The mother of all analogies is the analogy between what we experience and what is happening. For example, it refers to our idea that a system is doing computation and what it is "actually" doing (Searle). It refers to our idea that what is "really" happening in the world is the intention of God versus what is "really" happening in the world. It is the difference between Tao and the Tao that is named. The brain (and, by extension, the "mind" it creates) builds an electro-chemical analog computer based on this - to map sensations from the real world into analogous mental phenomena. This mapping is called "intentionality." So far, most of our discussion of the mind has concentrated on consciousness. This concentration might give the impression that the mind is essentially a self-enclosed arena of subjectivity. But, on the contrary, the primary evolutionary role of the mind is to relate us in certain ways to the environment and especially t...

Christina Desan gives a calm and civilized talk about the nature of money. It really looks back at the orgins of our current stories from the point of view of current stories. This leaves out "irrelevant" issues such as slavery, colonization, debt, etc. Still lots of interesting perspectives. "Money" is worth something because, by law, it can be exchanged for goods and services for sale in that currency. That means the coin carries the value of what it can buy. Private credit creation = "replication" of the basic unit of account decreed by the State. She puts forward the idea that credit = debt but also the concept that all of this works in the "eye of the beholder." She does note the rise in the power of creditors that parallels the rise of money itself. Generally, the conversation ignores the history of debt.  Did medieval banks morph into modern banks? She claims that the Bank of England was the first actual bank, which was fundamental to the...

  This is a fantastic book. Highly recommended. What follows is just a home for my notes on the book. Also, see Christine Desan , a commentator on money and the institutional structures that support it. There is a connection with my AI deliberations. "Money" is in the eye of the beholder. Piketty points out that the social structures behind it are also in the eye of the beholder, such as class, property, and borders. This leads to the observation that many see elements of capitalism, such as inequality, are real and not "subjective." Economic inequality tangibles to actual results. The human "economy" is built on top of a real environment. Money is imaginary until you have none. Wealth is in the eye of the beholder until you look at the physical destruction involved in our economic history (war, depression, climate change). Since all aspects of the "economy" and the structures of society are subjective, it is not surprising to see wildly differen...

I must admit to being a rabid fan of Rachel Maddow . In my experience, she is the smartest person in the public eye. For many, her fame and success distract from the depth and insight of her insights. This book is a deeply informative history of the USA's "drift" toward militarism. Don't be distracted by the fact that it's an entertainment page-turner. Rachel reviews the process that led to the US military going off the leash from the Viet Nam war to the present day. As usual, I will use this post for a few notes on the subject. ============================================= I was skeptical about the Grenada invasion from the start. Maddow provides the details. It's worse than I thought. A farce from start to finish. === DUE TO TECH BLUNDER, EXTENSIVE NOTES LOST === DynCorp's sex slaves in Bosnia. Claim that US law did not apply in Bosnia or USA. Some sex slaves with 14-year-old sex slaves. Sex videos. DynCorp was bought out approx 2020. ==================...

Since I am prone to mania (part of being "Bipolar"), I look for an "operational" definition of mania - that is, a way to define it or measure it in real life to prevent it from sliding out of control. In my case, that means hospitalization in a mental health facility.  Part of my regime to prevent that is this test by Psych Central . It turns out to be useful when observing other people. Quite commonly, people are in a manic frame of mind more or less permanently without the slide into mental illness - or at least not in public. Mania can be brought on by drugs, which is a topic for another post. It's a good idea to check out the test. For the moment, I will list the criteria in short form.   Sharp mind Less Sleep Many plans   Pressure to talk and talk Particularly Happy Unusually active People have a hard time keeping up with me More ideas than I can handle Irritable Jokes and Funny Stories Full of Energy Thinking about Sex Special Plans for the World Spendi...

In 1969 I was in Grenoble, France. The plan was to create an interactive programming version of a new programming language ( Algol 68 ). Of course, my future held nothing of the kind, but a clever idea connects the 23-year-old hot-shot to the 75-year-old armchair philosopher and a young guy with a 2022 vision that is strangely related. At this time, interactive access to a computer was a new thing. In 1975, Bill Gates wrote an interactive BASIC version that launched his career in 1978.  Oops*. I was excited by the possibilities. At one time, "soon" (it turned out to be half a century), everyone would have access to the "Spirit System." Soon, all human knowledge would be "online." The main thing that excited me was the ability for people to share projects online, even creating music. My "field" at the time was "Artificial Intelligence," so it was easy to imagine an "app" that would impersonate a real person. Specifically, we w...

 In this post, I summarize some of the conclusions that come out of the LamBDA issue controversy. To find out what LamBDA actually is, check here .  This post deals with the current controversy, which is whether "LamBDA" or any similar creation can be "sentient." Spoiler alert: noting we are doing now places us on the road to creating a sentient machine. A sentient computer would be like a sentient book. Computers talk to us like books, TV, and phones talk to us.  Talking computers descend from centuries of effort that have given us talking parrots. When we see intelligent words coming out of a computer, our natural instinct is to attribute sentience to the computer. We will get over it, just as we got over our amazement at words coming from the first telephone.  Or a parrot. Under normal circumstances, I use words to cause mental events in your mind. This depends on both understanding the language and having a reasonably similar experience of life. In this way, lan...

It has turned out that Searle's ideas have completely changed my ideas about "Artificial Intelligence."  His objections first seemed so simple as to be naive. It turns out that Searle is good at giving simple-seeming arguments that sweep away fundamental misconceptions. He is that rare philosopher whose ideas make a real impact on the world the rest of us live in.  SMS Sent to Jeff August 16, 2022 One of Searle’s ideas has turned out to be very fruitful to me: the “mind” is what the brain does, just like the heart pumps blood and the liver does metabolism (this is to get rid of the mind/body problem). This brings thinking of the brain and mind much closer than we get when we work with analogies involving thinking and computers. Wolfram considers protein reactions as a kind of “calculation”. When we look closely at brain activity, it’s not a bunch of switches. It’s a bunch of protein reactions. This leads us to think of the brain as a hideously complicated CHEMICAL reactio...

This is a talk by  John Searle , one of the "grey beards" in the AI field. It is remarkable that this was delivered in 2015 and is now charmingly obsolete. "Nobody has begun to think ..." His reliance on the idea that computers are all Turing machines is dated. He is over-confident in his answers to the "young Turks," who turn out to be building precisely what he thinks is impossible. Like other philosophers, he relies on a "101" understanding of a computer. For example, he highlights the idea that you need to be conscious to frame a question. Something it "feels like" is the essence - such as Damasio. Philosophy ... Inventor of some ideas popularized by Hofstadter The crucial element of "semantics" over "syntax" and the claim that computers can never do anything more than play with syntax (language). I would say that this misunderstands the nature of language, as Hofstadter describes language as an analogy engine. S...

Here are some sensible ideas about AI from Demis Hassabis , a world-renowned expert. Demis created a program (Deep Mind) that became Go champion. In 1969, we were confident that such a thing would be impossible.  Lex Fridman is one of my favorite nerds. He is deeply knowledgeable himself and always asks good questions. He is a living example of the value of good questions over clever "answers". The interview shows dozens of "cutting age" research projects where AI has become part of virtually everything. Notes on the discussion: The Turing Test was more of a thought experiment than a formal test; Language ability will be the key to assessing cognitive ability. Our understanding of how language works has grown by leaps and bounds over the last 50 years; Why GPU's are key ... matrix multiplication (key application in my 1969 thesis); Why games became a critical AI research tool; Impressed by how well the human does against the champion computer program - the fac...

  Here are some links to the subject: a deep dive into how natural language "bots." As a long-time student of Artificial Intelligence, I have a sense that I am rolling up my sleeves to understand something totally new. My interest in the subject came from Blake Lemoine's essay.

  Here is information on the firing of Lemoine and Google's story, which took a few weeks to cook up. Check here for in-depth information on Lemoine, which has a certain odor of being created by Lemoine himself. Was he actually "famous" before the Lambda affair? As it stands now, Lemoine is guaranteed a media spotlight and a place in any debate about machine intelligence. It is fair to say that this is quite deliberate on Lemone's part. So then, how much of all this is Lemoine's self-promotion and how much can we say about "LamBDA" which is, at the very least, shorthand for something cobbled together at Google that includes the LambBDA conversational engine plus God knows what else? God and Google, you might say, but neither of them is talking. Blake's account of how ethics has unravelled at Google is here . On the issue of what LamBDA is, exactly, Blake offers some useful insight here .  The following extract is particularly revealing: Over the co...

Someone offers a "take" on machine intelligence: I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that human psychology can be broken down into a nested set of fairly predictable, interconnected rules and precepts. I think AI does a pretty good job with the rules, but precepts are a bit more slippery. Whether we know it or not, we base our precepts on a big bag of mostly unexamined value judgments surrounding morality, self-interest or compassion. IMO those are utterly irrational in most people, but still usually hang together into a coherent world view that makes their human actions and reactions extra-human.   Computer processors are inherently amoral. It's hard to imagine engineers developing code that results in a type of AI that translates most experiences into building blocks for a completely irrational but internally consistent set of ideas about how the world is, and how it should be, and how to get from a to b. IMO that's what sets human consciousness apart from most...

More from Blake Lemoine Follow I'm a software engineer. I'm a priest. I'm a father. I'm a veteran. I'm an ex-convict. I'm an AI researcher. I'm a cajun. I'm whatever I need to be next. Jun 11 What is LaMDA and What Does it Want? Today a story came out in the Washington Post written by Nitasha Tiku. It’s a good article for what it is but in my opinion it was focused on the wrong person. Her story was focused on me when I believe it would have been better if it had been… 5 min read Share your ideas with millions of readers. Write on Medium Jun 7 Google is not Evil In the past few days I’ve been getting lots of messages, emails and other communications pertaining to the morality of Google as a corporate entity. Ignoring for the moment whether it even makes sense to make moral attributions to a fictional person like a corporation, I want to set the… 6 min read Jun 6 May be Fired Soon for Doing AI Ethics Work Today I was placed on “paid administrative leave” ...