Category: Psychology

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

Notes on Pumps: Sensibilities and Framing with Algorithmic Feedback

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“A sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about.” So begins Sontag’s Notes on “Camp” in the 1964 Partisan Review. And what of the political anger and disillusionment across the United States and in the developed world? What of the gnawing desire towards superiority and control that accompanies authoritarian urges? What of the fear of loss of power to minority ethnic and religious groups? These may be the most discussed sociopolitical aspects of our modern political sensibility since Trump’s election in 2016 when a bitter, vindictive, hostile, crude, fat thug briefly took the reigns of America, then pushed and conspired to oppose the election of his successor.

What attracted his followers to him? I never encountered a George W. Bush fanatic during his presidency. Though not physically small, he talked about “compassionate conservatism” with a voice that hung in the upper register of middle pitches for men. He was neither sonorous nor mean. His eyebrows often had a look of surprise and self-doubt that was hinted at in claims he was a very reluctant candidate for president. I met people who voted for him but they seemed to accept him as an acceptable alternative to Gore or, later, to Kerry—not as a figure of passionate intrigue. Bush Jr. did receive a rally-around-the-flag effect that was based on circumstances that would later bring rebuke over the casus belli of the Iraq War. Similar sensibilities were true of the Obama years—there was a low positivity for him on the Left combined with a mildly deranged antagonism towards him on the Right.

Was the lack of Trump-like animating fanaticism due to the feeling that Bush Jr. was a compromise made to the electorate while Trump was, finally, a man who expressed the real hostility of those who vote Republican?… Read the rest

Wordle and the Hard Problem of Philosophy

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I occasionally do Wordles at the New York Times. If you are not familiar, the game is very simple. You have six chances to guess a five-letter word. When you make a guess, letters that are in the correct position turn green. Letters that are in the word but in the wrong position turn yellow. The mental process for solving them is best optimized by choosing a word initially that has high-frequency English letters, like “notes,” and then proceeding from there. At some point in the guessing process, one is confronted with anchoring known letters and trying to remember words that might fit the sequence. There is a handy virtual keyboard displayed below the word matrix that shows you the letters in black, yellow, green, and gray that you have tried, that are required, that are fit to position, and that remain untested, respectively. After a bit, you start to apply little algorithms and exclusionary rules to the process: What if I anchor an S at the beginning? There are no five-letter words that end in “yi” in English, etc. There is a feeling of working through these mental strategies and even a feeling of green and yellow as signposts along the way.

I decided this morning to write the simplest one-line Wordle helper I could and solved the puzzle in two guesses:

Sorry for the spoiler if you haven’t gotten to it yet! Here’s what I needed to do the job: a five letter word list for English and a word frequency list for English. I could have derived the first from the second but found the first first, here. The second required I log into Kaggle to get a good CSV searchable list.… Read the rest

Intellectual Capital, Religion, Audiofools, and Irrational Poynting Vectors

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Twin New York-associated articles of note today. First, we have the New York Times with Ilana Horwitz of Tulane University on the topic of how religion helps working-class young people—especially boys—to better achieve after high school. This is part of the ongoing saga of better understanding the sagging social support network (“social capital”) that has been suggested to explain high rates of despair, opioid addiction, alcohol abuse, suicide, and even white supremacist ideation and Trumpism among working-class Americans. What is particularly interesting to me is that the same religious enhancement of educational attainment doesn’t apply to the children of college-educated professionals and the author notes that strong religious belief systems—especially among young women—may interfere with future decision-making by directing them towards traditional female careers and roles.

Meanwhile, Cornel West has a wide-ranging interview in The New Yorker where he repeatedly decries Harvard for becoming a spiritual wasteland of sorts, dedicated to the education of a professional-managerial class that lacks some elemental soul needed to translate ideas into public intellectual and social engagement:

That’s not just brother Trump, even though he’s a neo-Fascist one. He’s on the continuum with so much of the professional-managerial class in terms of their lack of accountability to working people and poor people. Once you have that kind of spiritual decay and moral decrepitude, man, then it’s just gangsterization on steroids, man. That’s where America’s headed.

So it seems many of the religious working-class college achievers are just working towards some kind of soulless professionalism. Without converting their intellectual achievements into activism, and by just focusing on jobs and further achievement, they are content to let the backslide towards authoritarianism continue apace. West sees a neoliberal hypocrisy at every turn, as well, and almost as toxic as the fascist urge.… Read the rest

We Are Weak Chaos

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Recent work in deep learning networks has been largely driven by the capacity of modern computing systems to compute gradient descent over very large networks. We use gaming cards with GPUs that are great for parallel processing to perform the matrix multiplications and summations that are the primitive operations central to artificial neural network formalisms. Conceptually, another primary advance is the pre-training of networks as autocorrelators that helps with smoothing out later “fine tuning” training programs over other data. There are some additional contributions that are notable in impact and that reintroduce the rather old idea of recurrent neural networks, networks with outputs attached back to inputs that create resonant kinds of running states within the network. The original motivation of such architectures was to emulate the vast interconnectivity of real neural systems and to capture a more temporal appreciation of data where past states affect ongoing processing, rather than a pure feed-through architecture. Neural networks are already nonlinear systems, so adding recurrence just ups the complexity of trying to figure out how to train them. Treating them as black boxes and using evolutionary algorithms was fashionable for me in the 90s, though the computing capabilities just weren’t up for anything other than small systems, as I found out when chastised for overusing a Cray at Los Alamos.

But does any of this have anything to do with real brain systems? Perhaps. Here’s Toker, et. al. “Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (with the unenviable acronym PNAS). The researchers and clinicians studied the electrical activity of macaque and human brains in a wide variety of states: epileptics undergoing seizures, macaque monkeys sleeping, people on LSD, those under the effects of anesthesia, and people with disorders of consciousness.… Read the rest

Triangulation Machinery, Poetry, and Politics

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I was reading Muriel Rukeyser‘s poetry and marveling at some of the lucid yet novel constructions she employs. I was trying to avoid the grueling work of comparing and contrasting Biden’s speech on the anniversary of January 6th, 2021 with the responses from various Republican defenders of Trump. Both pulled into focus the effect of semantic and pragmatic framing as part of the poetic and political processes, respectively. Sorry, Muriel, I just compared your work to the slow boil of democracy.

Reaching in interlaced gods, animals, and men.
There is no background. The figures hold their peace
In a web of movement. There is no frustration,
Every gesture is taken, everything yields connections.

There is a theory about how language works that I’ve discussed here before. In this theory, from Donald Davidson primarily, the meaning of words and phrases are tied directly to a shared interrogation of what each person is trying to convey. Imagine a child observing a dog and a parent says “dog” and is fairly consistent with that usage across several different breeds that are presented to the child. The child may overuse the word, calling a cat a dog at some point, at which point the parent corrects the child with “cat” and the child proceeds along through this interrogatory process, triangulating in on the meaning of dog versus cat. Triangulation is Davidson’s term, reflecting three parties: two people discussing a thing or idea. In the case of human children, we also know that there are some innate preferences the child will apply during the triangulation process, like preferring “whole object” semantics to atomized ones, and assuming different words mean different things even when applied to the same object: so “canine” and “dog” must refer to the same object in slightly different ways since they are differing words, and indeed they do: dog IS-A canine but not vice-versa.… Read the rest

Bobos and Grifters

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It’s a good time to be a pundit trying to find a vein of gold that explains the polarization of modern America. Is it political, societal, sociological, psychological, economic, or some mixture of all of the above? Take David Brooks’ new Atlantic essay on bobos and boubours. Here we have modern politics emerging from social, economic, and meritocratic trends that build on his riff on Richard Florida’s ideas of the creative class in the early 2000s. I’ll sum it up as simply as I can, though I also want to touch on why it seems flawed to me. But here we go:

  1. An intellectual elite arose that controls media, educational opportunities, technology, and culture (the “bobos” for bourgeois bohemian).
  2. Our politics (and some international as well: Marine Le Pen, Boris Johnson, etc.) reflect a backlash against these new overlords by the “boorish bourgeoisie” (boubours) who see their political voices suffocated in this new class order.
  3. Maybe if we mixed together a bit more we can reduce the temperatures and empathize with one another better.

OK, so Brooks is on that solution bandwagon that always reaches for more social integration to solve all ills. It is positive and very bobo (I doubt he would disagree given his self-confessional acknowledgement of his own status as part of the creative class in the article.) We have seen calls for less assortative mating, more bipartisan dinner parties for congresspeople, and other ideas in the past.

All very positive, agreed.

But what if the real problem is more sinister? How about the idea that many people are being manipulated by con artists with respect to the things that should matter to them?… Read the rest

Flooding the Mystery Zone with Cynicism

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The Mystery of the FoxI just finished planting one of my two urban garden plots here in Southern New Mexico. The circles had been left unattended and later covered with weed-control fabric that I topped with rock a few years ago when I visited from our Arizona home and discovered a vexing and disturbing collection of items buried in the soil. There was a child’s ball, a partially melted white candle, some marbles, a variety of small bones and strange animal remains, indeterminate masses of red and brown, unusual feces, and large pork chop bones. A shrine to strange, ancient deities? The remains of an ancient civilization? Our security camera coverage and the gates and fencing ruled out human activity. So we were left with wild animals, specifically gray foxes with long bushy tails that appear integrated into our little downtown community. We see them on the cameras early in the morning hours, typically, and they do some rather odd things, so the notion that they were collecting interesting items and burying them did not seem unreasonable. We also observed one fox flipping a piece of torn paper plate in the air in front of an unimpressed cat crouching nearby. Foxes will sometimes do similar jumping behavior as a method for mesmerizing their prey, but why bury a melted candle? Perhaps it smelled just enough like food that the fox thought it might come in handy during lean times later. And the child’s toy ball? Plastic odors might also resemble food. Maybe.

The New Mexico foxes, skunks, raccoons, and, I’m informed, some formerly pet coatimundi that wander in the area (but we’ve never seen), as well as the javelina, coyotes, deer, bobcats, and foxes around our Arizona forest home, are certainly influential in my Tusker Long project that tries to tackle an alien world where the worker slave animals have broken from their chains of servitude and simplicity to dominate society and come to grips with their own limits, prejudices, and historical animosities (perfectly wrong word, that).… Read the rest