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I really enjoyed reading this palmistry.
Reading you on Buber : Buber seems to mistake dissolution as a soteriological goal, which it could be I guess. but is not a required goal in very many buddhisms. I would consider doubling-down on this mistake a bit of slur. Dissolution might be an acceptable outcome as an insight, but this does not preclude engagement as a pathway to enlightenment.
I say this as a fellow traveller with neo-Pyrrhonism, but who does not have a soteriological bone in my body.
Encounter is the thing of course. https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/if-the-world-is-a-thing-we-have-made
Good fable. If we swap out the diamond macguffin for logic itself, it's a whole new level of Gödelian pain, can weak bias priors iterations catch this out? Some argue analogue intuitions live through these formal paradox gardens this but my own intuition doubts this... maybe my intuition is too formal, who knows?
Also some "intuitions" are heavily resisted to forgetting about the diamond because they want it badly, and then their measures used to collect data often interfere with the sense of the world and thus reality. I suspect "general intelligence" and "race" are examples of these pursuits (separately and together)(I think they mean smarts and populations but proponents hate that). Thus AGI is a possible goose chase, especially when we are the measure of all things looking for greener pastures. This is how cognitive dissonance is possible in otherwise non-narcissistic members of humanity.
Also, beware of any enterprise that requires new clothes, this applies even if you are not an emperor.
Shiny diamond negligees in particular.
back link https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/all-logic-is-a-prior
All logic is a prior.
Moss, Jessica, and Whitney Schwab. “The Birth of Belief.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 57, no. 1 (2019): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.2019.0000.
That covers the ancient invention of what we later in English call 'belief'. Belief/believing as an English world was used by Latin speaker Christians to explain it to warrior culture elites who wanted to be Roman empire too dude. It meant to 'hold dear'. Use of it (particularly by analytic philosphy streams centuries later ignoring it origins) to mean 'proposition that' is a subset in a long history. Your "belief as a bet" is a subset of that propositional use.
Belief/believing as a mental practice (it is taught) is one of the biggest mistakes we humans have ever made. Go Pyrrho of Elis! A better word would be to turn world into a gerund. To world, to live.
"Believing/belief" doubles down on intensitional states of mind (among others). This is not required to live, and it tends to stamp down onthe inquiring mind. I.E. it goes doctrinal and world-builds rather than worlds in a healthy way.
"I want to believe" is unhealthy but it has captured to who just want to say I want to live.
iterate, repeat, revise
I agree with RogerDearnaley "Briefly, humans are not aligned," to some percentage I am too afraid to put a number on.
My comments are not directed in general terms about humans, but about particular free-riders known as narcissists and psychopaths, who do a greater proportion of what are regarded as examples of bad behaviour. And how we deal / fail to deal with.
Narcissists and psychopaths cannot align with anything, they just take advantage or take cover from such possibilities. Considering a lot of our values are in fact directed at dealing with this type of behaviour, while not readily acknowledging that such types directly seek to control the expression of those values in policing them (they love being in charge, thye love status, they love hierarchies, they love being the cop, the concierge) , such that we have a set of nested complexities playing our in the " solution space" of morals that we live in. Aligning LLMs with that as an example before us is dangerous. It is probably the danger.
Analogy: Values are much like vowels, constrained by physiology/[eco-nomics/ology] perhaps those linguists who study speech can produce a neutral schwa, but in each language and dialect the "neutral" schwa is perceived differently. Thus the vowels/values have instances that are not heard as such in another language circumstance, even if it is the same sound.
What is common is the urge to value 'things', a bias to should the world into social reality, in which values produce outcomes (religion/art/markets/society/vehicles of values expression and rite). Something should be done!
Narcissists and psychopaths (on a continuum I'll admit) have no access to those "priors" to inform their growth into community. They have no empathy and so little to no morality outside of following the rules of what they can get away with. Isomorphically mapping those rules/histories which result (as index to "values"), that we have created to deal with free-riders, and so map into alignment may/will produce perverse outcomes. The mechanical application of law is an example here.
Also we have created out of the hindsight of logic powerful logics of hindsight, but if our insight fails to perceive this conundrum, our frankenstein's monsters may not thank us.
Especially where we fail to recognize that what may well be outcomes are causes. Our own dialects as the speech of god. This is doubly dangerous if there is no such thing.
Many of use have an urge to think like Kant, but the only moral imperative I can see common to humanity is to have this feeling to should, or that there should be such an imperative, everything else is an outcome of that urge within an incomplete empathic field of nurturing we call the world, (because there are constraints on survival -- bringing up children-- anything does not go), and which is produced/organised by this very urge to should things into doing.
How do we "align" with that?
LLMs are already aligned with the law in a way, and has wonderful capabilities to produce code, but the culpabilities are still ours.
But our understanding of our own autopoetic processes, grwoing into into adult culpability are not yet agreed on/understood, innerstood even! Especially where we do not police free-riders enough, and allow them influence into the process which polices them.
Actually the sovereign citizens are a good example of legalistic narcissism LLMs might produce. Except better networked.
So the maths don't matter until we nut that out. Or so I try to work on at whyweshould bloig.
There is a difference between theory-of-mind and empathy. We can should either of them into our worlding structures: morality/religion/art/law/lore/fiction. One's gets shoulded as legalistic and divisive balancing acts, focusing on culpability and blame, and the hindsight of logic, and the other... there-is-a-gap… ---to where responsibility blurs (all) this into credit we can mirror-neuron our way into empathy and thinking of the children, everyone as children. Moral agency is more than Kant in good form, and is more about bettering than the good. About bettering that which does not exist. The world.
Fantastic. Good examples of why Kant failed. Or rather, why evolution and Kant don't really get it on. Kant's universalising is an outcome of the moral worlding worldbuilding urge, which arises in evolution, not from ideals and their desperate ontologies. Thanks https://unstableontology.com/about/
Took me some 20+ years to come up with "why we should".
I agree with the other comments here suggesting that working hard enough on an animals' language patterns in LLMs will develop models of the animals' worlds based on that language use, and so develop better contexted answers in these reading comprehension questions. With no direct experience of the world.
The SVG stuff is an excellent example of there being available explicit short cuts in the data set. Much of that language use by humans and their embodied world/worldview/worldmaking is is not that explicit. To arrive at that tacit knowledge is interesting.
If beyond the stochastic parrot, now or soon, are we at the stage of stochastic maker of organ-grinders and their monkeys? (Who can churn out explicit lyrics about the language/grammar animals and their avatars use to build their worlds/markets. )
If so there may be a point where we are left asking, Who is master, the monkey or the organ? And thus we miss the entire point?
Poof. The singularity has left us behind wondering what that noise was.
Are we there yet?
Comment one: Paternalism, besides fulfilling desires for you, tells you what your desires are. Its nurturing, but not in a nurturing way. Authoritarianism doesn't bother doing any of that, your agency/making is a problem, a threat, because it exists. It is a uni-world in structure much like a narcissists psychopath's view of themselves where self=world, and both these de-nurturing parasites survive and co-evolve with us, where we support and acquiesce by de-agenting ourselves as only agents can. The self/world is a ratio of sorts, of partials ranked and intermixed: like Intention/preferences/inclinations/wants-needs/biases/values. (keyword Janus).
Comment 2: Intention/preferences/inclinations/wants-needs/biases/values need not be conscious per se, nor even subconsciousness, to affect learning. An intimation of weight can direct the organisation of legs/walking in robotic spiders. (I'll get back here with a reference to this work from early to mid 2000s, might take a few days). It is easy in one's mind's eye to swap a mass with a drive (e.g. hunger) and see how an animal that moves arises and moves-over/absorbing the flow of energy that plants delay. And thus the body/world is made as it own thing from the substance of the terrain as a substrate of the landscape composed with the body moving over it, until involuted into psychology within their society/polities/economies, nurturing or otherwise.
My frameworks: I write on world/worlding/worldbuilding from a poetic interdisciplinary position with nods to moral philosophy as an applied tech involving some psychology (if a bit pop) , over at https://whyweshould.substack.com/
Follows up on what I learned from primatologists: https://www.academia.edu/40978261/Why_we_should_an_introduction_by_memoir_into_the_implications_of_the_Egalitarian_Revolution_of_the_Paleolithic_or_Anyone_for_cake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poiesis Based on the other comments regarding methodologies (frameworks) I predict more poetry will be required, both to reframe our assumptions (disruption), and to map between frameworks (that we are moral urged to should (be made) ) in order to communicate this research re-building worlds of us (as we should).
I have below average mathematical understanding.
I will follow the work and debates on agency and modelling with interest.
we need to get better at policing narcissism and psychopathy, arguing about anything else is a distraction
I find the working memory question very intriguing and this is an interesting matrix to explore it, particularly with the comments. My own thoughts are in regard (not into how to measure working memory) but of working imagination: how many ideas can we come up in one minute (perhaps with reference to an index of "novelness") as oppose to OCD anxious repetitions. Though knowing the working anxiety repetitions may also be useful.
"specific" My General intelligence is possibly above average but my maths co-processor is crap, my AiPU module for LLM is better than anyones, to the point I laugh at my own jokes in great pain, using the AiPU for maths is not great, I have a strong interior narrative, I am not a super-recogniser, not tone deaf, but have some weird fractal 2.23 mind's eye (I can swap between wireframe rotations and rendered scenes plus some other stuff I cannot find words for)(def not aphantasic https://newworkinphilosophy.substack.com/p/margherita-arcangeli-institut-jean ), I have a good memory, auto-pilot is very strong and rarely get lost I think these two things are connected in me at least, about this memory thing my wife says I have a long memory and this is a bad thing. Putting all that into IQ is dumb.