The Fourth Arena 2: New beings in time

Yesterday I suggested that we are at the edge of a new era in cosmic history, at least our local version of it, for we have little idea what’s been happening with life on other planets in other solar systems in other galaxies or even if such life exists or has existed. The arena of matter started 14 billion years ago, from which the arena of life emerged four billion years ago. Human culture, the third arena, started about 3 million years ago. We are now on the threshold of a fourth arena.

The second and third arenas each brought new kinds of beings into the world, and those beings brought with them new ways of being in time. Living beings, the second arena, use free energy – ultimately from the sun – to swim against the tide of entropy. Life has been getting ever more complex over the long run – something David Hays and I argued in A Note on Why Natural Selection Leads to Complexity.

The third arena has brought us, well, cultural beings – there is no one good word for them. Yes, we are talking about human culture and therefore about human beings. But in this scheme human beings are themselves creatures of the second arena, animals. But very special animals, but animals that that provide the arena in which cultural beings can live.

What do I mean by cultural beings? Things like songs, stories, works of visual art, buildings, machines, and so forth. All of these are cultural beings. Physically, they are constituted of matter in various ways, but they live in and through us.

And they have the potential to live as long as humans walk the earth. We know little of those protohumans who crafted those stone tools in Africa some two or three million years ago. They probably spoke some kind of proto-language, which is lost. Their clothing, lost, their songs and dances, lost, their food, what did they eat? But those stone tools persist, and specialists have spent hours upon hours trying to figure out how they made them.

What about the ancient Greeks? Some of their stories live on in the two poems by Home, Iliad and Odyssey. But many stories have been lost. We also have tools and implements, remnants of building, and so forth. We could ramble through all of human history like this, but you get the idea, no? Ancient texts, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Confucian Analects, and many others are still read today and used as guides to life. Cultural beings can, in the right circumstances, persist beyond the lives of the people who originally made them.

Sometimes an artifact – the material husk of a cultural being ¬– is brought to life after it has been dead. The manuscript for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was lost in the 14th century, but brought back from the dead in the 19th. J.R.R. Tolkien produced an edition in the 20th century, it has become a staple of YouTube videos, and was recently made into a movie, for the third time, albeit with a story somewhat revised from the original.

These cultural beings have a different relationship with time and matter than life forms do. Lifeforms inevitably die and their matter disintegrates into dust. Cultural beings can migrate from one material matrix to another. As long as humans exist to animate them, cultural beings can persist.

What kind of beings will arise in the Fourth Arena? Do we see them now, if only in primitive form? It so, what and where are they? How do they differ from the cultural beings of the third arena? Perhaps they will be computational beings living in the cloud and producing, what? third arena cultural beings for human inhabitation?

More later.

What a view! Those apartments face New York City.

Greedflation: Does economics need a reset, reboot, and rethink?

Lydia DePillis, Is ‘Greedflation’ Rewriting Economics, or Do Old Rules Still Apply? NYTimes, June 3, 2022.

Since prices started to escalate a year ago, politicians and economists have seized on inflation to tell their preferred story about what went wrong, and what policies would bring it back into line. Some say it’s very straightforward: Supply and demand, Economics 101.

“There’s simply a lot of cash out there,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist for the accounting firm RSM US, referring to the several trillion dollars in pandemic stimulus that’s filtered into the economy since early 2020. “The competition for those goods is up and that’s sending prices up, whether we’re talking about getting a Nissan Sentra or a seat on an American Airlines flight.”

The White House and progressive organizations, however, say wait a minute: This time is different. In a time of extraordinary disruption, they contend, increasingly dominant corporations are taking the opportunity to jack up prices more than they otherwise could, which is squeezing consumers and supercharging inflation. Or “greedflation,” as the hypothesis has come to be known.

The argument comports with the Biden administration’s focus on the ills of economic concentration. Congressional Democrats have run with the idea, introducing bills that would impose a temporary “excess profits tax” on companies that charge prices they deem unreasonably high, or simply ban those high prices altogether. Critics, including the nation’s largest business lobby, deride these efforts as based on a “conspiracy theory” and a “flimsy argument.”

So what’s really going on?

It’s hard to tease out. A pandemic, a trade war, a land war, huge government spending, and a global economy that’s become vastly more integrated might be too complex for traditional macroeconomic theory to explain. Josh Bivens, research director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, thinks that’s a good reason to revisit what the discipline thought it had figured out.

“When I hear stories about an overheating labor market, I don’t think about falling real wages, and yet we have falling real wages,” Dr. Bivens said. Nor is the rise in profits typical when unemployment is so low. “The idea that ‘there’s nothing to see here’ — there’s everything to see here! It’s totally different.”

When thinking about greedflation, it’s helpful to break it down into three questions: Are companies charging more than necessary to cover their rising costs? If so, is that enough to meaningfully accelerate inflation? And is all this happening because large companies have market power they didn’t decades ago?

And economics is not organized to sort things out:

The relationship of profits, inflation and market power will be tough for economists to nail down. High-quality government data will take time to produce. Moreover, it requires a melding of micro- and macroeconomic disciplines that haven’t had to synthesize so many factors simultaneously, with little historical precedent.

There's more at the link.

Roses in the Jersey City Heights

The Fourth Arena: What’s Up in the world these days? We’re moving to a new, a new what?

About ten years of so ago I discovered object-oriented ontology (OOO) and Bruno Latour. That plunged me into a philosophy period during which I ended up taking a really Big Look at things. I ended up sketching a cosmology/ontology, Living with Abundance in a Pluralist Cosmos: Some Metaphysical Sketches. I ended up arguing that, to date, the universe has seen the emergence of three arenas of abundance. I’ve taken the term “abundance” from Paul Feryerabend: the universe is abundant, it just keeps generating lots and lots of stuff.

I’ve identified these three realms on this nice chart which I round in Wikipedia’s entry on Universe. Roughly speaking, the universe began 14 billion years ago, giving rise to the arena of Matter. Four billion years ago Life emerged. While animals do have culture – the higher primates, certainly, do beaver dams count as culture? I don’t know – it’s human culture that ushered in a new arena, that of Culture. Wikipedia dates Oldowan tools to about 2.6 million years ago. That’s when we can locate the origins of human culture. Whether it’s a million years later or earlier hardly matters on this time scale.

Just as the other areas exhibit internal differentiation, so does Culture. Over the years David Hays and I had developed an account of cultural evolution based on fundamental cognitive architecture which we cultural ranks. We’ve identified four cultural ranks. Rank 1 is based on speech and emerged we don’t really know how long ago. Let’s put it between 100,000 and a million years ago; I doubt that it’s younger and it may well be older. Rank 2 is based on writing and is 5000 to 7000 years old or so. Rank 3 began to emerge after Asian methods of calculation reached Europe by way of the Arabs. It is thus based on calculation and showed its face, say, 700 or so years ago. It gave us the scientific and industrial revolutions, but also the novel, coherent geometric perspective in drawing and painting, and harmony in music. We traced Rank 4 back to statistical mechanics and Darwinian evolution in the 19th century and flourished in the wake of Alan Turing’s conceptualization of computing and then, at mid-20th century, with the development and deployment of digital computers. At this point a large percentage of the earth’s peoples individually own one or more digital computers, whether in their phone or a laptop device, or some other device or devices.

Look at the time scales involved. Speech emerged millions of years ago. Writing only 1000s of years ago, 10,000 at the outside. Calculation is 100s of years, 1000 at the outside. And computation? Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859; Clausius formulated the idea of entropy in 1865. But the digital computer is a mere 70 years old or so. Cultural evolution is accelerating.

And what if we measure those intervals in generations, where a generation is 30 years? Let’s simplify things:

Speech = 1M years ago = 33,333 generations ago
Writing = 10K years ago = 333 generations ago
Computation = 1kya = 33 generations ago
Computing = 100 years ago = 3 generations ago

A mere three generations to remake the cognitive matrix from top to bottom; that’s compressing things quite a bit. Remember, culture is passed on through imitation and education between generations. But you can see where that evolution seems to be heading. It takes an individual 15 to 20 years to internalize the basic ideas and norms of their culture. Barring unforeseen advances in genetic engineering and pedagogy, that process cannot be compressed any more.

What’s happening now? Perhaps it is only the consolidation of Rank 4. Maybe it’s that, but also the emergence of a new rank. Hays and I talked about a fifth rank in private, but never published about it. Conceptualizing Rank 4 was difficult enough.

Still, the question must be asked: Are we witnessing the emergence of Rank 5 culture? And behind that lurks an even more radical question: Are we seeing the emergence of a new Arena of Abundance, the Fourth Arena?

We argued that Rank 4 was grounded in and driven by computing. At the moment it appears that machine learning, deep learning, artificial neural nets, all of them, are doing amazing things, things that are prompting apocalyptic fever in some quarters. Is AGI (artificial general intelligence) just around the corner? Will that yield a world of super-intelligence computers? What then?

I’m sure some of that is just hype and projection, tech-bros and others getting too far out over the edges of their skis. Here we have Holden Karnofsky breathlessly proclaiming we’re living in “the most important century” humankind has ever had. He’s projecting that, over the next 1.4 billion years humans and our intelligent machines are going to people the whole freakin’ galaxy. Really?

Karnofsky’s vision strikes me as something like Olaf Stapledon plus computers. It’s science fiction that’s escaped from the realm of imagination and into the real, not as actual, but as potential, as future. He senses that something Big is afoot and seeks to rationalize it.

Is that so very different from what I’m doing? I can’t help but wonder whether or not something of cosmic magnitude is in fact going on. However skeptical I am about all this AGI-is-coming hype, I am in fact deep into the process of drafting a paper arguing that machine minds are possible and that sketches out the broad requirements for them. Who knows?

More later.

In a park in Union City

Living with Abundance in a Pluralist Cosmos: Some Metaphysical Sketches

Bumping to the top to mark the profusion of creativity pouring out of machine learning and deep learning. We're heading into the 4th Arena!

 

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You can download a PDF of the main exposition of my pluralist metaphysics from my online  repositories:

• SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2197108
• Academia.edu:  https://www.academia.edu/4066568/Living_with_Abundance_in_a_Pluralist_Cosmos_Some_Metaphysical_Sketches

The PDF, of course, includes the introduction which I published here a few days ago: From Literary Criticism to Pluralist Metaphysics, an Introduction. You can also download PDF's of secondary documents. I've listed the currently available ones after the eight propositions in the main document.

Eight Propositions in a Pluralist Metaphysics

This main exposition sketchs a pluralist metaphysical system variously inspired by the ideas of Bruno Latour, Paul Feyerabend, Graham Harman, J. J. Gibson and William James.

1. Objects: Individual entities of many different scales are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos.

2. Abundance: These entities enter into relations with other entities but are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by the sum of all possible relations.

3. Realms of Being: In the large objects exist in patterns of relatively stable interactions among multiple objects. These are relations of indirect or vicarious causality. Analytically, we need to separate the roles from the entities that assume them. This is the core of what will become a distinction between culture and society.

4. Unity of Being: Humans desire the ability to access and reflect on memories of events in one’s life. The extent that that is achieved is called Unity of Being.

5. Life Way: A Latourian collective, with human and non-human members, is considered to participate in all the Realms in which any member of the collective plays a role. The ‘envelope’ of those Realms is called a Life Way.

6. Latourian Negotiation: Collectives having different Life Ways have been interacting through a process of negotiation in which differences among Life Ways are resolved and commonalities created or not depending on the desire to extend the boundaries of the larger more inclusive collective. The outcome cannot be predicted or foreseen.

7. Realms of Abundance: Realms of Being are organized into Realms of Abundance, of which three have appeared to far: Matter, Life, and Culture.

8. The Fourth Arena: The current global Latourian negotiation brings us to the edge of a fourth Arena of Abundance. If it goes well, that’s where our successors will dwell.

Pluralism Papers

Literary Criticism 21: Academic Literary Study in a Pluralist World

Abstract: At the most abstract philosophical level the cosmos is best conceptualized as containing various Realms of Being interacting with one another. Each Realm contains a broad class of objects sharing the same general body of processes and laws. In such a conception the human world consists of many different Realms of Being, with more emerging as human cultures become more sophisticated and internally differentiated. Common Sense knowledge forms one Realm while Literary experience is another. Being immersed in a literary work is not at all the same as going about one's daily life. Formal Literary Criticism is yet another Realm, distinct from both Common Sense and Literary Experience. Literary Criticism is in the process of differentiating into two different Realms, that of Ethical Criticism, concerned with matters of value, and that of Naturalist Criticism, concerned with the objective study of psychological, social, and historical processes. Note: Most, but not all, of the pieces in this document are in the main pluralist exposition. There is a introduction specific to this set of documents and a four-part 'program' for literary studies.

Harman’s Tables and Abundance

Abstract: By substituting Paul Feyerabend’s rhetoric of abundance for Graham Harman’s rhetoric of withdrawal one can establish the basis for pluralist ontology organized around Realms of Being. This paper traces the steps by which I made that substitution. The crucial step involved J.J. Gibson’s account of how one can determine whether or not one is perceiving real objects: Real objects yield more information upon further scrutiny; imaginary objects do not.

Reading Latour: Reassembling the Social

Abstract: Notes on Bruno Latour, Reassembling: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, with some consideration of compositionism. These ideas are developed with ideas and concepts from cognitive science, literary studies, music, and extensive examples from the world of contemporary graffiti.

Ontological Cognition

Ontological cognition is about the cognitive apparatus we use to organize the world into different kinds of things according to their powers and capacities: animal, vegetable, mineral; living, non-living; human, non-human; etc. As such it differs from the philosophical discipline of ontology, which is about the world itself, not our thoughts about the world. As ontological cognition snakes through many disciplines these reflections run from Wittgenstein through literature and the Great Chain of Being to computation and knowledge representation (KR).

Reading with Graham

Abstract: Graham Harman has proposed a counter-factual literary criticism based on his object-oriented ontology. I argue: 1) that this proposed practical criticism collapses into the existing process of literary culture and is therefore empty, 2) that it implies a Platonic conception of the literary text, 3) that it follows from a rejection of Lévi-Strauss’s empirical work on myth that dates back to the mid-1970s and 4) that that rejection defended an intentionalist conception of the text, rather than a mechanistic one. As a counter-proposal I examine Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale using a method inspired by Lévi-Strauss, arguing that the differences between the plots of these two texts can be attributed to different cultural constructions of the family.

Vitalism

Abstract: The contemporary conception of mere matter that we have from quantum mechanics is so very different from that available to Descartes and so many others that the distinction between living and non-living that they in part founded on the distinction must be re-thought. The purpose of such a rethinking is not to assert that difference between a rock and an acorn, for example, is not so great as it once was. In this new dispensation they are still very different kinds of things, but the whole conceptual world in which that difference is inscribed and traced is itself a new and by no means complete one.

I plan to issue three more sets of supporting documents, one on the explicit construction of spirits (directed at Jane Bennett), a miscellaneous set of posts, and one collecting some of my criticisms of Levi Bryant.

The relationship between geography and demeanor of fictional detectives in Europe

Okay THIS is quite accurate pic.twitter.com/cj8UkJFPBf

— Lincoln Michel (@TheLincoln) May 31, 2022

Map of cortical activation while reading aloud

Now available at #JNeurosci @SfNJournals “A spatiotemporal map of reading aloud”
We mapped the spread of activity across the brain while reading aloud known and novel words, using intracranial recordings (46 patients, >3k electrodes, ~10k words) https://t.co/HGPyh94vgh pic.twitter.com/SE501jXiJ9

— Oscar Woolnough (@OWoolnough) June 1, 2022

Abstract

Reading words aloud is a fundamental aspect of literacy. The rapid rate at which multiple distributed neural substrates are engaged in this process can only be probed via techniques with high spatiotemporal resolution. We probed this with direct intracranial recordings covering most of the left hemisphere in 46 humans (26 male, 20 female) as they read aloud regular, exception and pseudo-words. We used this to create a spatiotemporal map of word processing and to derive how broadband γ activity varies with multiple word attributes critical to reading speed: lexicality, word frequency, and orthographic neighborhood. We found that lexicality is encoded earliest in mid-fusiform (mFus) cortex, and precentral sulcus, and is represented reliably enough to allow single-trial lexicality decoding. Word frequency is first represented in mFus and later in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and inferior parietal sulcus (IPS), while orthographic neighborhood sensitivity resides solely in IPS. We thus isolate the neural correlates of the distributed reading network involving mFus, IFG, IPS, precentral sulcus, and motor cortex and provide direct evidence for parallel processes via the lexical route from mFus to IFG, and the sublexical route from IPS and precentral sulcus to anterior IFG.

Significance Statement:

Reading aloud depends on multiple complex cerebral computations: mapping from a written letter string on a page to a sequence of spoken sound representations. Here, we used direct intracranial recordings in a large cohort while they read aloud known and novel words, to track, across space and time, the progression of neural representations of behaviorally relevant factors that govern reading speed. We find, concordant with cognitive models of reading, that known and novel words are differentially processed through a lexical route, sensitive to frequency of occurrence of known words in natural language, and a sublexical route, performing letter-by-letter construction of novel words.

A Weak Shadow of Early Life Language Processing Persists in the Right Hemisphere

A Weak Shadow of Early Life Language Processing Persists in the Right Hemisphere of the Mature Brain | by Kelly C. Martin, Elissa L. Newport & colleagues | https://t.co/Ss5z3NRLbA pic.twitter.com/faDxDT5roT

— Neurobiology of Language (@jneurolang) June 1, 2022

Abstract of article linked above:

Studies of language organization show a striking change in cerebral dominance for language over development: We begin life with a left hemisphere (LH) bias for language processing, which is weaker than that in adults and which can be overcome if there is a LH injury. Over development this LH bias becomes stronger and can no longer be reversed. Prior work has shown that this change results from a significant reduction in the magnitude of language activation in right hemisphere (RH) regions in adults compared to children. Here we investigate whether the spatial distribution of language activation, albeit weaker in magnitude, still persists in homotopic RH regions of the mature brain. Children aged 4–13 (n = 39) and young adults (n = 14) completed an auditory sentence comprehension fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) task. To equate neural activity across the hemispheres, we applied fixed cutoffs for the number of active voxels that would be included in each hemisphere for each participant. To evaluate homotopicity, we generated left-right flipped versions of each activation map, calculated spatial overlap between the LH and RH activity in frontal and temporal regions, and tested for mean differences in the spatial overlap values between the age groups. We found that, in children as well as in adults, there was indeed a spatially intact shadow of language activity in the right frontal and temporal regions homotopic to the LH language regions. After a LH stroke in adulthood, recovering early-life activation in these regions might assist in enhancing recovery of language abilities.

Some traffic lights from yesterday's walk

Interesting interview with Geoffrey Hinton [+follow-up Q&A]

The Robot Brains Podcast

Season 2 Ep 22 Geoff Hinton on revolutionizing artificial intelligence... again

240 views Jun 1, 2022 Over the past ten years, AI has experienced breakthrough after breakthrough in everything from computer vision to speech recognition, protein folding prediction, and so much more.

Many of these advancements hinge on the deep learning work conducted by our guest, Geoff Hinton, who has fundamentally changed the focus and direction of the field. A recipient of the Turing Award, the equivalent of the Nobel prize for computer science, he has over half a million citations of his work.

Hinton has spent about half a century on deep learning, most of the time researching in relative obscurity. But that all changed in 2012 when Hinton and his students showed deep learning is better at image recognition than any other approaches to computer vision, and by a very large margin. That result, that moment, known as the ImageNet moment, changed the whole AI field. Pretty much everyone dropped what they had been doing and switched to deep learning.

Geoff joins Pieter in our two-part season finale for a wide-ranging discussion inspired by insights gleaned from Hinton’s journey from academia to Google Brain. The episode covers how existing neural networks and backpropagation models operate differently than how the brain actually works; the purpose of sleep; and why it’s better to grow our computers than manufacture them.

What's in this episode:

00:00:00 - Introduction
00:02:48 - Understanding how the brain works
00:06:59 - Why we need unsupervised local objective functions
00:09:39 - Mass auto-encoders
00:10:55 - Current methods in end to end learning
00:18:36 - Spiking neural networks
00:23:00 - Leveraging spike times
00:29:55 - The story behind AlexNet
00:36:15 - Transition from pure academia to Google
00:40:23 - The secret auction of Hinton’s company at NIPS
00:44:18 - Hinton’s start in psychology and carpentry
00:54:34 - Why computers should be grown rather than manufactured
01:06:57 - The function of sleep and Boltzmann Machines
01:11:49 - Need for negative data
01:19:35 - Visualizing data using t-SNE

Links:
Geoff's Bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton
Geoff's Twitter: https://twitter.com/geoffreyhinton?la...
Research and Publications: https://bit.ly/3z3M54e
Google Scholar Citations: https://bit.ly/3N892HJ
Story Behind the 2012 NIPS Auction: https://bit.ly/3t9xsIN
GLOM: https://bit.ly/3lYgWr6
Vector Institute: https://vectorinstitute.ai/

Follow-up Q/A to the previous video:

 

403 views Jun 8, 2022 Last week, we were honored to have Professor Geoff Hinton join the show for a wide-ranging discussion inspired by insights gleaned from Geoff's journey in academia, as well as past 10 years with Google Brain. The episode covers how existing neural networks and backpropagation models operate differently than how the brain actually works; the ImageNet/AlexNet breakthrough moment; the purpose of sleep; and why it’s better to grow our computers than manufacture them.

As you might recall, we also gave our audience an opportunity to contribute questions for Geoff via Twitter. We received so many amazing questions from our audience that we had to break down our time with Geoff into two parts! In this episode, we’ll discuss some of these questions with Geoff.

Tune in to get Geoff’s answers to the following questions AND MORE:

Are you concerned with AI becoming too successful?
What is the connection between mania and genius?
What childhood experiences shaped him the most?
What is next in AI?
What should PhD students focus on?
How conscious do you think today's neural nets are?
How important is embodiment for intelligence?
How does the brain work?

Two views of the Empire State Building in the distance

Miriam Yevick on why both symbols and networks are necessary for artificial minds

Miriam Yevick was a mathematician who corresponded with physicist David Bohm in the 1950s and went on to publish a very interesting article on the formal structure of perception and cognition: Holographic or fourier logic [1]. The abstract:

A tentative model of a system whose objects are patterns on transparencies and whose primitive operations are those of holography is presented. A formalism is developed in which a variety of operations is expressed in terms of two primitives: recording the hologram and filtering. Some elements of a holographic algebra of sets are given. Some distinctive concepts of a holographic logic are examined, such as holographic identity, equality, contaminent and “association”. It is argued that a logic in which objects are defined by their “associations” is more akin to visual apprehension than description in terms of sequential strings of symbols.

In 1978 she commented on an article by John Haugeland, The nature and plausibility of Cognitivism, and spells out the implications of her idea for cognition ([2] p. 253):

The author here points out a distinction between two modes of understanding our environment: the first identifies objects by quasi-linguistic representations; the other apprehends objects by means of nonarticulate skills. This dichotomy; which is undoubtedly related to the complexity of the concrete objects to be recognized or manipulated, was projected as follows by von Neumann (1966, pp. 51-54): “certain objects are such that their description is more complex than the object itself.”

We can explicate this proposition on a theoretical level in the domain of optical patterns. (See Yevick, 1975op. cit.). Such patterns or objects are thin, white regions on a black background. These can be simple (regular), like the outlines of rectangles; or complex, like the outlines of Chinese characters or random-like motions. The following holds true: a complex object requires a long (sequential, quasi-linguistic) description but yields a sharp recognition (auto-correlation) spot under holographic filtering; hence it is identified most readily by holographic recognition, or holistically. A simple object requires a short (quasi-linguistic) description but yields a diffuse recognition spot; hence it is identified most readily by quasi-linguistic representation or description.

Description and holographic recognition thus appear as two (complementary) modes of identifying an object: the more complex the object, the longer its description and the sharper its auto-correlation spot, and vice versa. The more complex the physiognomy of a person, the more unique, and hence sharper, its identity and ease of recall; the more simple, the more common and hence “unidentifiable.” Perfect holographic recognition obtains for a totally “random object”, that is, one with an infinitely long description; for a perfectly sharp point the opposite is true.

Suppose that one is given a store of objects with which one is familiar, a holographic recognition device, and a quasi-linguistic mode of representation; one is then presented with an arbitrary object to be “identified.” An approximate match is obtained either by producing a description of acceptable length or by holographic recognition of a subset of similar (associated) objects from the store. The mode of identification that will be more appropriate then depends on the complexity of the unknown object. If it is simple, we "know" it by a short linguistic description; if it is complex, by the "associations” it evokes.

If we consider that both of these modes of identification enter into our mental processes, we might speculate that there is a constant movement (a shifting across boundaries) from one mode to the other: the compacting into one unit of the description of a scene, event, and so forth that has become familiar to us, and the analysis of such into its parts by description. Mastery, skill and holistic grasp of some aspect of the world are attained when this object becomes identifiable as one whole complex unit; new rational knowledge is derived when the arbitrary complex object apprehended is analytically described.

She goes on to point out that the same distinction holds in the domain of abstract objects (254):

A careful scrutiny of the various presentations leading to Godel’s result reveals that the “abstract objects” that are the entities under discussion in a formal system actually occur in two modes: as objects identified by bold- faced pictures or shapes or marks on paper, and as objects generated recur- sively from certain zero-entities, recognized in some way by their rank, that is, the first of a certain list (Quine, 1950); an expression of length one (Shoenfield, 1967); a sequence of one symbol (Godel, Pred. 15 in van Heijenoort, 1970; Mendelson, 1964); entities generated by a successor operation on a pair of arguments (Kleene, 1970, pp. 247, 251-252; Pred. Dn 1 should read: y≍0). We recognize abstract objects of the first kind byosten- sion (holistically); those of the second kind are recognized by sequential generation or description. But whereas in the case of concrete objects discussed above, it is possible to assert that these two modes of (approximate) identification refer to the same object, the abstract objects have no identity recognizable beyond their formal mode of representation or generation. Thus, going beyond Haugeland’s remark and using the word “mode” for his “dimension,” we note that the mixing of modes is already present in the argu- ment that yields Godel’s undecidability result: it rests essentially on the identification of abstract objects (“formal numerals”) recognized in two dis- connected modes. The well-known confusion between Mention and Use reappears here as a confusion between showing and telling or display and enumeration, that is, as a mixing of dimensions.

The following quotation from Freudenthal (1960), who attempted to construct a language, “Lincos,” aimed at cosmic communication, clearly projects the irreducible duality: “We have agreed to abstain as much as possible from showing (concrete things or images of concrete things) but we cannot entirely abstain from it. Our first message will show numerals as an in– troduction to mathematics. Such an ostensive numeral, meaning the natural number n, consists of n peeps with regular intervals; from the context the reader will conclude that it aims aishowing just the natural number n.”

For minds to communicate or to do formal mathematics, they must possess both a quasi-linguistic (sequential, rational) and a holistic (ostensive, associative) dimension.

This has an obvious bearing on the current controversy in artificial intelligence between partisans of a pure neural network approach and those who argue that symbols are necessary as well. Neural networks exemplify Holographic or fourier logic, literally so in the case of convolutional neural networks. But symbolic reasoning is necessary as well. They apply to different classes of objects.

David Hays and I gave Yevick’s work an important place in our papers on the natural intelligence [3] and metaphor [4].

References

[1] Yevick, Miriam Lipschitz, Holographic or fourier logic, Pattern Recognition, Volume 7, Issue 4, December 1975, Pages 197-213, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00074458

[2] Yevick, Miriam L., The two modes of identifying objects: descriptive and holistic for concrete objects; recursive and ostensive for abstract objects. Brain and Behavioral Sciences, 1(2), 253-254. 1978, doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00074148

[3] William Benzon and David Hays, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence, Journal of Social and Biological Structures, Vol. 11, No. 8, July 1988, 293-322, https://doi.org/10.1016/0140-1750(88)90061-9

[4] William Benzon and David Hays, Metaphor, Recognition, and Neural Process, The American Journal of Semiotics, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1987), 59-80, https://www.academia.edu/238608/Metaphor_Recognition_and_Neural_Process.

Gary Marcus has raised a $350K bet against Musk's prediction of AGI by 2029. Will it go higher?

Super-AGI is pumped!

The prediction:

2029 feels like a pivotal year. I’d be surprised if we don’t have AGI by then. Hopefully, people on Mars too.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 30, 2022

The $100 K bet is in the linked article, which also sets forth the 5 criteria Marcus suggests:

are you in, @elonmusk? I say no way we will get to AGI by 2029, and lay down 5 suggestions for how we might tell:https://t.co/yfXycZeAd9 https://t.co/x1D4OGsX7Y

— Gary Marcus 🇺🇦 (@GaryMarcus) May 31, 2022

Another $100 K:

Gary, I'll match your bet!

— Vivek Wadhwa (@wadhwa) May 31, 2022

And another $100 K:

Gary, I will also match your bet!

— Serafim Batzoglou (@s_batzoglou) June 1, 2022

And another $50 K:

He's not biting guys. He knows what it takes to make production ai work. Wth here is $50k from my side if it helps ?

— Aniket (@aniketvartak) June 1, 2022

That's where the bet stands as of 6:02 AM EDT on Wednesday June 1, 2022. How high can it go? Will it get to a million?