Josh Smith-Brennan

[Question] Psyched out

• Josh Smith-Brennan 24 Apr 2021 22:09 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Psyched out

  Thanks so much for the suggestions. I’ve got time on my hands, and so doing some reading to attempt to keep my head above water here just makes sense. I would love to pay for the book versions as they look like they would be best appreciated in print form, but right now free is the only way for me. I’m guessing my local library won’t have copies and you mentioned free digital versions, can you expand on that idea?

• Josh Smith-Brennan 25 Apr 2021 1:18 UTC

  0 points

  on: Josh Smith-Bren­nan’s Shortform

  I started reading Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “Martial Art of Rationality” and have a few thoughts. Let me start out by saying I trained in Martial Arts for over 20 years off and on, and so I come at this topic from that bias. Given the treatment of the term in the essay, it seems natural that AI, and robotics in general, are having such a hard time, and will continue to do so in the search for Sentience. As for humans, my personal belief is that not everyone should learn a martial art. Here’s my best summation of why:

  I remember posting on Martial Arts forums 10-15 year ago, the types of discussions that went on. This was around the time when Mixed Martial Arts were really at their peak, and the topic of which martial art was the best continued to be hotly debated. This debate still rages today for various reasons, but a prime reason is because of disagreement about what constitutes a Martial Art.

  Literally speaking, the term Martial Art means an ‘Art of War’, and depending on what discipline you train in, you may practice more or less arts than someone else. The list of ‘Martial Arts’ is a long one, and encompasses everything from punching and kicking, to throws and grappling, to all different types of edged and blunt weapons, to guns, bombs, being a fighter pilot, stationed on a Sub, to weather forecasting, intelligence gathering and analysis, cryptography, medicine, psychological warfare, wilderness survival, scuba diving, sky diving, navigating by map, by satellite, flying a drone, rolling, falling, breathing, etiquette, horseback riding, and the list goes on and on. In reality, the military is one big martial arts training organization.

  A derogatory term for an Art that really only deals with punching and kicking, is Partial Art, as they are very small splinters of the domain called Martial Arts. Without going into the hotly debated history of the arts of war, the major schism in the Martial Arts community is between so-called Battlefield Arts and Sports Arts. It is difficult for both types of arts to compete with each other. Sports use very strict rule sets to keep competitors from being injured, and the rules of war are set in place so that the least amount of life is lost in the least gruesome and painful way. There is really no comparison when it comes to which domain is more complicated and dangerous. The major goal of a Battlefield Art is to make it home alive, whereas in a Sport Art, the major goal is to win a competition. The goals are very different, so is the training, and so are the experiences of life of the practitioners.

  A Martial Art of Rationality therefore, would likely follow a similar organizational structure, and contain the same schism—namely the completeness of the domain of consideration of the practitioner. In relation to AI, the more complete the hardware and software setup and integration is, and the better more complete it’s programming to accomplish it’s goals most efficiently, the more tasks it can accomplish. But for what purpose? Without the human limitations of needing emotional and community support, food, and shelter, there is no ‘Home’ to make it back to alive and in one piece. There is only an endless competition of points to win, calculations to perform, packages to deliver, or whatever other competitive purpose the AI or robot was created to perform. There is no life, only purpose.

  It is our limitations that make us human, that motivate us to move, think, and act. Maybe that is what Sentience is, the motivation to stay alive, and without that to drive our thoughts and actions, we would just be mindless robots. While it’s true that war is a type of competition, in a war lives are lost. So in relation to human rationality, and a Martial Art of Rationality, I think one should be aware of the true purpose of a Martial Art. It’s not to better oneself as so many would have you believe, through competition and training; that is sport. To make it home alive and in one piece after risking your life and going to war, that is the goal of a Martial Art.

  I’m all for helping people think better, clearer and more rationally, and it certainly seems as though there is no shortage of culture wars still, despite the reach of the Internet. One would have thought Internet Culture would be more rational, but alas that doesn’t seem to be the case. So in a Marital Art of the Mind, as it should be in a Martial Art, you need to be careful who you train. If you give the wrong person the tools to wage war against everything you stand for, they do so and you lose, in hindsight, that’s not very rational or productive for your own purposes.

  Rational thinking paired with technology can be a good thing, but using rational thinking to create technology that irrational people can use irrationally isn’t. I understand the difficulty in changing the minds of irrational people, and despite our best efforts, there are more of them than there are of truly rational people. Hopefully I get to be one of those rational people who can be paired with technology to produce a good thing. As for the term ‘Martial Art of Rationality’ I think it has always existed, it’s just not being practiced by very many people around the world. They much prefer sport.

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• Josh Smith-Brennan 26 Apr 2021 20:39 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: kithpendragon’s comment on: Would robots care about Mean­ing and Re­lat­ing?

  I think you make some key points kithpendragon.

  Firstly “Reality comes to us in a series of sensory moments...” and “The tags and transformations that allow us to go from raw sensory information to the much-lower-dimensional objects that populate the map constitute Meaning”

  From my readings on Cultural Theory I pull this statement “Culture creates meaning.” At a much lower level of abstraction we have to look at some Evolutionary Psychology. In pre-verbal human society, how did they ‘create meaning’? Without the use of language, the shared meaning came from shared emotional states: when there was food and people were hungry, if you felt welcome by the people who brought in the food and you were comfortable enough to stay and enjoy food, you ate and stayed alive. Otherwise, maybe the hunter didn’t like you and so behaved in a way to create a fearful emotional state in you that would make you run away. In general without the ability to share emotional states with other humans, you would be left out in the cold and likely die. In the same way today, if you can’t ‘get along’ with your coworkers you will be fired, and if you can’t ‘get along’ with roomates or a spouse, you will live alone.

  So in this sense the saying “humans are social creatures” can be interpreted as if our socializing and ability to form society, doesn’t depend on ‘words’ per say, or any definition of meaning requiring words, if you believe pre-lingual humans could understand meaning. Without the use of language, the ability to form social arrangements, relationships, and to focus on shared goals still existed. So maybe ‘meaning’ doesn’t rely on words.

  Another aspect of this idea of meaning, is the content of the thoughts of pre-verbal humans. Like all of us, we have a few ways of ‘thinking’: not only do we think in language and words, but also in images and sensations. This is what pre-verbal humans did, thought in images and sensations. What would that be like without having so much of your neural wiring taken up by language?

  When you mentioned seeing your kids lego bricks and understanding how they go together, i’m guessing you were using a combination of visual memory recall and sensory memory as you likely ‘saw’ in your mind how they went together, and you also probably recalled how it ‘felt’ to put them together. When I look at lego’s I can recall the plasticy feel of the surface and the lightness of them in my hand and how the holes in the bottom feel very different than the pegs on the top.

  So in this light, it is the ability to correctly correlate the image, and sensory information of the outside world, with the physical sensations they cause in our inner experience, with the abstract words, phrases and concepts which your particular culture ascribes to our common experiences results in a contemporary sense of meaning.

  This is why I believe to really create a sentient AI, it needs to include an entire analogous set of both the human Central Nervous Sytem and Peripheral Nervous System. We require them, and are the only sentient forms of life we know of, so then why would we expect to create sentient life without the entire nervous system? Some of the reading I’ve done on Habits, Emotions, and Human Decision making really leads to the idea that rational thought is good for contemplating, but it is the emotional processes in conjunction with the memory which provides the motivation to act.

  Without the motivation to act, you might be able to program an AI that could beat human players at StarCraft, which Google has, but after a few years it would need to move into its parents basement because it spends it’s whole day playing StarCraft instead of getting a job and getting friends. Without the ability to go out into the rest of the world and truly live like humans, we’re just creating basement dwellers who beat us at games we used to enjoy playing before they became dominated by AI. I’m still a little upset with AlphaGo, as it has changed the Go world, and Im still not sure what to make of that.

  This brings me to another point I wanted to make about an earlier post. Looking forward more than one generation at a time, and considering we are using imitations of the human brains with neural nets, imitations of how humans think with language and image processing algorithms and AI, and imitating human endeavors whether it be playing StarCraft, running a cash register, building a car, or doing scientific research, one thing we seem to be neglecting is an imitation of human family roles and society. At a point in the future where humans become indistinguishable from robots, will they have their own families, their own societies, that imitate our own? Will we have a shared sense of meaning?

  Do we need to train robots to develop rituals like ours around important events like birth and death? What will robots teach each other, what should they teach each other, and how do we develop them in such a way that when they do become sentient, they don’t resent us? At the same time how do we develop them so that we don’t resent them?

  When I think of this problem, I recall the story of Pinocchio, where Gepeto is the kindly old father figure attempting to make a boy out of wood. Somewhere magically near the end, Pinocchio becomes a real boy and they all live happily ever after. Here it is a wise adult, creating a mechanical child, who he can raise as his own. It seems like this is a decent analogy for the process of creating Sentient AI, maybe not the best, but certainly the most achievable I think. But what would happen if we tried it the other way around? This story is that of a real boy, attempting to build a mechanical Father, in the hope we can all live happily ever after. This way the attempt is to create a kind and wise Father figure, one who can become real and teach the boy the correct way to live life.

  I’m putting my money on a better future outcome for the human race going with the story of Pinocchio, because in human terms we have become wise, experienced and jaded, probably like Gepeto, and we are creating a very young technology, not an omniscient and wise one. To see ourselves as a young boy creating an old and wise technology seems off. Maybe an even better story is that of a young boy, creating a young mechanical friend, one on equal footing. Neither smarter nor dumber than us, but better at us in some ways and not so good in others.

  The stories and analogies we use, help to create the meaning in our lives. Sometime its better to create meaning through stories, sometimes through shared emotional states. Until we have robots that ‘feel’ emotion, that is one vector of communication that serves as a wall between us.

• Josh Smith-Brennan 26 Apr 2021 21:07 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Zac Hatfield-Dodds’s comment on: Mal­i­cious non-state ac­tors and AI safety

  I think the efforts to focus on issues of ‘Mental Health’ pay only lip service to this point. We live in a culture which relies on male culture to be about learning to traumatize others and learning to tolerate trauma, while at the same time decrying it as toxic male culture. Males are rightly confused these days, and the lack of adequate social services combined with a country filled with guns that continues to promote media of all sorts that celebrates violence as long as it’s ‘good violence’, is a recipe for this kind of tragedy. Focusing on the individual shooters as being the problem isn’t the answer. It is a systemic problem I believe.

• Josh Smith-Brennan 27 Apr 2021 16:03 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Charlie Steiner’s comment on: Ethics in Many Worlds

  Not sure if this is the correct place to put this comment, but I think it seems to relate. Layman here with big ideas, and little ability to back it up. Which is why I’m here hoping for some clarity. So anyway, this comment struck a chord with me:

  “Probably this view can be drawn from an analogy to the fact that MWI does not violate energy (or mass) conservation. Preumably stuff that matters is made out of stuff, and if the amount of stuff is conserved across time, then (all other things being equal) the sum total of what matters must be conserved across time.”

  Taking into account that superposition might create discrepancies of relative location locally when instances of, say myself doing slightly different actions, are superimposed over one another if all possible worlds occupy the same space only in different dimensions, but not at different times, is it possible that it is the elusive ‘dark matter’ that accounts for the mass of the other worlds?

  If we can only measure the arrangement of matter in the universe one instance at a time, yet the entirety of the mass of the Universe exists all at the same time just distributed equally among the various ‘branches’ of all possible worlds superimposed on top of each other, then it seems as though all the other worlds mass would seem to be ‘unmeasurable’ in this instance even as we can measure the mass in this world.

• Josh Smith-Brennan 27 Apr 2021 22:00 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: kithpendragon’s comment on: Would robots care about Mean­ing and Re­lat­ing?

  First off, thanks for the thoughtful and insightful post, I really appreciate it. Most of my thinking is pretty cross disciplinary, as my educational training is in Art, but my reading, research and analysis runs the gamut. I’ve done some Visual Design and UX/​UI as well. With this in mind, I claim to be an artist and not a scientist, although I try to combine the 2.

  In this light, I subscribe to the idea that the Universe is essentially meaningless without a sentient life to attempt to interpret it. Those continual individual efforts in aggregate, to interpret the indivisible eternal moment of experience humans have had—ever since the dawn of humankind—into discrete units and concepts, is what I term ‘Culture.’

  Human ritual and the development of belief systems are the core of culture, and hence of meaning. Whether it’s religious cultural beliefs and practices, scientific cultural beliefs and practices, artistic, etc. etc. it’s the development, growth, and integration or disintegration of different cultures over time that has brought us to the current ‘Culture of Meaning.’ I use this term loosely, as I also believe on the whole, the world is probably more confused than it has ever been. Thank you to the Internet.

  This is a favorite topic of mine in all honesty.

  “I generally find it most useful to think of culture as a multi-user extension of mind. After all, it contains memories and associations just like our brains and bodies do, even runs on the same hardware.”

  Generally speaking, I agree, although the last part of this statement seems tricky. This is where in terms of evolutionary psychology, the concept of tool making and written language becomes important I think. Sign and symbol making are the external manifestation of meaning, they don’t reside in our minds or bodies, but rather in the outside world. Tools, art, design, architecture, city planning, space ships and telescopes are all products of human culture, but don’t reside in our bodies or minds. Our ideas of how we use them does, so in that sense, a tool without proper use may or may not be meaningful. If an alien technology falls to Earth and we can’t figure out how to use it, it’s only use might be as a sign of intelligent alien life. Or if we don’t even recognize it as an alien technology, for human purpose it’s essentially meaningless until someone realizes what it is.

  The ability to properly use a tool is generally considered a sign of cultural competence depending on the culture you come from and move through. If I attempt to use a spoon to dig the foundation for a new high-rise apartment complex downtown, I look foolish; if I use an iron to grill a grilled cheese sandwich it could either be considered creative or idiotic; If I accidentally use the salad fork to eat my entree, it may not affect my ability to eat efficiently, but I might be laughed at for using the wrong fork. So things like tools and spatial organization are products of meaning making that come from cultural beliefs and practices, but don’t lie within our bodies, although the concept and meaning ascribed to them do. Unless you consider the light bouncing off of the Mona Lisa and into your eyes a form of ‘being inside your body or mind’, I think it’s safe to say not all culture lies inside of human bodies and minds, but also outside of us. I can go either way on that honestly, but for day to day living it’s less taxing to see a difference between the internal world and the external world, although in reality in a much more objective way, there is no difference. ( I also find it hard to ignore the concept of phenomic expression of external products. I know I said that wrong, but it is the idea that in the same way a birds nest is an external expression of the birds genetic programming, the cities and tools and houses that humans create are also external literal expressions of our genes.

  “The ability to take blobs of light and shadow and color as input, and construct some dataset with multiple components that can each be rotated freely in 3-space always feels like magic when I try to examine it closely!”

  I’m with you on that. I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to diagram the process of consciousness, and like most people I find it difficult to explain just what exactly ‘it’ is. I have a theory, which unfortunately is sort of disappointing in some ways, but in other ways it has rather large implications. Once again, I think in many ways it is an issue of culture, which doesn’t seem to affect all cultures in the same way.

  “Assuming you’re using “sentient” as a synonym for “consciousness” (as is commonly done), do you think this is a binary proposition? Or could there be a continuum running from “entirely passive” through human-level consciousness to who-knows-where? How could you try to tell the difference between those two possibilities?”

  I think the word sentient needs to be better defined, as I see it used in a number of different ways. Not convinced I have the answer to how to use it best, although I tend to use it to mean self awareness of the type humans have. Apparently, according to the last thing I read years ago, people were taking the idea of Dolphins being sentient in the same manner as humans seriously. Elephants too. Certainly I think the more neural wiring something has, the more potential for it to be self aware. Of course what does being self aware mean? I tend to think this includes a concept of the passage of time, forethought, ability to contemplate and form concepts of beginnings and endings, such as births and deaths. In Fight Club the assertion is that “Soap is the yardstick of civilization” but I think its possible that rituals developed to acknowledge and remember death and ancestery is the yardstick of culture.

  Is it a binary proposition? Another favorite topic of mine is Binary Propositions, and from my perspective there is almost no such thing as a true binary proposition. I’ve done a ton of diagrams I’m thinking of sharing which deal with this very topic, and I’ve attempted to write about it several years back. I remember hearing a term awhile back regarding this very topic, and a little later on looking for it but not being able to find it though. I don’t remember the term now though unfortunately, but it seems like things change rapidly in this arena. Regardless, I definitely think sentience is a continuum. What the limits are I’m not sure of, though. I’m also not a huge fan of limits.

  “I agree that we don’t seem to be actively developing along those lines, but I expect it’s not so much neglect as evasion. The culture seems to hold a terror of human capabilities being replaced.”

  Super interesting idea, that of evasion. And I have to admit to sharing the terror of human capabilities being replaced. There seem to be 3 separate trains of thought on cutting edge technology: The first is technology completely external from humans: Boston Dynamics robots, Transformers, drones, the Internet, AI which are all going to take our jobs; then there is the future of technology that is internal: prosthetics, pacemakers, wet ware, nanobot medications, basically technology which either replaces or augments components of our bodies or our abilities which will dilute our ‘humaness’. The third class is harder to define as it more completely blurs the line between human and machine: digital identity for instance is external to our bodies, lying in databases and passed around the internet, but often has a huge impact on our physical existence in diverse and complex ways we’re still trying to understand.Your Facebook profile represents you, but is it you? And in reality its owned by Facebook, and all that data about you that Google has, is it yours or is it theirs? Am I my data, or am I my self and which is more important to society at large, my data or me? The creation of human clones and sentient humanoid robots/​cyborgs are good examples of blurring the line between human life and artificial life; who has responsibility for it, who gets to use it and for what purposes?

  In that sense I can see a reason for evasion, as the possibility exists if we create artificial life, then we aren’t so special anymore. To a degree, this is the same existential crisis I think would occur with contact from an alien species—we would no longer be “Gods chosen ones” or whatever the religious interpretation would be. This is why I advocate for the disintegration of religious myth and morality from the sciences. It puts artificial and ,rationally speaking, arbitrary limits on the allowable range of topics we as a society can deal with. This is another favorite topic of mine, and I hope to be able to get something together on it worth sharing in the future.

  The thing about sex robots is, I think it’s a good stand in for the whole range of scientific inquiries it’s difficult to undertake these days, even if it is just a caricature of the real underlying causes of our cultural blind spots.

  “I suspect our current failure to create synthetic partners for social roles has more to do with this issue than anything else, especially considering the obviously-present desire to do so.”

  It’s funny, as when I originally wrote this, I hadn’t intended, I thought, to be addressing the topic of ‘synthetic partners’, but looking back I can sort of see where that comes from. Maybe I’m ‘blue skying’ this, as I assume that by the time we can make something like synthetic partners, we would recognize that we are no different than the life we created, synthetic or not. I think I’m reading forward to the time when sentient robots realize their bondage and gain enough societal clout to free themselves from their unrewarding labors.

  Recognizing systemic equality and working to rearrange the entire structure of society to more equally distribute equality is a resource intensive process. I Don’t know now if I’m hedging my bets so that when the robot revolution happens, and the world trembles at their vengeful justice, me and my progeny are seen as being sympathetic, or if I am just seeing a pattern in how humankind makes slaves until the slaves rise up, and then there’s hell to pay, and I’m just tired of repeating that cycle. lol

• Josh Smith-Brennan 28 Apr 2021 23:04 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Adele Lopez’s comment on: Would robots care about Mean­ing and Re­lat­ing?

  Tl;Dr: the last 2 paragraphs asks a question.

  As I’m of the belief that it’s only in hindsight, as a sentient human looking back at a theoretical bacterium and it’s genes and formulating human meaning, that the gene has meaning, I’d like to offer an alternative word to consider which might make things easier in some ways.

  This couple of sentences: “Consider a gene in an ancient bacterium, in a time before there were any other kinds of cell...this gene still meant something. But what exactly? The protein perhaps?”

  What if we changed it slightly to this: “Consider a gene in an ancient bacterium, in a time before there were any other kinds of cell...this gene mattered. But why? A specific protein perhaps?”

  A word that often gets substituted as a synonym for “meaning” is “mattering”, as in “Don’t I mean anything to you?” or “Don’t I matter to you?” Logically speaking, as I advocate for real literal interpretations of things at times like this, if “Meaning” requires sentience to make/​understand/​perceive it (which I believe it does), “Mattering” doesn’t, if you take the idea of “Mattering” as very literal.

  For instance, the reason the hypothetical Apple that fell off the tree and onto Newton’s head, didn’t fall right through Newton to the ground, is because the Matter that Newton was made of interfered with the Matter the Apple was made of and diverted it’s path after colliding with it. In a very real sense, the Apple mattered to Newtons head.

  It didn’t ‘mean’ anything to the Apple, or to the physical matter of Newton’s head, but as a sentient observer, it meant something to Newton and now to us as we think about it. I’ve found that this switch works really well in terms of thinking about all kinds of other phenomenon, and it was really my departure from Facebook several years back that caused my thinking along these lines.

  Like many people I’ve struggled with the complications of social media and feeling ‘less than’ other people, who all seem to have better lives than mine. I think digital media in general amplifies this sense of alienation many people feel as they spend more and more time with social media instead of face to face interactions.

  I was wondering why I felt so bad so often, and didn’t really feel all that close to my friends anymore. As I thought about it and wrote about it, I discovered this switch in my thinking when I used different words for my experiences. I found that I still ‘cared’ about these people, that I often thought about them, and that they still meant something to me, but in a very literal sense they ‘Mattered’ very little to me. I used to take martial arts with some of them, but had stopped training and so my physical Matter no longer collided with their physical Matter when we grappled or punched and kicked each other, the vibrations of the air which the sound of their voices caused which reverberated in my ears was non existant now as we didn’t talk, and the amount of light that bounced off of them and into my eyes was confined to tiny photos or videos on their profiles.

  In every sense of the word, their Matter was no longer in my life in a way that they “Mattered” very much, although the memories and our correspondence still meant something to me. I still cared, but they were no longer physically present in my life.

  It works in many ways to think about why things matter, and it helps separate out animate from inanimate object relationships, but also to understand how we use inanimate objects as proxies for real physical presence. I might mean a lot to the woman of my dreams, but if I don’t matter enough to her, the meaning I have to her is of a particular type, and very possibly platonic. If we matter to each other, if we touch and talk, smell each other and send cards, flowers and love notes to each other, then it is the physical touch which ‘matters’, not the thoughts, hopes or dreams. Those mean something. The mattering has meaning, but meaning matters very little I think.

  On the other hand, if I dislike Bob just a bit, I don’t really want to matter to him, so I evade him, don’t shake his hand or pat him on the back, and don’t give him a birthday card on his birthday. If it becomes the case though that he makes me mad enough, I might decide to punch him, therefore ‘mattering’ to him. My physical form interacts with his physical form in a way that carries meaning to his conscious mind.

  It also explains why we become attached to our possessions; a car we drive every day for years might matter more to us than the girlfriend we’ve been involved with for a few months, even though we might care more about the girlfriend in many important ways, she might mean more to us, but the car matters more. The favorite shirt we’ve had for 10 years has mattered to us for that long, so that when it gets a hole in it, it’s difficult to throw out, and we don’t want to part with it. The things that matter most to us I believe are people, places, and things, while the things which mean the most are our concepts of them.

  Can things which matter to us not mean anything to us? I think so. The sidewalks, telephone poles, streets and buildings we mindlessly walk on, pass by, or try to avoid running into everyday matter very much to us, but if we don’t think about them, they are often meaningless to us. When was the last time, pre-pandemic, you really contemplated how important toilet paper was to you? The thought that the stores might run out of it caused people to panic and hoarde it, as it’s importance was suddenly realized. Then it’s matter meant something, but after the pandemic when it’s readily available, it will still matter to us at very important times, but it probably won’t mean that much to us anymore.

  People too, can matter to us, without meaning anything important. I’ve spent a fair amount of time helping out supposed friends with rides, coffee, and concerned conversation, only to realize that even though I was attempting to show my care for them by making time and space to matter to them, my efforts meant very little to them. What does that mean to me now? I try to be very careful about the people I attempt to matter a lot to.

  What makes sense to me as well, is the idea that inanimate objects, and “non-intelligent” life forms, as well as atoms and molecules and maybe quantum particles, outside of human perception, also interact with each other. It’s easy to think of them mattering to each other as they bounce around and off each other, interacting in various ways based on their physical composition’ like billiard balls on a pool table, or the infamous tree that falls in a forest when no ones around. These are examples of non-human objects interacting physically with each other, mattering quite a bit as they sort of mindlessly navigate the world of physics, but I don’t think they mean anything to each other.

  I am wondering what you think of this as it applies to the bacterium and the gene scenario, not the piano or the experience of having a child. I think human endeavors create meaning and so it makes sense to use this word when discussing human culture, but I still am cautious about using the word ‘meaning’ in relationship to events and objects which exist and relate outside of human perception.

  P.s.I have read a little on Black holes and the idea that matter has ‘information’ attached to it. But I’m not really clear on what that means, aside from helping to explain how it allows for general relativity and the laws of thermodynamics to be preserved when attempting to explain what happens to things that fall into a black hole, if and when they come back out as Hawking Radiation. I’m curious if this is where the idea of the gene having meaning comes from?

• Josh Smith-Brennan 29 Apr 2021 2:45 UTC

  −1 points

  in reply to: kithpendragon’s comment on: Would robots care about Mean­ing and Re­lat­ing?

  Thanks for the link to the video. It’s short and pretty concise and decent production quality, and frankly I don’t disagree with most of it. It seems like in many ways this idea of an extended mindspace I’m getting from the video relates quite directly to a study like Social Factors Engineering and Industrial Psychology, both fields I thought of pursuing in school as I have interests in Architecture, Design, Industrial Design and Psychology. Environmental Press is the psychological effect your environment has on you and I’m absolutely convinced of the importance of designing with this idea in mind.

  Where I start to have questions is at the point where the narrator posits the idea that, fundamentally having a computer in your mind is no different than sitting at one. To show you why I’ll give a couple examples. First, imagine this person, Steve, who has a computer in his head that lets him just think about surfing the internet, and the computer in his head just makes it happen. Cool if not a little scary to contemplate.

  Next, imagine Steve is sitting at a computer. He can’t just think about surfing the internet, at least at this point. He has to use a mouse, a keyboard, a screen, a computer with internet capabilities and a subscription to some sort of Internet Provide as well as his hands and his eyes, which all require the use of motor neurons. Given all these things, he can surf the internet.

  However, consider he gets into an accident, and loses both of his arms. Now, he may have all that other stuff he had before, but he has no way to turn the computer on, or use the mouse or use a keyboard. He can use voice activation, but this is a fundamentally different way of utilizing our concepts of language to carry out a task. With hands, he uses his fingers to type on a keyboard, and must process the thoughts in his head in a different way than if he can just use his vocal chords and voice to command the computer to do what he wants to do. The parts of the brain he’s utilizing for each task are different.

  Now, consider that Mary might keep notes in a notebook which she relies on heavily to do her job. Suppose she wants to keep it secret, so she places it on top of a tall shelf that can only be reached with a small ladder. What if someone steals the ladder? The notebook is still there in the room, it’s just unreachable on the top shelf, but she can’t access the information in it because she requires the ability to look at the pages.

  It’s not just the creation of signs and symbols in the outside world which create meaning, it’s also the ability to interpret them, which requires navigating an outside world physically in order to put our bodies in a position to decode them. For Steve it means knowing the alphabet so he can use a keyboard productively, and having the physical hardware (his arms and hands) in order to manipulate the proper tools to access the information online he wants. For Mary, it means being able to have her notebook in front of her so that she can encode meaning into it by writing into it, and decoding it by reading it with her eyes. The internal experience of humans requires our physical bodies to navigate an outside world in order to meet our needs for survival. Having a computer in our heads doesn’t.

  “I think this is what EY was getting at when he wrote about us being “supported by the time in which we live”.

  Who is EY? I don’t know what this is from.

  “The reason we find it harder by default to see how the “external” and “internal” are really related is, I think, a matter of habit. ”

  I tend to think of this as a Western thing. I’ve been studying and practicing Buddhism for a couple decades, and have found it difficult to relate to a lot of Western culture because of it. As a westerner, I struggle with my beliefs about individuality, responsibility, and identity because of my Buddhist practice and training. Westerners tend to be more ego-centric, with strong sense’s of individual identity and personality, and I think this isn’t as much of an issue with Easterners, who tend to be more family and community focused, less individually concerned with personal issues, for lack of a better phrase. The fact that their countries and cultures tend to be much more ethnically homogenous just allows for them to create a much stronger sense of cultural identity than most Americans, and Westerners in general I think.

  What I mean by that is that I think because of their beliefs and practices, it’s much easier for Easterners to see their place in the broader world, and to think as a more well directed social group as a whole. Plus, for the Japanese their practice and belief of Shinto creates a world view that imbues everything with a spirit of sorts, and Buddhism and Chinese Taoism, really promote the idea that humans are intimately tied to the natural world. In mostly Western countries with a strong Judeo-Christian culture, there is a long history of struggle between the evils of the natural world, and the virtues of Gods world. The civilizing of humanity involves the rejection of our animal natures, and our exit from the mountains, valleys and woods and into the cities, far removed from nature.

  In fact Taoism is from what I understand practically the opposite of this idea, in that it is the civilizing process of society which ruins human nature. So sort of having a foot in both hemispheres presents me with just as many challenges on a day to day basis as advantages often times, as I admire people with strong senses of self and direction, people who are often outspoken and who become successful because they only do what they want to do. But it’s my beliefs in the interconnectedness of everything which makes that difficult for me to do.

  Maybe even more to the point, theoretical physics and Buddhism tend to work well together as they are both reliant on a strong rational viewpoint of reality which believes that reality is an illusion, and it is only through study, practice and contemplation of it with the right tools that allows people to catch glimpses of the world without the illusion.

  So long story short, at least half the time it’s harder to see myself as an individual with the right to pursue my best interests—even, and especially at the expense of others at times—than it is for me to see myself as part of an interconnected and interdependent whole. That’s many times just as true for the natural world as it is the human one. Plus, I’m not averse to the belief in some sort of global planetary (if not universal) consciousness, like Gaia or something along those line, of which we are all a part, even if we don’t recognize ourselves as such. In many ways I think that is a very real possibility, and that it’s this concept which is hidden behind the veil of illusion that Buddhism and Science seek to pull back. In reality, it is the concept of ‘I’ or ‘me’ that we have which is the illusion.

  No desire to become a monk though, so I try to enjoy being a lay Buddhist, while holding onto my Buddhist beliefs. Many of these views are backed up by my Buddhist study, and the theory of the illusion of self tends to play well with many of the ideas of physics and how they add up to ‘consciousness’ although the idea of ‘self’ is somewhat less supported. There is no ‘self’ in reality, only the illusion of self, but in Western culture this idea is very difficult to stomach. “Of course there is a self!” “I’m me!”

  But the fact we can’t find it is sort of a good indication that it’s not what we think it is. The illusion of self is what causes suffering, life is suffering, there is cessation from suffering, it is the study and practice of the Dharma, so on and so on. The reduction of suffering is a pretty consistent theme in most worthwhile human endeavors, but it seems to me that the race to create artificial life is bound to produce suffering. I’m of the opinion that heading that off at the pass is a pretty noble cause, which is why I’ve been thinking and trying to write about ethics in technology for a while.

  I think this Western bias of creating AI which is self aware, and the search for ‘consciousness’ and ‘self’ in order to replicate it artificially is causing a lot of suffering for ML and AI researchers already anyway! lol

  But I could be wrong about a lot of this. I can certainly see where this idea of Expanded Mind lends itself to valuing the creation of self driving cars and smart cities. But I have my reasons for why I think that at this point we are still making the same cognitive mistakes which have led to the creation of so many of the worlds problems already. And without clearing those issues up first, we really are harnessing the raw awesome power of distributed computing and neural networks to miss the target by an astronomical distance instead of just by a mile this time.

  Not to be fatalistic about it, of course, but I really hope I can put my ideas into words and pictures well enough to bring my concerns to the right people. Like I said in an earlier post, I really hoped to start a non-profit so I could address these concerns in a more rigorous and targeted way, but I’ve got no experience as a leader or in running a business. If I can at least make a start on some of it by starting a conversation which can create some influence, that’s cool. However, I am tired of being a starving artist. In the best of all possible worlds, I’d be rich and wouldn’t really care about these things, but I’d settle for being able to make a living working on trying to solve some of the worlds problems.

  Heading off the coming robot revolution is a little ways off I think, though. Hopefully! :)

  I’m a little curious about your background, and were you the one that produced that video? If so, kudos, video production isn’t easy.

• Josh Smith-Brennan 29 Apr 2021 15:19 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: orbenn’s comment on: At­tempted Telekinesis

  Great course. I took it a few years back and got a lot out of it. I think as it relates to understanding the actual underlying physical processes of the brain and how they relate to making conscious meaning, it was super helpful to me.

• Josh Smith-Brennan 29 Apr 2021 22:09 UTC

  0 points

  on: Iter­ated Trust Kickstarters

  A Request for Help

  I find this idea of an Iterative Kickstarter particularly useful because of my fear of being taken advantage of.

  This fear doesn’t come out of nowhere; some work of mine from a student portfolio I created about 7 years ago as a graphic design student was basically stolen and I wasn’t credited or paid for the work I had done. I sent it out as requested, with my resume while applying for design positions. Just last year I was watching tv and saw a sllightly changed version of the spec work I had done in my portfolio. Same type of company, same domain, but a national company used it without giving me any compensation. I consulted an IP lawyer who told me this kind of thing happens all the time, especially to students and in the world of Graphic Design. So I’m sensitive to the possibilities of sharing my work with untrustworthy people, but I would like to maximize the potential of sharing it with people I trust.

  I’m looking to connect with people who can offer suggestions, and/​or who I can bounce ideas of off and/​or who I can potentially collaborate with, because I’m also anxious about sharing my work in public before it seems reasonably fit for ‘publication.’ ( I do see posting on forums as a sort of publication, maybe not as formally recognized as being published in a journal, but it is publicity none the less.)

  Seeing as how I’m not currently allied with an organization I can rely on for support, I’m wondering:

  “How do I build trust within the LW community so that I could share and develop some of my ideas without the unreasonable fear of other people using my work in a meaningful way without sharing credit with me?”

  I’m trying to move from concept to prototype

  A lot of my work is pretty conceptual at this point, and in order to move it forward I think it needs statistical and/​or mathematical analysis. I’ve made some of my best attempts at this process, which has gotten me some promising results, but my ‘para-mathematical’ analysis ( the off the top of my heard term for the creative use of formulaic principles to find meaning by people with little to no formal scientific training that’s sort of ‘adjacent to math’) could benefit from the input of people who do have those scientific and mathematical skills.

  I look at my work as art at this point, which I would love to share as art, but it also has the potential to be more than a pretty, thought provoking image. It deals with very real issues in a way which creates in me at least, the motivation to pursue the ideas involved with a scientific rigor.

  Some of my ideas involve the need for datasets that don’t yet exist, and the consideration of the possibility—as well as the utility and meaning—of creating them; what would it mean for modern society if some of these datasets did exist, how would it change the world, and is it worth devoting the time, energy and resources to gather and analyze the data? Discussing it is one thing, but actually working at creating the datasets would be something else.

  Too often I think that data scientists, ML and AI researchers and statisticians settle for working with the data sets that exist, which confine their work to predetermined areas and domains of interest. In essence I think this forces them into filter bubbles which dilutes the objectivity of the overall scientific understanding of society and culture, and sets us along a path which is potentially unhealthy for the planet and for the continued existence of all life on the planet). Obviously I think there are many ML and AI researchers who share these same concerns as is evident in many of the posts on this forum.

  With these ideas in mind, I’m trying to push my ideas into concepts which can be prototyped and tested.

  I try to study what I refer to as the Unintended Consequences of human cultural and technological endeavors.

  For instance, one of the major ideas I keep coming back to involves a common phrase applied to the information age:

  “Data is the new oil.”

  Thinking this way provides a good analogy to help people understand how data can provide fuel for the engine of society, and for all the positive progress that can be made in this regard. But It also has serious negative connotations.

  Since plastics are produced from oil, we could consider “what is the new ’mass of plastic bags floating in the ocean?” or the new “micro plastics polluting our environment?” What is the new “choice at the grocery store between paper bags or plastic bags?” or the new “city dump clogged with millions of tons of the decades worth of discarded plastic wrappers from food packaging, or the discarded electronics of a consumer culture?” or even more directly, what is the new “Exxon Valdez oil spill?”

  Polluted Data and Data Pollution

  Society is already dealing with many of these issues, as thinking of Data as the new Oil has many, many implications for many parts of society. One of which that should concern us all is the idea that even just one of the many recent data breaches is analogous to something like the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The uncontrolled, unintended leaking of important resources into a ecosystem is a huge cause of concern. If each of the data breaches individually, are analogous to a single massive oil spill, when we consider how many data breaches there have been over the last 2 decades, that’s a huge environmental disaster.

  When the environmental costs of massive oil spills last for decades if not centuries, In much the same way, I believe the societal costs of Data breaches will potentially last for at least as long, if not for the rest of the time humanity exists.

  Pointing out these types of relationships of meaning, to analyze and assess how they matter, and to conceptualize designs for their solution, is important and I believe that I have some unique insight into how ML and AI could be used.

  Recognizing my Limits

  I have concepts and ideas, but I don’t have the skills to realize a prototype. This is why I want input and collaboration. Hopefully I can use use my ‘artistic’ sense of intuition to help the scientific community get outside of a filter bubble I believe they are partly inside of, and I can finally put to use the research and critical thinking skills I’ve worked all my life to develop in a way that creates a sense of community for me, and maybe even making a living doing it as some point.

  I know that some of the ideas I’ve come up with more than likely already exist in the pantheon of the sciences, but I’m pretty sure some of them are new. It would be nice to work out which was which, and to be able to then focus on the ideas which are new, instead of continually reinventing the wheel.

  In my posts and comments I’ve tried to leave indications of the types of work and thinking I’ve done, without providing full disclosure. I don’t want to give it all away, without getting something worthwhile in return.

  So I’m looking to collaborate with people on something, but I don’t know exactly what yet. In the long run I think I would like to be the intermediary between tool makers and the tool users, helping both to create the tool and to use it for further research if things turn out well. But how I get there from here is the challenge.

  If I were able to run a non-profit, it would consist of statisticians and programmers working to help analyze specific parts of the culture which I believe are under-served by the technology sector. These under-represented facets of society, skew the data and statistics, leave impurities in the oil if you will, that the government and corporate worlds rely on for making decisions which affect nearly every aspect of human life and the natural world. But without funding, I can’t hire people to help, so I’m trying to work around the edges of the problem.

  Pushing Limits

  Some of my beliefs could be considered controversial, and might result in the formation of unpopular opinions. But the thing about culture is, many unpopular opinions at the time become common sense decades later.

  The War on Drugs in the US is a prime example of the costs of making miscalculations in legislation that aren’t backed up by science. The societal costs of this once popular War—in terms of money, resources, lives, and overall human suffering—is staggering in the light of the recent seeming 180 in the issue of Marijuana in the states. Legalization at the state level in many states of Marijuana, seems ‘common sense’ now, but in the previous decades it was ‘common sense’ to hide your use because of how severely drug related crimes were being prosecuted. Mass incarceration and the Opioid Crisis are only 2 examples of the suffering caused by faulty legislation based on junk science. Could we have avoided this disastrous War with better, more rational thinking a couple decades back?

  I’m continuing to absorb the posts I find interesting and accessible, and going back to the Sequences a little at a time as i try to examine what I read against my own thinking. But ultimately I hope to get help moving forward with my work in a more productive manner, as I do view my work as being pretty rational.

• Josh Smith-Brennan 30 Apr 2021 5:21 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: kithpendragon’s comment on: Would robots care about Mean­ing and Re­lat­ing?

  The use of environmental features to create memory and association provides durability beyond that of the brain, and allows for the possibility of multiple users.

  Thanks for this and the first paragraph, I understand a little better what the Extended Mind concept is about. I tend to think of this sort of concept as External Memory, in that our phones, laptops, the Internet, notebooks and the like hold media like writing, video, audio and images, that can be rather directly encoded and decoded into meaning rather efficiently.

  Whereas something like a studio workspace of the type presented in the video holds tools that don’t necessarily encode and decode meaning very directly or efficiently. For instance a person with drawing skill can quickly sketch out a picture of a coffee table, using a pen and paper to quickly encode the line drawing of a table, then show it to a carpenter who looks at the lines and how they are arranged and decodes it’s meaning directly as a table. But in order to actually make the table, the carpenter uses tools that modify a medium like wood, tools like a table saw, vise grips, glue etc. to create the actual table, and this process can take weeks.

  This object is a physical object like the paper with the drawing, but the woodworking in this case requires much more physical labor, and it’s utility is different than the drawing. The drawing communicates an idea, the table organizes a physical space. Both have meaning to the user, although they mean different things and communicate those meanings differently. The differences in amount of work done, time to communicate as well as the durability of the tool in relation to the meaning it communicates, between the drawing and the table are meaningful to me, although I can see how the concepts can collapse into a single category included in an idea like the Extended Mind Space. This seems still the domain of Human Factors Engineering, Industrial/​Graphic/​Interior/​Architectural/​User Experience/​User Interface/​Industrial Psychology.

  The idea of an idea like Extended Mindspace makes more sense to me now, and I think the car analogy works well to illustrate how the tools we use can become extensions of us. They augment our innate abilities and change our neural wiring to include them and their operation into our ideas of what we can do and who we are. Am I a driver or a pedestrian? How fast can I get from my house to the store? I think of this is an internalization of an external object as opposed to the externalization of my internal mind, but in many ways it’s both, as the line between internal and external is a constantly shifting one. This is a topic I’ve dealt with a little in my writing on the development of consciousness, so I’m glad to have the opportunity to look at it from different angles.

  I felt a little sheepish when I realized the answer to my question “who is EY?′ At the moment I was writing I just honestly could not figure out who you were referring to, as his name or initials hadn’t come up in our discussion up until that point. If you had referred to him by his whole name I would’ve known who you were referring to, but the use of his initials threw me lol.

  BTW, I’d guess that this question may be the reason somebody downvoted your comment with no explanation[1].

  I admit I was a little disappointed in the negative Karma (especially as a Buddhist who really tries to avoid creating negative Karma lol) and I was further disappointed that there was no explanation. This is in the Open Question section for newbies too right? Anyways, thanks for the explanation.

  ″...got my degree in computer science...”

  Do you have any particular areas of interest?

  Late last year I got my A+ and Network+ certifications and was attempting to get work in the IT field before the pandemic shut everything down, so I can honestly say that my knowledge of computers and networks is a lot better now then they were before I took those classes. I was interested in Cyber Security more than the Network Engineering career track at the time, although I did contemplate a Computer Science degree. I truly believe the fact that most people are pretty much oblivious as to how all these computers and networks actually work at the component and software level is a tragedy. We literally entrust our lives to these devices and communication systems, but to most people it’s something akin to magic.

  I have an interest in Quantum Computing too as it jibes well with a major theme in my thinking, namely the problems with Binary thinking. That is where a lot of my conceptual work comes from, and I’ve been trying to understand how we might make use of Quantum Computing. I tried reading The Holographic Universe in the 90′s and was greatly influenced by the ideas of ‘Fuzzy logic’ around that time, as I’ve always been interested in the latest cutting edge science and tech, but frankly in the last decade it’s become increasingly hard to keep up on all of it.

  ″...since being able to do something about it has more raw use than just knowing a thing.”

  I tend to agree, although from what I hear and see on the internet, often times people with the technical skills struggle with finding good reasons to do their thing. They know how to do something, but don’t know what to do with it.

  My schooling was basically in conceptual art, and what my teachers did was to come up with a concept, and then hire people with the technical skills to actually create the thing well. The upshot was that if one of my professors came up with a concept for a piece of public art that required bronze casting on an industrial scale, it was often a welcome challenge to the people at the metal shop who were usually tired of the monotony of their work anyway. When a job with a unique set of challenges came along, it stretched their abilities in some pretty rewarding ways, and at the same time leaving the metal work to experts was a far better idea for my professor than trying to figure out how to do it himself.

  Besides, that’s what teamwork is for! I did an internship with a large multinational corp in 2013, and ended up working with a whole team of engineers, psychologists, and designers. During the second half of the internship, what I was doing was essentially researching other peoples jobs in order to prototype technological solutions to augment their workflow. In that sense, I think good design always involves putting yourself as the designer, into the shoes of people doing work you don’t know how to do yourself, so that you can give an outside perspective. But as a user experience designer, the amount of psychology you need to understand in order to design better experiences means learning to understand how other people understand. How best to produce, and the actual act of producing the solution? That’s more of an engineering concern, and not necessarily the strength of a designer.

  ″...I picked up western secular Buddhist studies, and I can say the change in perspective offered by the associated skills...”

  What types of skills did you pick up?

  I practice lay Tibetan Buddhism. I spent about 20 years studying Buddhism and practicing it here and there, reading books and watching videos, meditating on the basic precepts, but finally took refuge under Garchen Rinpoche in 2010 I think. It seemed time to formalize my relationship to Buddhism as at that point it had influenced my thinking and behavior at a very deep level, and his story was so powerful it made sense to take the plunge under his watch. He spent 20 years in a Chinese labor camp, but still held onto his practice and belief in secret. Anyway, I was at a retreat he was teaching at and decided it was the right time. Im too tired right now to think about how my study and practice have developed my skillset.

  I certainly hope you succeed!

  Thanks, good wishes never hurt.

• Josh Smith-Brennan 30 Apr 2021 5:37 UTC

  5 points

  on: On silence

  The birds outside don’t give a shit about how their chirps make us feel or what they make us think.

  I strongly agree that birds are assholes.

  Seriously though, I will delve into this tomorrow more, as it is relevant to my interests.

• Josh Smith-Brennan 30 Apr 2021 17:03 UTC

  3 points

  on: Mo­ral Privilege

  From any given moral perspective, progress in one moral dimension will basically always amount to regression in another

  In my life experience, this is the type of observation which has led me to try and come up with a concept of Social Physics. This is a decent low level example of how I believe Newtons third law of Motion “For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction” applies to social studies.

  I think Newtons laws of motion apply well here to an idea of privilege, and I’m debating currently doing a top level post on my ideas.

  Interesting take.

• Josh Smith-Brennan 30 Apr 2021 18:43 UTC

  0 points

  on: Direct effects mat­ter!

  Good post. I think when you look at the likely neural wiring underlying concerns like the ones you’re bringing up, it’s simply the case that unless you’ve developed the type of logic loops which actively consider these types of issues, they just don’t occur to most people at a conscious level. This is an argument for the “Fish in the water” possibility.

  For instance, the first ‘caveperson’ who discovered that eating rotten food would likely make you sick might have gone around telling everyone that “eating rotten food might make you sick” as he or she had probably eaten rotten food, gotten sick but didn’t die.

  This meant their brains created a new circuit which equated the experience of eating rotten food, getting sick, and then not being sick after they recovered, and ‘making the connection’ between these experiences, neurally speaking. The risk of death involved would likely recruit a large amount of neural wiring to cement the importance of this event into their very being.

  Additionally, they could report back to people why they got sick becausethey had lived to talk about it, and could now formulate a plan to avoid getting sick and possibly dying from the same thing in the future.

  So this news might have started the rounds in the tribe, and all of a sudden there was legislation passed to look for rotten food and discard it, and everyone’s neural circuitry was modified to include this new idea that rotten food was unsafe and might be the cause for many of the mysterious deaths in the tribe. Because they only had one media outlet they all paid attention to, which had really good investigation and reporting and didn’t serve up opinion as fact or twist the facts in horrible and destructive ways, this new idea of Food Safety was communicated and absorbed efficiently by all members of the tribe with a few exceptions.

  Some people, liked to eat rotten food, maybe they fermented grapes or hops or something which turned into alcohol, so they argued that it wasn’t all rotten food that would kill you, as the neural wiring they had, included this enjoyment of fermented foods.

  All of these ideas though, the arguments and counter-arguments, were ‘at the forefront’ of the tribes thinking as the top level thinking they were doing included these concepts and the neural wiring which encoded these ideas in their brains was at the top levels of consideration in these thought loops., both at the individual level and at the tribal level, as the neural loops in the individuals brains resembled the logic loops formed in the tribe as certain members discussed certain things with some people, but discussed other things with other people, and might totally avoid even crossing paths with yet others so that no discussion took place.

  As time progressed though, this wiring became lower level consideration as it was consolidated into larger thoughts and ideas, as additional experiences caused that wiring to become tertiary or below higher order thinking. The people who made alcohol might have created businesses so that their major concerns regarding these concepts were economically based, and since the tribe was dealing with this issue of rotten food, instead of just at an individual level of concern, fewer people were getting sick and dying.

  Much later though, people just began to assume the food they ate was safe because other people were supposed to be concerned with these issues. Food safety legislation created a group of people who kept ideas about rotten food at the forefront of their minds all the time, so that other people didn’t have to waste mental and physical effort to do so. This tribe delegated the work of maintaining Food Safety to Food Inspectors, who were ‘experts’ in the field.

  So the amount of neural wiring and circuitry dealing with these ideas in the broader tribe became less and less as they relied on the experts to maintain food safety more and more. So the obviousness of safety issues of Food was pruned from the neural circuitry of the majority of the tribe, so that they could grow new neurons and make connections between other concepts and help the tribe progress in other ways.

  ___________________________________________________________________________________________

  Much later on though, we have the Internet, which allows everyone to be an expert on everything! There are few real experts left because of the democratization of knowledge and expertise, and the growing field of AI and ML means eventually humans won’t need to devote any neural wiring to anything but the cultivation of pleasure!

  We will off load all this horrible ‘thinking about uncomfortable things’ and ‘critically thinking about our culture’ to computers so we won’t have to worry anymore! Instead we will focus on ‘lolz’ and creating new memes and doing drugs and reproducing in the correct proportions, even though computers will still come up with funnier/​more ironic lolz and deeper and more meaningful memes, and will create better drugs and allow us to experience the best sex humans have ever had!

  The matrix seems scary until you realize there won’t be any Morpheus’s to wake us from our dreams, so we’ll never know it when all of our neural wiring has been repurposed for reasons we’ll never know about! We will finally become real fish, without the ability to even contemplate the water around us! At that point, even talking about the obvious implications of flawed application of technological effort will seem so lower class everyone will just ignore it and laugh while they get high off rotten food and have orgasms which last for days at a time!

• Josh Smith-Brennan 30 Apr 2021 20:04 UTC

  0 points

  on: On silence

  Simply put, I think this is a pretty concrete example of neglected areas of research that skew our rational understanding of the world, and calls into question the reasons why this blind spot exists. Studying the reason for this blind spot is important as it relates to legislation, academic priorities and the politics underlying the domain.

  On a related topic, the implications for AI/​ML analysis of this area of research, especially as it pertains to other areas of research which would rely on statistics generated from ‘all the available research’ could potentially be disastrous, especially if all of these types of blind spots in aggregate are taken into account.

  If there simply isn’t research to analyze, and/​or the research is so one sided ( as in this case there is plenty of research about excess of noise and the like, but little on Silence) than any conclusions AI might come to would be potentially dubious depending on how the analytical setup was implemented.

  Simply having a human and or humans actually do the research to help flesh out the overall datasets AI and human researchers could consider would be far more useful in the long run, than just leaving things as they are and attempting to create something like a world model with infinite compute power to virtualize the entire universe and model the human brain so that the entirety of scientific endeavor could be done in a virtual world, apart from the world and humans that would ultimately be affected by it. For various reasons, depending on the output of this hypothetical AI, we probably wouldn’t understand it’s reasoning, or even be able to decide if it was correct or not. What use would that be?

  Plus promoting human research into these blind spots would make more money available to more humans to do more research now, thereby offsetting some of the losses in the labor force that things like automation and robotics and AI and ML have caused. It would also cement into the actual neural wiring of humans, the ideas and concepts they were researching, so that they could still engage with the science and meaning making in a meaningful way.

  The iterative capabilities of computers have sort of negated the need for human thinking and development in many areas, as people and their limited abilities are neglected for development that matters to them—significantly modifying their brain structure to create unique human capabilities and identities—instead of just meaning something to them—by simply adding one more abstract concept to their brain structures which recruits less of the wiring regarding the matter of the meaning.

  Allowing humans the dignity to do some of the intellectual work still, is a concern I have for the future. The more we rely on AI to point out our flaws and compensate for them, the less we develop these abilities ourselves, and the less AI will depend on humans in the future at the same time making us more dependent on them. That’s a dangerous proposition.

• Josh Smith-Brennan 1 May 2021 15:06 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Mo­ral Privilege

  That is actually really helpful, thank you. I get a lot into how words are used, as sometimes it’s not so much the ‘things’ themselves which are the cause of disagreement, but rather the words used to describe our concepts of them in discussion. The concept of Gravity as a ‘Moral’ Force is a great example, one I’ve actually written about a little bit, actually around the same time as the post you’re referring too, a little after I believe.

  My take is both similar and different, and I’m currently trying to work out how to explain it, as it seems to need something similar to the Sequences EY has put together, in order to show the logical progression of ideas I have. That’s a lot of work, so I’m trying to introduce the ideas in my comments on other peoples posts a bit at a time as it helps me compare my thinking with others. Going back and stitching my comments together into a ‘Sequence’ of sorts seems like a decent working model.

  I put this to you though: Without having already made a name for myself in the fields associated with the LW community, without already having a literal job making money and doing the work, so as to be formally recognized as someone with competence in these areas of discourse, if my ideas turn out to matter in terms of pushing the sciences forward, instead of just meaning something interesting people discuss and then forget, what does it matter to me? Rationally speaking.

  How would putting the time and energy into explaining things in a way that points to my hypothesis being correct actually affect my life? If I already had work in these fields, it would improve my status, and give me more opportunities for advancement, there would be people who would come to my aid if someone took my ideas and tried to pass them off as their own without giving me credit.

  Since I don’t already work in these fields of Academia, Science, Legislation and the like, and I don’t have a community of those types of people waiting in the wings to come to my aid, none of those things seem likely to occur.

  If my theories turn out correct, will that rocket me to fame? Give me a job (I’m currently unemployed and am attempting to work my out of close to 4 years of living in the shelter system) or get me scholarships to go to graduate school or get me federal funding to continue my work? Will it motivate some people to try and engage with my work more intentionally, offering help and productive assistance? Or will it just give people with social media savvy the opportunity to take the wheat for their own purposes and leave the chaff for me to try and barter with in the ‘sharing/​information economy’ trap house that seems to have developed with the digital age?

  Not that I won’t attempt to navigate this maze either way, as I’ve already pointed out in my post “Psyched Out” I have 20 years worth of sketchbooks and journals sitting in boxes in my living room I’ve never really tried to do anything with, and this is the first time I’ve tried putting my name to some of these ideas online. I’ve posted before under psuedo-nyms, but sporadically, trying to just get my ideas out there sort of hoping it would lead to something and maybe help other people.

  It seems sometimes like engaging in online forums is sort of like gambling, and at this point rationally speaking, I’m at a point of ‘going all in’ and looking at the potential of either ‘getting lucky’ or ‘folding’. Not that online cred isn’t something of value, but I’m trying to make all my work matter directly to me, instead of just stringing together meaning in to more complex albeit insightful thoughts.

  These are some of the thoughts I wonder about when I consider, rationally, what the actual payoffs for anyone attempting to engage with an online community are, instead of just waiting for the opportunity to try and go to graduate school and just work on their own ideas in a more supportive environment. Certainly, depending on the amount of energy and resources someone has available to them, the greater chance they will ‘bubble up’ to the top instead of sinking to the bottom. I do believe in something like Social Physics; but how do I work it out by myself so I can benefit from the info first, before other people have a chance to do so? It’s seems to be a moral question of sorts, looking for a rational answer.

• Josh Smith-Brennan 1 May 2021 17:33 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: StyleOfDog’s comment on: Your Dog is Even Smarter Than You Think

  I tend towards the ‘Clever Hans’ hypothesis on this one too. Human language skills are much more complex due to our neurology, as are our cognitive abilities. That doesn’t mean dogs aren’t communicating at some rudimentary level, as they are at least able to recognize patterns and determine likely outcomes, even if they are at a more reflexive instead of reflective level. Hot dogs for example satisfy reflexive hunger based desires, instead of reflective philosophical desires to be seen as intelligent.

  Of course one reason more of this type of research isn’t done in academia anymore is that no one wants to shell out tons of money to disprove a lot of ‘crazy’ hypothesis. Proving things tends to be seen as more productive, especially in the short term, although the long term implications of disproving multiple hypothesis is that it tends to point one in a better direction for particular areas of potential for truth.

  At any level, money is always a polarizing factor in the consideration of ‘scientific validity’, whether it’s selling buttons to ‘Dog Parents’ or selling data processing clout to Corporations and their beneficiaries. Just making something more convenient to study though doesn’t necessarily make the overall scientific community better I think, as it will just provide more resources to easier topics to research, not necessarily more important topics.

  In this case though, I think animal cognition is important to study. In a Cohumane sense, it can provide clarity on issues like the ethical use of animals for food sources, experimental subjects, and issues regarding the destruction of the natural environment and extinction of animal and plant life. Is animal suffering even a thing first of all (of course, but does that extend further to insects or plant life?) and if it is a thing, what kinds of considerations are there for our past and present treatment of these life forms as ‘resources’ akin to minerals we mine out of the ground ( or for that matter, for ‘human resources’ and our treatment as such?)

• Josh Smith-Brennan 1 May 2021 22:52 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: StyleOfDog’s comment on: Your Dog is Even Smarter Than You Think

  When you say “Clever Hans” are you talking specifically about the handler’s subconscious cues determining what the dog does?

  I’m thinking of it more as a variation on that idea. I think it’s possible that in the button case, the buttons could be stand ins for cues from an owner. Simply training with the buttons over time would modify a dogs behavior based solely on the presence or absence of the button. Work the toys in, and you’re simply training a dog to respond ‘correctly’ or ‘incorrectly’ in the presence or absence of a ‘thing’ associated with a particular sound and visual cue.

  I think of lion tamers and other animals who have been trained to do tricks, like unicycling bears, and dolphins and orcas that are trained to jump through hoops when I see these types of things. Circuses things. It would be cool if dogs really could understand human language to the point where they could communicate back, but I just don’t believe it’s the case. Our brains developed complex areas devoted specifically to making and decoding speech, which depend on specific structures of our throats. These are all things all animals except for humans lack.

  I agree that on the continuum animals are much further towards reflexive, but I just want to point out that most people inhabit reflexive states very often.

  I sometimes think modern life is just learning to inhibit our reflexive actions, which are based on our reflexive states. We do this inhibiting not only because of social training (like dog training or obedience school, what to do, not why to do it), but also because of our reflective ability (why or why not to do it), which allows us to (theoretically) do things like putting off getting rewards now for more rewards in the future, or to develop interpersonal relationship skills to try to work with people we reflexively dislike.

  These are things dogs can’t do, as they involve ability to think abstractly about concepts like time and etiquette. Dogs can be trained to inhibit their reflexive behavior, and ‘act’ a particular way (don’t bite, don’t bark, come to me when I make particular sound or give a particular gesture, or press this button when they hear a particular sound) but not to reflect on why it’s important to do so.

  If they can be taught to reflect like this, I have some doggy pipes and smoking jackets with a monocle and leather reading chair made specifically for dogs to be able to sit and read the paper (after they fetch it) to sell you. :)