New ways of understanding the world

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gepr

Re: New ways of understanding the world

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

1) there are different ways to try random,
2) there are different stuffs to be tried, and
3) there are different ways to reproduce.

The particular, concrete ways used to do 1, 2, & 3 constitute the theory.

On November 30, 2020 5:36:23 PM PST, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
>How about Try random stuff and possibly reproduce?

--
glen ⛧

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: New ways of understanding the world

Glen writes:

<1) there are different ways to try random,
2) there are different stuffs to be tried, and
3) there are different ways to reproduce.>

It seems to me the taxa of life are a description not a theory.

Marcus

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of ⛧ glen <[hidden email]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 1, 2020 2:34 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

gepr

Re: New ways of understanding the world

I'm too ignorant to say anything useful about description vs. theory. All I was talking about is whether one can build a machine that discovers patterns without a theory. And my answer is No. But my answer depends on the "minimal" qualifier. A theory, in this sense, is simply a collection of theorems, provable sentences in a given language. (It seems like a natural extension to include *candidate theorems* -- hypotheticals -- that may or may not be provable, which may match a more vernacular conception of the word "theory".)

And to go back to Jochen's 2nd post <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/New-ways-of-understanding-the-world-tp7599664p7599668.html>, it seems to me like a machine capable of discovering a theory of everything would *need* a prior language+axioms capable of expressing everything that physics (and biology, etc.) can express. And that implies a higher order language, a language of languages [⛧]. The "try random stuff and see what works" *fits* that meta-structure. A machine capable of shotgunning a huge number of subsequent languages *from* a prior language of languages, could stumble upon (or search for) a language that works.

Such meta languages are *schematic*, however. So when people like Tegmark assert that the universe *is* math, there's ambiguity in the word "math" that some people in the audience might miss, much like the ambiguity in the word "logic" that Nick often glosses over. Which math? Which of the many types of math best matches physics? Is it the same type of math that best matches biology? Psychology? Etc.

Of course, if we go back to Soare's definition of "computation" and require it to be _definit_, then it's not clear to me such a schematic AI, pre-programmed with a language of languages, *could* be constructed. But if we relax that requirement, then it seems reasonable.

[⛧] But a language of languages is still a language. Similarly, a theory of theories is still a theory, which is why even such a schematic AI would *still* require a prior theory.

On 12/1/20 6:17 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> It seems to me the taxa of life are a description not a theory.

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jon zingale

Re: New ways of understanding the world

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

It is a little strange to read "possessed a theory" from Nick because he
staunchly avoids language like "has consciousness". That said, I read him
here as saying that discovery of the self is a corollary to discovery of the
world. From my own perspective, theories are derived from (founded upon?)
doings, but are not the same thing as doings. Tryings are perhaps more
subtle, they evoke for me something like proto-theorems or lemmas. -- 2₵

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thompnickson2

Re: New ways of understanding the world

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

Every description engages a theory. It’s theories all the way down.

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Tuesday, December 1, 2020 8:17 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

Glen writes:

<1) there are different ways to try random,
2) there are different stuffs to be tried, and
3) there are different ways to reproduce.>

It seems to me the taxa of life are a description not a theory.

Marcus

gepr

Re: New ways of understanding the world

In reply to this post by jon zingale

That sounds like a fairly standard way of distinguishing between intuitiionist and classical conceptions. For me, the problem boils down to whether or not you allow for *actual* infinities or only possible infinities. If you take a doing like "choose a token, apply unary_1 to it, then apply binary_1 to the original token and the output of unary_1", the result will be a theorem. And there's no, in principle, distinction between the doing and the theorem. But if you then say, "do that forever". Then the result isn't really a theorem because there's really no result. You'd have to add something else ... like a convergence operator. But convergence is persnickety. A better operator would be a similarity/distance operator.

Marcus' "try random stuff, possibly reproduce" allows for options in "reproduce" of strong or weak similarity. (Obviously, for copying a software app, you need pretty strong similarity, but perhaps not when you have complex gen-phen maps.) So it seems reasonable to include similarity operators, but not convergence operators. Then instead of "do that forever", you have "do that until similarity_1 < ε". Even if similarity_1 is NOT monotonic, you can stop when you find a procedure that's close enough to a copy to halt. And that feels like a theorem to me.

Of course, there's no reason those derived theorems have to already be present at the very start of the process. The machine can have a "priming" period where it has to "prove" a bunch of theorems that will *eventually* detect the "order". So Nick's "already possessed" is technically wrong, which is what Marcus points out. But, in some sense, those provable theorems are *already* expressible in the prior language. So Nick is spiritually right.

But re: self discovery as corollary to world discovery -- It seems like Wolpert's paper argues against that: https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1362 The idea that there can only be a single strong inference device in the world implies an asymmetry between world and self discovery. But I can't really pretend to grok the contents of that paper. Maybe someone else here can?

On 12/1/20 8:09 AM, jon zingale wrote:
> It is a little strange to read "possessed a theory" from Nick because he
> staunchly avoids language like "has consciousness". That said, I read him
> here as saying that discovery of the self is a corollary to discovery of the
> world. From my own perspective, theories are derived from (founded upon?)
> doings, but are not the same thing as doings. Tryings are perhaps more
> subtle, they evoke for me something like proto-theorems or lemmas. -- 2₵

> On 11/30/20 1:24 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
>> I was arguing that given, say, a string of numbers, and no information external to that string, that no AI could detect “order” unless it already possessed a theory of what order is. I found the discussion distressing because I thought the point was trivial but all the smart people in the conversation were arguing against me.

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: New ways of understanding the world

In reply to this post by gepr

You seem to be implying that humans are somehow different than machines. That they have something like Chomsky's language acquisition device which is novel in ways that humans don't understand well enough to implement. My dog learns all sorts of conditional probabilities. For example, she knows she can paw on the garage door in the evening and find me on that conveyor belt machine thing. She knows or at least reacts to a correlation between me grabbing my wallet and driving to the dog park. She knows that food is available immediately after that trip. These networks of relations are the sort of structures that were learned in my copy deprotection example. Just deeper networks with somewhat more precise perceptual cues. I'm pretty sure my dog has no time or interest in theory. There are balls to chase, and delivery people to scare off. I would even say my dog performs experiments when she slams a toy down in front of me to see if it is a good time to play.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Tuesday, December 1, 2020 7:22 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

I'm too ignorant to say anything useful about description vs. theory. All I was talking about is whether one can build a machine that discovers patterns without a theory. And my answer is No. But my answer depends on the "minimal" qualifier. A theory, in this sense, is simply a collection of theorems, provable sentences in a given language. (It seems like a natural extension to include *candidate theorems* -- hypotheticals -- that may or may not be provable, which may match a more vernacular conception of the word "theory".)

And to go back to Jochen's 2nd post <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/New-ways-of-understanding-the-world-tp7599664p7599668.html>, it seems to me like a machine capable of discovering a theory of everything would *need* a prior language+axioms capable of expressing everything that physics (and biology, etc.) can express. And that implies a higher order language, a language of languages [⛧]. The "try random stuff and see what works" *fits* that meta-structure. A machine capable of shotgunning a huge number of subsequent languages *from* a prior language of languages, could stumble upon (or search for) a language that works.

Such meta languages are *schematic*, however. So when people like Tegmark assert that the universe *is* math, there's ambiguity in the word "math" that some people in the audience might miss, much like the ambiguity in the word "logic" that Nick often glosses over. Which math? Which of the many types of math best matches physics? Is it the same type of math that best matches biology? Psychology? Etc.

Of course, if we go back to Soare's definition of "computation" and require it to be _definit_, then it's not clear to me such a schematic AI, pre-programmed with a language of languages, *could* be constructed. But if we relax that requirement, then it seems reasonable.

[⛧] But a language of languages is still a language. Similarly, a theory of theories is still a theory, which is why even such a schematic AI would *still* require a prior theory.

On 12/1/20 6:17 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> It seems to me the taxa of life are a description not a theory.

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gepr

Re: New ways of understanding the world

Sorry. That wasn't my intention. Humans and dogs are nothing but machines (for this thread anyway). The point I'm trying to make is that the machinery inside your dog *is* a theory. The reason your dog understands the world in a similar way to other dogs is because dogs have similar machinery, similar theories. The difference between humans and dogs is that they have different machinery, different theories. The difference between an AI and a human is ... wait for it ... different theories. 8^D

On 12/1/20 9:00 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> You seem to be implying that humans are somehow different than machines. That they have something like Chomsky's language acquisition device which is novel in ways that humans don't understand well enough to implement. My dog learns all sorts of conditional probabilities. For example, she knows she can paw on the garage door in the evening and find me on that conveyor belt machine thing. She knows or at least reacts to a correlation between me grabbing my wallet and driving to the dog park. She knows that food is available immediately after that trip. These networks of relations are the sort of structures that were learned in my copy deprotection example. Just deeper networks with somewhat more precise perceptual cues. I'm pretty sure my dog has no time or interest in theory. There are balls to chase, and delivery people to scare off. I would even say my dog performs experiments when she slams a toy down in front of me to see if it is a good time to play.

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

thompnickson2

Re: New ways of understanding the world

In reply to this post by gepr

“the ambiguity in the word "logic" that Nick often glosses over”

Ok, let’s put this to rest, once and for all. I am going to try to steelman a position here that we can agree on

I stipulate that there are many logics. Certainly as many logics as there are maths. So, what is true of all “logics”? A logic is a proposed set of principles of right thinking. Thinking is “right” when it leads to expectations that prove out in the long run. What thinking is “right” depends on what one is thinking about. Some logic’s are more basic, more universal than others. In the very long run, we may hope to discover and agree upon fundamental principles underlying all logics, a logic of logics, if you ill. But for the foreseeable future what argument is logical will depend on what we are talking about.

Now I realize, Glen, that you are going to disagree with the aspiration implicit in the above passage. But other than my desire for convergence, have I got it right?

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Tuesday, December 1, 2020 9:22 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

And to go back to Jochen's 2nd post <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/New-ways-of-understanding-the-world-tp7599664p7599668.html>, it seems to me like a machine capable of discovering a theory of everything would *need* a prior language+axioms capable of expressing everything that physics (and biology, etc.) can express. And that implies a higher order language, a language of languages [⛧]. The "try random stuff and see what works" *fits* that meta-structure. A machine capable of shotgunning a huge number of subsequent languages *from* a prior language of languages, could stumble upon (or search for) a language that works.

Such meta languages are *schematic*, however. So when people like Tegmark assert that the universe *is* math, there's ambiguity in the word "math" that some people in the audience might miss, much like the ambiguity in the word "logic" that Nick often glosses over. Which math? Which of the many types of math best matches physics? Is it the same type of math that best matches biology? Psychology? Etc.

Of course, if we go back to Soare's definition of "computation" and require it to be _definit_, then it's not clear to me such a schematic AI, pre-programmed with a language of languages, *could* be constructed. But if we relax that requirement, then it seems reasonable.

[⛧] But a language of languages is still a language. Similarly, a theory of theories is still a theory, which is why even such a schematic AI would *still* require a prior theory.

On 12/1/20 6:17 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

> It seems to me the taxa of life are a description not a theory.

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doug carmichael

Re: New ways of understanding the world

With the election and work i have not kept up.. so this might be obvious but

the origin of “logic” is the greek logos, which means structure. If we compare economy with ecology we see that nomos means man made law whereas logos is structure in nature. (even the old testament has in the begin was the word, but the original Greek has “in the beginning was logos”

On Dec 1, 2020, at 9:15 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

“the ambiguity in the word "logic" that Nick often glosses over”

Ok, let’s put this to rest, once and for all. I am going to try to steelman a position here that we can agree on

I stipulate that there are many logics. Certainly as many logics as there are maths. So, what is true of all “logics”? A logic is a proposed set of principles of right thinking. Thinking is “right” when it leads to expectations that prove out in the long run. What thinking is “right” depends on what one is thinking about. Some logic’s are more basic, more universal than others. In the very long run, we may hope to discover and agree upon fundamental principles underlying all logics, a logic of logics, if you ill. But for the foreseeable future what argument is logical will depend on what we are talking about.

Steve Smith

Re: New ways of understanding the world

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Nick -

I should not be old enough to remember this, yet my mother exposed me to it way too young... it was most likely post 3rd or 4th grade summer when she felt I needed to fill my days with something besides wandering the hills with my dog, climbing trees and watching clouds "rotate" into my 3dimensional world, becoming familiar things like bunnies and faces. She assigned me to read one short bit of literature each day and write a short poem (one step below a limerick)... I remember reading a few pages a day of "archy and mehitabel" and being deeply puzzled by everything from the concept of a cockroach typing (I had not seen a cockroach by that time in my life) to his highly stylized diction and imagery. It probably bled into my "poetry" assignments. I found the whole text disturbing, knowing that adults actually found such nonsense interesting?

I find your stuck double-u key to add a nice "signature" to your writing... and references various issues of "coding" and redundancy and compression. I doubt there are many if any examples where the leaving out the W is in any way ambiguous to those of us who have the context. I wonder what Google Doc's OCR would make of it if you printed it out, scanned it in, and gave it a chance to "guess" what you meant?

I own a classic (40s?) typewriter which I was told (by the woman at the garage sale) that it belonged to her father who was widowed in his 40s about the time she was coming of age. (it was of the generation of typewriters which had no '1' key, leaving it to the typist to use the lower case 'l' instead.) He was already (going?) blind at the time, and ended up living with her as she raised her own (young) family. A remote family friend and he apparently developed a romantic but strictly epistolary relationship. To facilitate it, she bought his "ladyfriend" a braille typewriter and him the one I bought from her. They apparently exchanged "love letters" (weekly?) for a couple of decades until his lady friend passed away (in their 70s?). The lady friend's family sent boxes of his letters to her after he died, but kept the braille typewriter. She still had the bundles of both of their letters that she wanted to find an archive to accept, but had not yet. She showed me some of his letters where his fingers had strayed from "home" so that some of the letters were "off by one"... I didn't look closely, because it did read as pseudo-gibberish, but it was likely one row-above because there were numerals interspersed in the gibberish passages. I tried typing with my eyes closed a few times just to see how it felt and what came from it. I found that the offset from the space-bar was a dead-giveaway for me when I was "off-home" by a row rather than off-by a column. I think I was too self-conscious/aware as I did it to be "natural" in my mistakes. I haven't tried typing on the typewriter for over a decade, the ribbon is way too dry at this point, I am sure, to do more than leave faint impressions/marks. I suppose the braille version would not suffer from this! I have a few sheets of braille from a manual which I sometimes like to run my fingers over and imagine what it is like to "read" this way... it triggers some interesting synaesthesia but I nave no sense of being able to "read" it... I'm sure it requires the same deliberate "bootstrapping" that sight reading alphabetic (or any other form) of visual text requires.

Keep on typing! Maybe you can switch out your broken W for "yet another" key?

- Sieve

Russell, et. Al.

Are any of you old enough to remember Archie and Mahitabel. A tale of a love-lorn cockroach ho could only type one key at a time by leaping on it. Hence no upper case.

It was a rip on e. e. cummings, a famous poet of the time ith the same bad habit. My family ent nuts about it in the 40’s. It contains meters and rhymes only a cockroach could rite.

That’s all I remember. I said I as raised in a literary family, I never said I as literate. Let me tell you, life ithout a double-u key truly sucks.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email].

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Russell Standish
Sent: Monday, November 30, 2020 10:37 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

Was your laptop recycled from the White House perchance?

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=121980&page=1

On Mon, Nov 30, 2020 at 09:47:22PM -0600, [hidden email] wrote:

> Hmm! I don't think I (or glen) have to be a creationist. Only a "start-in-the-middle-ist". I am not interested in the "first structure". Let's figure out hoW all the others Work and then We'll Worry about the first one. (sorry, my doubleU key is effed up and Lenovo is back ordered on keyboards. Does anybody kno a Lenovo executive I could have slaughtered. ) The interest in the first of anything is just creationism set loose from the constraints of religion.

> n

> Nicholas Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University

> [hidden email] https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

>

>

>

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels

> Sent: Monday, November 30, 2020 7:36 PM

> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

>

> How about Try random stuff and possibly reproduce?   It is starting to sound like you are a creationist.

>

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???

> Sent: Monday, November 30, 2020 4:45 PM

> To: [hidden email]

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

>

> The AI has to have something to *do*. That mechanism amounts to a theory. If the AI looks for patterns in digits, then "look for patterns in the digits" is a type of theory. If the AI tries to copy a set of encrypted digits, then "decrypt and copy the digits" is the theory.

>

> I would further argue that the AI cannot exist, the recipe/algorithm can't exist, without some schematic definition of the things it'll operate on and for tests of a successful operation. So, it would make sense to claim that all 3 are required for there to be a theory. I'm not making that strong of a claim. I'm only trying to back up Nick on his claim that there must be some sort of prior theory for any of it to "work" ... however "work" might be understood.

>

> On 11/30/20 4:35 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

> > The one is the AI or the rat and its related gene sequence? Or you need all three?   I claim that the last two are not a theory, and that an AI could do that data mining.

> >

> > -----Original Message-----

> > From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???

> > Sent: Monday, November 30, 2020 4:29 PM

> > To: [hidden email]

> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

> >

> > Well, that *system*, {one, person, genetic sequence} contains an endogenous theory (or a set of possible theories). If you slice out the {one} doing the operating, then you lose the theory.

> >

> > On 11/30/20 4:22 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

> >> So if one is given a person (or a rat) and a genetic sequence that animal amounts to an endogenous theory?

> >>

> >> -----Original Message-----

> >> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???

> >> Sent: Monday, November 30, 2020 4:14 PM

> >> To: [hidden email]

> >> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

> >>

> >> Well, sure. But just because the theory is endogenous, doesn't imply that theory does not *exist*, nor that it's not *prior* to the launch. So, even in that case, Nick's correct that the theory (or a spanning kernel of it) exists before-hand.

> >>

> >> On 11/30/20 4:06 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

> >>> Once one figures out how the monitor reacts then one can see how certain registers change as a result of changes in instruction sequences.     The relationship of a perturbation to an outcome is simple, learnable and relatively unambiguous for a typical microprocessor.    Assembly of subroutines follow the same principles. (One can observe a stack with enough experimentation.)    The language is learned (not given) and the axioms implied by the structure of the machine. The goal of copying is sort of beside the point.

> >>>

> >>> -----Original Message-----

> >>> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???

> >>> Sent: Monday, November 30, 2020 3:51 PM

> >>> To: [hidden email]

> >>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

> >>>

> >>> But if we use the word "theory" in its minimal sense of "a language and a set of axioms", then your "to be copied so that it does the same thing" *is* a theory, albeit a different theory (or containing theory) for one that would treat the [un]copyable application over and above the act of copying. What would be interesting would be the *number* and diversity of theories validatable/executable against any given set of tokens.

> >>>

> >>> On 11/30/20 3:33 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

> >>>> I spent a fair amount of my youth disassembling boot procedures of various copy protection schemes.   There one is given a list of numbers that bootstrap an operating system and an application. A small portion of that list of numbers is relevant to preventing that list of numbers from being copied from one media to another.   It wasn’t really necessary to have a theory of the application, generally, to understand how to change the numbers to make that list copyable.   If one had no theory of a computer instruction set or of an operating system, but was just given a disk and the goal of copying it to get the computer to do the same thing when the copied disk was put in to the disk drive instead of the original disk, it is possible to learn everything that is needed to learn which numbers to change.   No oscilloscope needed, no theory of solid state physics, etc. Ok, maybe one reference manual.   Biology is the same, but without a concise reference manual.

> >>>>

> >>>>

> >>>>

> >>>> *From:* Friam <[hidden email]> *On Behalf Of

> >>>> [hidden email]

> >>>> *Sent:* Monday, November 30, 2020 1:25 PM

> >>>> *To:* 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'

> >>>> <[hidden email]>

> >>>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

> >>>>

> >>>>

> >>>>

> >>>> All,

> >>>>

> >>>>

> >>>>

> >>>> I feel like this relates to a discussion held during Nerd Hour at the end of last Friday’s vfriam. I was arguing that given, say, a string of numbers, and no information external to that string, that no AI could detect “order” unless it already possessed a theory of what order is. I found the discussion distressing because I thought the point was trivial but all the smart people in the conversation were arguing against me.

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Principal, High Performance Coders     [hidden email]

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: New ways of understanding the world

In reply to this post by gepr

Dogs and humans share 84% of their DNA, so that almost sounds plausible on the face of it. However, humans have about 16 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex but the whole human genome is only about 3 billion base pairs, and only about 30 million of it codes for proteins. This seems to me to say that learning is more important than inheritance of "theories" if you must insist on using that word.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Tuesday, December 1, 2020 9:06 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

Sorry. That wasn't my intention. Humans and dogs are nothing but machines (for this thread anyway). The point I'm trying to make is that the machinery inside your dog *is* a theory. The reason your dog understands the world in a similar way to other dogs is because dogs have similar machinery, similar theories. The difference between humans and dogs is that they have different machinery, different theories. The difference between an AI and a human is ... wait for it ... different theories. 8^D

On 12/1/20 9:00 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> You seem to be implying that humans are somehow different than machines. That they have something like Chomsky's language acquisition device which is novel in ways that humans don't understand well enough to implement. My dog learns all sorts of conditional probabilities. For example, she knows she can paw on the garage door in the evening and find me on that conveyor belt machine thing. She knows or at least reacts to a correlation between me grabbing my wallet and driving to the dog park. She knows that food is available immediately after that trip. These networks of relations are the sort of structures that were learned in my copy deprotection example. Just deeper networks with somewhat more precise perceptual cues. I'm pretty sure my dog has no time or interest in theory. There are balls to chase, and delivery people to scare off. I would even say my dog performs experiments when she slams a toy down in front of me to see if it is a good time to play.

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gepr

Re: New ways of understanding the world

In reply to this post by doug carmichael

I like the reference to structure, but not the reference to "in the beginning", which smacks of foundationalism.

Unfortunately, I can't agree with Nick, even ignoring convergence. I am anti-foundationalist. So appeals to a universal logic are problematic. I think I ahdere to a fairly standard understanding of "logic" as fundamentally about *consequence*, what is guaranteed to obtain, what is likely to obtain, and what is so incoherent as to be unconsiderable. And it's importantly *syntactic*, not necessarily semantic. Logic needs no referent. Reason, however, does need a referent. Reason relies on logic, but is not limited by it.

This maps to the idea of structure. Logic is really just the distinction between what fits together and what doesn't fit together. That's all it is. There is no "right thinking", only whether or not you're following the rules of the game or not. And it remains to be seen if there is a universal logic. But there is a fantastic website for it: https://www.uni-log.org/

On 12/1/20 9:26 AM, Douglass Carmichael wrote:

> With the election and work i have not kept up.. so this might be obvious but
>
> the origin of “logic” is the greek logos, which means structure. If we compare economy with ecology we see that /nomos/ means man made law whereas /logos/ is structure in nature. (even the old testament has in the begin was the /word/, but the original Greek has “in the beginning was /logos/”
>
>> On Dec 1, 2020, at 9:15 AM, <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>>
>> “the ambiguity in the word "logic" that Nick often glosses over”
>>
>> Ok, let’s put this to rest, once and for all. I am going to try to steelman a position here that we can agree on
>>
>> I stipulate that there are many logics. Certainly as many logics as there are maths. So, what is true of all “logics”? A logic is a proposed set of principles of right thinking. Thinking is “right” when it leads to expectations that prove out in the long run. What thinking is “right” depends on what one is thinking about. Some logic’s are more basic, more universal than others. In the very long run, we may hope to discover and agree upon fundamental principles underlying all logics, a logic of logics, if you ill. But for the foreseeable future what argument is logical will depend on what we are talking about.
>>

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

gepr

Re: New ways of understanding the world

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

Well, as I've tried to make clear, machines can *accrete* their machinery. I think this is essentially arguing for "genetic memory", the idea that there's a balance between scales of learning rates. What your dog learns after its birth is different from what it "knew" at its birth. I'm fine with tossing the word "theory" for this accreted build-up of inferences/outcomes/state. But it's as good a word as any other.

I suspect that there are some animals, like humans, born with FPGA-like learning structures so that their machinery accretes more after birth than other animals. And that there are some animals born with more of that machinery already built-in. And it's not a simple topic. Things like retractable claws are peculiar machinery that kindasorta *requires* one to think in terms of clawing, whereas our more rounded fingernails facilitate both clawing and, say, unscrewing flat head screws.

But this accreted machinery is *there*, no matter how much we want to argue where it came from. And it will be there for any given AI as well. Call it whatever you feel comfortable with.

On 12/1/20 9:39 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Dogs and humans share 84% of their DNA, so that almost sounds plausible on the face of it. However, humans have about 16 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex but the whole human genome is only about 3 billion base pairs, and only about 30 million of it codes for proteins. This seems to me to say that learning is more important than inheritance of "theories" if you must insist on using that word.

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: New ways of understanding the world

Map Nick's list of numbers to a spatiotemporal snapshot of the physical world. The dog and the human have both learned how to learn about it. Whether it took 1 year, 8000 years, or 2.7 billion years sort of doesn’t matter in the argument except that the new AI needs enough time to perform experiments to learn the consequences and meaning of different patterns of numbers. If the list of numbers describes every possible action that the AI could take and how that particular path would be recorded, then any given experiment could in principle be encapsulated in a single set of numbers; it is just a matter of what cells in the hyperspace the AI decides to look at.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Tuesday, December 1, 2020 9:54 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

Well, as I've tried to make clear, machines can *accrete* their machinery. I think this is essentially arguing for "genetic memory", the idea that there's a balance between scales of learning rates. What your dog learns after its birth is different from what it "knew" at its birth. I'm fine with tossing the word "theory" for this accreted build-up of inferences/outcomes/state. But it's as good a word as any other.

I suspect that there are some animals, like humans, born with FPGA-like learning structures so that their machinery accretes more after birth than other animals. And that there are some animals born with more of that machinery already built-in. And it's not a simple topic. Things like retractable claws are peculiar machinery that kindasorta *requires* one to think in terms of clawing, whereas our more rounded fingernails facilitate both clawing and, say, unscrewing flat head screws.

But this accreted machinery is *there*, no matter how much we want to argue where it came from. And it will be there for any given AI as well. Call it whatever you feel comfortable with.

On 12/1/20 9:39 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Dogs and humans share 84% of their DNA, so that almost sounds plausible on the face of it. However, humans have about 16 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex but the whole human genome is only about 3 billion base pairs, and only about 30 million of it codes for proteins. This seems to me to say that learning is more important than inheritance of "theories" if you must insist on using that word.

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gepr

Re: New ways of understanding the world

Right. Except that these little machines are not merely learning a static string. They're *writing* to the string at the same time they're reading it.

On 12/1/20 10:12 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Map Nick's list of numbers to a spatiotemporal snapshot of the physical world. The dog and the human have both learned how to learn about it. Whether it took 1 year, 8000 years, or 2.7 billion years sort of doesn’t matter in the argument except that the new AI needs enough time to perform experiments to learn the consequences and meaning of different patterns of numbers. If the list of numbers describes every possible action that the AI could take and how that particular path would be recorded, then any given experiment could in principle be encapsulated in a single set of numbers; it is just a matter of what cells in the hyperspace the AI decides to look at.

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: New ways of understanding the world

Ok, so like an android in the spaceship that is 150 years into a 200 year mission, it reflects back on its experiments with the humans that were alive in the first 100 years of its mission. The dataset sealed up after the last human died.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Tuesday, December 1, 2020 10:34 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

Right. Except that these little machines are not merely learning a static string. They're *writing* to the string at the same time they're reading it.

On 12/1/20 10:12 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Map Nick's list of numbers to a spatiotemporal snapshot of the physical world. The dog and the human have both learned how to learn about it. Whether it took 1 year, 8000 years, or 2.7 billion years sort of doesn’t matter in the argument except that the new AI needs enough time to perform experiments to learn the consequences and meaning of different patterns of numbers. If the list of numbers describes every possible action that the AI could take and how that particular path would be recorded, then any given experiment could in principle be encapsulated in a single set of numbers; it is just a matter of what cells in the hyperspace the AI decides to look at.

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thompnickson2

Re: New ways of understanding the world

In reply to this post by gepr

But Glen, I am an anti-foundationalist, too. I never asserted that logic was the foundation of anything. It is subject to the same pragmaticist [sensu Peirceae] evaluations that are the fate of any conception. It, like everything else, is the result of accumulations of pattern in experience. It is a midden, not a foundation.

I have a prediction. I predict that you are an older brother to one or two younger siblings.

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Tuesday, December 1, 2020 11:43 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

I like the reference to structure, but not the reference to "in the beginning", which smacks of foundationalism.

Unfortunately, I can't agree with Nick, even ignoring convergence. I am anti-foundationalist. So appeals to a universal logic are problematic. I think I ahdere to a fairly standard understanding of "logic" as fundamentally about *consequence*, what is guaranteed to obtain, what is likely to obtain, and what is so incoherent as to be unconsiderable. And it's importantly *syntactic*, not necessarily semantic. Logic needs no referent. Reason, however, does need a referent. Reason relies on logic, but is not limited by it.

This maps to the idea of structure. Logic is really just the distinction between what fits together and what doesn't fit together. That's all it is. There is no "right thinking", only whether or not you're following the rules of the game or not. And it remains to be seen if there is a universal logic. But there is a fantastic website for it: https://www.uni-log.org/

On 12/1/20 9:26 AM, Douglass Carmichael wrote:

> With the election and work i have not kept up.. so this might be

> obvious but

> the origin of “logic” is the greek logos, which means structure. If

> we compare economy with ecology we see that /nomos/ means man made law whereas /logos/ is structure in nature. (even the old testament has in the begin was the /word/, but the original Greek has “in the beginning was /logos/”

>> On Dec 1, 2020, at 9:15 AM, <[hidden email]>> <[hidden email]>> wrote:

>> “the ambiguity in the word "logic" that Nick often glosses over”

>> Ok, let’s put this to rest, once and for all. I am going to try to

>> steelman a position here that we can agree on

>> I stipulate that there are many logics. Certainly as many logics as

>> there are maths. So, what is true of all “logics”? A logic is a proposed set of principles of right thinking. Thinking is “right” when it leads to expectations that prove out in the long run. What thinking is “right” depends on what one is thinking about. Some logic’s are more basic, more universal than others. In the very long run, we may hope to discover and agree upon fundamental principles underlying all logics, a logic of logics, if you ill. But for the foreseeable future what argument is logical will depend on what we are talking about.

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thompnickson2

Re: New ways of understanding the world

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

“AI needs enough time to perform experiments to learn the consequences and meaning of different patterns of numbers”

Abused metaphor alert !!!!! Haven’t you “personalized” AI? It would seem to me that the one thing you are NOT allowed to do with AI is personalize it.

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Tuesday, December 1, 2020 12:13 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

-----Original Message-----

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???

Sent: Tuesday, December 1, 2020 9:54 AM

To: [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world

I suspect that there are some animals, like humans, born with FPGA-like learning structures so that their machinery accretes more after birth than other animals. And that there are some animals born with more of that machinery already built-in. And it's not a simple topic. Things like retractable claws are peculiar machinery that kindasorta *requires* one to think in terms of clawing, whereas our more rounded fingernails facilitate both clawing and, say, unscrewing flat head screws.

But this accreted machinery is *there*, no matter how much we want to argue where it came from. And it will be there for any given AI as well. Call it whatever you feel comfortable with.

On 12/1/20 9:39 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

> Dogs and humans share 84% of their DNA, so that almost sounds plausible on the face of it. However, humans have about 16 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex but the whole human genome is only about 3 billion base pairs, and only about 30 million of it codes for proteins. This seems to me to say that learning is more important than inheritance of "theories" if you must insist on using that word.

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