Category: Perceptual

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

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

The Retiring Mind, Part V: Listening and Ground Truth

Mark Davis2 Comments

Human hearing is limited in the range of frequencies that we can discern. Generally, at the high end, that limit is around 20kHz, which is a very high pitch indeed. But, as we age, our high frequency perception reduces as well, until we may very well have difficulty hearing 8kHz or understanding human utterances in old age. You can test your own approximate limits with a simple YouTube video that raises pitches quickly up through the spectrum. I’m capping out at just north of 13.5kHz using a cheap speaker attached to my monitor, and with normal but quiet ambient background noise.

The original design of the Compact Disc by Phillips and Sony used the 20kHz limit as guidance for the encoding of the digital information on the disks. Specifically, the input analog waveform was sampled at a resolution of 16 bits 44.1kHz, which gives a maximum volume range of 2^16 (96dB) and supports the Nyquist sampling theorem that requires double the maximum frequency of the input stream in order to reconstruct that stream.

And CDs were very good, exceeding the capabilities of vinyl or cassettes, and approaching the best magnetic tape capabilities of the time. They also had some interesting side-effects in terms of mastering by freeing bass frequencies that had to be shifted towards the central channel on vinyl in order to avoid shortening recordings unduly because of the larger groove sizes needed to render low frequencies.

But now, with streaming, we can increase our resolution still further. Qobuz and Tidal offer Hi-Res audio formats that can range up to 24 bit resolution at 192kHz sample rates. Tidal also promotes MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) format that may use lossy compression but preserves aspects of the original master recording.… Read the rest