Philo of Math Talk

from 2019

Spherical Pinball Machine

If you’ve been jumping around inside these blogs, and you’ll know the ones I mean if you’ve been doing that, then you’ve seen the statistical material seeping in by osmosis, as the author, yours truly, is placed in sink or swim mode vs-a-vs some objective reality we know not, being not omniscient.

I summarize data science for my students as the business of predicting the future, which may seem too narrow given all the data sifting we’re doing to get better pictures of the past. But that’s the thing: where will we expect to get those better pictures? In our future. The past is already over, and is immutable. In that sense, anticipating what will be is redundant. We face forward in time, try turning that around. Not easy right?

Enter the Active Inference lingo, where we partition off future from past (priors) with a Markov blanket. Your energy budget is to spend on countering entropy within your own model, which you might as well call the action (sometimes gradual, sometimes steep) of gradient ascent, as descent, these are as left vs right conventions (gotta pick one, just be consistent within your own namespace). 

To the extent you’ve not reached an apex, you’ve got free energy left to try. Once in equilibrium, you’re not tapping out savings so quickly, yet every belief system leaks. Your hand is always needed on the tiller even if your touch is light. It’s that experience of free agency that keeps us from calling it autopilot, which isn’t to say the pilot is forbidden from taking cat naps.

The active agent’s response to sensory or “sent-int” is action, preferably constructive such as to restore mental model applicability. No one wants to throw out a mental model and start over from scratch, except in sandbox areas, such as we provide in some of our workshops. 

The agent actively shapes her, his or their world to conform to expectations, and only resorts to backup responses if no such restorations ensue. So then there’s shifting gears and taking a new position.

Which reminds me, when people ask me about the est Training (1970s mostly) what do I say? Not that I’m always able to predict my own banter (I learn what I’ll say when I say it), at the moment I’m gonna say it was all about “getting off it” which means owning one’s condition sufficiently to make a leap to a next condition not only feasible, but gracefully accomplished and already in the rear view mirror. Yes, that’s wishful thinking in many cases but at least we’re clear on for what we wish.

Other times I’ll steer them to that steersman handbook, a relevant piece of 1970s published esoterica. Marshall McLuhan and Bucky Fuller overlapped a lot in the intellectual culture (IC) of that time. Werner Erhard got some big wheels turning, the Hunger Project being one of them.

The Bayesian (vs Frequentist) is dash boarding it, flying in some OODA loop, and adjusting en vitro, looking to optimize. The instruments on the dash keep updating, not just in content, but in makeup. Different instruments come along, providing new freedoms. Some instruments fade making room. Attention may be all you need, but it’s also finite. We’re not the omniscient ones.

Like I said, the material is seeping in by osmosis, a stochastic process. Both 52LivingIdeas and Math4Wisdom chapters were about thinking schematically, meaning diagrammatically. TrimTab had some of that too, and of course FSI. We have this other way of thinking more graphically rather innately these days. The right brain is back from vacation.

It’s less about which structures you use, than about using such structures in the first place, and being willing to hop between them, as none in isolation is likely to sufficiently serve.  

One learns to bounce around in a spherical pinball machine of sorts. I tend to use that metaphor a lot in my YouTube channel (see above).

Future Visions

Lloyd Kahn, the self taught architect, proved to his own satisfaction that domes don't work, even though he built one of the famous ones. He got started on domes working with J. Baldwin for that experimental boarding school.

But then were these one-off DIY domes what Bucky Fuller had in mind? Not really. He was looking for something more aerospace and able to provide shelter for more rectilinear structures internally.

As for domes leaking, J. Baldwin had a good story regarding how that happened. Baldwin claimed he was so eager to get the dome tabulations out to the hippies that he declassified Joe Clinton's NASA computations too early, when they still had some bugs in them.  No wonder they leaked, right?

Keep in mind that oil and grain companies around the world have used domes because they are both free-span and leak-proof, if done right, by industrial engineers.

Python Teaching Ideas

Verboten Math

We call it spam and/or self promotion if you try to educate your peers regarding latter day American Transcendentalism. We are Borg. Resistance is futile.

Leveraging Python

Pythonic Andragogy (Lightning Talk, Pycon)

Achieving Our Country (Thanksgiving 2024)

Memo to Faculty (School of Tomorrow)

Rerun

Cultagory Theory (School of Tomorrow)

:: language project video ::

Stochastic Science

Related reading:

The Science of Infinity (blog post)

Presidential Race PR 2020

XREF: 

Meme Spotting

Pirate Party

Hypertoon City

Given I'm back in the wheelhouse, steering a cohort through rites of passage in the cult of coding (Python) and stats (statistics, data science), I'm once again reintroducing the tools of the trade, such as pandas and numpy. And the datasets in seaborn. Such as tips, penguins and titanic.

Thinking about tips gave me a prompt for the above AI graphic, but in my head I was imagining a tips-based hypertoon. Imagine a black and white (meaning grayscale) film in which 1950s dressed urban characters frequent a busy restaurant. 

Consider a camera shot of one table with five people, two smoking, three dressed as males. In one scenario, a woman gets up, espying a good friend at another table. She begs pardon from her table mates, saying she'll be right back, and she takes an empty seat at a nearby table, striking up a conversation with her friend. 

The camera is following all these and sees her return. We might even see a cut, letting viewers know time has passed, but not much.

In the diagram, that would be like an arrow from a circle, looping back into itself. She gets up, the action takes us away from the table, but we come back, almost as if nothing had happened, and indeed, lets have at least a few frames that never change. 

This immutable segment, of people sitting just so, with just these expressions, is what we keep coming back to, which adds a dimension of eerie dreaminess to this film. This isn't the only keyframe we keep revisiting; it's one hub among many. We in a looping environment such that we'll eventually have seen every scenario, but there might be hundreds of them, of varying length.

The general idea is you have keyframe immutable sequences from all over the restaurant, including outside on the snowy sidewalk, in the restrooms, where women gossip and men stare stoically at urinal advertisements, in the kitchen, in the back alley with the dumpsters. 

Then you have a playhead, which travels within the spaghetti ball of scenarios that interconnect all these keyframes in a graph, a network, a topology. We might have five scenarios that take us to the dumpsters, and three that take us back inside. Each scenario has a direction, an arrow marking time's flow. In geometry hypertoons, these scenario transformations might all be reversible, but when it comes to humans in a restaurant, most action is one-way.

Here's the random element: when the movie player, the playhead, enters a keyframe sequence, it has more than one way to go next. The viewer will recognize the table, the people, but last time she got up, whereas this time she doesn't. A waitress shows up instead. 

Next time a waiter appears, whom this time we follow back into the kitchen (and there's that same chef -- we keep seeing him, and those pancakes...). We don't get back to that table for quite awhile, revisiting other tables, and those dumpsters again, before we get there. We end up following that lady back, like the first time, from the table she'd been visiting. It's exactly the same scenario. We're on rails. 

You get the idea.

Cult Talk

Media Literacy

:: breakfast viewing ::

We probably needed a term like 'media literacy' because 'literary criticism' left out movies, radio, all the new media. Literature means books, and literary meant literature. No one wanted to confine themselves in that way. Semiotics was too egghead, but was a good runner-up. One of the professional videographers I know was a Semiotics major.

Literary criticism came from such writers as Norman O. Brown and Hugh Kenner. They would know how to connect the dots and make sense of a dense piece of writing. But then Marshall McLuhan came along, pointing out the great disconnect taking place within the sensorium. 

Who would be able to preserve linear discursive thought patterns in an age of quick cuts, channel changes, kaleidoscopic nonlinear, some might say chaotic, input order? EST people? That was a book. Bucky Fuller was an EST person, wrote the author, and Fuller agreed, by writing a blurb for the book's cover.

My pitch to the American Friends Service Committee back in the day, was along the lines of the above Youtube essay: the be media literate, one needs to create, not only consume, these communications. Don't just study the propaganda others disseminate, make your own propaganda. Make ads. Just for fun. See what it takes to be persuasive.

AFSC was quite receptive and we enjoyed the challenge of making television, in Spanish, for a local cable TV youth audience. Voz Juvenile was the name of the show. At CUE, we adapted the idea for seniors. Why not let elderly folks write and record their own show, again for community television. Media literacy involves learning how to edit, run a camera.

Adding spin to facts, thereby doctoring them, does not have to mean outright falsification. Think of a pep talk. Sometimes your job is to put a bright face on things. Does that mean you're lying? What happened to conjuring? What happened to casting spells? Halloween approacheth.

My Private Sky

 

Prompt:

Ludwig Wittgenstein is holding a private language black box and peering into it while in a thought balloon he is picturing a golden scarab beetle to himself. Egyptian pyramids in the background. Princeton philosophy.

The AI LW above looks more like Bertrand Russell, who lives close to LW in Hilbert Space. No wonder the LLM adds a Bertie tinge, right?

That little homunculus underlines the "private theater" metaphor that Gilbert Ryle assured us was a category mistake. BTW: How does one illustrate category mistakes in Category Theory?

For those wishing more context:

Wittgenstein didn't buy the St. Augustine picture of words gaining their meaning by being pointers, even as they serve to govern attention and focus our minds. "Not by pointing they don't" I can hear him saying. So when you find yourself imagining a perfect circle in your mind's eye and saying to yourself "THIS is what 'perfect circle' means", imagine Wittgenstein poking his head in and saying 'no it isn't'. How would you contradict him? By showing him how perfect the circle truly is?

 
Ludwig suggested that whatever you're calling private, which is the whole of your experience come to think of it, just call it a "beetle" instead and go around talking about your "private beetle". 

No, he wasn't a Volkswagen salesman. He was talking more like a scarab, as we find later in Jung (a different beetle story). 

Does language ever point to "the beetle" in order to mean "the beetle"? How would you prove that it does or doesn't, and to whom? Mulling over such questions is what passes for philosophy in the academy today (I speak from experience).

Unitarily Conceptual

If eternally aconceptual, partially overlapping scenarios Universe were unitarily conceptual, what might it look like? Is that a "spaghetti monster"?

The Power of Nightmares (trailer)

Debate Clip

On Design

Quaker Roots

in the tradition of Smedley "Fighting Quaker" Butler

Debate teams, get ready. 

Do your homework.

Random Facebook Comment

Talking philosophy with Ivana, Epistemology group.

Ivana: and what about the mind then?:D Who controls it? Isn't it a product of brain activity?

Me: I’d say there’s no global universal meaning to these terms “brain” and “mind”. Sure, “brain” is the name of that fatty organ in the skull, we all know that, but the meaning of that word stretches far beyond such denotations e.g. look at “Pepsi” — so much more than a dark carbonated sugary juice in a bottle. Think of the bottle as the skull. Then think of the PR army that makes Pepsi compete with Coke. The logo alone is a major signifier. We don’t have widely accepted icons (logos, brands) for each organ, but we could (some part of Unicode). That’d change the meaning of brain, the way I think of meaning.  

In the case of “mind”, the situation is even more clear: no specific organ need be referenced (although one might be). It all depends on the local namespace we’re in i.e. “who is talking?”. For example, a namespace I’m steeped in draws an important distinction between “brain” and “mind” and develops these differences through various published titles — not Foucault, not Derrida, and not theosophy, although developed contemporaneously with the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky stuff. 

Let me say here that I consider “brain” and “mind” two very different words and it’s a waste of good English to conflate them to mean the same thing i.e. to use them as synonyms. “Is your world really so simple that you can afford to erase that distinction?” Is the kind of questions I’d have upon encountering such an alien namespace. 

I’m also influenced by Freud and the psychoanalytic movement, which I trace back to Nietzsche in many dimensions. But that’s just me. I wouldn’t claim that my usage patterns match those of your random epistemologist. A lot depends on one’s ontology (I’ll conflate “ontology” with “vocabulary” in this paragraph).

Notes on BASKET

If you're up on Bucky Fuller's Synergetics, as distinct from Haken's, and you could be up on both (or neither) then you'll likely know of BEAST, if not by that acronym. BASKET = BEAST + K.

I'm talking about the A & B modules, a pair, one easily distorted into the other, or "morphed", both wedges, tetrahedrons, slices of space. 

Then come the T & E modules, exactly the same shape as one another (tetrahedrons) but one radiating outward enough further from a common center to leave a gap, like a biosphere of a planet, between the two rhombic triacontahedrons in question, the one of volume 5 (120 T), and the one of volume 5 plus (120 E).

And finally: the S, wedged between the octahedron of volume 4 (D edge length; D for diameter) and the eight faces-inscribing 20-faced icosahedron, or a “dozeneighteyes” in Struppi's dozenal namespace. 24 S slices define the difference, a dozen left and a dozen right.

All these A, B + E, T + S modules are handed (L and R), come as inside-outs of one another (same diff).

Enter the K, and hence BASKET.

The K has the same T & E shape, so KET or TEK is a logical triple, as is BAT or TAB (all 1/24). The K is 1/120th of a rhombic triacontahedron of volume not 5, not 5+, but 7.5 i.e. the RT made of Ts, scaled up 3/2 times, volume-wise. K volume = (1/24)(3/2) = 1/16, or half the MITE volume of 1/8 (MITE = B+ A+ A- = A+ A- B-), though not shaped that way.

RD 6 yellow; RT 7.5 red; Octa 4 green; Cube 3 blue

The K is allowed to resonate with DK, or David Koski, in helping us remember the timeline and the fact that the RT of volume 7.5 did not occur in concentric hierarchy renderings until later.

The 7.5 volume RT shares vertices with the volume 3 cube and by extension with tips of rhombic dodecahedron short diagonals. That's the RD of volume 6, made of As and Bs.

In addition to the 7.5 RT, Koski and Kirby (KU, myself) talked a lot about the 21.21 RT (15√2), the one of volume 20 times Syn3 (Syn3 = 2nd root of 9/8). I often will say "2nd root" instead of "square root" given Synergetics addresses this very prejudice. Python lets me customize the namespace.

That's four RTs of interest, in order of increasing size: 120 Ts (5), 120 Es (5+), 120 Ks (7.5), SuperRT (21.21...).

Here are the volumes we're talking about again, this time arbitrarily extended to 50 decimals:

Here's the Jupyter Notebook that goes with this blog post.

Church Symbolism

Pirate Party Politics (School of Tomorrow)

More Geopolitics

A Philosopher's Journey

JavaScript: The Good Parts

:: Douglas Crockford ::

Python: Still Relevant

This professor works in the same ballpark as I do: Python as applied to data science, Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL: a subtype of ML) in particular. However my bailiwick has been earlier in the pipeline, between data gathering and feeding said data to Machine Learning models. That includes: preliminary analysis, normalization, standardization, cleaning, reorganizing, visualizing.

Statisticians didn't have all these fancy ML tools until recently and their discipline up until then hasn't faded so much as abetted what has of late become center ring: deep learning. 

In practical terms, what used to be managed in spreadsheets (volatile) and databases (more secure) is now managed with a hybrid of the two: the programmable DataFrame. Bring your rows and columns into a single complex object, and work with it in code, rather than with fleeting mouse clicks or other unreplicable magic dust.

Why am I plugging Python in the philosophy blog? For many obvious reasons, but let's just say because the School of Tomorrow, powered by latter day American Transcendentalism (a kind of intuitionism), is using Python to yak up the 4D meme. Yes, I'm referring to Quadray Coordinates and so on, not to be confused with (x, y, z, w) coordinates within the hypercube, or Quaternions. Disambiguation is important at this point, or you'll get rather lost in the 4D jungle.

A less obvious reason: I think the philosophers' obsession with such as propositional calculus, ala Russell, Wittgenstein, Frege et al, was really about laying the groundwork for Turing and Von Neumann types to add the electronic dimensions. Logic meets circuit boards, giving us logic boards, and eventually the CPUs and GPUs we think about, and program, today. Philosophers should learn to program, in other words, if only to keep in touch with the atomic layer, the domain of Democritus.

More Synergetic Weirdness

One Thinker Weighs Another

Ghosts of Now

Ghosts of previous nows in the now haunt our daydreams in a recursive manner.

Another etymological connection worth remembering: "to haunt" and "to frequent". 

To frequent a place is to come back to it often, but then one may abandon past haunts for other frequencies, only to encounter their ghosts in future terms (times).

Oblique to "frequency" in Synergetics is "angle" or "shape" which comes across as liminal, transitory, given our experience is in-universe episodic. We're tuned in. What's "out" is what might enable our next leap through a portal, to some other world (frequency, channel, system, plot).

What evokes our sense of "time machines" i.e. of different times coexisting in parallel, reachable from one to another, is a sense of the timeless, what unites all the times with a physics we maybe wouldn't recognize on paper. 

The new world has its rules, all too familiar in the sense that our codification of them has always been incomplete, in the old world as well. The sense we might expand our appreciation for the underlying physics take us into a twilight zone of non-consensus reality, the private language of solipsistic research.

The criterion that runs through liminal space collections, defining their genre, is their depopulated nature. We have the specific angle and viewpoint of the individual, somewhat forgotten and storyless, and likely no one else. 

Phenomena get reduced to a bare minimum, drained of ideation to become "suchness", and a sense of  claustrophobia (or maybe freedom) comes from the missing plot, the absence of any sense of eventual convergence to some resolution. What's to resolve?

In the timeless liminal spaces of the interwebs, nothing ever happens that would disturb its equanimity. This resting in peace is offset by the Matrix, or rather the many matrices or worlds, the sound stages, that ornament and implement the rules (explore their consequences) in recursively fractal specificity.

Anthropology Reading

Synergetics Livestream #020.1 ~  Omnitopology, Interference Domains, Numerology

Operation DuckRabbit

MathArtStream 4 ~ Kirby Urner: “Dimension" in Synergetics

Nominalist thinking involves playing "pin the tail on the donkey", where the tail is some "signifier" like the numeral 2, and the donkey is twoness itself, the essence of two, for which the numeral is but a name. We're allowed to get loquacious about what twoness truly entails. We might say "the set of all sets of two elements". If we're into Synergetics, we'll speak of axial twoness (additive, rotating) versus inside-outside twoness (multiplicative, resizing).

Take the word "infinity": to what does it point, in order to get its meaning? Those with a rich imagination may flash on several images but is that what it means to mean something, i.e. to flash on images?  Might a signifier have a use without a signified? Put another way: how might we use words as a means without needing them to have referents?

In the above talk, I will focus on the word "dimension" and suggest this word has meaning through embeddings in language games, such as our "three-tuples determine a location in space" talk. What about 4-tuples? Let's talk about quadrays.

I introduce the concept of namespaces by showing how we already had a bifurcation in the meaning of "fourth dimension" by the time we got to Minkowski versus Hilbert spaces. 

The possibility of non-Euclidean geometries had already led to forks at the fifth postulate. But might we venture away from the Euclidean lineage by going in some other direction, meaning-wise, such as by rewiring "dimension talk"? 

Enter Karl Menger and the geometry of lumps.

Enter Synergetics and yet another namespace wherein 4D is a tentpole, helping to anchor another circus tent. 

A minimum box or room, a container, with no sides or lids left off, no windows or doors left open, has four walls, not the six a hexahedron has. Ergo space is four-directional (or say dimensional). Call that austere primitive beginning "pre-frequency" and then subdivide from there, adding spin, color, energy, nuance.

So there we have at least three namespaces using "dimension" in characteristic language games by the end of the 20th Century and onward.

Plus lets not forget the fractional dimensions of discrete maths. "Infinity" rears its head in this namespace as well, like the monster in Loch Ness, even as we zoom into a Mandelbrot Set (or Mandelbulb, as the case may be).

Countering nominalism, is operationalism, or Wittgenstein's "meaning as use". The rules emerge from the playing, while meaning is more or less fleeting, depending on the half-life of the containing corpus.

More Geopolitics

Hypertoons vs Dreamcasts

I don't know that these dreamcasts are really called that; I was just looking for a word. Are they the hypertoons I've been describing, i.e. smooth transformations between keyframes in a network? They could be. Hybrids are doable, by simply adding repetition and branching.

More to the point is attention to a specific corpus. My paradigm hypertoons, the corpus I've personally explored, is that of one "concentric hierarchy" i.e. a nest or maze of polyhedrons. I've elsewhere suggested "a cabal" of polyhedrons (or how about "bouquet"?). The Synergetics namespace is already self-consciously intra-corpus transformative in a right brainish animated way.

Rather than surrender to the stochastic randomness of generative graphics, we could use AI to make some of the segments, but then loop in other segments developed by other means. Children's Television Workshop has always been a model: come up with canonical representations of A-Z, 0-100, and have the segments segue through those. An AI fantasy about the letter A turns to a claymation. These might be among the art school's warm-up exercises, with benefits to children.

For example, we want the Jitterbug, treated over and over by different graphical artists. Once at an icosahedron, we have so many ways to go. It might become a nucleocapsid. It might unfold into a world map. The icosahedron might take its place in a flextegrity lattice, underwater, with fish. 

Manufacturing Consent

Deep State Synergetics (School of Tomorrow)

Tensegrity Workshop

Retrospective

Stochastic Satire

AI Plaza Of Perpetual Progress - Runway Gen2

Opus

Hard Core Synergetics: School of Tomorrow

:: more think tank ammo ::

American Dreamer

Brittany Howard - Stay High (Official Video)

Smart Chatter

ML for Startups

Coffee Shops Network: Featured Video

by Casey House

Tunnels to Codas:

TrimTab

M4W

Invisible Landscape Series - 1980s (Friend links):

IL I

IL II

Octaphase = Everyday Mind

Hardball with a Butterfly

Solarpunk Summarized

Punk Philo

I'm surprised more bloggers haven't connected ChatAI (not a trademark) with "pabulum" as a name for the output, a kind of prose we find readable and nutritious, and predictably so, given how it's made in the sausage factory. Or in punk: "AI puke".

The cogsci crowd tends to imagine models float around in neuronal tissue somehow, behind the eyes, whereas the true Markov sheet is the illuminated manuscript, Dark Ages, monks at work. The human training data accumulates in Real Memory, meaning reality, and not redundantly in neural tissue. If we wish to explain photographic memory... not here, not now. Not something most of us have.

When the Library at Alexandria burned, however that went, mainly to keep soldiers warm some people tell me, this was akin to neuronal tissue burning, in the sense of our losing the principal medium of civilizational storage: papyrus or whatever. 

But there's this objection that if no one is "thinking about X" then the deeply buried scrolls regarding X must be moribund, and true, they are. Being moribund has nothing to do with being a recording medium for some collective Mind. Temperature matters. A kind of thermodynamic vector equilibrium is still in the picture, at minimum.

Back to pabulum: there's an upside to our having filled the cloud with chatter, in terms of now creating mashup versions of what we've already said, reaping the sewn. That the math is strong enough to find these least action geodesics through a cogspace (game space, namespace) seems miraculous, bravo AI, let me be the first to convey my congratulations. 

Or is it RI (real intelligence) we should be applauding? Lets not sell ourselves short. We were inverting matrices long before Nvidia did that for us. I applaud Dr. Hinton and the nD polytopal geometry that was harboring elements of ML, even earlier in the University of Toronto tradition, thanks to Dr. Coxeter.

The Markovian sense in which the present serves as a barrier/blanket twixt the future and past, does not require human experience (bandwidth) explaining the passing down, through time, of these or those memory systems (scrolls, records, files...). 

An old and interesting language might reawaken and once again become readable / understandable to a receptive bunch. Receptivity begets transmissivity in many cases.

From the CodaCombs

Decoding my pun.

The Catacomb Codas. I've stuffed many a deep chamber with some of this Synergetics stuff. Detractors (or even entomologists) might picture me barfing up pabulum, weighed in tetra-somethings, anticipating this nurturing content will empower the colony going forward, the hive mind or whatever.

---

Synergetics is a namespace used by “anticipatory design scientists” (cliche phrase) to explore a geometry of thinking.

Synergy (the concept) suggests unanticipated (surprising) developments when the (perhaps already analyzed) parts cohere and inhere in the form of newly emergent wholes, meaning the unexpected is to be expected, if not precisely.

Chance and randomness play a role, sometimes for the better (luck, windfall, boost) leading to new scientific discoveries (e.g. radio, penicillin) that transform our continuation strategies. A good science lab is a studio within which to produce and confirm surprising (novel) findings.

Between an inside (concave) and outside (convex) comes our Markov blanket membrane, our omnidirectional halo model, our system of relevance between twilight zones, that takes its own manifestation, its own existence, as further evidence if its suitability as a model (life form).

  

We may always recurse to say a model itself relies on models. A model is a set of biases, preferences, simulations, generalizations, generative vectors, forming a semantic alchemical space, internally to a containing model. Models have a natural half-life, a decay curve, unless updated, presuming a continually changing environment.

 
Sense decays towards nonsense and obsolescence unless actively tuned and maintained.

Our system’s context might be “the village” (township, base, outpost) organized around various types of seer, chief or shaman, each of whom internalizes (models) the village, its procedures and ceremonies, rules of government, and its context (the rest of the world). Their collective steering produces synergetic results.

In general systems theory (GST), the personal workspace (PWS) may be variously interpreted, as a lab or studio, game pod or cubicle, an individual on the beach (with a dog maybe).

 
Synergy comes from the “value added” i.e. between the energy in (including sensory input, food calories, art supplies) and energy out (including action, making, crafting, cooking), i.e. from the gap between energy in and energy out filled by work (personal activity) of whatever nature.

 
Work is potentially value adding (varying criteria apply). Energy throughput may also be entropic, as when a dam or bridge gives way, and no longer serves a purpose.

A follow-up message to Andrius, who asked about Wittgenstein's private language argument:

Wittgenstein’s so-called “private language argument” is much debated as a topic, as Wikipedia is quick to point out. He’s countering the idea that there’s a private “known to me alone” basis for language e.g. no ”private ostensive definitions” e.g. this is what “pain” means to me (maybe a philosopher pinches himself or bites his own tongue at this point, to emphasize the private nature of the associated qualia) — Wittgenstein wants to break the hold of this picture, which he thinks derives from illusions and confusions. His views seem most counterintuitive to those who believe the meanings of words spookily appear even as the words are uttered, side-by-side as it were. Related conversation: LW’s “beetle in a box” thought experiment. Being the last speaker of a language going extinct is not considered a counter-argument by Wittgenstein’s defenders. Can a language in principle be understandable only by the person who knows it? Do we even recognize there’s a language there?

Promised Land

Anthropology Talk

The Beatnik generation superseded the Bohemians (Bucky Fuller's generation) and ushered in the subsequent hippie subculture, subsumed within Baby Boomers. Then Gen X and Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha. I'm not claiming these as global terms. Many timelines traverse the same calendrical domain, each offering a perspective.

Philosophy Talk

[ continuing a discussion thread at the M4W Coda ]

Andrius, the response of philosophy to the problematic nature of words, the so-called Linguistic Turn, was not to turn on words as irrelevant because there’s a deeper wordless womb language we can reference instead, when establishing agreement around cognitive frameworks (which themselves involve words and diagrams as we have seen).

I say this because my questioning of your working hypothesis is in alignment with philosophy since Wittgenstein i.e. I’m not really going out on a limb or stating an unheard of view, in suggesting introspection and so-called mental states are not the principal foundation for usage patterns even around such “psychological” words as “understand”, “think”, “pain”. 

These are public language games that require the warp and weft of everyday situations and behaviors to remain anchored (intelligible). 

I believe the cogsci people would benefit from reading LW’s Philosophical Investigations (about investigating the meanings of key philosophical words) because I also think how a lot of cogsci people think about the brain (e.g. that “understanding” must be at bottom a singular identifiable mental process and therefore neural process) is superstitious.

You are, on the other hand, trafficking in what is by definition a low bus numbers philosophy because you’re resting your claims on privileged access to a preverbal language that we’re all supposed to recognize as best articulated by yourself, an argument from authority, “I’m on another level” (e.g. Aristotle's -- your example as I recall) and quasi-universally derided as poor logic. For the record I’m not impressed nor intimidated by these prima donna outbursts.

From my point of view, you got off the philosophy bus (you did take some classes right?) too early, thereby missing some critical puzzle pieces, and struck out on your own, always risky. I wish you well in your endeavors, and hope the gaping holes in your education (from my angle) don’t hamper you too much. You’re presumably finding the ammo you need in that smattering of math topics you favor (I've got mine).

Parting ways is appropriate at this time, as WW has little to offer me regarding world events and geopolitics, which I’ve made clear are my foci these days. Your Wiki page on Putin looked promising, but as is, unchanging, isn't relevant, for reasons I’ve specified in more detail elsewhere.

Daniel per my meeting notes, I’m happy with how Knowledge Engineering is going and given I’m out of town, on a farm, working with the farmer’s schedule, I should free myself of Zoom obligations in the interim. We’ll have more meetups down the road I’m sure, maybe in a different Coda.

One of the Best Documentaries Ever

Taxonomy of Surprise

In some backwaters of philosophy, it's still problematic to associate brain states with concepts as multifarious as "surprising", which we furthermore doubt needs referents in the form of "feelings" to anchor its meaning, any more than "accidental" would need mooring in the feelings zone.

Feelings may accompany discovering it's snowing, not that sunny spring day you so rightfully anticipated. Do you leap for joy because snow is, on the whole, a more fun outcome, with more unexplored potential? Do you curse the fates and shake your fist at the heavens? Do you shrug it off? Do you text a friend? So many questions, too many circumstances. Clearly, words have clear meanings no thanks to the myriad duties to which they're put; in spite of that.

However the idea that the project in philosophy is to get really clear on what "surprising" really means, such that those elusive brain states now emerge, is to cling to a type of nominalism many who think of themselves as philosophers worked hard to let go of. We don't want to re-brainwash ourselves into imagining all these "mental states" that furthermore, in the background, get to be neural signatures.

That way lies putting a skull cap on a dude to see how full of sarcasm he might be, or to get that number for melancholia. We're talking throwback phrenology, but with hands on signals instead of skull shape. Same diff? Lets just say I'm a skeptic. "Surprising" is a social construct mapping to a gazillion situations we overtly encounter in everyday life. No neural maps need apply (and don't, is my guess).

Map Projections (xkcd)

Pro Human PR

Beautiful Ai video based on a poem by ChatGPT

Hypertoons Explained

Quadray Slides

Designing Cities

Sam Hill's Quaker Legacy

Mike Acerra Interviews Kirby

Thinking with Mike Accera, Episode #5

BEAST Deck Review (School of Tomorrow)

Source Code

Intro to Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy

Mental Models

I've been engaged in productive philosophical discussions with Andrius Kulikauskas of Math 4 Wisdom (M4W), a set of partially overlapping study groups and other committees centered around a philosophical language known as Wondrous Wisdom.

Wondrous Wisdom may be grappled with as a stash of cognitive frameworks, ways of organizing core concepts to reflect workflows and progressions. I recommend visiting the Wondrous Wisdom Wiki for more details (visit Vocabulary). 

My frameworks here were influenced and inspired by the ones Andrius has come up with.

The All Seeing Eye represents the sense that we're being watched over or supervised or judged, and we extrapolate that sense to where "even Lucifer feels watched" i.e. no matter how high a demon or angel may consider themselves to be, there's always a sense they're being observed, perhaps by a yet higher consciousness.

The idea of God might be summarized by the meme "every being senses a super being" i.e. a sense of a yet higher self, up to final Self as an omega terminus (alluding to Teilhard de Chardin).

Those not subscribing to God talk may prefer to see Future Humanity as this higher consciousness i.e. future versions of ourselves with the benefit of a lot more hindsight. Others project higher intelligence in the form of ETs, or simply wiser folks, teachers of various kinds, saints and bodhisattvas.

The Unconscious is an endless cornucopia of raw material for dialectical debates, of constant back and forth, is a kind of battleground. 

How else could the ego star as a warrior if not against the backdrop of some polarized space of good vs evil. Without a gradient and a sense of "higher ground" there's nothing to fight for.

The "three minds" in this picture are: the unconscious (peripheral); the conscious (the focus: me within the world) and consciousness (the observer storyteller with its sense of a greater intelligence shining from "behind" or "above").  

Plato's Cinema is of course Plato's Cave, wherein the observer is watching "the movie of my life" meaning some hero's journey in the Joseph Campbell sense. The star (focus) of the show is some "me" surrounded by a "not me" world (environment) that's nevertheless tuned in and therefore part of the world of everyday experience. 

The Unconscious the presently untuned and is peripheral to Conscious content and continually percolates inward, synergizing with existing content, sometimes in surprising ways. 

The Unconscious sometimes comes across as communicating intuitions from that higher self, as the All Seeing Eye is its source as well.

Sometimes and ego may feel overwhelmed by a welling up of unconscious material. The ego is akin to the captain of a ship on sometimes stormy seas, seas inhabited by deep-dwelling unknown creatures.

How do we make mental models in the first place? They form in stages. 

What's new first appears as some "whatson" that needs to be turned in to ascertain its nature and reality, existence itself being a first attribute to test for. "Is this just a mirage?" is a beginning stage question, or "is it real?"  We need to know WHAT "it" is even was we figure out if it's real or not. 

WHAT turns to WHETHER.

Depending on WHETHER something is real (nonfiction) or not (fiction), we will look at HOW and WHY somewhat differently. 

Fictional motives (world domination) and posited mechanisms (anti-gravity engines) may be attributed to the fictional UFO UAPs, whereas a non-fictional Chinese weather balloon will generate more mundane reality-fitting explanations.

A main idea here is we're always updating and revising our mental models. By interrogating them and figuring out key ways to verify or invalidate various aspects of them, we feed an iterative process. 

Sometimes a mental model will go "pop" like a balloon, meaning it will become suddenly unbelievable. We can't always go back and make ourselves believe what we no longer believe.  Systems come and go i.e. they come with a half life.  

Every system is a ticking time bomb until its pull date, one might say. Some have lasted thousands of years, passed down from generation to generation. However, given their context keeps changing, it's usually difficult to claim a system has "stayed the same" even within a single generation.  Systems keep morphing, to keep up with the times they're in.

Enabling Societal Debate: Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge Engineering Study Group

Ant colonies accomplish internal communications by means of pheromones, chemical signatures which spread at the speed of smell. 

In this and similar meetups of the Knowledge Engineering Study Group, we fleshed out more of the biology around ants, likewise a way to appreciate the current state of bioinformatics as a discipline

For more meeting notes and links, check the M4W Coda.

Dance Music

Eisenfunk - Pong

Intro to Symbolic Dynamics

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A TrimTab Presentation

David Koski on the BEAST modules

The US Civil War: A Study in Failed Social Engineering

A central thesis of The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, is that Pragmatism is in part a reaction to Dogmatism, where the latter typifies a mindset unable to avoid a Civil War. People pay too high a price for principle, based on a sense of self-righteousness. Not pragmatic.

What had failed to prevent the US Civil War was in particular the Bible, used to inflame and promote zealotry on all sides. Everyone grew up learning from it, and all Sunday school programming derived from it, yet when push came to shove, a Bible-oriented upbringing (i.e. one's training in Christianity) didn't show the way out, and mayhem ensued. 

Cain rose against Abel as a great union (a federation), an experiment in social engineering if there ever was one, tore in half. So maybe the Bible didn't have all the answers? Enter pragmatism.

Even among theologians, a healthy skepticism arose: leaning on the saints, on the gospels, on the ancient Greeks (especially Aristotle) for all one's thinking could only be out of laziness. Times change. The new mantra: think for yourself. That's reliable because, per Transcendentalism (as well as Quakerism): you have your God within you (St. Aquinas had said much the same thing).

Emerson's exhortations seemed to awaken a universal capacity lurking within the soul of everyman (to use a sexist vocabulary), whereas Whitman conveyed that freeing sense of a blank slate, or at least a new one, a fresh canvas, full of promise and adventure, a new world. A world without the blemish of slavery.

Fast forward to our day and say we're in a Palestinian Studies class. The analogies are clear, as the headlines today are about the illegitimacy of forced displacement (what happened to many of these families in the first place) versus whether families have an inherent freedom to escape from harm's way. 

If Gaza has been an open air prison, then why not give everyone a travel pass and tickets to some New Gaza of their choice, with those remaining the ones choosing to hold the fort, until sanity returns to the region? Help everyone stay in touch. Open the system to other refugee populations as well, as we boot up a system of routing hubs especially designed to help out in emergency situations.

That may sound like a kind of Zionism, this proposal to facilitate establishing Palestinian colonies elsewhere (so "ethnic cleansing" then?), including well outside of West Asia. How about in Cuba for instance, at a place called Guantanamo, now used for R&R. Keep it a fun place, while putting it to a serious good use. Lose the "bad neighborhood" reputation built up for it by the torture taxi club. 

In considering all these issues, remember how President Lincoln thought: he was very open to the idea of Blacks leaving en masse, for Liberia, for Central America, for Haiti. So were a lot of the abolitionists.  End slavery; send them home. But Lincoln didn't want to "send" people against their wills. He might have been prophetic in many ways, but he didn't have twenty-twenty foresight; almost no one does. Not all of the time. If the opportunity were properly presented...

Obviously, once you've invested your heart and soul in Alabama or Tennessee or whatever, it's not that easy to want to move anywhere else. But think of how part of the allure of the US military is the opportunities it offers to see the world. Some people will be up for it, especially if free to come back, if only for visits. The new libertarianism posits each human is born with an inherent right to explore the planet; and nation-states are not intended as barriers to this human right so much as facilitators thereof.

As a Palestinian, opting for a stint or tour in Jordan or Kuwait was never seen as conceding that Palestine is no longer innately a state, if only a diaspora state, much like Kurdistan, or Tibet are. Or Intel and Hilton.

Palestine persists, but not as a synonym for any other entity. 

Palestine is not a caliphate, nor necessarily an ethno-state of any kind, which is how it manages to realistically aspire to provide a safe haven to a great many ethnicities, like the USA hopes to, and China, including new Islamic sects indigenous to North America, perhaps with histories tracing back to Black Panthers and Malcolm X in some cases. 

New branches of Judaism are welcome as well. These world religions are all good at getting along with each other, especially when they're not merely real estate agents and property management companies in disguise, using religion as more acceptable packaging or as a tax dodge.

What I'm suggesting is that nextgen North Americans (and not only them) would benefit by using current events in West Asia to inform their own developing views of the US Civil War, which is quite a bit further back in time and sometimes much obscured by the gases and dusts of intervening generations. The thought patterns remain important. Read more Octavia Butler maybe?

I underline "North Americans" because it's a history that's already readily accessible to you if you live here, through monuments (Statue of Liberty) and movies, and because "Refugees Я Us" i.e. accommodating refugees, migrants, people on the move, is part of our destiny, our role, as denizens of a New World, as polyglot pioneers from all genetic and epigenetic lineages. 

We wish to not fail hard as social engineers of our own futures, and we study history to learn from our track record as hominids etc. We see mistakes, and successes. We've been smart sometimes too.

BEAST: A Particle Zoo

History of Pragmatism

Metaphysical Club (School of Tomorrow)

Intro to German Idealism

Philosophy Book Clubs

Some of us have studied The Metaphysical Club, which graphs a school of thought usually labeled as American pragmatism. At the outset, we're reminded how this layer of American heritage was forged in the US Civil War.

Readers in the far future, meaning in the 21st Century say, tend to forget all the nuances that swirled in the wake of the US's establishment as a nation-state, still very much in the process of spreading westward. To what extent would additional states, in the process of being added, permit the institution of slavery within their midst?

Accompanying acts of emancipation, on through the Civil Rights period, was the rise of mechanization, including escalators and elevators and the possibility of high rises (some qualifying as "skyscrapers"). In both the lineages of the pragmatists and the transcendentalists came Buckminster Fuller (the grand nephew of Margaret Fuller) with his forward-looking "energy-slave" concept: our machines would slave for humanity, increasingly effectively, freeing humanity itself from the scourge of slavery.

We would still need skilled professionals, people who knew how to leverage their work with automation. These would not be slaves however, so much as the master faculty and apprentice students of an emergent "global university" (another metaphor for Spaceship Earth).

Over at the Trim Tab Book Club, we've been alternately reading books by, and then about, said Buckminster Fuller, a prominent and prophetic futurist through much of the 20th Century. His ideas about a "design science revolution" anticipated the advance of "copyleft" policies among source code engineers.

I'm signed up for Sociology through what I'm seeing as within the NPU framework, in turn friendly with my School of Tomorrow based here in Oregon (NPU and PSU are linked in my thinking). 

It's through that reading program, undertaken with other scholars online, that I was cued regarding The Metaphysical Club as relevant background reading. We're interested in continuing to stream these streams.

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Comment:  

@kirbyurner

Speaking of pronouns (aren’t we always), the blob arrogantly assumes it speaks for Americans, whereas it’s just one more ethnicity, characterized by the usual Manifest Destiny mental illness. We are not an empire. We’re a conquered people struggling to win our freedom. We Americans, that is. 

Xref:
Sharing About Geopolitics

"... a conquered people"

Guest Appearance (2021)

Project 69 and McLuhan

Modes of Reasoning

If you're like me, you admired the fictional Sherlock Holmes for his powers of deduction. 

Now we're being corrected by a teacher, Umberto Ecco, author of The Name of the Rose.

Me: OK, so you want to be a stickler and split hairs: Sherlock was good at induction then. 

"Nope" says the teacher, "he was good at abduction more than anything".

Abduction? What on earth...?

The above video makes the differences clear:

• induction gives us discoveries (which could be wrong)
• deduction gives us valid claims if the premises are true
• abduction gives us explanations (which could be wrong)

You'll hear the philosopher in the video characterizing both induction and abduction as "invalid" which sounds too harsh to my ears, given the exigencies of existence. We might be better off saying "not bulletproof" instead.  

Using a shield is a valid strategy; even if it proves insufficient, that doesn't invalidate having given it a try. To say "induction" is an invalid form of reasoning sounds like advising we should avoid use it. On the contrary, it's the best mode we've got in many instances.

Sure, exceptions may get through our defenses, disrupting our narrative, and causing our theoretical edifice to crumble if the ad hoc patches won't save it. 

But that doesn't mean we were necessarily careless or thoughtless in creating said edifice. We did what we could, with the information available. Perhaps we could have dug for more info. Sometimes more due diligence is in order. Ah, the wisdom of hindsight. Sometimes we fool ourselves.

Sherlock Holmes could have been wrong: Watson might've never have been in Afghanistan. But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was in charge of the story and knew from the art of storytelling that making a character's signature superpower too unreliable might undermine the intended plotlines. 

Have Holmes be right to an uncanny degree. Endow him with an enviable track record.

We're to credit Charles Sanders Peirce for vectoring "abduction" into our namespace, meaning he gave it momentum and spin. Peirce is usually categorized as one of the American pragmatists, along with John Dewey, Richard Rorty, William James and Buckminster Fuller.

The term "abduction" playfully exudes a different meaning as well: it's what aliens do when they suddenly transport a human to a new vista (say their spaceship), and then (typically) restore said human to the pre-abduction environment, but now with memories of the sudden state change. 

To be abducted is like a sudden channel change, or like an imposed drug trip versus one sought out. Abduction comes as a surprise. The word "abduction" therefore has a hint of "unlikely explanation" given how tales of ETs are considered fringe in some circles.

I taken the UFO-flavored meaning of abduction to more clearly explain a computer science notion of "decoration" and more specifically to expound upon Python's "decorator syntax". Check it out.

Computer Generated Hypertoons

I'm always wondering what a production house with some serious animators could make from my primitive "hypertoon" concept.

The idea is a simple one: think of a smooth transformation between A and B, nevermind yet what exactly is transforming. Label A and B as "key frames". Now imagine scenarios A to C and B to C. We now have a triangle. A point D with scenarios to A, B, C would now complete a tetrahedron.

A "scenario" could be like a cuboctahedron (A) twist-contracting into an icosahedron (B) ala the Jitterbug Transformation. That icosahedron (A) could then spin around 31 axes (opposite corners, mid-edges, face centers) yielding a great circle network (C). The network (C) could then shift, with some circles staying, others forming, others fading, to give the 25 great circles of the cuboctahedron (D). Add A to D. D to B might involve some kind of global sharing.

The hypertoon "playhead" displays scenarios between key frames. When it gets to a key frame, a decision is made, perhaps randomly, perhaps weighted, and a next scenario gets played. There's a sense of smooth transformations throughout, as the viewer visually tours the "space" of interconnecting scenarios. The network might be compared to a spaghetti ball.

Key frames that link to themselves, i.e. that start and end on the same frame, might sometimes run a number of times in a loop.

Search on "hypertoons" in the search box at the upper left for more, including some running examples.

Sharing About Geopolitics

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