Month: February 2021

Intelligent Borrowing

Mark DavisLeave a comment

There has been a continuous bleed of biological, philosophical, linguistic, and psychological concepts into computer science since the 1950s. Artificial neural networks were inspired by real ones. Simulated evolution was designed around metaphorical patterns of natural evolution. Philosophical, linguistic, and psychological ideas transferred as knowledge representation and grammars, both natural and formal.

Since computer science is a uniquely synthetic kind of science and not quite a natural one, borrowing and applying metaphors seems to be part of the normal mode of advancement in this field. There is a purely mathematical component to the field in the fundamental questions around classes of algorithms and what is computable, but there are also highly synthetic issues that arise from architectures that are contingent on physical realizations. Finally, the application to simulating intelligent behavior relies largely on three separate modes of operation:

  1. Hypothesize about how intelligent beings perform such tasks
  2. Import metaphors based on those hypotheses
  3. Given initial success, use considerations of statistical features and their mappings to improve on the imported metaphors (and, rarely, improve with additional biological insights)

So, for instance, we import a simplified model of neural networks as connected sets of weights representing some kind of variable activation or inhibition potentials combined with sudden synaptic firing. Abstractly we already have an interesting kind of transfer function that takes a set of input variables and has a nonlinear mapping to the output variables. It’s interesting because being nonlinear means it can potentially compute very difficult relationships between the input and output.

But we see limitations, immediately, and these are observed in the history of the field. For instance, if you just have a single layer of these simulated neurons, the system isn’t fundamentally complex enough to compute any complex functions, so we add a few layers and then more and more.… Read the rest

The Twin Earth Dissonance Conspiracy

Mark DavisLeave a comment

I came of age with some of the mid-to-late 20th century literature that took conspiracies as truss work for calculated paranoia, from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Philip K. Dick’s identity shuffling, and on to the obscurely psychedelic Illuminati books by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. They were undoubtedly influenced by the dirty tricks and mind control fantasies and realities of the Cold War, from thallium and LSD poisoning plots against Fidel Castro to the Manchurian Candidate and John Birchers; from Dr. Strangelove to ratfucking in the Nixon-era Republican Party.

The fiction paralleled and mimicked those realities but it was also infused with a kind of magical realism where the ideas permeated through the characters in a nexus of paranoia and fantasy. The reader was admitted to eccentric ways of structuring the history of the world and the motives of unseen forces acting through organizations, governments, and powerful people.

While endlessly fun, the fictional forms were also an inoculation: no mundane conspiracy could possibly capture that pulse of inside knowledge of a mystic firmament of lies and outlandish goals canopied above our earth-chained heads.

But here I am again, though much less amused and more fearful.

I think I read ten different reporting and opinion pieces today on the topic of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the shock-curiosity of the day who amplified QAnon, Jewish space lasers, political assassination fantasies, and likely a range of yet-to-be-discovered subjects of scorn and ridicule. Most analysts agree that such fantastical and angry ideas are methods for manipulating gullible people. They are tools for the acquisition of power over others.

The whole project feels like an alternative reality so late in America’s evolution, like we’ve transitioned to a Counter-Earth or Bizarro Htrae or Nabakov’s AntiTerra.… Read the rest