This is based on the Great Simplification presentation on the subject with  Daniel Schmachtenberger 00:00 - Conversations and origin of friendship 02:47 - Recap on superorganism and metacrisis 07:21 - Why is AI relevant to the metacrisis 09:30 - History of Intelligence 12:25 - Techno-optimism vs Techno-pessimism 17:55 - Narrow Boundary Focus vs Wide Boundary Focus & Competition 33:39 - Progress realists? 39:02 - Jevons Paradox 40:52 - 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and Nth Order Effects 46:01 - Human Intelligence and AI 52:16 - Intelligence and Modeling 1:04:02 - The Difference Between Wisdom and Intelligence 1:12:41 - Chesterton’s fence 1:13:03 - Progressive and Traditionalist as Dialectics 1:18:07 - Genetics and Intelligence vs Wisdom 1:28:55 - Can we have wisdom with 8 billion humans? 1:30:59 - Plasticity of Humans and Innovation 1:38:29 - Capitalism, an early form of computing 1:42:45 - Did Anyone Invent Capitalism? 1:48:38 - General vs Narrow Artificial Intelligence ...

On Tue, Mar 12, 2019, at 7:30 PM Len Bruton <...> wrote: There seems little doubt that science looks for explanations by seeking out those physical objects within brains that may yield a closer appreciation of how minds function and maybe just where they are to be found!!  Following your very different approach, my thought experiment is to ask whether Earthly minds and whether Earthly consciousness existed 100 million years ago?  Is it then a valid question to ask whether reality existed prior to minds This question can send us spiraling down an infinite regress. There seem to be two ways of stopping this. Either accept the reality of "mind" or accept the reality of "the world". Otherwise, you have a problem of reality being something in the mind, which is itself in reality, or a model of reality and so forth ... Wayne Brown <chillyfinger@gmail.com> to Len Given that we have a mind, it also makes sense if other living things have a mind or someth...

I'm a career computer systems analyst, with a special love for "OOA-object-oriented analysis". OOA is particularly attractive since it comes very close to the way we think in a categorical way. After reading a few books on the economy, especially the " Value of Everything ". Here are some of the key objects in this model: Resources, such as corn, fish, wood, fuel. Each of these resources has its own profile as to how much "work" is required to obtain the resource, how much is available etc. The Market. This turned out to be the most complex thing to specify. How do you model trades between people? This question is at the heart of economic theory, such as, How does money evolve? The Person. Resources are owned and consumed by persons. To make the model work, we'd need thousands of these persons with different "policies" regarding consumption and trade. The environment. This object "owns" resources, but also knows about th...

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Most people shy away from simple math. In fact, publishers demand that no equations, however simply don't appear in popular books. From this perspective, the simple graphs and equations that appear in introductory textbooks appear sophisticated. In particular, these tools have a hard time presenting anything but a super simple, static picture of the world. If you approach the same situation with different tools, a very different picture emerges. Even simple computer simulations can show complex behavior that can't be reduced to equations of any sort. I played around with this idea a bit but abandoned it because it would have involved an unrealistic effort to implement it. However, even while simply drawing up a specification, you can see the kind of things a model could address. Most important is the question of stability or even a stable pattern of oscillation. Model specifications seem t...

(A note to Len) Our mathematical models (or our ability, in general, to predict or "understand" a system) must always be bound by an artificial "carving out" of the application domain of understanding specification of scale - including the applicability of our tools to the scale we are working with recognition of the precision we expect or the precision that is even theoretically possible. This visualizes a "fractal" nature of reality (or our models of reality) up to a point, where models at one scale fail at a different one. In "Road To Reality" Penrose attempted to construct a framework for a smooth transition from one model to another (Relativity to Quantum Mechanics, for example). I'm afraid I remained unconvinced but partly because I'm too lazy or too stupid to follow his arguments in detail. In a hypothetical University curriculum in this field (which still needs to be named), I think that scale, chaos, non-linear systems a...

The project draws an extensive parallel between computer technology, specifically computer programming languages and the open-ended aspect of culture that includes language but also the wider methods, especially those aspects of technology that are used to explain or communicate culture. Humans interact with computers in many other ways, including paying for them and using them to "make money" (computers become actors in the "real economy" with huge impact on the "economy", which is right-wing word for "society").You can't entirely ignore the broad issue of "automation", which is perhaps the topic of most interest to the average reader. Seen from this angle, Part 1 (below) is a primer on the nature of automation, especially "computerization". Most primers on computers ignore the way computers actually "work" in the world and focus on aspects that most people do not need to know (such as CPU's, disks, RAM etc....

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.” As Dennett hints (with typical subtly), there is a lot of "junk philosophy" around the subjects dear to Jaynes' heart. In this post, I'd like to extract one of Jayne's ideas and wipe a bit of "junk" off it to see where it gets me. At the center of Jayne's theory is the "bicameral mind", which is firmly based on the idea that we have a "right brain" and a "left brain" with notably different capabilities, each capable of acting somewhat on their own. The "right brain" is good at seeing the "big picture" and sends its judgments to the left brain, where they are perceived as speech - sometimes the speech of the Gods. As things get historically more complicated, we evolve our present day "inner chatter", no longer attributed to the Gods (if we are sane), b...

In a previous post  I sketched out the importance of being a bit more imaginative when we ask the difficult question, What is the mind like . It's time to abandon the ancient assumptions that I have a little person inside my head  that's the "real me" and somehow, perhaps this little person (the soul) will survive death. It's obviously not like that. There is "nobody home" in the brain, nothing "controlling" it. The "self" is what it feels like to be a brain. That is still a big mystery, but progress nonetheless. Here, I'd like to discuss another aspect of the ancient view. Is there only one "self" running around in my brain? And, while we are at it, is there more to the "self" than this entity that seems to be looking out my eyes? Is there more to "me" than the "me" I feel writing these lines? Mountains of experimental evidence says there is. Lots more. I have always been very interested i...