but IMO many people overrate it. It seems like a typical trip creates "insights" that can't be communicated and don't have much effect on the world afterwards

— Alyssa Vance (@alyssamvance) June 21, 2022

FWIW I've recounted my own adventure in Touchstones • Strange Encounters • Strange Poems • the beginning of an intellectual life.

* * * * * 

 

Ornstein's Tart's State-Specific Sciences, and a Note on Work, Love, Play, and Adventure

Graham Harman has just posted a link to a Latour draft: Biography of an Investigation: On a Book about Modes of Existence (PDF).

An Ethnographer from Mars

Here's one passage, about his days in Africa:

In the Abidjan of 1973-75, I discovered all at once the most predatory forms of capitalism, the methods of ethnography, and the puzzles of anthropology. And one puzzling question in particular that has never left me: why do we use the ideas of modernity, the modernizing frontier, the contrast between modern and premodern, before we even apply to those who call themselves civilizers the same methods of investigation that we apply to the “others” – those whom we claim, if not to civilize entirely, then at least to modernize a little? ...

There was a flagrant asymmetry here: the Whites anthropologized the Blacks, yes, quite well, but they avoided anthropologizing themselves. Or else they did so in a falsely distant, “exotic” fashion, by focusing on the most archaic aspects of their own society – communal festivals, belief in astrology, first communion meals – and not on what I was seeing with my own eyes (eyes educated, it is true, by a collective reading of L’Anti-Oedipe): industrial technologies, economization, “development,” scientific reasoning, and so on: in other words, everything that makes up the structural heart of the expanding empires.

Whence the idea of applying the methods of the social sciences, ethnography in particular, to the most modern practices.

Indeed, why not? Why not, in effect, take up the role of the mythical Martian ethnographer and use it as a vehicle to study the Modern World at the very heart of Modernity and height of its Powers?

 

Of his mid-70s work in the neurological laboratory of Roger Guillemin at the Salk Institute:

How could one explain that, here too, the appeal to an abusive transcendence had been able to dissimulate the layer of texts, of documents, that had to be continuously rewoven in order to produce a truth that could not be based, try as one might, on a firmer foundation? Was it possible that scientific veridiction was as far away from Double-Click information as the latter is from religious truth – in which case we would find ourselves faced with three types of veridiction, each entirely distinct from the others and true in its own genre and its own fashion?

Peak Experiences and Alternate Realities

At roughly the same time a rather different group of investigators was attempting to make sense of the experiences afforded by psychedelic drugs and by meditation. One of them, a psychologist named Robert Ornstein Charles Tart, talked of "state-specific sciences"–alas, the book in which he used the term is no longer on my shelf and I cannot remember its name, much less a page number. The idea was this: When you take a psychedelic drug you (may well) have a (so-called) peak experience in which deep truths are revealed to you. Those truths often seem like trite nonsense to those who've not experienced a psychedelic peak. Let's posit that those deep truths are, in fact, specific to one's biochemical neural state and can ONLY be judged and appreciated from within that state. Those who've not taken the drug, and had the trip, are in no position to pass judgment on the truths revealed in the trip. They don't know what they're talking about.

Work, Love, Play, Adventure

I don't remember when I read Ornstein Tart, but it was probably in the early 1970s. While I didn't take his notion of state-specific science at face value, I did feel it pointed at a truth that needed to be worked out. And I've been working at it off and on ever since. David Hays and I often talked of Work, Love, Play, and Adventure as specific and more or less independent modes of human action, each in effect having its own modes of veridiction, to use Latour's word. We never saw our way to writing these thoughts out in a systematic exposition, though bits and pieces managed to show up here and there. My various posts on behavioral mode contribute to this line of thinking, in particular, see Q. Where’s Reality? A. Which One?

* * * * *

It does seem to me that Latour is following the same scent, though perhaps though a different territory. We shall see. At this point I'm only on page 6 of a 20 page article, and there's his book to come: An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence. We shall see.

More later.

ADDENDUM: A link to a summary of Latour's modes-of-existence project. Website for the digital version of the project, with short characterizations of the fifteen modes.

Transition Zone [Hoboken, NJ]

Welcome to the Fourth Arena @3QD

That’s my latest article at 3 Quarks Daily:

Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/06/welcome-to-the-fourth-arena-the-world-is-gifted.html

I suggest that we may be moving into a new Cosmic Arena, from inanimate Matter (1), to Life (2), to Culture (3), to . . . just what? Let’s simply call it the Fourth Arena while we’re figuring it out.

A Complex Universe

I begin by arguing that the universe is basically complex. Here’s a recent tweet that makes the point:

Good reminder (by Gabor Vattay): pic.twitter.com/M88IBFGN0r

— Luiz Pessoa (@PessoaBrain) June 20, 2022

Beyond that, read the article.

We need to rethink how we live

But I will leave you with the question that Michael Liss posed to me, and my answer to him. The question:

Bill, how does society adapt to the potential that so many who worked in jobs that required human interaction/conversation find their careers made obsolete? We've had waves of displacement in the past, but mostly at the "mechanical" level--artisans who were pushed out because of industrialization, farm work replaced by machinery, even secretaries replaced by word-processors and spell checks. This has pushed some people to reach higher, but a lot of the rest accept jobs in low-wage industries, and find their status and family's potential for advancement diminished. Businesses, driven by profit motive, will adapt or close, but government can't do that. When a large section of the population in both traditionally blue and white collar jobs realize that their government either has no answers, or is beholden to a few, what next for civil society?

My reply:

That’s a complicated question, Michael, and I might have to write a book, albeit a compact one, in order to come up with an answer. I can’t answer it now. But I can say a few things that I’d have to take into consideration.

I’d start out with a famous remark Keynes made in a 1930 essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” in which he argued that a 15-hour workweek should suffice for all our economic needs.

Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes today in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard-those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me—those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties—to solve the problem which has been set them.

I feel sure that with a little more experience we shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it today, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs.

It's quite clear that we have utterly failed on that last count. Those of us with jobs devote more time than ever to them. The convenience of email has made us available to our employers 24/7 365. And while the necessity of working from home during the pandemic has led many to question the wisdom of going into the office 5 days a week for 8 to 10 hours a day plus commute time, I’m not at all sure how that’s going to work out. I should think the boss class will do its best to see that distant-work tech means that work haunts you wherever you are, 24/7 365.

And people will put up with it? Why? Because they don’t, in the end, know how to use their leisure. I’m sure Netflix and the rest will do their best to keep us supplied with binge-worthy video. But, come on? Is that life?

I got a shock when my father took early retirement at 62; he was in perhaps the earliest cohort who had that option. He spent his career as an engineer with Bethlehem Mines. He was very good, and certainly loved (aspects of) his job. And still he retired as soon as he could.

How did he spend his time? He spent an enormous amount of time playing solitaire. Every day, several hours a day. This was an intelligent man, with many interests, golf, stamp collecting, wood-working, and he read a lot. And, yet, when he had the time to devote to them, he spent it playing solitaire. Yes, he did play golf, more often, he found some guys to play bridge with, he ramped up his stamp collecting, but never did anything with his wood-working. So he spent less and less time at solitaire, but it never tapered off to zero.

And he’s not alone. I’ve read articles about retirement coaches, people who work with retired executives and such to help them figure out how to spend their time when they’re retired. I’m pretty sure these coaches to not work for minimum wage. I suspect they’re more likely to charge lawyers’ rates, though probably not at the top of the range. The only people who can afford those rates would be highly skilled people working relatively high on the totem pole. Why for god’s sake do those people need help unwinding? Why don’t they just buy some Hawaiian shirts and join the Jimmy Buffett parrot-head crowd – which, by the way, some of them are doing. As you may know, Buffett has become rich from various businesses, the most recent of which is retirement communities for people who want to sit around with friends sipping margaritas and eating cheese burgers in paradise.

More Keynes:

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semipathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.

THAT’s what we’ve got to think about.

Now, yes, we’ve got global warming to deal with. We aren’t going to be able to do that by simply munching on paradise cheese burgers. That’s going to take a lot of work, though of what kind and by whom and where, that’s somewhat up in the air. And we’ve got to do better on pandemic preparedness, which is a matter of both political will and bureaucratic will (the CDC and FDA failed us miserably). And then there’s the specter of war. Somehow in the middle of all that we need to rethink who and what we are.

And then there’s these new machines. What do they mean for the law, your profession? What aspects of the law require a high-level of face-to-face interaction? There’s acquiring clients and maintaining the relationship. There’s the actual back-and-forth of negotiation. And there’s litigation, which may require theatrical skills as well. But there’s an awful lot of routine paperwork of varying skill level. You’ve got to review warehouses full of documents and produce boilerplate prose. I’m guessing that lot of that is done by paralegals and junior associates, many of whom are bored witless. That can all be replaced, is being replaced, but computer systems. I know that document discovery has gone way beyond keyword search (I’ve got a cousin in the legal AI business). I’d think that the latest AI chatbots can be trained up to draft boilerplate and I assume people are working on it now, though I have no idea whether or not any of it is being deployed.

Meanwhile Neal Stephenson has written a smashing book in The Diamond Age, in which a young girl is given an interactive book that helps her mature. And we’ve got bots cranking out some very interesting images. We’ve got lots to work with.

But we’ve got to revise our conception of what makes a good life. Let’s take Keynes seriously.

Relational Nets Over Attractors, A Primer: Part 1, Design for a Mind

New working paper. Title above, links, abstract, table of contents, preface, and appendix below.

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/81911617/Relational_Nets_Over_Attractors_A_Primer_Part_1_Design_for_a_Mind
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4141479
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361421487_Relational_Nets_Over_Attractors_A_Primer_Part_1_Design_for_a_Mind

Abstract: Miriam Yevick’s 1975 holographic logic suggests we need both symbols and networks to model the mind. I explore that premise by adapting Sydney Lamb’s relational network notation to represent a logical structure over basins of attraction in a collection of attractor landscapes, each belonging to a different neurofunctional area (NFA) of the cortex. Peter Gärdenfors provides the idea of a conceptual space, a low dimensional projection of the high-dimensional phase space of a NFA. Vygotsky’s account of language acquisition and internalization is used to show how the mind is indexed. We then define a MIND as a relational network of logic gates over the attractor landscape of a neural network loosely partitioned into many NFAs. An INDEXED MIND consists of a GENERAL network and an INDEXING network adjacent to and recursively linked to it. A NATURAL MIND is one where the substrate is the nervous system of a living animal. An ARTIFICIAL MIND is one where the substrate is inanimate matter engineered by humans to be a mind; it becomes AUTONOMOUS when it is able to purchase its compute with services rendered.

Preface: Notation as Speculative Engineering 2
1. How it Began: Symbols, Holograms, and Diagrams 3
2. A Semantic Net vs. A Relational Network over Attractors 12
3. Simple Animals, Attractor Landscapes, and Lamb’s Notation 18
4. Some Basic Constructions 27
5. Language, Inner Speech, and Thought 38
6. Kinds of Minds 49
Coda: Topics for Further Exploration 62
Appendix: The Idea in 14 Statements 67
References 69

Preface: Notation as Speculative Engineering

I write this paper as a kind of philosopher, a speculative engineer. I am an engineer because I am curious about how to design and build things. I speculate because that is the only way to enact what I attempt in this paper. W. Ross Ashby wrote Design for a Brain. I write in that spirit, but my topic is a bit different: design for a mind.

I propose a diagrammatic notation convention as a crucial design tool. It is a convention that relates patches of cortical tissue with a classical model derived from mid-century computational lingistics. My aim is to provide a way of thinking about how a meshwork of neurons can give rise to symbolic thought. Think of the notation as a collection of Lego pieces for a mind.

There’s the bricks and mortar, and there’s the whole building. You can’t create a building simply by piling up bricks and morter. You have to design it first. That’s what this is paper about, the tools you need to design the building.

As such it is a simplification, an idealization. I have had to leave much out of account. Setting aside the things I do not know, and the things I’d don’t know that I do not know, incorporating all that I do know – not to mention things I but know about, more or less, would have made it impossible for me to do much of anything at all. Organization is the problem, gathering these many and various things, these ideas, facts, models, observations, what have you, gathering them together and laying them out in a coherent order, that is the problem.

It is my belief that by pushing through, if not to completion, at least to some kind of closure is the best way bring order to this material. Get it one place where we can see and examine it. Then and only then does it make sense to ferret out the many things I have missed or gotten wrong. In this case, closure means an explicit definition of what a mind is. That in turn leads to definitions of artificial and natural minds, and autonomous artificial minds.

Are those definitions correct? They may be useful without being correct. They are best thought of as being provisional, a means to deeper conceputalization and more refined definitions. The only way to measure their limitations is to try them out and see what becomes visible.

Appendix: The Idea in 14 Statements

1. I assume that the cortex is organized into NeuroFunctional Areas (NFAs), each of which has its own characteristic pattern of inputs and outputs. It does not appear that NFAs are sharply distinct from one another. Their boundaries can be revised – think of cerebral plasticity.

2. I assume that the operations of each NFA are those of complex dynamics. I have been influenced by Walter Freeman (1999, 2000) in this.

3. A low dimensional projection of each the phase space for each NFA can be modeled by a conceptual space as outlined by Peter Gärdenfors.

4. Each NFA has its own attractor landscape. A primary NFA is one driven primarily by subcortical inputs. Then we have secondary and tertiary NFAs, which involve a mixture of cortical and subcortical inputs. (I am thinking of the standard notions of primary, secondary, and tertiary cortex.)

5. Interaction between NFAs can be approximated by a Relational Network over Attractors (RNA), which is a relational network defined over basins in multiple linked attractor landscapes.

6. The RNA network employs a notation developed by Sydney Lamb (1961) in which the nodes are logical operators, AND & OR, while ‘content’ of the network is carried on the arcs.

7. Each arc corresponds to a basin of attraction in some attractor landscape.

8. The output of a source NFA is ‘governed’ by an OR relationship (actually exclusive OR, XOR) over its basins. Only one basin can be active at a time. [Provision needs to be made for the situation in which no basin is entered.]

9. Inputs to a basin in a target NFA are regulated by an AND relationship over outputs from source NFAs.

10. Symbolic computation arises with the advent of language. It adds new primary attractor landscapes (for phonetics & phonology, and morphology) and extends the existing RNA. The overall RNA is roughly divided into a general network and a lingistic network.

11. Word forms (signifiers) exist as basins in the linguistic network. A word form whose meaning is given by physical phenomena are coupled with an attractor basin (signifier) in the general network. This linkage yields a symbol (or sign). Word forms are said to index the general RNA.

12. Not all word forms are directly defined in that way. Some are defined by cognitive metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1981). Others are defined by metalingual definition (David Hays 1972). I assume there are other forms of definition as well (see e.g. Benzon and Hays 1990). It is not clear to me how we are to handle these forms.

13. Words can be said to index the general RNA (Benzon & Hays 1988b).

14. The common-sense concept of thinking refers to the process by which one uses indices to move through the general RNA to 1) add new attractors to some landscape, and 2) construct new patterns over attractors, new one or existing ones.

Red and white

Discrete word forms float on a sea of continuous meaning

That it words suggests that 'beneath' those discrete word forms we have a continuous (multidimensional) field of semanticity, if you will. The semantic differential taps into that. 2/2@GaryMarcus @ylecun @MadamePratolung @emilymbender @Ted_Underwood

— Bill Benzon, BAM! Bootstrapping Artificial Minds (@bbenzon) June 20, 2022

That is to say, word forms constitute a discrete index into a continuous underlying semantic space.

On the practical business of intimate intellectual collaboration, getting brains in synch

Mordechai Rorvig, The Computer Scientist Who Parlays Failures Into Breakthroughs, Quanta Magazine, June 13, 2022:

Why do you think your collaborations with Teng were so successful?

When I was starting grad school at MIT, he was an instructor there. We started working on problems then and had a very compatible working style. You’ll notice I have a couch in my office. In my office at MIT I had two couches. That meant Shang-Hua and I could both work — like, literally just spend all day lying down thinking about something, and when you have an idea, get up and talk about it. He was very happy to spend a lot of time thinking about things and talking about problems. Like me, he was happy to work on absurdly hard problems that we probably wouldn’t solve. Failure was the standard result of anything that we worked on, even if we were working on it for years. But that was OK.

David Hays and I did something similar:

This ritual began when both of us were exhausted from the intellectual work, and frustrated because we weren’t making progress. Each of us would lie back and drop into fitful reverie. Every so often one of us would make a comment or ask a question. The other would reply, to no mutual satisfaction, and the fitful reverie would continue. Eventually we would work through it, begin talking and talking, and Dave would sit down to the computer and write up some notes on what we had accomplished.

I suspect this involves relaxing into a mental mode where the brain's so-called default mode network is regnant.

Some shots of yesterday's sunrise

Hyperviscosity and Bathtub Philosophy [complex neural dynamics, really]

This was originally published 11.30.12, but I'm bumping it to the top of the queue because I'm thinking about the general idea of the fluid mind. Here's a working paper, From Associative Nets to the Fluid Mind,

https://www.academia.edu/9508938/From_Associative_Nets_to_the_Fluid_Mind

A couple of mornings ago I had a good idea while lounging in the tub. A good idea, but not a great or surprising idea. Good’s enough.

As I explained a year or so ago, I do a lot of thinking while lounging in the tub in the morning—or, for that matter, at other times of the day, on occasion. So this was not at all unusual. Still, I thought I’d post a brief note to the blog, you know, just to note the cognitive utility of hanging out in the tub. ‘Cause tending to one’s mind is important, but a rather obscure and tricky business.

Alas, I forgot to do so. And I forget just now which good idea I had that day, though I have a sense that I did act on it. Anyhow, it happened again today. So I made a point of writing a note this time.

Today’s insight is simple, that I could, and perhaps even should and will, talk about manga and anime at the end of my next, and I hope penultimate post, on pluralism. Working title for the post: Facing up to Relativism: Pluralist Axiology.

A mouthful, that: “axiology.” It’s basically a cover term for ethics and aesthetics. What’s a pluralist got to say about the fact that different peoples have different Life Ways?

Negotiation, that’s what. Latour talks about it in “Exploring Common Worlds” in Politics of Nature. While I had no specific itinerary in mind when I set out on this venture into OOO-land, I certainly didn’t expect to find myself with an occasion to talk about cartoons. But now...

* * * * *

Enough. This is about the bathtub, not about a post I’m going to write sometime in the next several days (I hope).

 

What is it about bathtub lounging that’s so congenial to meandering thought, to reverie? And why’s such thought useful?

It’s certainly not about working out details, about dotting i’s and crossing t’s. That requires sustained attention. Bathtub thinking seems to allow things to float to the surface and there wander around and mingle together.

I like to think of the mind as fluid, and has having many different viscosities at once. Call it hyperviscosity. Some things move very slowly, like chilled molasses, only slower. Other things move rapidly, like gas in a flame. But, in the mind, these things are all going on at once and consciousness, well, it attends sometimes to the fast things, sometimes to the slow things, and sometimes to the glacial things.

It’s not just that, in the tub, you really don’t have anything else to do; it’s not just the open time. It’s also the warm water. That’s important. It doesn’t have any effect on the brain’s temperature, of course, as that’s regulated to be body temperature, but the relaxation does have an effect on the overall state of the mind.

Tub thinking seems to affect the dynamics of hyperviscosity. The different viscosities tend to segment into different layers. Tub thinking gets the layers to interact with one another.

I’m thinking that some very slow things move just a bit faster and creep up a layer or three. Some of the fastest things dissipate and get out of the way. Other slow down, even way down, and sing. Thus there’s a gentle turnover in the depths and surfaces of the mind.

Hyperviscosity, of course, is just a metaphor.

Just a metaphor.

Nothing to it.

Miles and John Lennon – a meeting of titans

From Reddit

Anything beyond the Higgs? Is collider physics over?

Adrian Cho, Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else, Science, 13 June 2022.

Before the 27-kilometer-long ring-shaped LHC started to take data in 2010, physicists fretted that it might produce the Higgs and nothing else, leaving no clue to what lies beyond the standard model. So far, that nightmare scenario is coming true. “It’s a bit disappointing,” allows Barry Barish, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. “I thought we would discover supersymmetry,” the leading extension of the standard model.

It’s too early to despair, many physicists say. After 3 years of upgrades, the LHC is now powering up for the third of five planned runs, and some new particle could emerge in the billions of proton-proton collisions it will produce every second. In fact, the LHC should run for another 16 years, and with further upgrades should collect 16 times as much data as it already has. All those data could reveal subtle signs of novel particles and phenomena.

Still, some researchers say the writing is on the wall for collider physics. “If they don’t find anything, this field is dead,” says Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago who hunts dark matter in smaller experiments. John Ellis, a theorist at King’s College London, says hopes of a sudden breakthrough have given way to the prospect of a long, uncertain grind toward discovery. “It’s going to be like pulling teeth, not like teeth falling out.”

Since the 1970s, physicists have been locked in a wrestling match with the standard model. It holds that ordinary matter consists of lightweight particles called up quarks and down quarks—which bond in trios to make protons and neutrons—along with electrons and featherweight particles called electron neutrinos. Two sets of heavier particles lurk in the vacuum and can be blasted into fleeting existence in particle collisions. All interact by exchanging other particles: The photon conveys the electromagnetic force, the gluon carries the strong force that binds quarks, and the massive W and Z bosons carry the weak force.

The standard model describes everything scientists have seen at particle colliders so far. Yet it cannot be the ultimate theory of nature. It leaves out the force of gravity, and it doesn’t include mysterious, invisible dark matter, which appears to outweigh ordinary matter in the universe six to one.

And what of naturalness and supersymmetry? The lack of further discoveries puts them in jeopardy:

A notion called naturalness suggested the low mass of the Higgs more or less guaranteed the existence of new particles within the LHC’s grasp. According to quantum mechanics, any particles lurking “virtually” in the vacuum will interact with real ones and affect their properties. That’s exactly how virtual Higgs bosons give other particles their mass.

That physics cuts both ways, however. The Higgs boson’s mass ought to be pulled dramatically upward by other standard model particles in the vacuum—especially the top quark, a heavier version of the up quark that weighs 184 times as much as the proton. That doesn’t happen, so theorists have reasoned that at least one other new particle with a similar mass and just the right properties—in particular, a different spin—must exist in the vacuum to “naturally” counter the effects of the top quark.

The theoretical concept known as supersymmetry would supply such particles. For every known standard model particle, it posits a heavier partner with a different spin. Lurking in the vacuum, those partners would not only keep the Higgs’s mass from running away, but would also help explain how the Higgs field, which pervades the vacuum like an unextinguishable electric field, came into being. Supersymmetric particles might even account for dark matter.

But instead of those hoped-for particles, what have emerged in the past decade are tantalizing anomalies—small discrepancies between observations and standard model predictions—that physicists will explore in the LHC’s next 3-year run.

There's more at the link.

See this post, Lost in Math: Sabine Hossenfelder at Stevens Institute.

H/t 3QD.