Category: Cognitive

After Z

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The nights and days collide with violence. There is the nocturnal me and the dazed, daylight version squinting away from the glaring windows. There are the catnaps that lace with riotous algebras. I am addicted to caffeine, or run on it, until even it becomes unpersuasive, and I droop over at the keyboard. Then this pulse of creation pulls me out again, stunned for a few beats, and I grasp my mug and stumble back to the lab floor.

Z keeps changing, day by day, midnights into dawns, and reawakening in clanging novelty. Z is for “zombie,” for it is in the uncanny valley of both a physical and cogitating thing. It perceives, stands, jogs in place beside me on the laboratory floor, an ochre braid of wires bouncing in a dreadlock mass behind it. Z plays chess, folds towels (how hard that was!), argues politics (how insane is that one!), and constantly restructures nuances in its faces and gestures. Sometimes I’m tired and Z is an impertinent teenager. Often there are substitutions and semantic scrambling like a foreigner who mistakes a word for another, then carries on in a fugue of incoherence.

There is a half-acre of supercooled GPUs to the north of the lab where the hot churn of work is happening. It’s a spread of parallel dreamscapes, each funneled the new daily stimuli, stacking them into a training pool, then rerunning the simulations, splitting and recombining, then trying again to minimize the incoherency, the errors, and the size of the model. Of the ten thousand fermenting together, one becomes the new Z for a few hours, but then is gone again by morning, replaced by a child of sorts that harbors the successes but sheds the excesses and broken motifs.… Read the rest

The Hard Problem of the Future

Mark Davis1 Comment

The American zeitgeist is obsessed with decline and a curious sense of ennui. On the progressive left there is the rolling mortal threat of inequality and the destruction of the middle class. Wages don’t keep up with inflation or, more broadly, the cost of living. On the new MAGA right there is an unfocused rage that builds in part on the angst of hollowed-out rural and post-industrial communities, and then in part on undocumented immigrants as scapegoats and symbolic of lefty lawlessness, and again in part as a tirade against wealthy, coastal elites who control the media, universities, and have pushed the Overton window in incremental lurches towards inclusiveness. The populism is mostly half-baked, certainly, and exploited by cynical conservatives for undermining social support while bolstering commercial interests and reducing taxes for the well-to-do. But half-baked is enough for a sensibility; things fully realized are only afterthoughts.

There are other chthonic rumblings and imputations that filter up. The rise of China’s industrial, military, and scientific power is a growing shadow that some see threatening to engulf the world in its umbra. And with it comes the fear of slowing technological might, despite the domination of the recent technological present by the United States. We might be left behind like unhoused, opioid-addicted, modern peasants. The crumbling of the cities would be just punishment even if their loss only cascades the problems of the heartland.

And so as the future keeps getting harder, we turn to mad kings who promise radical change in the face of hard problems. The change can’t possibly be realized, so it is better to just pretend that there are solutions. Annex Greenland, rename the Gulf of Mexico, incorporate Canada, occupy Panama, reach for Mars, acquire territory, but all the while cocooned by the complex institutional and international realities that mean that acting aggressively and alone is now untenable.… Read the rest

All Hail Evolved Irrationality

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From an impersonal distance, watching other people make decisions is always interesting. They may apply reason and passion in varied measures to figure out a way forward, or a lifestyle, or even fashion choices. Often they mindfully weigh the choices and decide to moderate even that process, committing to a radical path that has drama and uncertainty. It’s sometimes better to be interesting than cautious and correct. As a virtue this recalls the romantic movements that arose in opposition to the mechanization of the 19th century as trains and steamships criss-crossed the world. Order and peace were at odds with drama, passion, faith, and love that are somehow in our core, animalistic nature.

Motifs of uncertainty crept into science and reason as we transitioned into the 20th century, from the stochastic rumble of thermodynamics, to the realigning of basic concepts like gravity as a space-time curvature, and then the wave-particle duality of quantum reality. The clockwork of the universe that was so oppressively mechanistic showed fuzzy edges and knotty intersections that defied ordinary-scale expectations. The combined mathematical realizations of incompleteness and algorithmic uncomputability overlaid the investigations of the physical to such an extent that new theories were developed that proposed that the quantum world and mind are inextricably laced together; subjective and objective do not exist independently.

Even as our knowledge and management of the universe has grown, there is a background roil of irrationality, like the primal chaos of Tiamat. Human thought has a collection of ways of organizing the world that appear to be natural consequences of our social development. Religious belief is a widespread catalyst for building predictable and supportive communities by slaving our baser tendencies to coordinating strictures, obligations, and status maintenance.… Read the rest

Incredulity as a Moral Failure

Mark Davis4 Comments

I keep encountering arguments from incredulity in the speculative religious community. An argument from incredulity is just an assertion by the arguer that they can’t imagine how something is possible. In two recent examples, the arguers are the Christian faithful and are trying to deconstruct materialist counterarguments to their speculations about collections of facts. I think this is both an intellectual and a moral failure. It is an intellectual failure when the speculators don’t choose the obvious stance with regard to unknowns and unknowables: I don’t know. It is a moral failure when the consequences of such intellectual failures leads to weakly-justifiable faith constructs that harm or might harm others.

Let’s take a couple of examples. First, we have Ross Douthat (I know, I know, I spend too much time on him, but he does have a big platform being at New York Times). He has a forthcoming book about why one should believe in a religion, although he is not forceful about which particular one is the right choice for any individual, it seems. But here is a recent set of three arguments from that book. They all rely on incredulity in some way.

  1. The fine tuning argument. Ross thinks it is highly improbable that some physical constants in our universe happened by chance. He also thinks that one materialist solution to that happenstance is to speculate about multiverses. In the multiverse solution, there are many universes (maybe a cosmic foam with little universe bubbles!) and ours just happened to be goldilocksish for the structure we observe. Of course, we can speculate all day about this. We can instead say perhaps we have been having infinite Big Bangs as a single universe expands then collapses.
… 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

Follow the Paths

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There is a little corner of philosophical inquiry that asks whether knowledge is justified based on all our other knowledge. This epistemological foundationalism rests on the concept that if we keep finding justifications for things we can literally get to the bottom of it all. So, for instance, if we ask why we think there is a planet called Earth, we can find reasons for that belief that go beyond just “’cause I know!” like “I sense the ground beneath my feet” and “I’ve learned empirically-verified facts about the planet during my education that have been validated by space missions.” Then, in turn, we need to justify the idea that empiricism is a valid way of attaining knowledge with something like, “It’s shown to be reliable over time.” This idea of reliability is certainly changing and variable, however, since scientific insights and theories have varied, depending on the domain in question and timeframe. And why should we in fact value our senses as being reliable (or mostly reliable) given what we know about hallucinations, apophenia, and optical illusions?

There is also a curious argument in philosophy that parallels this skepticism about the reliability of our perceptions, reason, and the “warrants” for our beliefs called the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). I’ve previously discussed some aspects of EAAN, but it is, amazingly, still discussed in academic circles. In a nutshell it asserts that our reliable reasoning can’t be evolved because evolution does not reliably deliver good, truthful ways of thinking about the world.

While it may seem obvious that the evolutionary algorithm does not deliver or guarantee completely reliable facilities for discerning true things from false things, the notion of epistemological pragmatism is a direct parallel to evolutionary search (as Fitelson and Sober hint).… Read the rest

Sentience is Physical, Part 3: Now with Flaming Birds

Mark Davis1 Comment

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

Entanglements: Collected Short Works

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Now available in Kindle, softcover, and hardcover versions, Entanglements assembles a decade of short works by author, scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor Mark William Davis.

The fiction includes an intimate experimental triptych on the evolution of sexual identities. A genre-defying poetic meditation on creativity and environmental holocaust competes with conventional science fiction about quantum consciousness and virtual worlds. A postmodern interrogation of the intersection of storytelling and film rounds out the collected works as a counterpoint to an introductory dive into the ethics of altruism.

The nonfiction is divided into topics ranging from literary theory to philosophical concerns of religion, science, and artificial intelligence. Legal theories are magnified to examine the meaning of liberty and autonomy. A qualitative mathematics of free will is developed over the course of two essays and contextualized as part of the algorithm of evolution. What meaning really amounts to is always a central concern, whether discussing politics, culture, or ideas.

The works show the author’s own evolution in his thinking of our entanglement with reality as driven by underlying metaphors that transect science, reason, and society. For Davis, metaphors and the constellations of words that help frame them are the raw materials of thought, and their evolution and refinement is the central narrative of our growth as individuals in a webwork of societies and systems.

Entanglements is for readers who are in love with ideas and the networks of language that support and enervate them. It is a metalinguistic swim along a polychromatic reef of thought where fiction and nonfictional analysis coexist like coral and fish in a greater ecosystem.

Mark William Davis is the author of three dozen scientific papers and patents in cognitive science, search, machine translation, and even the structure of art.… Read the rest