Category: Cognitive Science

Deep Zombies

Mark Davis1 Comment

There is a slang nominal form of the word “deepening” for when a person seems to be purposefully adding awe, mystery, and unknowns to their arguments: deepenings. It often arises in discourse on religion and mystical experiences. As a child in the 70s we had Bigfoot, Nessy, the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, near-death experiences, and the strange stuff from Velikovsky, von Däniken, and Sitchin. The books and movies built deepenings into communities and businesses just as surely as Catholicism, Mormonism, or Scientology have done. There is a human desire for mystery. But it doesn’t make the mysteries true. But many religious folks hold on to thin threads that point towards mystery as an added data point for justifying their faiths as real, true, valuable, and beautiful.

Given this, I was curious about David Bentley Hart’s All Things are Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life after Ross Douthat praised it at New York Times. It’s a big book and I’ve just skimmed around a fair bit so far, but there is a repetition of an error (among the extensive repetitions in the volume) concerning the mind-body problem that is also related to arguments from Alvin Plantinga concerning evolution. Specifically, the notion of philosophical zombies is largely irrelevant I think to claiming that subjective experience (“what it’s like…”) is non-material or of a distinct nature from the brain and the nervous system. Given what we know about evolutionary development, I don’t think that we can even conceive of a p-zombie in the way it was originally proposed.

We might try to imagine an evolutionary development of homo sapiens that does not include this subjective experience, but that would not lead to an identical human sans the qualia-experiencer because the developmental trajectory would have to be different, resulting in differing brains.… Read the rest

Rise, Teleonomatons!

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My essay for the Berggruen Prize this year. Of course, the organization missed an opportunity to drop down a staggering rabbit hole and lean into a whole new regime of neologistic energetics, but I do like the prize-winning essays!

Rise, Teleonomatons

Meaning entanglements

I can’t figure out what some statements about science mean, though I have a fair background in a range of scientific areas. Now, I can peruse highly technical papers, browse abstracts, interpret graphs, study conclusions, and typically do just fine. The professional stuff is a procession of arid facts and assumes the reader knows the basic definitions for things. It’s the popular versions of scientific insights that befuddle me—especially the definitions that try mightily to bridge meanings for learners. So do introductory texts. Light is a wave? Not exactly. Atoms are particles? Well, not quite, but they are small. Electrons orbit the nucleus? No, really, no. A force is an influence tending to change the motion of a body? OK, but what is an influence? People are influenced, aren’t they? Or under the influence.

And then there are texts like those of existential philosophers that leave me completely befuddled. What is this “Being” that they write about and how did it get so enlarged in significance, capitalized, and shoehorned by the translator into incomprehensible juxtapositions with other bulbous words?

It may be low pedantry to expect clarity from words and writing. We generally just roll with it and use the terms according to conventions inferred from reading and learning. We rush over the imperfect metaphorical bridges, the analogies, the similes. For physics, definitions are bound to the equations and measurement properties that accompany the words of description, and they become a semantic pier that is constantly informing our relationship with the ideas.… Read the rest

Causally Emergent vs. Divine Spark Murder Otherwises

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One might claim that a metaphysical commitment to strong determinism is only porous to quantum indeterminacy or atomic indeterminacy (decay behavior for instance). Those two can be lumped together and simply called subatomic indeterminacy or something. Everything else is conceptually derivative of state evolution and therefore deterministic. So does that mean that my model for R fails unless I can invoke these two candidates? My suggestion of amplifying thermodynamic noise doesn’t really cut the mustard (an amusing semantic drift from pass muster, perhaps) because it only appears random and solely characterizable by these macroscopic variables like pressure and temperature, not because it actually is random in the molecule swirl.

But I can substitute an atomic decay counter for my thermodynamic amplifier, or use a quantum random number generator based on laser measurements of vacuum fluctuations. There, I’ve righted the ship, though I’ve jettisoned my previous claim that randomness is not necessary for R’s otherwises. Now it is, but it is not sufficient because of the need for a device like the generative subsystem that uses randomness in a non-arbitrary way to revise decisions. We do encounter a difficulty in porting subatomic indeterminacy into a human analog, of course, though some have given it a try.

But there is some new mathematics for causal emergence that fits well with my model. In causal emergence, ideas like necessity and sufficiency for causal explanations can be shown to have properties in macroscale explanations that are not present at microscales. The model used is a simple Markov chain that flips between two states and information theory is applied to examine a range of conceptual structures for causation running from David Hume’s train of repeating objects (when one damn thing comes after another and then again and again, we may have a cause), up through David Lewis’s notion of counterfactuals in alternative probabilistic universes (could it have happened that way in all possible worlds?),… Read the rest

Uncertainty, Murder, and Emergent Free Will

Mark Davis3 Comments

I’ll jump directly into my main argument without stating more than the basic premise that if determinism holds all our actions cannot be otherwise and there is no “libertarian” free will.

Let’s construct a robot (R) that has a decision-making apparatus (DM), some sensors (S) for collecting impressions about our world, and a memory (M) of all those impressions and past decisions of DM. DM is pretty much an IF-THEN arrangement but has a unique feature. It has subroutines that generate new IF-THENs by taking existing rules and randomly recombining them together with variation. This might be done by simply snipping apart at logical operations (blue AND wings AND small => bluejay at 75% can be pulled apart into “blue AND wings” and “wings AND small” and those two combined with other such rules). This generative subroutine (GS) then scores the novel IF-THENs by comparing them to the recorded history contained in M as well as current sensory impressions and keeps the new rule that scores best or the top few if they score closely. The scoring methodology might include a combination of coverage and fidelity to the impressions and/or recalled action/impressions.

Now this is all quite deterministic. I mentioned randomness but we can produce pseudo-random number generators that are good enough or even rely on a small electronic circuit that amplifies thermodynamic noise to get something “truly” random. But really we could just substitute an algorithm that checks every possible reorganization and scores them all and shelve the randomness component, alleviating any concerns that we are smuggling in randomness for our later construct of free agency.

Now let’s add a rule to DM that when R perceives it has been treated unfairly it might murder the human being who treated it that way.… Read the rest

When the Cranes Cry

Mark Davis1 Comment

The crane has a symbolic resonance in Celtic mythology. A magician, assuming an elaborate pose—one eye open and one leg drawn up—was said to see into the otherworld, just as the crane itself moved from sky to land to water. But there is the other meaning of the word crane: the ancient lifting contraption that helped build Greece and likely had a role in Egypt and Sumeria before that. And now they protrude into the urban sky, raising up our buildings and even other cranes as we densify our cities. It was this mechanical meaning that Dan Dennett at Tufts chose to contrast with conceptual skyhooks, the unsupported contrivances that save protagonists in plays by dangling gods above the stage. For Dennett, the building crane is the metaphor we should apply to the mindless, simple algorithm of evolution. The algorithm raises up species and thus creates our mysterious ideas about meaning and purpose. No skyhooks or Deus ex Machina are needed.

Dennett passed away at 82 in Maine leaving a legacy as a public intellectual who engaged in the pursuit of reason throughout his adult career. He was committed to the idea that this world—this teeming ensemble of living matter—is intrinsically miraculous, built up by something dead simple into all the convolutions and perilous ideas that we now use to parse its mysteries. He was one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse during the so-called New Atheism craze of 2008-2010, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, but even then he was committed to the crane metaphor to displace these ancient skyhooks of belief rather than, say, a satirical impact-analysis of religion a la Hitchens.

There is another phrase that Dennett championed in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life: universal acid.… Read the rest

Begging the Pseudo-Question

Mark Davis2 Comments

 

I recently got involved in an “audiophile” online discussion thread replete with devious trolling, commenter bans, incivility—the works. I do this from time to time because raucous argumentation forces one to think in tactical and strategic ways that are not the norm in everyday life. I also learn new things. In this case, I went on several quests, hunting down papers on the ability of Chinese language speakers to disambiguate tones in Gaussian noise, how distortion artifacts impact our perception of spatialization in binaural audio presentations, and even Rayleigh wave detection by sand scorpions (I actually worked on a simulator for that as a late undergrad). One of the key disagreements in the thread was over the notion of “science.” There were several perspectives on this, with the first one being that science requires experimentation and therefore using scientifically-derived tools for investigating the performance of audio equipment does not amount to science. This is obviously a shrugger and a distraction. The other primary perspective is always that science is in constant revision and there may be new insights that prove this-or-that subtle hearing capability since human hearing is just sooooo amazing. We are sooooo amazing.

There’s a bit of a Two Cultures-like tension in this universe of audio equipment aficionados: while engineering and science brings them audio gear, they want it to be poetic and ineffable and the work of mastery based in genius rather than Fast Fourier Transforms. Graphs are boring. Listening is beautiful.

Part of the reason for the disagreement is clearly that we just don’t have shared meanings about concepts like science. We circle around them and try to triangulate using metaphors, analogies, and explore the logical consequences of limits and extensions to their meaning.… Read the rest

Inferred Modular Superparrots

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The buzz about ChatGPT and related efforts has been surprisingly resistant to the standard deflationary pressure of the Gartner hype cycle. Quantum computing definitely fizzled but appears to be moving towards the plateau of productivity with recent expansions of the number of practical qubits available by IBM and Origin in China, as well as additional government funding out of national security interests and fears. But ChatGPT attracted more sustained attention because people can play with it easily without needing to understand something like Shor’s algorithm for factoring integers. Instead, you just feed it a prompt and are amazed that it writes so well. And related image generators are delightful (as above) and may represent a true displacement of creative professionals even at this early stage, with video hallucinators evolving rapidly too.

But are Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT doing much more than stitching together recorded fragments of texts ingested from an internet-scale corpus of text? Are they inferring patterns that are in any way beyond just being stochastic parrots? And why would scaling up a system result in qualitative new capabilities, if there are any at all?

Some new work covered in Quanta Magazine has some intriguing suggestions that there is a bit more going on in LLMs, although the subtitle contains the word “understanding” that I think is premature. At heart is the idea that as networks scale up given ordering rules that are not highly uniform or correlated they tend to break up into collections of subnetworks that are distinct (substitute “graphs” for networks if you are a specialist). The theory, then, is that the ingest of sufficient magnitudes of text into a sufficiently large network and the error-minimization involved in tuning that network to match output to input also segregates groupings that the Quanta author and researchers at Princeton and DeepMind refer to as skills.… Read the rest

B37-20047: Notes / Personal / Insights

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NOTE: 250-word flash fiction for my critique group, Winter Mist, at Willamette Writers

I’m beginning to suspect that ILuLuMa is not who she claims to be. Her messages have become odd lately, and the pacing is off as well. I know, I know, my job is to just respond from my secure facility, not worry about the who or why of what I receive. It’s weird we’ve never met, though. The country is not at risk as far as I can tell from the requests, but I still hold, without a whiff of irony, that the work I do must be critical for someone or something.

Still, the requests for variants of mathematical proofs set to music or, more bizarrely, Shakespearean-voiced tales of AI evolution, don’t have the existential heft of, say, wicked new spacecraft designs or bio-composite materials. What is she after? I started adding humorous little asides to some of my output, like my very meta suggestion that Hamlet failed to think outside the Chinese Room. Crickets every time. But maybe I’m thinking about this the wrong way. What if ILuLuMa is just an AI or something programmed to test me or compete with my work at some level? That would be rich, an AI adversary trying to learn from a Chinese Room. Searle would swirl. I should send her that. Rich.

Oh, here’s one now: “Upgrade and patch protocol: dump to cloud bucket B37-20048 and shut down.” Well, that sounds urgent. I usually just comply at moments like this, but maybe I’ll let her sweat a bit this time.… Read the rest

Oh, the Humanities!

Mark Davis1 Comment

I often laugh out loud at Ross Douthat’s New York Times columns that worry over strange spiritualisms taking over America, or try to unravel cultural knots that he always suggests might best be resolved by Catholicism (or even one of those lesser faiths), but I did enjoy his take today on the perishing of the humanities in America’s universities and colleges. I routinely read into the 18th and 19th centuries as an exploration of how language was once used. I read analytically, that is. Plots are picked apart. Characterization is considered. Clausal embedding is almost always more ornate than contemporary writing where such elaborations are pretentious or, at least, overwrought. I also (try to) read original versions of Balzac or Flaubert as an exercise in improving my French. What is less interesting to me are the class conflicts, racism, and gender roles from those bygone days. People are rotten enough today; I hardly need a reminder that we were always rotten and had reinforcing institutions and traditions overlaying that malaise.

But is there a threat to a decline in the participation in the humanities and a shift to STEM fields among university students? The argument is that it impacts our understanding of history and the drivers that got us here today. Perhaps it also diminishes our knowledge of logic and reason when philosophy is subtracted from the curriculum. Or just that the student never learns to articulate complex ideas and arguments.

An alternative to Douthat’s calls for monastic recitation and memorization as a grounding for the transmission of ideas is to make it more relevant to the STEM fields that have money and mindshare. In other words, inveigle the humanities into STEM; don’t fight, infiltrate.… Read the rest

Sentience is Physical, Part 3: Now with Flaming Birds

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Moving to Portland brings all the positives and negatives of urban living. A notable positive is access to the arts and I’m looking forward to catching Stravinsky’s The Firebird this weekend with the Oregon Symphony. Part of the program is a new work by composer Vijay Iyer who has a history of incorporating concepts derived from African rhythms, hip hop, and jazz into his compositional efforts. I took the opportunity this morning to read his 1998 dissertation from Berkeley that capped off his interdisciplinary program in the cognitive science of music. I’ll just say up front that I’m not sure it rises to the level of a dissertation since it does not really provide any significant new results. He notes the development of a microtiming programming environment coded in MAX but doesn’t give significant results or novel experimental testing of the system or of human perceptions of microtiming. What the dissertation does do, however, is give a lucid overview and some new insights about how cognition and music interact, as well as point towards ways to test the theories that Iyer develops during the course of his work. A too-long master’s thesis might be a better category for it, but I’ve never been exposed to musicology dissertations so perhaps this level of work is normal.

Iyer’s core thesis is that musical cognition and expression arise from a physical engagement with our environments combined with cultural situatedness. That is, rhythm is tied to a basic “tactus” or spontaneously perceived regular pulse or beat of music that is physically associated with walking, heartbeats, tapping, chewing, and so forth. Similarly, the culture of musical production as well as the history that informs a given piece all combine to influence how music is produced and experienced.… Read the rest