Category: Evolutionary

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

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

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

Tit, Tat, and Political Sensitivities

Mark Davis1 Comment

I’m almost always surprised by the spectrum of political responses to events and circumstances around the world. The political animal, it seems, is very different from me. I don’t need a fusillade of analysis to understand a Supreme Court decision, or an indictment, or an economic event. I don’t want to be glad handed an interpretation meant to soothe me or align me with a tribe. I just need facts and am willing to hold labeling and castigation at arms length while looking at the matter in as dispassionate a manner as I can summon. Even when I feel a jolt of irreverence or schadenfreude or disgust, I try to maintain neutrality in my initial analysis. I am boringly optimistic, too, which seems quaintly outdated in an America that keeps getting richer and more powerful but acts like a caged animal in raging from one crackpot stimulus to another.

But why are so many of our fellow citizens like that? It is easy to be dismissive—those freakin’ idiots!—but there may be something deeper at play. For example, in many human predispositions and even illnesses we have recent studies that show that insofar as there is a clear genetic channel, the range of genes involved is so enormous that we can’t really nail down any single or distinctive causal factor. The terms for this are polygeny and pleiotropy and they simply mean that many alleles are involved, interact with one another, and likely interact with the environment during development. Most mental illness (and here) as well as gayness are current examples of this. Our understanding may change, of course, but for now we have the unsurprising realization that we are very complex animals.… 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

Sentience is Physical

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Sentience is all the rage these days. With large language models (LLMs) based on deep learning neural networks, question-answering behavior of these systems takes on curious approximations to talking with a smart person. Recently a member of Google’s AI team was fired after declaring one of their systems sentient. His offense? Violating public disclosure rules. I and many others who have a firm understanding of how these systems work—by predicting next words from previous productions crossed with the question token stream—are quick to dismiss the claims of sentience. But what does sentience really amount to and how can we determine if a machine becomes sentient?

Note that there are those who differentiate sentience (able to have feelings), from sapience (able to have thoughts), and consciousness (some private, subjective phenomenal sense of self). I am willing to blend them together a bit since the topic here isn’t narrowly trying to address the ethics of animal treatment, for example, where the distinction can be useful.

First we have the “imitation game” Turing test-style approach to the question of how we might ever determine if a machine becomes sentient. If a remote machine can fool a human into believing it is a person, it must be as intelligent as a person and therefore sentient like we presume of people. But this is a limited goal line. If the interaction is only over a limited domain like solving your cable internet installation problems, we don’t think of that as a sentient machine. Even against a larger domain of open-ended question and answering, if the human doesn’t hit upon a revealing kind of error that a machine might make that a human would not, we remain unconvinced that the target is sentient.… Read the rest

Type 2 Modular Cognitive Responsibility for a New Year

Mark Davis1 Comment

Brain on QI’m rebooting a startup that I had set aside a year ago. I’ve had some recent research and development advances that make it again seem worth pursuing. Specifically, the improved approach uses a deep learning decision-making filter of sorts to select among natural language generators based on characteristics of the interlocutor’s queries. The channeling to the best generator uses word and phrase cues, while the generators themselves are a novel deep learning framework that integrates ontologies about specific domain areas or motives of the chatbot. Some of the response systems involve more training than others. They are deeper and have subtle goals in responding to the query. Others are less nuanced and just engage in non-performative casual speech.

In social and cognitive psychology there is some recent research that bears a resemblance to this and also is related to contemporary politics and society. Well, cognitive modularity at the simplest is one area of similarity. But within the scope of that is the Type 1/Type 2 distinction, or “fast” versus “slow” thinking. In this “dual process” framework decision-making may be guided by intuitive Type 1 thinking that relates to more primitive, older evolutionary modules of the mind. Type 1 evolved to help solve survival dilemmas that require quick resolution. But inferential reasoning developed more slowly and apparently fairly late for us, with the impact of modern education strengthening the ability of these Type 2 decision processes to override the intuitive Type 1 decisions.

These insights have been applied in remarkably interesting ways in trying to understand political ideologies, moral choices, and even religious identity. For instance, there is some evidence that conservative political leanings correlates more with Type 1 processes.… Read the rest

One Shot, Few Shot, Radical Shot

Mark Davis1 Comment

Exunoplura is back up after a sad excursion through the challenges of hosting providers. To be blunt, they mostly suck. Between systems that just don’t work right (SSL certificate provisioning in this case) and bad to counterproductive support experiences, it’s enough to make one want to host it oneself. But hosting is mostly, as they say of war, long boring periods punctuated by moments of terror as things go frustratingly sideways. But we are back up again after two hosting provider side-trips!

Honestly, I’d like to see an AI agent effectively navigate through these technological challenges. Where even human performance is fleeting and imperfect, the notion that an AI could learn how to deal with the uncertain corners of the process strikes me as currently unthinkable. But there are some interesting recent developments worth noting and discussing in the journey towards what is named “general AI” or a framework that is as flexible as people can be, rather than narrowly tied to a specific task like visually inspecting welds or answering a few questions about weather, music, and so forth.

First, there is the work by the OpenAI folks on massive language models being tested against one-shot or few-shot learning problems. In each of these learning problems, the number of presentations of the training data cases is limited, rather than presenting huge numbers of exemplars and “fine tuning” the response of the model. What is a language model? Well, it varies across different approaches, but typically is a weighted context of words of varying length, with the weights reflecting the probabilities of those words in those contexts over a massive collection of text corpora. For the OpenAI model, GPT-3, the total number of parameters (words/contexts and their counts) is an astonishing 175 billion using 45 Tb of text to train the model.… Read the rest