Tuesday, April 30, 2024

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?

Thursday, April 25, 2024

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.

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Philosophy Talk

Language of Wisdom Meetup April 9, 2024

[ 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.

Tuesday, April 16, 2024

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).

Friday, April 12, 2024

Pro Human PR

Beautiful Ai video based on a poem by ChatGPT