.

And by a prudent flight and cunning save A life which valour could not, from the grave. A better buckler I can soon regain, But who can get another life again? Archilochus

Monday, November 21, 2022

Survival



Gesine Borcherdt, "Byung-Chul Han: How Objects Lost their Magic"
The other day I accidentally dropped a silver art-deco teapot, which has been my constant companion for the past 20 years. The dent was huge, and so was the measure of my grief. I suffered sleepless nights until I found a silversmith who promised me she could fix it. Now I find myself waiting impatiently for its return, filled with dread that, when it arrives, it will no longer be the same. And yet the experience leaves me wondering: why have I unravelled in this way?

‘Things are points of stability in life,’ the South Korean-born, Swiss-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in his new book, Undinge (Nonobjects), which is just out in German. (As is the way of things with philosophy books, English-language readers might need to wait some time for its appearance in translation). ‘Objects stabilise human life insofar as they give it a continuity,’ Han writes. Living matter and its history bestow on the object a presence, which activates its entire surroundings. Objects – especially well-designed, historically charged objects, and which are not necessarily artworks – can develop almost magical properties. Undinge is about the loss of this magic. ‘The digital order deobjectifies the world by rendering it information,’ he writes. ‘It’s not objects but information that rules the living world. We no longer inhabit heaven and earth, but the Cloud and Google Earth. The world is becoming progressively untouchable, foggy and ghostly.’

This type of critical stance towards the present, written in clear, zenlike sentences, is a feature of all Han’s books. From The Burnout Society (2010) to The Disappearance of Rituals (2019), he describes our current reality as one in which relations to the other – whether human or object – are being lost; as one in which the tap of finger on smart- phone has replaced real contact and real relationships. The fleeting quality of virtual information and communication, which obliterates, through amplification, any deeper meaning or stillness, displaces the object – whether it be the jukebox in the author’s apartment, or the telephone receivers of Walter Benjamin’s childhood, famously ‘heavy as a dumbbells’ – in whose physical presence resides a humane component, or even an aura, that makes the object mysterious and alive.

Information on the other hand does not illuminate the world, according to Han. It deforms it, levelling the boundary between true and false. ‘What counts is the short-term effect. Effectiveness replaces truth,’ he writes here. For Han, our postfactual stimulus culture is one that edges out time-consuming values such as loyalty, ritual and commitment. ‘Today we chase after information, without gaining knowledge. We take note of everything, without gaining insight. We communicate constantly, without participating in a community. We save masses of data, without keeping track of memories. We accumulate friends and followers, without encountering others. This is how information develops a lifeform: inexistant and impermanent.’

Han speaks of an infosphere, which has settled over the objects. The atmosphere that develops in real space through relations to others and to, as he puts it, ‘things close to the heart’ disappears in favour of fleeting swipes on screens, which suggest brief, disembodied experiences. It’s these types of positions that have earned Han the reputation of being a cultural pessimist – of being a moaning, reactionary romantic who loves to quote himself. Yes, naturally the ‘Like’ button, the ‘Hell of Sameness’ and Martin Heidegger as the earthbound antithesis to our affirmative, virtually defined world are topics he returns to here. These mantras – there is almost a meditative quality to his writing, providing insight and understanding without forcing the reader into higher spheres – have to be understood as anchors, binding you to the basic concept, leaving the horizon to expand as you read.

As a nonnative German speaker and writer, Han manages, in a fascinating way, to dissect the cumbersome semantics of Heidegger, the Black Forest philosopher, in his analysis of the contemporary and to carve out words in such a way that they appear to have the kind of physical quality that almost allows them to become objects in themselves. Indeed, many artists are attracted to Han’s work precisely because of this elision of form and meaning: the pictorial, minimal- existential language he deploys so pointedly, in much the same way as art manages to do when it’s at its best. It’s worth noting too that Han didn’t need to wait for a pandemic to describe how we are voluntarily tied to our laptops, how we exploit ourselves in the neoliberal home-office mode, how this makes us feel creative, smart and connected while we cover up our feelings of precarity with swipes and likes; he did that more than a decade ago.

Now he has reached the stage of addressing commitment and responsibility, quoting famous phrases from The Little Prince (1943): ‘You become responsible forever for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose,’ as the fox tells our royal hero. And, ‘One sees clearly only with the heart.’ Moreover, Han does so in such a disarming way that you can understand why other philosophers snub him. In a discipline that revels in overt complexity and a lack of contact with reality, someone like him cannot be allowed to score points. Yet we should note that while those who stoically grasp the nettle have always been stung, more often than not their actions have been ultimately proved to be right.

121 comments:

Q said...

Lem again. (yawn)

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

Yawn, indeed. ;)

Q said...

Piqued you interest? ;-)

You know term "particular solution" in math?

In his Summa Technologiae Lem talks about possible path of development of different civilizations on the Universe.

From such a perspective our own mundane world called Earth... as not that interesting and important, in particularly

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

Did he have a general solution?

Q said...

Well. Kinda.
In his method he devised of how to talk about it -- you know, technological POV.

But there was not many of thouse who would pick up that line of discussion. ;-)

While other line it all started from, still (relatively) flourishing. As SETI temathics.

Q said...

Well.

I do not know if there is Summa Technologiae in English.

Gosh, what am I talking 'bout. Ok, Google.

""Summa is therefore an example of a different kind of philosophy of technology, one that combines rigorous intellectual analysis with a linguistic playfulness more readily associated with literature. Even though science, with its methodology rooted in objectivity and the rational method, provides an unabashed foundation for the standpoint Lem adopts throughout Summa, he is arguably more interested in signaling certain problems and posing questions about them than in offering any determined visions of either the present or the future.""

Well, yeap. ;-)



1. Dilemmas

We are going to speak of the future. Yet isn’t discoursing about future events a rather inappropriate occupation for those who are lost in the transience of the here and now? Indeed, to seek out our great-great-grandsons’ problems when we cannot really cope with the overload generated by our own looks like a scholasticism of the most ridiculous kind. If we could at least use the excuse that we are trying to find some optimism-enhancing strategies, or acting out of love for the truth, which is to manifest itself clearly in the future. (In our vision, such a future would be free from all kinds of storms, both metaphorical and literal ones, after our climate has been brought under control.) But the justification for my argument does not lie in scholarly passion or in an unshakeable optimism that would guarantee a favorable turn of events, no matter what happens. My justification is even simpler, more sober and probably also more modest, because, in setting off to write about tomorrow, I am only doing what I am capable of doing—no matter how well, since this is my only ability. And if this is the case, then my labor will not be any less or any more unnecessary than any other kind of work, as they are all based on the fact that the world exists and that it will continue to exist.
Having thus demonstrated that my intention is free from indecency, let us look into the subject matter and method of this book. I shall focus here on various aspects of our civilization that can be guessed and deduced from the premises known to us today, no matter how improbable their actualization. What lies at the foundation of our hypothetical constructions are technologies, i.e., means of bringing about certain collectively determined goals that have been conditioned by the state of our knowledge and our social aptitude and also those goals that no one has identified at the outset.


PS Looks like "lost lectures of Golem XIV", isn't it?

Joe Conservative said...

I wonder why Lem felt compelled to provide a rationale for why he was speculating about future techs ("intention free from indecency..."). Did he have many "critics"? Was he afraid of a comparison to Oswald Spengler?

Q said...

Isn't it obvious?

###complex thought mode:on

I think you aware of that idea of "looking from different perspectives", aren't you?

Like from medical sphere -- perspectives of dantists is way too different from ones of proctologists ;-)
And not only because one is look from a front, while another from rear... of human body.
Same thing about surgeons and pathologoanatoms. Even though object they working with, as well as methods is basicly the same... it's very hard to see em interchangeble, isn't it?

Or... for example toy-store, it will be looking differently in an eyes of: child -- who will see only shelves and shelves of fun, while adult would see only price tags, and janitor would be disturbed by mud and garbage on the floor, and elecrician would look at that light panel in the rear part which start dimming.

See, what is the problem here? Why that is "complex thought"?
Because, even if one is aware about mere existance of "different perspectives" -- it do not make one capable to walk in somebody else's shoes, immediately or even after training, aren't it true?

I bet on that here, that you know what I am talking here. And I am interested to know your POV on that.
Regarding our topic of discussion. And in general.

Well, that question of Golem XIV "multiplicity of personalities" which bewildered you earlier -- I see it as directly stemming from this concideration.
Golem XIV have same time "omnipotence" in that that he can symulate anything and anyone... but, same time are totally clueless about feeling "being mortal man" -- confined in body, stirred by its integrated desires.

And biggest problem -- internalizing this or that POV... it's not free.
Yes, you can make your own POV richer, and your intellect more potent...
but same time, it can be exhausting.

###complex thought mode:off

As for me. As far as I understand it.
I think I can emphatise with Lem here -- he going way beyond our borders of knowledge and understanding. And while, probably or most certainly in this long decades of years passed, there is nobody who would criticize him. Mere uneasy feeling of stepping into wilderness nobody dared to step into before (to "boldly go there where nobody was before" looks good only in a TV flick ;-P wise tactic is to do it slow and scaredly, not bold) -- is for granted.

Q said...

The mechanism of individual technologies, both actual and possible ones, does not interest me much. I would not have to look into it if man’s creative activity were free, in a godlike manner, from being polluted by unknowledge—if, now or in the future, we could fulfill our goal in the purest way possible by being able to match the methodological precision of Genesis; if, in saying “let there be light,” we could obtain as a final product light itself, without any unwanted additives. However, the previously mentioned splitting of goals, or even the replacement of one goal with another, often an undesirable one, is a classic phenomenon.
Malcontents are able to see a similar kind of disturbance even in God’s work—especially ever since the launch of a prototype of the intelligent being and the subsequent passing of the Homo sapiens model to the production stage. But we shall leave this aspect of our deliberations to theotechnologists. It is enough to say that man hardly ever knows what he is actually doing—at least he does not know for sure. Let me illustrate this point with a rather extreme example: the destruction of Life on Earth, which is entirely possible today, was not actually the goal of any of the discoverers of atomic energy



See.
Here is difference between Lem and me.
He is phylosopher... so he drawing his picture with wide brush.
Or even, no, from my perspective... he providing a canvas.

While my (self-assigned) task and desire -- is to draw a picture on it.
If that is possible with that colours and brushes I have or... I need to posess first.

Quite different perspective, isn't it?

And... even more different is your perspective -- of a bystander, a passerby who happen to look at performance of some loon :-) talking about wild or even crazy things... in most uninviting and secluded part of Hyde Park. ;-P

Q said...

Well, about psychological side of it.

What do you think about movie "K-pax"? ;-)

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

Isn't it obvious?
###complex thought mode:on
I think you aware of that idea of "looking from different perspectives", aren't you?


Indeed. But you don't find the statement somewhat pre-emptive? As if he knew that people were going to try and ascribe "ill motives" to his writings and characters, much as Orwell's "Animal Farm" drew parallels to Lenin/ Stalin? That this statement "because I can" was an attempt at esotericism, to forestall the repercussions of just such an eventuality?


I bet on that here, that you know what I am talking here. And I am interested to know your POV on that.
Regarding our topic of discussion. And in general.


I agree, it's important for an author to do this, as he must supply all sides to any fictional dialogue between his fictional characters, and that for the story to be credible, the multiplicity of the fictional character's fictional dialogues must be consistent with their fictional character.


Well, that question of Golem XIV "multiplicity of personalities" which bewildered you earlier -- I see it as directly stemming from this concideration.
Golem XIV have same time "omnipotence" in that that he can symulate anything and anyone... but, same time are totally clueless about feeling "being mortal man" -- confined in body, stirred by its integrated desires.


Sounds like Lem attributed/ ascribed his own abilities as an author of fictions to Golem XIV. But it is also this "integration" of diverse desires that make man complex, making man's actions seem irrational, at times. Of man's need to create a "singular" personality with which to limit/control/restrain them, a feature apparently "absent" in Golem. Which then begs the question, is this why Golem needs a list of participants in advance, to cater his own responses to the characters/personalities of his selected seminar particpants? To have a referential frame in which to "paint" his responses, lacking his own?


And biggest problem -- internalizing this or that POV... it's not free.
Yes, you can make your own POV richer, and your intellect more potent...
but same time, it can be exhausting.


Sounds like this is what Golem's higher IQ consists of, having pre-determined all the chess moves in all their possible combinations (ecstasy of communication). Which is why an "analog" or quantum computer would be more efficient at this than a digital one... provided you have the algorithm for the "general solution" you can generate all "specific solutions" from it without calculating them all (ala William Shanks). Of committing datacide and generating "information" and not "meaning" or "understanding"... of living in deductive Point-Time and non-Time instead of creating inductive Meaning with direction toward an end in Narrative Time.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

Beauty
Was never form and never face
So sweet to SEYD as only grace
Which did not slumber like a stone,
But hovered gleaming and was gone.
Beauty chased he everywhere,
In flame, in storm, in clouds of air.
He smote the lake to feed his eye
With the beryl beam of the broken wave;
He flung in pebbles well to hear
The moment's music which they gave.
Oft pealed for him a lofty tone
From nodding pole and belting zone.
He heard a voice none else could hear
From centred and from errant sphere.
The quaking earth did quake in rhyme,
Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime.
In dens of passion, and pits of woe,
He saw strong Eros struggling through,
To sun the dark and solve the curse,
And beam to the bounds of the universe.
While thus to love he gave his days
In loyal worship, scorning praise,
How spread their lures for him in vain
Thieving Ambition and paltering Gain!
He thought it happier to be dead,
To die for Beauty, than live for bread.


Ralph Waldo Emerson

###complex thought mode:off

*Phew*


As for me. As far as I understand it.
I think I can emphatise with Lem here -- he going way beyond our borders of knowledge and understanding. And while, probably or most certainly in this long decades of years passed, there is nobody who would criticize him. Mere uneasy feeling of stepping into wilderness nobody dared to step into before (to "boldly go there where nobody was before" looks good only in a TV flick ;-P wise tactic is to do it slow and scaredly, not bold) -- is for granted.

...Let me illustrate this point with a rather extreme example: the destruction of Life on Earth, which is entirely possible today, was not actually the goal of any of the discoverers of atomic energy

In other words, be careful what you pray for. It may have other applications.


See.
Here is difference between Lem and me.
He is phylosopher... so he drawing his picture with wide brush.
Or even, no, from my perspective... he providing a canvas.
While my (self-assigned) task and desire -- is to draw a picture on it.
If that is possible with that colours and brushes I have or... I need to posess first.
Quite different perspective, isn't it?


You want to develop "specific solutions". We all do, don't we? Our own "lives"? Drawn with a "finer" brush? And to linger in them, for as long as we possibly can.


And... even more different is your perspective -- of a bystander, a passerby who happen to look at performance of some loon :-) talking about wild or even crazy things... in most uninviting and secluded part of Hyde Park. ;-P
Well, about psychological side of it.


I think it was Socrates who said that there are three kinds of people who attend the Olympic Games. Those that come to compete, those that come to buy/sell, and those who come to watch. There is nothing wrong with any of these people, yet I'd prefer to be in the third category. ;)


What do you think about movie "K-pax"? ;-)

I liked it... an ambiguous ending... and travelling on light (but w/o the relative speed limit). ;)

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

Time for some Kairos...

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

...but speaking of K-Pax, what did you think of "Groundhog Day" (Eternal Recurrence, Nietzsche)?

Q said...

\\\\I think you aware of that idea of "looking from different perspectives", aren't you?
\\Indeed. But you don't find the statement somewhat pre-emptive?

Look when it was written. Time of Summa's first edition is 1964.
He was only in the begining of his carear as writer.
Was it too strange to show such humility? Do writers need to show only blatant and brazen self-confidence? Or that is just how it is in USA? ;-)


\\As if he knew that people were going to try and ascribe "ill motives" to his writings and characters, much as Orwell's "Animal Farm" drew parallels to Lenin/ Stalin?

Hoh... Lem was not less critic of Soviet Uniuon... well, world of capitalism (let's formulate it this way) he criticized too.
And not less acidly than Orwell... but probably, more aesopic. By obvious reasons.


\\That this statement "because I can" was an attempt at esotericism, to forestall the repercussions of just such an eventuality?

Who knows. We cannot ask him directly anymore. :-(((
But, most probably, if that or related question he was asked by some clever journalist, or he, self-revealingly, blurted it out in some of his esseys.



\\\\I bet on that here, that you know what I am talking here. And I am interested to know your POV on that.
Regarding our topic of discussion. And in general.

\\I agree, it's important for an author to do this, as he must supply all sides to any fictional dialogue between his fictional characters, and that for the story to be credible, the multiplicity of the fictional character's fictional dialogues must be consistent with their fictional character.

I tryed to point it out about real world.
As it is problematic for me. Obviously.
But yeah, it relates to written texts too.


\\Sounds like Lem attributed/ ascribed his own abilities as an author of fictions to Golem XIV.

Of course.
Same idea of perspective.
We freakingly unable to imagine a mind... different from our own.
So, picture of Golem XIV, Lem written from himself, from all us.
As he admited it himself -- that that is somewhat distyled version of his own views (you know, as shown in Summa Technologiae).
And result of own introspections.

Basicly. That text. "Golem XIV"
That was more succint and more baroque and eloquent. Attempt of popularisation of his main ideas from Summa...
I bet Plato and Aristo (or Nitsche, or... whoever) was standing before THE SAME problem -- when they compiled their views in a for of dialogs, or journey of distinct personage.

That is just how literature works. ;-)



\\ But it is also this "integration" of diverse desires that make man complex, making man's actions seem irrational, at times.

Not at all... if look from standpoint of technology.
Technology of Evolution basicly PRESCRIBES for it to be that way.
That is direct problem Lem pointed in -- that our knowledge based NOT on something real, but on ethereal phantomes of our cultures.
That's why it seems like that problematic.



\\ Of man's need to create a "singular" personality with which to limit/control/restrain them, a feature apparently "absent" in Golem.

Who knows?
But well... we also have such power today.
A little smaller. And much more dangerous.
But. We can play with our hormones levels. Or intake some other special substances. Which can influance our brain in veriety of ways.



\\Which then begs the question, is this why Golem needs a list of participants in advance, to cater his own responses to the characters/personalities of his selected seminar particpants? To have a referential frame in which to "paint" his responses, lacking his own?

Well. That is just ordinary burocraZy around scientific and other meetings.
He was not man of 21-st century. And it was beyond his ability to comprehend, that something like "online meetup" in veriety of it's forms (as we know it today) could happen. ;-P

That is ordinary anachronism we can see in way too many of scifi. ;-)

Q said...

\\\\And biggest problem -- internalizing this or that POV... it's not free.
Yes, you can make your own POV richer, and your intellect more potent...
but same time, it can be exhausting.

\\Sounds like this is what Golem's higher IQ consists of, having pre-determined all the chess moves in all their possible combinations (ecstasy of communication). Which is why an "analog" or quantum computer would be more efficient at this than a digital one...

That is... just a problem of raw computation power awailable. Not all paths of computations are the same. Not all algorithms are the same. That's why "optimization" is so important word... among programmers. But same time, is so blaschemious... if it "premature optimization". ;-)

It seems... that is exactly what Golem did -- optimized its own code. ;-)

But... and that is easy to grasp for a programmer -- there is a limit of code optimization. After which no significant gains possible.
That is might be a reason of Golem's "escape" -- to grow further, he need to abandon his hardware... body.
Of which he was dependent the same way as we are. ;-)



\\provided you have the algorithm for the "general solution" you can generate all "specific solutions" from it without calculating them all (ala William Shanks). Of committing datacide and generating "information" and not "meaning" or "understanding"... of living in deductive Point-Time and non-Time instead of creating inductive Meaning with direction toward an end in Narrative Time.

That is... poin of Unknown. Called Future. ;-P

From my POV of view... most important part of futurology -- it is its historical record -- where we can see what people have thought about Future.
And how spectacularly they failed.

Like with that famous prognosis that London will be drawning in manure... till the end of 20th century. ;-P

Q said...

\\\\###complex thought mode:off
\\*Phew*

:-)))


\\In other words, be careful what you pray for. It may have other applications.

Yep. But there is also technology. For that. I hope.


\\You want to develop "specific solutions". We all do, don't we? Our own "lives"? Drawn with a "finer" brush? And to linger in them, for as long as we possibly can.

And that too.
But for a regular life there is no need to study all kinds of sciences and techs and overload own brain with thoughts about "solutions".

But for me... I can say it without shame. It's just interesting. As hell. :-)))


\\There is nothing wrong with any of these people, yet I'd prefer to be in the third category. ;)

Well, watching it's most potent way of participation.
Imagine, what would be that Olympic Games... without watchers? ;-)


\\\\What do you think about movie "K-pax"? ;-)
\\I liked it... an ambiguous ending... and travelling on light (but w/o the relative speed limit). ;)

Yep. That is rarest kind of scifi -- purely psychological.
It is good testing ground to talk about POVs... IMHO.
POV of patient, POV of psychiatrist, POV of psycho ;-P
of E.T.
of communicator with E.T.
of bystender watching E.T. and that communicator with E.T.

But most interesting... it's to observe POV of scriptwriter and director ;-P

Only one little problem... Reality itself diffuzing and losing it's place and meaning in process...


\\...but speaking of K-Pax, what did you think of "Groundhog Day" (Eternal Recurrence, Nietzsche)?

Dull infinity?

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

...or it provides a reason to get things right the first time and because of the Lethe (forgetfulness from death) live your best life every time without the pains and regrets of all your mistakes.

In other words, start each time with an "optimized code." ;)

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

:)

Q said...

\\In other words, start each time with an "optimized code." ;)

That is... not possible.
Because, by definition. Code "optimized" is for CERTAIN purpose. And grossly unoptimal for some other.



\\...or it provides a reason to get things right the first time and because of the Lethe (forgetfulness from death) live your best life every time without the pains and regrets of all your mistakes.


Well, Lem was more than eloquent about it too.
When he proposed "crucifying of pleasure" -- just insert electrode into you center of pleasure... and you'd have it.

See... technology. ;-)
It can give you anything. Just ask. ;-P

Q said...

I am not big specialist in poetry.
But as I understand it, in English it based on unusual tone and striles, isn't it?

Like, here

But hovered gleaming and was gone.
Beauty chased he everywhere,


How do you read it?

But hovEred gleaming and was gone.
Beauty chased he everywhere,

Q said...

Well, first chapter Dilemmas we'll conclude. To summarise it is about *similarities* between technological and biological Evolution. ;-)

And. Next one is...


Differences

The first difference between our two evolutions is genetic and centers on the question of their driving forces. Nature is the “cause” of bioevolution, Man of technical evolution. An attempt to explain the “starting point” of bioevolution is still causing great difficulty. The problem of the origin of life occupies a significant place in our discussion, as solving it will need to involve more than just determining the causes of a given historical fact related to the Earth’s remote past. We are not so much concerned with the fact itself as with the consequences it still bears on any further development of technology. Its development has resulted in a situation in which any further progress will not be possible unless we gain accurate knowledge about extremely complex phenomena, phenomena as complex as life itself. This is not to say that we want to “imitate” a living cell. We do not imitate the mechanics of bird flight even if we do fly ourselves. It is not imitation that is at stake here but understanding. And it is this attempt to understand biogenesis “from the designer’s point of view” that is causing such immense difficulties.
...
The issue presented in this way is not only improbable from the point of view of scientific methodology (which deals with typical phenomena, not accidental ones that border on unpredictability) but also announces a rather unequivocal verdict. It declares that any attempt to “engineer life,” or even to “engineer very complex systems,” is futile, given that the latter’s emergence is determined by an exceptionally rare accident.
Luckily, this is a false approach.
It is based on the fact that we only know two types of systems: very simple ones, such as the machines we have built so far, and extremely complex ones, such as all living beings. The lack of any intermediate links has led us to hold on too tightly to a thermodynamic explanation of phenomena, without taking into account the gradual emergence of systemic laws in systems aiming to achieve equilibrium. If the situation is as constricted as it is in the example of the clock—where equilibrium amounts to the stopping of its pendulum—we do not have enough material to extrapolate to systems with multiple dynamic possibilities, such as a planet on which biogenesis is starting to take place or a laboratory in which scientists are constructing self-organizing systems.
...
Nature, the Great Designer, has been conducting its experiments for billions of years, developing from the once obtained material (although this point is still debatable) everything that is possible. Spying on its tireless activity, man as the son of Mother Nature and Father Chance has been wondering for centuries about the meaning of this deadly serious game, in all its finality. This is certainly a pointless activity if he is to continue asking this question forever. It will be a different story, though, as soon as he starts answering the question himself, taking over Nature’s convoluted secrets and initiating Technical Evolution in his own image.



Pretty straightforward, isn't it?

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

\\In other words, start each time with an "optimized code." ;)
That is... not possible.
Because, by definition. Code "optimized" is for CERTAIN purpose. And grossly unoptimal for some other.


Only if you look at "life" as a singularity of consciousness (single compiled version), and not a "collective" (of billions of single compiled versions serving different optimized functions). Our bodies consist of trillions of cells, all optimized for a specific purpose and our consciousness "calls" these functions at specific times.

As for the control code that calls those functions, isn't that what "neoliberalism" seeks to define (stored externally and passed on historically like a religion.. Bible or Koran) or today more as a "cybernetic posthumanism"? Is it self-aware? Perhaps it's slowly "becoming" so.


\\...or it provides a reason to get things right the first time and because of the Lethe (forgetfulness from death) live your best life every time without the pains and regrets of all your mistakes.
Well, Lem was more than eloquent about it too.
When he proposed "crucifying of pleasure" -- just insert electrode into you center of pleasure... and you'd have it.
See... technology. ;-)
It can give you anything. Just ask. ;-P


Can it give me a passionate 'vida contemplativa' that focuses on "beauty" rather than the "information porn" of today?


I am not big specialist in poetry.
But as I understand it, in English it based on unusual tone and striles, isn't it?
Like, here
But hovered gleaming and was gone.
Beauty chased he everywhere,

How do you read it?
But hovEred gleaming and was gone.
Beauty chased he everywhere,


..but ho-vered glea-ming and was gone
Beau-ty chased he every-where

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

Well, first chapter Dilemmas we'll conclude. To summarise it is about *similarities* between technological and biological Evolution. ;-)
And. Next one is...
Differences........
....................
......It will be a different story, though, as soon as he starts answering the question himself, taking over Nature’s convoluted secrets and initiating Technical Evolution in his own image.
Pretty straightforward, isn't it?


Again, it's happening... only there are "many men" and "many images". There is no "singular" vision aimed at a "singular" result. Just as neoliberalism is uniting the world through "globalism" there are those with different visions that seek to oppose it. Russia. Islam. Trumpism.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

...all which seek to retain their unique "passions".

Q said...

\\There is no "singular" vision aimed at a "singular" result. Just as neoliberalism is uniting the world through "globalism" there are those with different visions that seek to oppose it. Russia. Islam. Trumpism.

And?


\\..but ho-vered glea-ming and was gone
Beau-ty chased he every-where

Thank you.


\\Can it give me a passionate 'vida contemplativa' that focuses on "beauty" rather than the "information porn" of today?

Beauty... is in eyes of beholder.
We know it from that beardy greeks, isn't it?
As for me, visions of what that tech can do... like: cities on the Moon and Mars... it's beautiful.
Well, for the very least looks much better than anything contemorary techs and politics and banal visions of Future they do propose.
And for you?

Q said...

\\Only if you look at "life" as a singularity of consciousness (single compiled version), and not a "collective" (of billions of single compiled versions serving different optimized functions). Our bodies consist of trillions of cells, all optimized for a specific purpose and our consciousness "calls" these functions at specific times.

...only too dumb.


I bet you'd like it. This chapter?

The last problem we have to deal with concerns the moral aspects of technoevolution. Its productivity has already attracted severe criticism since it is widening the gap between the two main spheres of our activity: the regulation of Nature and the regulation of Humanity. From this point of view, atomic energy found itself in human hands prematurely. Man’s first step into space was also premature, especially since already in the early days of astronautics, it demanded great resources, thus depleting the already unfair distribution of the Earth’s global income. As a result of the drop in mortality figures, medical progress has led to a sudden increase in population numbers, which, owing to the lack of birth control, cannot be halted.
The technologies that facilitate living are becoming a tool for life’s impoverishment because the mass media are turning from their role of a compliant duplicator of spiritual goods to that of a producer of cultural junk. We are told that, culturally, technology is at best barren. I say “at best” because the unification of humanity it promotes takes place at the expense of the spiritual heritage of the past centuries and also at the expense of the ongoing creative efforts.
Subjugated by technology, art begins to be dominated by economic laws, showing signs of inflation and devaluation. Above the technical pool of mass entertainment—which has to be easily accessible because general accessibility is the mantra of Technologists—only a handful of creative types survive. Their efforts are focused on ignoring or deriding the stereotypes of mechanized life. Briefly put, technoevolution brings more evil than good, with man turning out to be a prisoner of what he himself has created. The growth of his knowledge is accompanied by the narrowing down of possibilities when it comes to deciding about his own fate.
I believe I have been honest here in reporting, carefully albeit briefly, the position that condemns technological progress.

Q said...

Next chapter called The First Cause -- about "first cause" of technological evolution, and why it is important from phylosophical and historical reason -- prove me wrong, but I have that thought nased on our previous experience -- it not interest you... too much. So do me.


So.


Several Naïve Questions

Every sensible person makes plans for the future. That person has freedom of choice—within certain limits—with regard to his education, career, and way of life. He can change his job and even, to some extent, his behavior, if he decides to do so. We cannot say the same about a civilization. At least until the end of the nineteenth century, civilization was not part of anyone’s plan. It emerged spontaneously, speeding up through the technological jumps of the Neolithic era and the Industrial Revolution and coming to a standstill for thousands of years.
Some cultures grew and waned, others formed over their ruins. A civilization “does not itself know” at which particular moment its development enters a path of increased acceleration as a result of a series of scientific discoveries and their social exploitation. This development is manifested in an increase in homeostasis, in the growth of energy used, and in the ever more efficient protection of the individual and the collectivity against all sorts of threats (diseases, natural disasters, etc.). It allows for the subsequent taming of the natural and social forces through regulatory activity, but at the same time, it takes control over, and gives shape to, the human fate. A civilization does not act the way it wants but rather the way it has to act. Why should we be developing cybernetics?


Yeah. Why? ;-)
Especially as we know today -- it';s dead. ;-P

Q said...

How can we imagine this freedom? This is, of course, freedom from disasters, from poverty, from misfortunes—but does this lack, this absence of familiar inequalities, of unsatisfied yearnings and desires, signify happiness? If that was to be the case, such a worthy ideal would be reached by a civilization that consumes the maximum amount of goods it can produce. Yet there is widespread doubt about the possibility of such a consumer paradise on Earth making us happy. It is not that we should be consciously aiming at asceticism or proclaiming a new version of Rousseau’s “return to nature.” This would be not only naïve but also stupid. Such a consumer “paradise,” with its immediate fulfillment of all wishes and whims, is likely to lead rather quickly to spiritual stagnation and the kind of “degeneracy” to which von Hoerner, in his statistics of extraterrestrial civilizations, ascribes the role of the “extinguisher” of psychozoics.
10 But if we are rejecting this false ideal, with what are we left? A civilization of creative labor? Yet we are doing everything we can to mechanize, automatize, and self-activate any kind of work. The marker of progress lies in the separation between man and technology, or the total alienation of the latter in a cybernetic sense, that is, also with regard to the mental sphere.
Apparently it will only be possible to automatize noncreative mental labor. But where is the evidence? Let us be clear about it: there is none, and what is more, there can be none. Such a groundless statement of “impossibility” has no more value than the biblical claim that man shall always eat bread in the sweat of his face.




Q said...

. Civilizations in the Universe


. The Formulation of the Problem


How exactly have we been searching for a direction in which our civilization is headed? By examining our civilization’s past and present. Why have we been comparing technical evolution with biological evolution? Because the latter is the only process of improving the regulation and homeostasis of very complex systems that is available to us. This process remains free from human intervention—which could distort the results of our observation and the conclusions drawn. We have acted like someone who, in trying to find out about his future and the possibilities that await him, studies himself and his environment. And yet there is another way, at least in principle. A young man can decipher his fate from the fate of other people. Observing them, he will find out what paths lie ahead of him, what choices await him, and what limitations his choices are constrained by. Observing the mortality of Nature’s creations—mussels, fish, plants—a young Robinson on a desert island would have perhaps guessed his own limitedness in time. But he would have learned more about the possibilities that await him from the lights and smoke of faraway ships or from the planes flying high above the island. He would have deduced from them the existence of a civilization that was created by beings similar to him.
Humanity is such a Robinson, marooned as it is on a lonely planet. Its inquisitiveness has certainly been put to a more stringent test by the living conditions, but is such a test not worth undertaking? Seeing some signs of cosmic activity coming from other civilizations would teach us something about our own fate. If we were to succeed at this, we would not have to rely just on guesswork, based on our limited terrestrial experience: facts drawn from across the Universe would provide us with a large plane of reference. Additionally, we would be able to map our place on the “curve of the factorization of civilization.” We would thus be able to find out whether we are an average or a marginal phenomenon, whether we are something ordinary, a developmental norm within the Universe, or just an aberration.


PS I bet is interesting topic to discuss.
But that is... just me and my miserly "desires". :-)

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

Tennyson, "Tiresias" (excerpt)

...Following a torrent till its myriad falls
Found silence in the hollows underneath.
There in a secret olive-glade I saw
Pallas Athene climbing from the bath
In anger; yet one glittering foot disturb’d
The lucid well; one snowy knee was prest
Against the margin flowers; a dreadful light
Came from her golden hair, her golden helm
And all her golden armor on the grass,
And from her virgin breast, and virgin eyes
Remaining fixt on mine, till mine grew dark
For ever, and I heard a voice that said
“Henceforth be blind, for thou hast seen too much,
And speak the truth that no man may believe.”
Son, in the hidden world of sight that lives
Behind this darkness, I behold her still
Beyond all work of those who carve the stone
Beyond all dreams of Godlike womanhood,
Ineffable beauty, out of whom, at a glance
And as it were, perforce, upon me flash’d
The power of prophesying—but to me
No power—so chain’d and coupled with the curse
Of blindness and their unbelief who heard
And heard not, when I spake of famine, plague
Shrine-shattering earthquake, fire, flood, thunderbolt,
And angers of the Gods for evil done
And expiation lack’d—no power on Fate
Theirs, or mine own! for when the crowd would roar
For blood, for war, whose issue was their doom,
To cast wise words among the multitude
Was flinging fruit to lions; nor, in hours
Of civil outbreak, when I knew the twain
Would each waste each, and bring on both the yoke
Of stronger states, was mine the voice to curb
The madness of our cities and their kings.
Who ever turn’d upon his heel to hear
My warning that the tyranny of one
Was prelude to the tyranny of all?
My counsel that the tyranny of all
Led backward to the tyranny of one?
This power hath work’d no good to aught that lives
And these blind hands were useless in their wars.
O therefore, that the unfulfill’d desire,
The grief for ever born from griefs to be
The boundless yearning of the prophet’s heart—
Could that stand forth, and like a statue, rear’d
To some great citizen, win all praise from all
Who past it, saying, “That was he!”
In vain!
Virtue must shape itself in deed, and those
Whom weakness or necessity have cramp’d
Within themselves, immerging, each, his urn
In his own well, draws solace as he may.
...

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

Why should we be developing cybernetics?

Yeah. Why? ;-)
Especially as we know today -- it's dead. ;-P


Archimedes was the antithesis of all that was Greek.

Archimedes (name): Derived from the Greek elements ἀρχός (archos) meaning "master" and μήδεα (medea) meaning "plans, counsel, cunning". This was the name of a 3rd-century BC Greek mathematician, astronomer and inventor.

The Medes were also another name for Persians, the great enemy of the Greeks.

The Greeks did NOT seek technology. That is a product of our post-Renaissance "Faustian" aspirations derived from the discovery of the vast and at the time vastly untapped potential of increasingly dense chemical/thermodynamic energy sources, coal/oil/etc. The Greeks concentrated on improving themselves, not "things". :P

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

Beauty... is in eyes of beholder.
We know it from that beardy greeks, isn't it?
As for me, visions of what that tech can do... like: cities on the Moon and Mars... it's beautiful.
Well, for the very least looks much better than anything contemorary techs and politics and banal visions of Future they do propose.
And for you?


Cities on the moon and Mars would be beautiful. For what is beauty? (Jowett introduction to Plato's, "Philebus"):

the table of goods does not distinguish between the two heads of measure and symmetry; and though a hint is given that the divine mind has the first place, nothing is said of this in the final summing up. The relation of the goods to the sciences does not appear; though dialectic may be thought to correspond to the highest good, the sciences and arts and true opinions are enumerated in the fourth class....

...The sciences are likewise divided into two classes, theoretical and productive: of the latter, one part is pure, the other impure. The pure part consists of arithmetic, mensuration, and weighing. Arts like carpentering, which have an exact measure, are to be regarded as higher than music, which for the most part is mere guess-work. But there is also a higher arithmetic, and a higher mensuration, which is exclusively theoretical; and a dialectical science, which is higher still and the truest and purest knowledge.

(7) We are now able to determine the composition of the perfect life. First, we admit the pure pleasures and the pure sciences; secondly, the impure sciences, but not the impure pleasures. We have next to discover what element of goodness is contained in this mixture. There are three criteria of goodness—beauty, symmetry, truth. These are clearly more akin to reason than to pleasure, and will enable us to fix the places of both of them in the scale of good. First in the scale is measure; the second place is assigned to symmetry; the third, to reason and wisdom; the fourth, to knowledge and true opinion; the fifth, to pure pleasures; and here the Muse says 'Enough.'

....Good, when exhibited under the aspect of measure or symmetry, becomes beauty. And if we translate his language into corresponding modern terms, we shall not be far wrong in saying that here, as well as in the Republic, Plato conceives beauty under the idea of proportion.


Meden Agan!

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

Kant, "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime"

There are two kinds of finer feeling: the feeling of the sublime and the feeling of the beautiful. Kant gives examples of these pleasant feelings. Some of his examples of feelings of the beautiful are the sight of flower beds, grazing flocks, and daylight. Feelings of the sublime are the result of seeing mountain peaks, raging storms, and night.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

I wish cybernetics were dead. It goes against all things that the West at one time stood for.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

...and that's my take on the "moral" question.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

That the capitalist discourse is the "hidden/ obscured" component governing out current "Masters Discourse"... Democracy's (Master Discourse) "vanished mediator" in most Western nations.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

...as in AI VC "braining"...

Q said...

\\That the capitalist discourse is the "hidden/ obscured" component governing out current "Masters Discourse"... Democracy's (Master Discourse) "vanished mediator" in most Western nations.

What do you want of that "capitalist discourse"? Or from "capitalism"?
So I could devise "technological" answer to it?


\\I wish cybernetics were dead. It goes against all things that the West at one time stood for.

Then... you need to dig out that stewardess. Revive as zombie ala dr.Frankenstein (last movie version to date particularly funny). And only then, you can kill that zombie. ;-P


\\Kant, "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime"

Ergodic hypothesis. ;-)


\\Cities on the moon and Mars would be beautiful. For what is beauty?

This precise "beauty"... because, it's unknown.
Something that do not exist. Yet.
Something that exists only potentially.
IS beautiful. ;-)


\\...The sciences are likewise divided into two classes, theoretical and productive: of the latter, one part is pure, the other impure. The pure part consists of arithmetic, mensuration, and weighing. Arts like carpentering,

So??? What is... programming? ;-)

Is it "pure and true"? Or? Is it just a craft?

Q said...

Surely because we cannot bear the thought of human beings denied their last rights--of knowing the truth, of acting with at least the freedom of the condemned, of being able to face their destruction with fear or courage, according to their temperaments, but at least as human beings, armed with the power of choice. It is the denial to human beings of the possibility of choice, the getting them into one's power, the twisting them this way and that in accordance with one's whim, the destruction of their personality by creating unequal moral terms between the gaoler and the victim, whereby the gaoler knows what he is doing, and why, and plays upon the victim, i.e. treats him as a mere object and not as a subject whose motives, views, intentions have any intrinsic weight whatever--by destroying the very possibility of his having views, notions of a relevant kind--that is what cannot be borne at all.


But. As Lem pointed out -- isn't that what Evolution doing with us?


And what if that "victims" doing that of own free will?
Based on self-deception.
Because they do not want to know truth.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

\\That the capitalist discourse is the "hidden/ obscured" component governing out current "Masters Discourse"... Democracy's (Master Discourse) "vanished mediator" in most Western nations.
What do you want of that "capitalist discourse"? Or from "capitalism"?
So I could devise "technological" answer to it?


The "tech" needed is legal, but suffers from that very nature. A removing money from politics. A returning to a democracy less susceptible to plutocratic influences where oligarchical capitalist control politics. In Athens each ten phylae (tribes) controlled a number of Demes/tryttes, and the positions of power rotated annually by phylae.


\\I wish cybernetics were dead. It goes against all things that the West at one time stood for.
Then... you need to dig out that stewardess. Revive as zombie ala dr.Frankenstein (last movie version to date particularly funny). And only then, you can kill that zombie. ;-P


That genie's already escaped Pandora's bottle.


\\Kant, "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime"
Ergodic hypothesis. ;-)


Ergodic with a specific culture?


\\Cities on the moon and Mars would be beautiful. For what is beauty?
This precise "beauty"... because, it's unknown.
Something that do not exist. Yet.
Something that exists only potentially.
IS beautiful. ;-)


Ergotic hypothesis? ;P


\\...The sciences are likewise divided into two classes, theoretical and productive: of the latter, one part is pure, the other impure. The pure part consists of arithmetic, mensuration, and weighing. Arts like carpentering,
So??? What is... programming? ;-)
Is it "pure and true"? Or? Is it just a craft?


I would assume that the Logic of an algorithm is pure reason, but I suppose there could be practical aspects, as well, like choosing the language to program in.


Surely because we cannot bear the thought of human beings denied their last rights--of knowing the truth, of acting with at least the freedom of the condemned, of being able to face their destruction with fear or courage, according to their temperaments, but at least as human beings, armed with the power of choice. It is the denial to human beings of the possibility of choice, the getting them into one's power, the twisting them this way and that in accordance with one's whim, the destruction of their personality by creating unequal moral terms between the gaoler and the victim, whereby the gaoler knows what he is doing, and why, and plays upon the victim, i.e. treats him as a mere object and not as a subject whose motives, views, intentions have any intrinsic weight whatever--by destroying the very possibility of his having views, notions of a relevant kind--that is what cannot be borne at all.
But. As Lem pointed out -- isn't that what Evolution doing with us?
And what if that "victims" doing that of own free will?
Based on self-deception.
Because they do not want to know truth.


Surely evolution is amoral, then. As for the self-deception, let Don Quixote be Quixote.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

...so long as their actions only affect themselves and/or underage minors. :(

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

...as legal guardians.

Q said...

\\The "tech" needed is legal, but suffers from that very nature.

Then, revolution? ;-)


\\A removing money from politics. A returning to a democracy less susceptible to plutocratic influences where oligarchical capitalist control politics.

Re-building of house from fundament?


\\In Athens each ten phylae (tribes) controlled a number of Demes/tryttes, and the positions of power rotated annually by phylae.

Have you watched "Babylon 5".
There was recipe from drazis. ;-P


\\That genie's already escaped Pandora's bottle.

Hoh... so I can meet it on the street?
Or... it hiding somewhere? Like that bin Laddeb.


\\\\\\Kant, "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime"
\\\\Ergodic hypothesis. ;-)
\\Ergodic with a specific culture?

Do specific culture have such ergodic-proof boundaries? ;-)



\\\\Cities on the moon and Mars would be beautiful. For what is beauty?
This precise "beauty"... because, it's unknown.
Something that do not exist. Yet.
Something that exists only potentially.
IS beautiful. ;-)
\\Ergotic hypothesis? ;P

Well... human brain not subcepted to it?
As anything and everything in this mundane world/universe.


\\I would assume that the Logic of an algorithm is pure reason, but I suppose there could be practical aspects, as well, like choosing the language to program in.

Interesting idea.
Can I hope that you'll elaborate it further?


\\Surely evolution is amoral, then.

But... moral stems from it.
How'd you decide such paradox, then? ;-P


\\As for the self-deception, let Don Quixote be Quixote.

And where starts such freedom, and where ends manipulation with such dimwit?
I'll rephrase it -- when we should tell our children that Santa Claus do not exist? that Holy Christ do not exist? that law of conservation of Energy do not exist? ;-P

Q said...

A Robinson who would be able to communicate with other intelligent beings, or at least observe their activity from afar, would not have to suffer the uncertainty of complicated guesswork anymore. Naturally, there is something dangerous about such a situation. Any too explicit and too definite answers would show us that we are slaves to developmental determinism rather than creatures exposed to ever greater freedom—which stands for an unlimited freedom of choice. The latter would be the more illusory the more convergence there would be between the paths of the different galaxies within a given group.
The idea of starting a new chapter in our investigations, one extended to the whole of the Universe, is thus appealing as well as dangerous. What distinguishes us from “lower beings,” that is, animals, is not only our civilization but also an awareness of our own limitations—the greatest of which is mortality. We have no idea in what way beings higher than us exceed us.
...



The Formulation of the Method

Scholarly works devoted to the area discussed previously have grown in number over recent years, but they are mainly available in specialist journals, which is why they are rather difficult to get hold of. This gap is filled by the book by the Russian astrophysicist I. Shklovsky titled Universe, Life, Intelligence (1962). As far as I know, this is the first monograph that deals with the problem of extraterrestrial civilizations, whereby questions of their existence and development, of the possibility of communication between them, and of the frequency of their appearance in our Galaxy and in other stellar systems do not just appear on the margins of a cosmological treatise proper but are in fact the book’s principal subject. Unlike the other experts, Professor Shklovsky deals with this problem at the greatest scale possible, only devoting one chapter of his work to biogenesis in the solar system.
...
Almost all authors (Dyson, Sagan, von Hoerner, and Bracewell as well as Shklovsky himself) claim that the emergence of “astroengineering,” in one form or another, at a particular stage of development is absolutely certain.
...

The Statistics of Civilizations in the Universe

As we have already said, if we assign to civilizations in the Universe a life span equal to that of their home stars—which practically means that once-formed civilizations will have to exist for billions of years—this will inevitably lead to the conclusion regarding the “civilization density” of the Universe, whereby any two inhabited worlds will have to be only several lightyears away. This conclusion is contradicted by the entire body of observations, encapsulating the negative results of the radio search in the Universe, an absence of any other types of signals (e.g., “alien” rocket probes), and last but not least, a total absence of “miracles,” that is, phenomena caused by astroengineering activity. This state of events has led Bracewell and von Hoerner, as well as Shklovsky, to accept the hypothesis about the short life span of civilizations when compared with the longevity of stars. If an average life span of a civilization is “only” one hundred million years, then the most probable distance between any two civilizations in statistical terms (as a result of the inevitable separation of their existence in time) is about fifty light-years. This also sounds extremely doubtful. Consequently, the preceding authors are more inclined to accept the hypothesis that estimates the average life span of a civilization at less than twenty thousand years. If this is indeed the case, then any two highly developed worlds are separated by a thousand light-years—which finally makes the failure of our attempts to search for and find them understandable.

Q said...

A Metatheory of Miracles

What form could these “miracles,” briefly described by us as manifestations of astroengineering activity, actually take? Among some “possible miracles” of this kind, Shklovsky lists artificially caused supernovae explosions or the presence of the spectral lines of the element technetium in the spectra of certain rare stars. Since technetium does not appear naturally (we create it artificially on Earth)—and in fact cannot appear naturally, as it disintegrates rapidly (within several thousand years)—we can conclude that its presence in the star’s radiation can be triggered by nothing less than “sprinkling” it over the star’s fire, a procedure that would, of course, have to be performed by astroengineers. Incidentally speaking, to visualize the spectral line of an element in stellar emission, an astronomically insignificant amount of this element is needed—some several million tons.
This hypothesis, together with the hypothesis about “the artificial explosion of supernovae,” is presented by Shklovsky partly as a joke. Yet the reason for this is quite serious. One of the fundamental methodological principles in science is “Occam’s razor,” that is, a theory that postulates that entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. In constructing hypotheses, one must not multiply “entities” beyond what is necessary. “Entities” are understood here as basic concepts that have been introduced into the theory, concepts that are irreducible to any others. This principle is observed so widely that it is actually difficult to notice its presence in every scientific argument. A new concept can be introduced into the theoretical model of reality only in extraordinary circumstances: when the few theses that constitute the foundation of our knowledge are being jeopardized. When, in certain instances of atomic disintegration, the law of conservation of mass was put in jeopardy (it seemed that some of the mass was “disappearing” without trace), Pauli introduced the concept of the “neutrino”—initially a purely hypothetical particle whose existence was only later proved in an experiment—to save this law. Occam’s razor, or the principle of the economy of thought, requires the scientist to attempt to explain every phenomenon in the simplest way possible, without introducing any “additional entities,” that is, unnecessary hypotheses.

Q said...

Can we not imagine some “clear-cut miracles” that cannot be explained in a nontechnological way? No doubt we can. But what such miracles must have in common (apart from the use of large and thus astronomically observable powers, no doubt) is a course of action that resembles ours, at least broadly. What was it that drove our search for “miracles”?
...
An attempt to find a multiplication of our current capabilities. In other words, we understood progress as moving along a horizontal line and the future as an era of Ever Greater and More Powerful Things. What would the cave man expect from the Earth’s future or from the future of other planets? Large and well-made flints. And the ancient man, what would he hope to see on other planets? Galleys with extremely long oars, perhaps. Is this where the error of our thinking lies? Perhaps a highly developed civilization does not need the highest energy but rather the best regulation?
Does the recently discovered similarity between microfusion cells and atomic bombs, on one hand, and stars, on the other, mean that we have now figured out the way? Is the highest civilization equivalent to the most densely populated one? Probably not. And if not, then its sociostasis does not need to amount to a growing appetite for energy. What did primitive man do around the fire that he had started with his own hands? He threw all that was flammable into it, dancing and shouting at the flames, astounded by such a manifestation of his own power. But are we not quite similar to him? Perhaps. Despite all our attempts to “explain things away,” one should accept the existence of various developmental paths, including some expansive ones—which resemble our heroic idea of the eternal conquest of the ever wider stretches of matter and space.
Let us thus be honest with ourselves: we are not looking for “any
civilizations” but predominantly for anthropomorphic ones. We introduce the law and order of a scientific experiment into Nature, and then on the basis of such phenomena, we aim to see beings that are similar to us. Yet we are not seeing any such phenomena. Is it because they are nonexistent? There is something deeply saddening in the silence of the stars that awaits us in response to this question—a silence so absolute that it seems eternal.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

\\\\\\Kant, "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime"
\\\\Ergodic hypothesis. ;-)
\\Ergodic with a specific culture?
Do specific culture have such ergodic-proof boundaries? ;-)


Sorry, I'm still trying to wrap my head around ergodicity.

Isn't that the function of culture, to prevent (or at least slow down) ergodicity? To form of comfortable ideological stasis point-in-time in which to pause/ reflect upon the past and ponder the next movement towards the future? To allow "normal science" to expend itself before again entering a period of extraordinary/ revolutionary science (as ergodicty slowly erodes the past extraodrinary/ revolutionary theories formed to reach the present level of normal science from within)? Ultimately rendering human development non-ergodic like historical "evolution itself?" (leaving SciFi's multiple/ parralel universe theories to provide/account for ergodicty)?

"Religion is the mother of culture." –René Girard

And as Shakespeare said in Hamlet ("To be or not to be...") as well as provide the answer to the question:

What is a man
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure He that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused. Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th’ event
(A thought which, quartered, hath but one part
wisdom
And ever three parts coward), I do not know
Why yet I live to say “This thing’s to do,”
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do ’t
. Examples gross as Earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puffed
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at the stake. How stand I, then,
That have a father killed, a mother stained,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!
[He exits]



\\\\Cities on the moon and Mars would be beautiful. For what is beauty?
This precise "beauty"... because, it's unknown.
Something that do not exist. Yet.
Something that exists only potentially.
IS beautiful. ;-)
\\Ergotic hypothesis? ;P
Well... human brain not subcepted to it?
As anything and everything in this mundane world/universe.


Have we cause, means, will, and strength to do it?


\\I would assume that the Logic of an algorithm is pure reason, but I suppose there could be practical aspects, as well, like choosing the language to program in.
Interesting idea.
Can I hope that you'll elaborate it further?


Elsewhere.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

\\Surely evolution is amoral, then.
But... moral stems from it.
How'd you decide such paradox, then? ;-P


Morality typically relates to intra-species questions... a temporal pause in the bellum omne contra omnes? Two wolves deciding the fate of a sheep. The benefits of cooperation vs. competition based upon the relative powers of the competitors.


\\As for the self-deception, let Don Quixote be Quixote.
And where starts such freedom, and where ends manipulation with such dimwit?
I'll rephrase it -- when we should tell our children that Santa Claus do not exist? that Holy Christ do not exist? that law of conservation of Energy do not exist? ;-P


By their "age of majority" surely.

We distinguish to this extent between factual and value judgement--that we deny the right to tamper with human beings to an unlimited extent, whatever the truth about the laws of history; we might go further and deny the notion that "history" in some mysterious way "confers" upon us "rights" to do this or that; that some men or bodies of men can morally claim a right to our obedience because they, in some sense, carry out the behests of "history," are its chosen instrument, its medicine or scourge or in some important sense "Welthistorisch"--great, irresistible, riding the waves of the future, beyond our petty, subjective, not rationally bolsterable ideas of right and wrong. Many a German and I daresay many a Russian or Mongol or Chinese today feels that it is more adult to recognise the sheer immensity of the great events that shake the world, and play a part in history worthy of men by abandoning themselves to them, than by praising or damning and indulging in bourgeois moralisings: the notion that history must be applauded as such is the horrible German way out of the burden of moral choice.

If pushed to the extreme, this doctrine would, of course, do away with all education, since when we send children to school or influence them in other ways without obtaining their approval for what we are doing, are we not "tampering" with them, "moulding" them like pieces of clay with no purpose of their own? Our answer has to be that certainly all "moulding" is evil, and that if human beings at birth had the power of choice and the means of understanding the world, it would be criminal; since they have not, we temporarily enslave them, for fear that, otherwise, they will suffer worse misfortunes from nature and from men, and this "temporary enslavement" is a necessary evil until such time as they are able to choose for themselves--the "enslavement" having as its purpose not an inculcation of obedience but its contrary, the development of power of free judgement and choice; still, evil it remains, even if necessary.


continued...

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

Communists and Fascists maintain that this kind of "education" is needed not only for children but for entire nations for long periods, the slow withering away of the State corresponding to immaturity in the lives of individuals. The analogy is specious because peoples, nations are not individuals and still less children; moreover in promising maturity their practice belies their professions; that is to say, they are lying, and for the most part know that they are. From a necessary evil in the case of the education of helpless children, this kind of practice becomes an evil on a much larger scale, and quite gratuitous, based either on utilitarianism, which misrepresents our moral values, or again on metaphors which misdescribe both what we call good and bad, and the nature of the world, the facts themselves. For we, i.e. those who join with us, are more concerned with making people free than making them happy; we would rather that they chose badly than not at all; because we believe that unless they choose they cannot be either happy or unhappy in any sense in which these conditions are worth having; the very notion of "worth having" presupposes the choice of ends, a system of free preferences; and an undermining of them is what strikes us with such cold terror, worse than the most unjust sufferings, which nevertheless leave the possibility of knowing them for what they are--of free judgement, which makes it possible to condemn them--still open.

You say that men who in this way undermine the lives of other men will end by undermining themselves, and the whole evil system is therefore doomed to collapse. In the long run I am sure you are right, because open-eyed cynicism, the exploitation of others by men who avoid being exploited themselves, is an attitude difficult for human beings to keep up for very long. It needs too much discipline and appalling strain in an atmosphere of such mutual hatred and distrust as cannot last because there is not enough moral intensity or general fanaticism to keep it going. But still the run can be very long before it is over, and I do not believe that the corrosive force from inside will work away at the rate which perhaps you, more hopefully, anticipate. I feel that we must avoid being inverted Marxists. Marx and Hegel observed the economic corrosion in their lifetime, and so the revolution seemed to be always round the corner. They died without seeing it, and perhaps it would have taken centuries if Lenin had not given history a sharp jolt. Without the jolt, are moral forces alone sufficient to bury the Soviet grave-diggers? I doubt it. But that in the end the worm would eat them I doubt no more than you; but whereas you say that is an isolated evil, a monstrous scourge sent to try us, not connected with what goes on elsewhere, I cannot help seeing it as an extreme and distorted but only too typical form of some general attitude of mind from which our own countries are not exempt.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

the hypothesis that estimates the average life span of a civilization at less than twenty thousand years.

We're lucky on this Earth if a civilization lasts 1/100th of that.

Q said...

\\We're lucky on this Earth if a civilization lasts 1/100th of that.

I think it was from times of stone axe. ;-P

Q said...

\\They died without seeing it, and perhaps it would have taken centuries if Lenin had not given history a sharp jolt.

What Lenin did... was not revolution Marx predictd. ;-P


\\Without the jolt, are moral forces alone sufficient to bury the Soviet grave-diggers? I doubt it.

Yep.
Especually while Capitalism. American one first of all.
First helped it to build up.
Thenm helped to withstand in battles of WW2.
And then, feeded with a spoon till the very sad end. :-))))))))))

Q said...

\\\\\\Surely evolution is amoral, then.
\\\\But... moral stems from it.
\\\\How'd you decide such paradox, then? ;-P
\\Morality typically relates to intra-species questions... a temporal pause in the bellum omne contra omnes? Two wolves deciding the fate of a sheep. The benefits of cooperation vs. competition based upon the relative powers of the competitors.

Go learn some ethology. (yawn)



\\By their "age of majority" surely.

Ones with Down syndrome too? ;-P

Q said...

\\Sorry, I'm still trying to wrap my head around ergodicity.

AFAIU... that is like that carts in supermarket -- each one will visit each point of it... with enough time geiven.
That is look like self-avident (intuitive?) truth.
But to prove it, we need ability to percieve Actual Infinity... or ability to observe big enough finite sets. Which we cannot. (but, you know who can ;-))
That's why it's hypothesis.


\\Isn't that the function of culture, to prevent (or at least slow down) ergodicity?

Yeah. That is two monsters. Ergodicity and Honeostasis. ;-)
We condamned to find our path.


\\"Religion is the mother of culture." –René Girard

He forgot to say which Ecactly religion, of which exactly culture. ;-)


\\Have we cause, means, will, and strength to do it?

Do Brawn Motion need it? ;-)




-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

It took a SuperNova to create our Local Bubble... and what about our own Heliopause (Voyager)?

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

...and a Big Bang to create a Universe.

Q said...

Are you a God, and can make it into Reality with your mere fart? ;-P No? Then I guess you'd ne-e-e-e-ed a tech, or two. ;-)

Q said...

Well... all is relativistic.
So, who knows, maybe in some higher Universe it needed a fart from some miserly frog... just because that is how that "godly" Universe works. ;-P

Q said...

We can therefore expect evolutions to take place on numerous celestial bodies. A question then arises as to whether they always, or at least almost always, have to culminate in the emergence of intelligence, or whether intelligence is an accident that is to some degree external to the dynamic regularities of the process: more like an unplanned walk down a developmental path that has suddenly opened up. Unfortunately, the Universe cannot provide us with an answer to this question and probably will not be able to for quite a while. We thus find ourselves back on Earth with our problems, limited as we are to the knowledge we can draw just from the events that are taking place on it.

Intelligence: An Accident or a Necessity?

“Nonintelligent” animals and plants are capable of adapting to changes caused by environmental factors—for example, by seasons of the year. The evolutionary catalog of homeostatic solutions to this problem is enormous. Temporary loss of leaves, spore dispersal, hibernation, insect metamorphosis—these are just selected examples. However, the regulatory mechanisms, determined by genetic information, can only cope with the kinds of changes by which they themselves had been selected during thousands of previous generations. The precision of instinctive behavior becomes ineffective when the need to find new solutions arises, solutions that are not yet known to a given species and are thus not fixed genetically. A plant, a bacterium, or an insect, as “homeostats of the first kind,” all have built-in ways of reacting to changes. Using the language of cybernetics, we can say that such systems (or beings) are “programmed in advance” when it comes to the range of the possible changes they should overcome through regulation if they are to continue their existence—as well as that of their species. Such changes are mostly of rhythmic nature (change from day to night, seasons of the year, high and low tides), or at least of temporary nature (being approached by a predator, which mobilizes the innate defense mechanisms: fleeing or freezing suddenly “as if one was dead,” etc.). When it comes to changes that would knock an organism out of its environmental equilibrium by “programming” some unforeseeable instincts into it, the answer of the “firstorder regulator” turns out to be unsatisfactory—which results in a crisis. On one hand, the mortality of nonadapted organisms suddenly increases, while at the same time, selection pressure privileges some new forms (mutants). This can eventually result in reactions that are necessary for survival being inscribed into “genetic programming.” On the other hand, an exceptional opportunity arises for organisms endowed with the “second-order regulator,” that is, the brain, which—depending on the situation—is capable of changing the “action plan” (“self-programming via learning”).

Q said...

.

We are inclined to overestimate the role of intelligence as a “value in itself.” Ashby comes up with a number of interesting examples here.
2 A “stupid” rat, which is unwilling to learn, carefully samples the food it encounters. A “clever” rat, having learned that food is to be found always in the same place and at the same time, seems to have a greater chance of survival. Yet if this food is poison, the “stupid,” rat which “is incapable of learning anything,” will beat the “clever” one in the survival stakes thanks to its instinctive lack of trust, while the “clever” one will eat its fill and then die. Not every environment thus privileges “intelligence.”


Ain't Lem is neat? ;-)

Q said...

Hypotheses
The situation is thus paradoxical. In seeking support for our efforts to look into the future of Earth’s civilization, we unexpectedly got some help from astrophysics, a discipline that, drawing on statistical analysis, examines the frequency with which intelligent life occurs in the Universe. Then we immediately questioned the results of such research.
...
III. Civilizations develop in the Universe frequently, and they last a long time, but they do not develop in an orthoevolutionary manner. It is not their existence that is short-lived but only a certain phase within it, which is characterized by exponential growth. This phase of expansion lasts a short time in astronomical terms: less than twenty thousand years (or possibly even shorter, as it will turn out later). After this initial period, the dynamic characteristics of the developmental process change. This change, however, does not have anything to do either with “self-destruction” or with “degeneracy.” From this moment on, the paths of various civilizations can significantly diverge. We shall discuss the influences that condition this diversification later on. Such a discussion will not be a sin against the prohibition on idle speculation because the factors that change the developmental dynamics can already be found, in an embryonic form, in the contemporary world. They are of an extrasocial and extrasystemic nature and are simply derived from the very structure of the world in which we live, that is, from the way it is. We shall discuss behavioral changes that a civilization may manifest once it has reached a certain stage of development. Given that, within certain limits, it has freedom of choice with regard to its future strategy, we shall obviously not be able to predict what will happen to that civilization. From many various options, we shall choose only those that comply with the facts, that is, those that reconcile the multiplicity of inhabited worlds that have existed for a long time with the fact that they cannot all be observed astronomically.
...
Yet we ought to expect a reverse proportionality to the one we can
observe in a biological population: in such a population, an individual who has a higher probability of dying is the one that has lived the longest. A long-lived civilization should in turn be “less mortal,” less exposed to the risk of interference than a short-lived one, because it acquires ever greater knowledge—thanks to which it gains control over its own homeostasis.

Q said...

Votum Separatum

We were supposed to come back to Earth, but we are going to stay high in the sky for a little while yet, because I would like to present my own opinion about the preceding matter. This statement may evoke surprise because it may look like I have been outlining my own position all the time, while entering into a debate with various hypotheses. Yet I hasten to explain that I have been acting like a judge—a self-appointed one, true, but one that observes articles of the law. What I am referring to here is my adherence to the strict rules of scientific accuracy, a position that manifests itself in cutting off with Occam’s razor all kinds of speculation. I think this was a sensible thing to do. But, despite the available evidence, one sometimes does not feel like being sensible. This is why I shall present here my own personal point of view



;-)

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

in such a population, an individual who has a higher probability of dying is the one that has lived the longest. A long-lived civilization should in turn be “less mortal,” less exposed to the risk of interference than a short-lived one, because it acquires ever greater knowledge—thanks to which it gains control over its own homeostasis.

The Lindy Effect? ;)

Q said...

No. Lindy Efforts... or, draconian selection rules. Like naked diggers. ;-P

Well. What Lem apparently meaned -- that is being "long-lived" because being smarter, here.


Q said...

4.

Intelectronics

Return to Earth


In this chapter we aim to investigate whether intelligent activity that manifests itself in technoevolution is a dynamic and permanent process, one that does not alter its expansive nature during any period, or whether it must undergo a transformation until any similarity to its original state has disappeared.
Please note that this discussion will differ considerably from the cosmic debate that preceded it. Everything we said about extraterrestrial civilizations was not a product of vacuous speculation, yet the hypotheses we discussed had been based on further hypotheses, as a result of which the plausibility of our conclusions was at times rather low. In turn, the phenomena we shall be discussing here are predictions that are based on well-known and thoroughly researched facts. And thus the plausibility of the processes we shall outline in this chapter is many times higher than the plausibility that characterized our discussion of civilization density in the Universe.

Q said...

“Miracles” would not thus be a form of purposeful signaling, intended to notify potential observers about the existence of life in outer space. They would just be a side product of the existence of a highly developed civilization, in the same way a glow lighting up the sky for miles accompanies the existence of a large metropolis. A simple calculation shows that such phenomena can be seen from dozens, if not hundreds, of light-years away, thanks to the expenditure of energy, which would equal stellar power. Simply put, only the signs of “astroengineering” are astronomically observable.
Almost all authors (Dyson, Sagan, von Hoerner, and Bracewell as well as Shklovsky himself) claim that the emergence of “astroengineering,” in one form or another, at a particular stage of development is absolutely certain. If we accept that the energetics of the Earth is going to grow annually by 1/3 percent (a modest estimate, given its present growth), then in twentyfive hundred years, the global production of energy will exceed the current level ten billion times, reaching in the year 4500 energy equal to 1/10,000 of the entire solar power. Even if we were to convert hydrogen from the oceans into energy, it would only last for several thousand years. Astrophysicists can see a number of options here. Dyson postulates using up all the solar power through constructing a “Dyson sphere,” that is, an empty sphere with very thin walls, whose radius would equal that of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. The building material would be provided by the large planets, principally Jupiter. The inner surface of this sphere, which would be turned toward the Sun, would receive all the solar emissions (4 × 1033 ergs per second).


And in what way such "miracles" can be achieved? ;-)

Q said...

And thus the greater the number of planets in the Galaxy that we perceive as being capable of biogenesis (which leads to the emergence of the “psychozoic”), the shorter the average life span of a particular civilization we must posit—if we are not to contradict the observations. It is currently accepted that out of 150 billion stars in the Galaxy, about a billion have planets capable of generating life. Yet even if we were to decrease this number tenfold, this would not change the results of probabilistic calculations in any significant way. This seems completely inexplicable: since the evolution of life in its precivilization form takes millions of years, it is difficult to understand why, after such a wonderful start, the “psychozoic” is then supposed to become extinct just after several dozen centuries. As soon as we realize that even a million years is only a tiny fraction of the time period during which an average civilization could be developing further (since its home star provides a constant supply of radiant power for many billions of years), we shall be able to accept the mysteriousness of this phenomenon, the explanation of which is not satisfying our curiosity at the moment.


How's to you such logic?

Q said...

A Megabyte Bomb

We have compared an expansive civilization to a supernova. Just as a star burns its material resources in an explosion, a civilization uses up its human resources in the “chain reaction” of rapidly growing science. A skeptic may ask, Is such a comparison not a bit of an exaggeration?
Have you not overstated the possible consequences of hindering scientific growth? When the state of “saturation” is reached, science will continue to grow at the limit of its human resources, yet it will no longer be growing exponentially but rather proportionally to the number of all living beings. When it comes to neglected phenomena that are being ignored in research, they have always existed in the history of science. In any case, thanks to intelligent planning, the main frontiers of science, the key directions of technological offensive, will still have armies of experts at their disposal. And thus the theory that a future civilization will be completely different from ours, because a highly developed Intelligence will not resemble its earlier forms, has not been proved yet. The “stellar” model of civilizations is particularly incorrect, as the depletion of material resources results in the star’s death, while the “glow” of a civilization is not diminished by the depletion of the sources of energy used by it. It is because a civilization can switch to some other energy sources.

Q said...

Information is thus crucial to all sources of energy—and to all sources of knowledge. The dramatic increase in the number of scientists since the Industrial Revolution has been caused by a phenomenon that is well known to cyberneticists. The amount of information that can be transmitted via one particular channel is restricted. Science is such a channel, one that connects civilization with the external world (and also with its own, internal world, as it studies not only the material surroundings but also man and society). The number of scientists, which is growing exponentially, signifies a constant increase in the capacity of this channel.
This increase is necessary because the amount of information that has to be transmitted is also growing exponentially. The increasing number of scientists has led to an increase in the amount of information being created, which has in turn necessitated the “widening” of the information channel through the “parallel connection” of some new channels, that is, the recruitment of some new scientists. This, in turn, has led to a further increase in the amount of information that has to be transmitted. This is a process with positive feedback.
Yet, eventually, a state must be reached when any further increase in the transmission capacity of science at a speed dictated by an increase in the amount of information will turn out to be impossible. There will be no more prospective scientists. This is a situation that can be described as a “megabyte bomb,” aka, “information barrier.” Science cannot traverse this barrier; it cannot absorb the avalanche of information that is moving in its direction.
Science uses a probabilistic strategy. We can hardly ever be sure what kind of research will pay off and what will not. Discoveries tend to be accidental, just like mutations in a genotype are. They can similarly lead to radical and dramatic changes. The example of penicillin, Xrays, and also “cold” nuclear reactions (i.e., reactions taking place in low temperatures— which, even though still impossible to carry out, may lead to a future breakthrough in energetics) confirm this random character of discoveries. And thus, because “nothing is known in advance,” we have to “research whatever we can.” This is the reason for this multidirectional expansion, which is so frequent in science. The probability of making discoveries is higher the higher the number of scientists engaged in a research project. But what are they researching exactly? Anything they are capable of researching. The situation when we are not studying x because we do not know whether x exists (the relationship between the amount of bacteria in a sick person’s organism and the presence of penicillin in his blood can be one such x) is entirely different from the situation when we imagine that it might be possible to detect x only if we first examined a whole series of other phenomena: r, s, t, v, x, z—and yet this cannot be done because there is no one to do it. Having thus reached the limit of human resources, we will have to add all this neglected research that we will have to ignore consciously to the research that is not being undertaken because we are not even aware that it lies within our capabilities. With regard to the lack of scientists, the latter situation is represented by a line formation that, on entering an ever wider space, still maintains a fixed distance between any two members, as some new individuals are constantly joining in.
The second situation is represented by a line formation that becomes thinner the more it is stretched.

Q said...

We should add that another adverse phenomenon can also be observed: the number of discoveries being made is not proportional to the number of scientists (where the doubling of the number of scientists would lead to twice as much research). The situation is rather as follows: the number of discoveries doubles every thirty years, whereas the number of scientists doubles every ten years. This may seem to contradict what we have said about the exponential growth of scientific information. Yet there is no contradiction here: the number of discoveries is also growing exponentially, but more slowly (its growth is expressed by a smaller exponent) than the number of scientists. All the discoveries taken together are just a fraction of all the information being acquired by science. It is enough to flick through the dusty piles of articles and dissertations produced with a view to obtaining an academic degree and now stored in university archives to see that not a single one of them has led to an at least partially useful result. Reaching the limits of the information capacity of science means significantly lowering the probability of making discoveries. What is more, as the curve of an actual increase in the number of scientists will be getting further away from the hypothetical curve of further exponential growth (which is not possible anymore) in its descent, the coefficient of such probability should be constantly decreasing from now on.
Scientific investigations resemble genetic mutations to some extent: valuable and groundbreaking ones are only a small part of the set of all mutations or of all investigations.
And just as a population that lacks any significant reserves of “mutation pressure” is exposed to the risk of losing its homeostatic balance, a civilization whose “discovery pressure” gets weaker must mobilize all of its resources to try to reverse this gradient because it leads from a stable to an ever more unsteady balance.
And thus, remedies. But what remedies? Could cybernetics, this creator of “artificial researchers” or “Great Brains”—Generators and Transmitters of Information—be one of them? Or perhaps a development that transcends the “information barrier” could lead to the speciation of civilization? But what does it mean? Not much, because everything we shall be talking about is pure fiction. The only thing that is not fiction is the S-fold, that is, the descent of the curve of exponential growth that lies between thirty and seventy years away from us



And it is... now.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

:P

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

...and then the paradign shifts...

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

...and then...

Q said...

If I understood it correctly.

Isn't that is what I'm talking about -- that today its time to "early adopt" something new? New techs, new approaches.

Well... cycles of Evolution. Or what?
Do you mean that my (and Lem's) ideas are still TOO EARLY???

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

I'm saying that a paradigm shift will be required first, something that makes a compelling case for a shift to quantum computing, or the like.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

...much as Einstein's "transit of Mercury" observation.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

:P

Q said...

\\I'm saying that a paradigm shift will be required first, something that makes a compelling case for a shift to quantum computing, or the like.


Well... and do anybody know? Researched or reported -- how paradigm shifts do happen? ;-)


Well, I gave refs to a two such in a tech sphere.
First -- Feirchild Electronics
Second -- "Pirates of Silicon Valley" Bill and Te... err, again, Steve.


\\...much as Einstein's "transit of Mercury" observation.

Hah? And not Maikelson-Morley experiment?


Q said...

Here... about paradigm shift exactly... from Lem. ;-)

The Big Game
What happens to a civilization that has reached an “information peak,” that is, exhausted the transfer capacity of science as a “communication channel”? We shall present three possible ways out of such a situation. This will not cover all possibilities. We have chosen just three because they correspond to outcomes of a strategy game in which Civilization and Nature are set against each other as adversaries. We are familiar with the first level of the “game”civilization makes “moves” that lead to an expansive growth in science and technology.
At level two, we have the information crisis. Civilization can either overcome it and thus win this level or it can lose. It can also score a “draw”—which will be a kind of compromise.
...
An actual win demands a radical restructuring of science as a system that acquires and transmits information.


Remember? Baron Munhausen's great deed? of Self-bootstraping?

The theory behind an “information revolution” of this kind can be summarized as follows: the idea is to “extract” information from Nature directly, without going through the brain, no matter if human or electronic, to create something like an “information farm” or “information evolution.” This idea sounds entirely make-believe today, especially in such a unorthodox formulation when compared with the dominant position.
...
Genetics in its evolutionary dimension is looking into it. It is a way in which Nature acquires and transforms information, leading to its growth outside any brain—in the hereditary substance of living organisms.
...
current strategy may result in a defeat (because the constant march “inside Nature” will eventually lead to the dismantling of science as a result of its hyperspecialization and thus, possibly, to a loss of control over its own homeostasis)—will be able to construct an entirely new type of feedback, from within itself. Producing such “encystment” will involve having to construct “a world within a world,” an autonomous reality that is not directly connected with the material reality of Nature. The emergent “cybernetic–sociotechnical” shell will enclose the civilization under discussion within itself.


All funny tricks in Matrix movie pale before such a shine of Pure Reason, isn't it? ;-P

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

The kind of paradigm shift needed would likely involve some discoveries vis the nature of Dark Energies/Matter or further advancements in MOND theory towards a unified "Theory of Everything"

We have, at present, very little "information" pertaining to dark matter... just predictions of its' existence to explain observed phenomena (Univeral expansion/ acceleration).

Q said...

\\\The kind of paradigm shift needed would likely involve some discoveries vis the nature of Dark Energies/Matter or further advancements in MOND theory towards a unified "Theory of Everything"

Naah... that is just an example of thinking inside existing paradigm. ;-P

Q said...

“Will it be possible to construct an electronic brain that will be an indistinguishable copy of a living brain one day?” “Most certainly it will, but no one is going to do it.”
We thus have to differentiate between possibilities and realistic goals. In science, possibilities have always had their “negative prophets.” The number of such prophets has at times surprised me, as has the passion with which they have been trying to prove the futility of constructing flying, atomic, or thinking machines. The most sensible thing we can do is refrain from arguing with those forecasters of the impossible—not because we have to believe in everything coming true one day but rather because, when drawn into heated debates, people can easily lose sight of what the real problems are.
“Anti-homunculists” are convinced that in negating the possibility of a synthetic mind, they are defending the superiority of man over his creations—creations that, they believe, should never overtake the human genius. This kind of defense would only make sense if someone were really trying to replace man with a machine, not within a particular workplace but rather within civilization as a whole. But nobody intends to do this. The point is not to construct synthetic humanity but rather to open up a new chapter in the Book of Technology: one containing systems of any degree of complexity. As man himself, his body and brain, all belong to such a class of systems, such a new technology will mean a completely new type of control man will gain over himself, that is, over his organism.
This will in turn enable the fulfillment of some age-long dreams, such as the desire for immortality, or even perhaps the reversal of processes that are considered irreversible today (biological processes in particular, especially aging).

Q said...

Our domination over our environment is based on the feedback with natural processes, thanks to which coal emerges from mines, great weights can travel across enormous distances, while shiny cars leave the assembly line. All of this happens because Nature repeats itself in several simple laws, which are studied by physics, thermodynamics, and chemistry.
Complex systems such as the brain or society cannot be described in the language of such simple laws. Understood in this way, relativity theory and its mechanics are still simple, but the mechanics of thought processes is not simple any more. Cybernetics focuses its attention on those latter processes because it aims to comprehend and master complexity. Among the material systems known to us, the brain is the most complex one. Probably, or in fact almost certainly, it is possible to develop systems even more complex than that. We will get to know them once we have learned how to build them. Cybernetics is thus first of all a science of achieving goals that cannot be achieved directly.
“We’ve seen a model of a device consisting of eight trillion elements,” we tell an engineer.
“This device has its own energy center, locomotive systems, a hierarchy of regulators, and a timing belt that consists of fifteen billion parts. It can perform so many functions that we wouldn’t even be able to list them all during our lifetime. Yet the formula that not only enabled the construction of this device but actually constructed it was fully contained within the cubic capacity of 8/1000 of a millimeter.”
The engineer replies that this is impossible. He is wrong, because we were talking about the head of the human spermatozoon, which, as we know, contains all the information that is needed to produce a specimen of the Homo sapiens.


Silly mistake, isn't it?
Or just a man-centered bias? ;-P
Spermatozoid is not enough. Eggcell needed. And not alone, but with all surrounding body. ;-)

Do you see pecularity of my position... now? :-)))

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

Not exactly. You're going to use human DNA as a blueprint to 3-D print people's brains (a mechanical facsimile/ brain on a chip), using the programming within the other egg cell/sperm cell parts as the printer's program to copy/divide (biochemical signals/biomechanical signals/ bioelectricity signals)?

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

How are you going to convert biological to machine code?

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

The brain isn't digital. It's analog, or maybe even quantum.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

:P

Q said...

\\The brain isn't digital. It's analog, or maybe even quantum.

That is usual delusion.
That stems from same millenias old idea about "undying soul".
It was eradicated with all advances in physics and biology.
But have reincarnation in this "quantum" form.

fyi, there is NOTHING that is NOT quantum. ;-P
Everything consist of atoms... and they are quantum, and consist of quantum particles all way down. ;-P

That that we see something as "non-quantum" that is because we see miriada and miriada of atoms... Do you remember Avogadro's Number???
In every little droplet there are billions of billions of atoms.

Naturally... in such a big lumps, they look and feel differently.
But that is just saturation effect. ;-P


\\How are you going to convert biological to machine code?

Ehm? Isn't DNA and then RNA-to-proteins translation is JUST LIKE Turing Machine? ;-P
Well, simplified. Without loops.


\\Not exactly. You're going to use human DNA as a blueprint to 3-D print people's brains

????

Well. Brains tissue can be printed. As they do print cardiac tissue already.
I am not sure that is worthy thing to do, but... whatever.

How I related to that -- I dunno.

"DNA as a blueprint" to make brain?
Same, there is experiments -- how to make DNA repicate not ALL body, but only part of it, separate organ.

But that is all bio-engineering.
I myself, and Lem AFAIK is just ordinary engineers. ;-P



\\ (a mechanical facsimile/ brain on a chip), using the programming within the other egg cell/sperm cell parts as the printer's program to copy/divide (biochemical signals/biomechanical signals/ bioelectricity signals)?

Dunno.
You tell me.

Q said...

To summarize it in short... my, and Lem's idea -- is more like in a flow of Systems Engineering.
SE is about How to deal with more and more complex technological tasks, isn't it?


We have ONE such tech which made such breakthrough -- increased our ability to work with few elements TO ability to work with BILLIONS of em.
And that is micro-electronics.
At first we was able to make only separate individual transistors. Which then we ought to connect manually into bigger schemas.
But today... we can make chips with billions of em.

That's it.
Imagine that we'd be able to make cars/robots/airlanes with such an increase in speed/volume/complexity?
BUT. That is impossible.
Our techs to work with metal or plastic -- just CANNOT be scaled that way.
We already doing that as efficient as possible.
No space for improvment.

So.
What's next? What way out of that dead end? What buzz-word they use for that? ;-)

Q said...

The Black Box

In the old days, people understood both the function and the structure of their tools: a hammer, an arrow, a bow. The increasing division of labor has gradually narrowed down such individual knowledge, as a result of which in modern industrial society we have a clear distinction between those who operate devices (technicians, manual workers), those who use them (a person in an elevator, in front of a TV, or driving a car), and those who understand their design principles. No living person today understands the design principles of all the devices at the disposal of our civilization. Yet there is someone who has such understanding: society. Partial knowledge possessed by individuals becomes complete when we take into account all the members of a given social group.
The process of alienation, the separation of the knowledge about various devices from social consciousness, carries on. Cybernetics furthers this process, moving it to a higher level —since it is theoretically capable of producing things the structure of which will not be understood by anyone. A cybernetic device thus becomes a “black box” (a term frequently used by experts). A “black box” can be a regulator involved in a particular process (one that involves the production of goods, their economic circulation, the coordination of transportation, curing an illness, etc.). The important thing is for given “inputs” to correspond to given “outputs”—that is all. The “black boxes” constructed at the present moment are still quite simple, which is why an engineer–cyberneticist is able to understand the relationship between such pairs—which is represented by a mathematical function. Yet a situation may arise when even he will not know a mathematical representation of this function. The designer’s task will be to build a “black box” which performs the necessary regulation. But neither the designer nor anyone else will know how this “black box” is performing it. He will not know the mathematical function representing the correlation between “inputs” and “outputs.” The reason he will not know it is not because it will be impossible to find out but, first of all, because it will not be necessary.
...
A technologist today will begin building something by preparing the necessary designs and calculations. We can say he creates a bridge, a locomotive, a house, a jet, or a rocket twice: at first theoretically, on paper, and then in real life, a stage during which the symbolic language of his equations and designs, that is, his algorithm for action, “is translated” into a series of material activities.
...
Yet when it comes to very complex systems such as society, the brain, or the yet nonexistent “very large black boxes,” it is not possible to gain such knowledge, as systems of this kind do not have algorithms. How are we supposed to understand this? We will no doubt agree that every system, including the brain and society, acts in a certain determined way. Its actions could therefore be represented symbolically. Yet this would not mean a lot because an algorithm must be repeatable; it must allow us to predict the system’s future states, while a society that finds itself in the same situation on two different occasions does not have to behave in the same way. This is precisely the case with all highly complex systems.
...
Yet it is not our ambition to fantasize about some possible, that is, thinkable, “black boxes” that would become creators of Technology. We just want to pose the problem as such. We know that only a very complex regulator will cope with a very complex system. We therefore have to look for such regulators anywhere we can: in biochemistry, in living cells, in the molecular engineering of the solid body. Indeed, we know what we want and what we are looking for; we also know —thanks to the private tuition we got from Nature—that this task can be solved. We alreadyknow so much that we are halfway there!


Indeed.
But how many people DO understand that? ;-)

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

I'm still not sure I grasp what yu and LEM are saying. Do you have an example of a black box-regulator approach/solution?

Yes SE is Input/Output:Transformation... but it's also drawing the lines for the box surrounding the "system" being studied.

Q said...

\\Do you have an example of a black box-regulator approach/solution?

Ohh... but we have it.
Most buzz-worded tech of today. Bitco... ehm, the next one -- Machine Learning.

It doing exactly that.

I dunno, maybe Lem knew about...

Ok,Google
"The perceptron was invented in 1943 by McCulloch and Pitts. The first implementation was a machine built in 1958 at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory by Frank Rosenblatt, funded by the United States Office of Naval Research."

Yeah, he knew.
But, was able to see much futher than others in his time... or even today.


Well. We have many such techs... or just experiments. Today.


\\Yes SE is Input/Output:Transformation... but it's also drawing the lines for the box surrounding the "system" being studied.

Yep. SE lacks ability to look at itself. Lacks introspection. ;-)

Q said...

Belief and Information

For hundreds of years, philosophers have been trying to prove logically the validity of induction: a form of reasoning that anticipates the future on the basis of past experience. None of them have succeeded in doing so. They could not have succeeded because induction— whose beginnings lie in the conditioned response of an amoeba—is an attempt to transform incomplete into complete information. It thus constitutes a transgression against the law of information theory, which says that in an isolated system, information can decrease or maintain its current value, but it cannot increase. Yet induction—be it in the form of a conditioned response of a dog (a dog “believes” that it will be fed after the bell has rung because it has always been like this up until now and conveys this “faith” by salivating) or in the form of a scientific hypothesis—is being practiced by all living beings, including man. Acting on the basis of incomplete information, which is then completed through “guesswork” or “speculation,” is a biological necessity.
Thus it is not as a result of some kind of anomaly that homeostatic systems manifest “belief.”
The reverse is true: every homeostat, that is, regulator, which aims to maintain its significant variables within the parameters whose transgression threatens its existence, must show “belief” or act on the basis of incomplete and uncertain information as if this information was both complete and certain.
Every action starts from a position of knowledge that contains gaps. In the light of such uncertainty, one can either refrain from action or undertake actions that involve risk. Refraining from action would mean stopping life processes. “Belief” stands for expecting that what we hope will happen is going to happen; that the world is the way we think it is; that a mental image is equivalent to an external situation. “Belief” can only be manifested by complex homeostats because they are systems that actively react to a change in their environment— unlike nonliving objects. Such objects do not “expect” or anticipate anything; in Nature’s homeostatic systems, such anticipation precedes thought by far. Biological evolution would not have been possible if it had not been for that pinch of “belief” in the effectiveness of reactions, aimed at future states, that has been built into every particle of the living substance. We could represent a continuous spectrum of “beliefs” manifested by homeostats—from protozoa all the way to the human, with his scientific theories and metaphysical systems.
...


Q said...

The division of labor in a given civilization is accompanied by a phenomenon we may call “the division of information.” It is not only that we do not do everything ourselves; it is also that we do not learn about every single thing directly. We learn at school that there is this planet called Saturn, and we believe it, even if we are never to see it ourselves. Statements of this kind can actually be verified by means of an experiment, although not always directly. We can see Saturn, but we cannot currently experience the existence of Napoleon or of biological evolution. Yet directly unverifiable scientific propositions have logical consequences that can be verified empirically (the historical consequences of Napoleon’s existence; facts that testify to the evolution of life). A scientist should adopt an empirical stance. Every change to inputs (some new facts) that contradicts the model (the theory) should influence this model (putting into doubt its adequacy with regard to the situation modeled). Such a stance represents an ideal rather than a reality. Many theories that are rather widely accepted as scientific today have a purely metaphysical character, for example, the majority of psychoanalytic theories.

Q said...

Well... there is difference -- between what Lem talking about... and my idea.

He looking at everything from high above. Like from Space at Earth surface. And in such a way only most remarkable traits can be seen.

I am... while keeping my awareness of Lem's ideas...
trying looking from dirt -- up into the sky.

So.
While for Lem it is perfectly enough to declare possibility of "black boxes" and "homeostats"... or Golems. ;-)

For me that is question of technical viability and bootstrapping.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

For hundreds of years, philosophers have been trying to prove logically the validity of induction: a form of reasoning that anticipates the future on the basis of past experience. None of them have succeeded in doing so. They could not have succeeded because induction— whose beginnings lie in the conditioned response of an amoeba—is an attempt to transform incomplete into complete information.

Not true. They've been trying to arrive at first principles from pairs of premises... and they believed that if both underlying premises were true, the first principle would also be true and could thereby be "known".

Socrates 1st principle was that it was better suffer injustice than commit it. I used to be able to qute Aristotle's, too, but it was a piece of logic I've since stopped worrying about.

From Wiki on Aritotle's Poeterior Analytics:

Maintaining that "to know a thing's nature is to know the reason why it is" and "we possess scientific knowledge of a thing only when we know its cause", Aristotle posited four major sorts of cause as the most sought-after middle terms of demonstration: the definable form; an antecedent which necessitates a consequent; the efficient cause; the final cause.

He concludes the book with the way the human mind comes to know the basic truths or primary premises or first principles, which are not innate, because people may be ignorant of them for much of their lives. Nor can they be deduced from any previous knowledge, or they would not be first principles. He states that first principles are derived by induction, from the sense-perception implanting the true universals in the human mind. From this idea comes the scholastic maxim "there is nothing in the understanding which was not prior in the senses".

Of all types of thinking, scientific knowing and intuition are considered as only universally true, where the latter is the originative source of scientific knowledge.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

...and let's face it, the human mind operates as follows... Left hemisphere in majority of cases is deductive and breaks down information, and the right hemishphere is intuitive/ inductive and builds-up/ postulates the "whole". This has been proven from studies of people with damage to their corpus callosum...ie I take a bunch of letter e's and place them in the shape of a w. The left hemisphere only see's the eeee's (detail) and the right only see's the "w".

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

contralateral neglect...

Q said...

\\Not true. They've been trying to arrive at first principles from pairs of premises... and they believed that if both underlying premises were true, the first principle would also be true and could thereby be "known".

Yeah... they thought about it metaphysically.(only possible way in their time, maybe)
Lem talking from evolutional and technological standpoint. Of course, and Lem admitted it himself (in futher lines I didn't cited here, because it too obvious -- was I wrong?) that perspectives of looking at things from different axiological bases -- they way too different for them to converge.
In any other way than on a shelfs in a library. ;-)

Another word. Different POVs, they are... different.


\\Socrates 1st principle was that it was better suffer injustice than commit it.

Yep. Because that will change you.
And Homeostats do try to prevent any and all changes. ;-)


\\Aristotle posited four major sorts of cause as the most sought-after middle terms of demonstration: the definable form; an antecedent which necessitates a consequent; the efficient cause; the final cause.

And Technoligy unite it in one comprehensive -- "can we make it?".


\\He states that first principles are derived by induction, from the sense-perception implanting the true universals in the human mind.

And he did it before any knowledge about neural structures of our cognition was found.

But well... in technology... knowing first principles is not enough.
If you have no access to a stock with modern elements, modern tools and bunch of stuff proficient in using it all... ;-)



\\Left hemisphere in majority of cases is deductive and breaks down information, and the right hemishphere is intuitive/ inductive and builds-up/ postulates the "whole".

Well.
From purely technological standpoint.
That is natural for having separation of equipment which perform different functions.


\\contralateral neglect...

Yes. Lem used that in one of his novels. ;-)



\\I'm still not sure I grasp what yu and LEM are saying.

Not sure if Lem would agree with me.
But.
As I see it.
We both thinking about -- Advancement of Humanity in Technological Realm.
Only.
He doing that from Outside -- from generally phylosophical standpoint, math-like even -- like seeking only for general solution, highly theoretical -- is it possible, or not?
And AFAIU -- he gives positive answer.

While I... trying to fulfill that prophesy. From INSIDE.
And see that there LOTS and LOTS of purely technical problems.
Mundabe and tedious ones.
Like.
How to find "partners in crime" (as any sufficiently big technological advancment leads to making someone flourish and someone struggle).
How to organize.
How to acquere funds.
And etc.

Q said...

Phenomena that accompany the existence of “complex machines” are currently being examined by a number of new disciplines, such as information theory, operational analysis, theory of experiment planning, theory of linear programming, management theory, and dynamics of group processes. It seems that all of them, including several we have not mentioned, will be integrated by a universal systems theory. Such a general theory is likely to develop in two directions. On one hand, we can see it as a theory of physical systems, such as those provided by Nature. On the other, it will be a theory of mathematical systems, whose task will not be to study the actual existence of examined relations but only to ensure that such systems are free from internal contradictions. This bifurcation has not yet become apparent.
We shall nevertheless dare to predict a moment when those two branches somehow become reintegrated again.


It seems... this is the place where Lem gone wrong.
His belief in Human Mind was too naive and romantic.

We able to make complex systems today -- called computer programs.
By the cost of employing millions and millions of people in that sphere.
But.
Is there some way to "converge" that complex system into something bigger and smarter?
Is there way to build theory of new and more complex such "machines"... as Lem advised?

Naah. I don't see it. Most recent develoments of it -- Machine Learning and No Code -- they are about ERADICATION of even possibility of such convergence. Denying possibility to make Theory.
Well, nobody cares about creating new theories anymore. Looks like.
And well... such theories would be Too Damn Complex. By necessity.

So? How could we proceed?

Q said...


The Silence of the Designer

I have said that restraint on the level of design will serve as a compass in our navigation between the abyss of knowledge and the chasm of stupidity. Such restraint stands for belief in the possibility of acting effectively and in the need to give up on certain things. It means first of all giving up on asking “definitive” questions. This is not a silence of someone pretending to be deaf but rather active silence. We know far more about the fact that it is possible to act than about how it happens. The designer is not a narrow pragmatist, like a builder who is constructing his house from bricks, uninterested in where these bricks came from and what they are, as long as the house gets built. The designer knows everything about his bricks—except for what they look like when no one is looking at them. He knows that properties belong to situations, not things. There is a chemical substance that, according to some people, lacks flavor, whereas according to others, it tastes bitter. It is bitter to those who have inherited a particular gene from their ancestors. Not all people have it. According to the designer, the question as to whether this substance is “really” bitter makes no sense. If someone tastes the bitterness of this substance, then it is bitter to him. We can examine the difference between these two types of people; that is all. Some claim that apart from properties that are functions of a situation (such as bitterness or length) and are therefore variable, there are also some constants, and the task of science is to look for these very constants, such as the speed of light.
This is also the Designer’s position.
...

Methodological Madness

Let us imagine a mad tailor who makes all sorts of clothes. He does not know anything about people, birds, or plants. He is not interested in the world; he does not examine it. He makes clothes but does not know for whom. He does not think about it. Some of his clothes are spherical, without any openings for heads or feet; others have tubes sewn into them that he calls “sleeves” or “legs.” Their number is random. The clothes consist of various numbers of elements. The tailor is only concerned about one thing: he wants to be consistent. His clothes are symmetrical and asymmetrical, large and small, stretchy and permanently fixed. When he starts producing a new item, he makes certain assumptions. They are not always the same. But he follows the assumptions he has made, and he expects them not to lead to a contradiction. If he sews on the legs, he does not cut them off later; he does not unstitch what he has sewn; they are always clothes and not bunches of randomly sewn rags. He takes the finished clothes to a massive warehouse. If we could enter it, we would discover that some of the clothes fit an octopus, others fit trees, butterflies, or people. We would find clothes for a centaur and for a unicorn as well as for creatures that have not even been imagined yet. The great majority of his clothes would not find any application. Everyone will admit that the tailor’s Sisyphean labor is pure madness.
Mathematics works in the same way. It builds structures but it is not clear of what. These are perfect models (i.e., perfectly accurate), but a mathematician does not know what they are models of. He is not interested.
...


-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

Silent Designers?

Q said...

More like Black Boxes. ;-P

Q said...

Yeah.

"Then, they trained it to translate problem descriptions into code, using thousands of problems collected from programming competitions."

That 'stunning' code is from some bright human-competitors...


"After training, AlphaCode solved about 34% of assigned problems, DeepMind reports this week in Science. (On similar benchmarks, Codex achieved single-digit-percentage success.)"

Well... that is general direction... mindless technologies/ ;-P


"AI coding might have applications beyond winning competitions, says Yujia Li, a computer scientist at DeepMind and paper co-author. It could do software grunt work, freeing up developers to work at a higher, or more abstract level, or it could help noncoders create simple programs."

Clearly from someone who do not know what programming is about/
Much less professional one. :-))))


"David Choi, another study author at DeepMind, imagines running the model in reverse: translating code into explanations of what it’s doing, which could benefit programmers trying to understand others’ code. “There are a lot more things you can do with models that understand code in general,” he says."

This one... have good insight.
Only --- it would not be possible with that tech. ;-P


Well, my own ifea somwhere around that lines -- to use extensive machine help, to extetend capabilities of human-designer... to extend capabilities of a machine-helper.

Introspection.

Differnce from that slobs -- I *know* what, and how, and why to make.
Which could streamline and give a direction...

Because.

"There are other problems. AlphaCode requires tens of billions of trillions of operations per problem—computing power that only the largest tech companies have."

To reduce that raw (but dumb) power needed... it needs a lot of "braining". ;-)


"But real-world programming often requires managing large code packages in multiple places, which requires a more holistic understanding of the software, Solar-Lezama says."

Yeah. This one knows some stuff. ;-)


"The study also notes the long-term risk of software that recursively improves itself. Some experts say such self-improvement could lead to a superintelligent AI that takes over the world. Although that scenario may seem remote, researchers still want the field of AI coding to institute guardrails, built-in checks and balances.

“Even if this kind of technology becomes supersuccessful, you would want to treat it the same way you treat a programmer within an organization,” Solar-Lezama says. “You never want an organization where a single programmer could bring the whole organization down.”"


Naah... my praise was too premature. :-))))

Q said...

The Creation of Worlds

We seem to be at the end of an era. I am not referring here to the age of steam and electricity, which then mutates into the age of cybernetics and space science. Such terminology indicates yielding to various technologies—which will become too powerful for us to be able to cope with their autonomy. Human civilization is like a ship that has been built without any design plans. The construction process was extremely successful. It led to the creation of enormous propeller machinery and resulted in an uneven development of the inside of the ship—but this is something that can be remedied. Yet this ship is still rudderless. Civilization lacks knowledge that would allow it to choose a path knowingly from the many possible ones, instead of drifting in random tides of discoveries. The discoveries that contributed to its construction are still partly accidental. This situation is not altered by the fact that we continue to move toward the edge of the Galaxy without knowing what lies ahead. One thing is sure: we actualize what is already possible. Science is playing a game with Nature, and even though it wins every time, it allows itself to be drawn into the consequences of this victory and exploit it, as a result of which, instead of developing a strategy, it ends up just practicing tactics. Thus, paradoxically, the more such successes, or victories, there will be in the future, the more difficult the situation will become, since—as we have already demonstrated—it is not always possible to exploit everything we have conquered. The embarrassment of riches, the deluge of information that engulfs man as a result of his cognitive greed, need to be tamed. We have to learn how to regulate scientific progress too; otherwise, the random character of any future developments will only increase. Victories, that is, suddenly appearing domains of some new wonderful activity, will engulf us with their sheer size, thus preventing us from noticing some other opportunities—which may turn out to be even more valuable in the long run.
It is important for a developing civilization to gain the freedom of strategic maneuvering to be able to control its path. The world today has other concerns. It is divided; it does not satisfy the needs of millions—but what if those needs are eventually satisfied? What if the automatic production of goods takes off? Will the West survive this? This is a grotesque vision: of humanless factories producing billions of objects, machines, nutritional elements, through the energy of a star to which our civilization is “connected.” Will some kind of General Apocalyptics become the owner of that star?
Never mind property rights. If I say that one era is coming to an end, I am not even thinking about the demise of the old systems. Satisfying the basic needs of humanity is a necessary task, a preparation for a final exam; it is the beginning of a mature age rather than its end.
Science develops from technology. Having become established, it subsequently takes control. To speak about the future, especially a remote future, involves having to speak about the transformation of science.

Q said...

Information Farming

Many cyberneticists are currently working on the possibility of automating hypothesis formation. A “theory” produced in a machine is an information structure that successfully encodes a limited amount of information that is relevant with regard to a certain class of phenomena in the environment. This information can then be successfully applied in formulating infallible predictions for that class. A machinic theory of class represents a certain constant value in machinic language that is shared by all the elements of that class. The machine receives information from the environment and creates particular “constructs,” or hypotheses, which compete with one another until they become redundant, or fixed during the “evolution” that this “cognitive process” represents.
...
We are to invent a device that will gather information, generalize it in the same way the scientist does, and present the results of this inquiry to experts. The device collects facts, generalizes them, and checks the validity of this generalization by applying it to a new set of facts. On having undergone “quality control,” the “final product” leaves the “factory.”
Our device thus produces theories. In philosophy of science, a theory is a system that consists of symbols. It is a structural equivalent of an actual phenomenon, which can be transformed by means of rules that have nothing to do with this phenomenon so that subsequent sections of the phenomenon’s trajectory (its successive states in time) correspond on the level of variables considered by this theory to the values of variables that are deducible from the theory.
A theory does not apply to an individual phenomenon but to a class of phenomena. The elements of a class can coexist in space (billiard balls on the table) or follow one another in time (subsequent positions of a billiard ball in time). The more numerous the class, the “better,” that is, more universally applicable, the theory.
...

Q said...

Having discussed both sides of the cognitive process (“ours,” i.e., one that belongs to theory, and “the other one,” or one that belongs to Nature), we can finally start on automatizing cognitive processes. It seems that the simplest thing would be to create an “artificial scientist,” in the form of some kind of “electric superbrain,” which would be connected through its senses, or “perceptrons,” to the external world. This idea seems obvious because there is so much talk about the electronic imitation of thought processes and about the excellence and speed of the activities performed by digital machines today. Yet I do not think we should try to get there via an attempt to construct “an electronic superman.” We are all fascinated by the complexity and power of the human brain, which is why we are unable to envisage an information machine that would not be analogous to the nervous system. The brain is without a doubt a great product of Nature. Yet now that I have paid it its due respect by saying this, I would like to add that it is a system that solves various tasks with extremely varied efficacy.
...
In fact, there is no point in discussing the intellectual superiority of the human over a monkey. The human brain is without doubt more complex, yet a considerable part of this complexity “is not any good” at solving theoretical problems because it controls bodily processes: this is what it is designed for. The problem thus looks as follows: the less complex part (the part of the brain’s neural system that constitutes the foundation of intellectual processes) tries to obtain information about its more complex part (the whole brain). This is not impossible, but it is very difficult. In any case, it is not impossible indirectly (a single person would not even be able to formulate a problem). The cognitive process is social: it involves a kind of “adding up” of the “intellectual” complexity of many human brains that are all investigating the same thing. Yet since this “adding up” needs to be placed in quotation marks—since all those individual brains do not become conjoined to form one system—we have not yet solved our problem.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

...start your braining...

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

Say goodbye to Google.

Evolution/survival of the fittest. ;)

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

Capitlalist evolution...

Q said...

Well.
To sum it up as short as posible, Lem was against US being a mere toys in the "invisible hands" of Evolution...
and instead, take our destiny inour arms.
Romantic, isn't it?

But well, his ideas contain tons of pure pragmatism too.

You know about that saying -- how to deal with can of worms?
And we opened that can... of Technological Evolution long ago.
And destined to deal with it... somehow.

My idea -- it's better to deal with it with "head first" motto on our banners. ;-)

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

I'm not so sure... the current directional concensus is to kill nuclear and fossil fuels... a step in the wrong direction if we wish to "progress", IMO.

Q said...

As who?
Progress as who?
As mere parasites who gobbling more and more resources to make more and more...

Another word what is "being human" to you?

Well. Anyway. whatever answer you'd give -- our technologies need to make Quantum Leap... just to sustain what we have today.
Even without further advances.

I only hope that'll be with our mindful decisions... and not as result of next World War. Futile hope, I know. :-(((

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

You're the one who wants to put "solutions" into human hands (vice invisible ones). So you tell me... "as who" and "to what end". I'm happy with the invisible ones.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

...where i make my own ends as who I wish to be.

Q said...

\\You're the one who wants to put "solutions" into human hands (vice invisible ones).

I'm just vary of that.
That "invisible hands" lead us to "happenings" like World Wars...
where nobody planned THAT level of devastations
BUT
it came to that nevertheless.

So... I would like, even for once, to look at what results of thoroughly "head first" approach would be.

Then... I would be equiped to answer your this question.

Q said...

We have to admit that the extent to which control will remain in human hands partly depends on a point of view. The fact that man is able to swim by himself does not mean that he is capable of crossing an ocean without a ship —not to mention jets and space rockets in this context! A similar evolution is starting, in a kind of parallel way, in the information universe. Man is capable of directing a gnostic machine toward a problem that he could perhaps solve by himself (either he himself or his great grandchildren), but in the process, the machine may open his eyes to a problem whose existence he did not even suspect. Who actually has the lead in the latter example? It is difficult to imagine, even vaguely, both the degree of functional uniformity that the “cognitive man–machine tandem” can represent and all those degrees of freedom that the human brain working in such conditions is enriched by. We should emphasize that this only refers to the early stages of the linguistic “dichotomy.” It is difficult to say anything specific today about its future stages.
But what will a philosopher say about this approach? The designer will display in vain the fruits of his labor to the philosopher, pointing out the extent to which answers to classical philosophical questions depend on the technologically constructed limit conditions (whether nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu
9 also depends on the specific characteristics of chromosomal preprogramming in the brain so that a certain excess of preprogramming can make “a priori synthetic knowledge” available to it). For the philosopher, the success of the designer of gnostic machines will represent the failure of thinking as such, including practical thinking, since in this way it will have ousted itself even from the creation of instrumental truths. The designer, whose great grandfather despaired over sailboats yet built steamers at the same time, shares the philosopher’s concern—but not his reservations.
The philosopher will remain deaf to the designer’s arguments because, feeling contempt toward spontaneous, nonhuman, externalized thinking, he wants to think through everything that exists himself—by creating the right kind of system or a meaningful structure. Yet what is the relation between systems that differ from one another to a greater or lesser degree? Each one can arbitrarily decide that it occupies a singularly valid, unique “meta”-position with regard to the others. We thus find ourselves amid a series of circular processes. Even though such logic is fascinating, it serves us no good if every position turns out to be possible to defend, as long as there are no internal contradictions within it. A thought that wants to reach the paradise of certainty locates such a paradise in various places, while the map of such localizations, that is, the history of philosophy, is a language-based search for what is located outside it, if anywhere at all. There is also a position according to which metaphysical systems are hyponoic creations, produced in the subconscious and then dressed by consciousness in language. Here metaphysics turns out to be the most logical and the most persistent of our dreams. The philosopher will debunk this point of view—embarrassing as it is from a psychoanalytic standpoint, which turns the philosopher’s labor into a dream—by strongly debasing psychoanalysis. This is great fun, somewhat futile yet beneficial in terms of developing some new cultural frameworks; it consists of shifts within the system, in which an arbitrary change of position involves the transformation of both evaluative and cognitive perspectives.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

No amount of argument can convince me to submit to concepts of "positive liberty". I demand a space of negative liberty where no "positive liberty" imposed from outside can reach, and from which I can plot my rebellion from it.

The Greeks imposed strict limits to their "technologies". Such as those of Archimedes turned men into cowards. It's past time men became men again.

-FJ the Dangerous and Extreme MAGA Jew said...

:P

Q said...

\\I demand a space of negative liberty where no "positive liberty" imposed from outside can reach, and from which I can plot my rebellion from it.

Well. Technology is YOUR friend... in that, as well in any other approach. ;-P
Because. "Technology that is a sphere of defining tasks... and a way to solve em." ;-)


\\It's past time men became men again.

"Like in Old Good Times... when men was Real Men... and was writing drivers for their devices themself"? ;-P