ᛕᎥᕼᗷᗴᖇᑎᗴ丅Ꭵᑕᔕ @Kihbernetics@qoto.org

The current craze over *social media ruining democracy* and *AI posing an existential threat to humanity* stems from the fact that most people don't understand that the only thing #technology is able to do is *amplify* their own capacity to do good or bad.
The Internet and AI are communication and intelligence #amplifiers, the same way motors and servo mechanisms are amplifiers of our muscle power.

#Consciousness, like #awareness is not a *thing*. It is a #state or property of the part of an entity's #cognition (which *is* a thing) that the entity may *be* conscious or aware of ... or *not*.

Furthermore, consciousness is a #binary proposition. One can be either conscious of something or not. You can't be a *little bit conscious* the same way you can't be a *little bit alive*.

@psybertron @yoginho

There is no doubt that physics was working well before we introduced measurement, math, and computation.

I think it was Kauffman who said that the reason why mathematics works so well with physics is because it was **invented** to explain physical facts. I was looking for the exact quote but found this instead:

https://kauffman2013.wordpress.com/

I read a sample of Robert M. Sapolsky's new book *Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will* on Amazon, and I really don't see why some people find it "revolutionary". I find it full of half-baked contradictory claims that don't hold water even under quick superficial scrutiny like this.

Brains don't generate behaviors. They #produce motor responses to sensory stimuli that an outside observer then interprets as the behavior of the observed individual in their immediate environment. The observer can also stick electrodes in the brain of the individual and then correlate the observed behavior with the measurements performed on some of the neurons and then conclude that those firings have caused the behavior. However, even if it was possible to replicate the exact sequence of the observed firings of all the neurons, the observed behavior would be different if the "response" of the environment was also not exactly the same as during the measurement.

Determinism alone doesn't "cause" anything even if there are no such things as "causeless causes". The current #state of the system is obviously determined by its previous state and the current sensory inputs, so there are at least two separate "determinisms" in play here all the time, and, as an individual existing in its particular environment, I have at least **some** #control over the unfolding of both, my biology (eating, drinking coffee), and my environment (writing this nonsense)😉.

@sozialwelten

Sorry. I'm re-drafting the post because the link does not work for some reason it replaces the two dashes between "On" and "the" with one long dash. I'll try to post this as plain text maybe it works.

It works😀 :

"http://www.polanyisociety.org/MP-On--the-Modern-Mind-1965-ocr.pdf"

I wish people who are coming up each day with a new "breakthrough" theory using physics and/or quantum mechanics to explain everything from complexity and life to consciousness and free will, would read first what #M_Polanyi has said about it.
This is from:
http://www.polanyisociety.org/MP-On--the-Modern-Mind-1965-ocr.pdf

@AndrewMurphie@indieweb.social

I see quite a few theories emerging lately that make no distinction between #structure and #system and this is just one of them.

Structures behave deterministically under the influence of natural #laws and are thus predictable, inherently purposeless, and controllable.

Systems, on the other side, besides being made of structures that must abide by those same natural laws, are also governed by arbitrary #rules that define their #purpose, either designed or evolved within a larger environment.

Dynamical systems (with memory) have in addition the ability to learn and modify those rules. How this happens can be influenced but not fully predicted or controlled by an external observer, especially for living systems.

It is this ability to resist outside control that I consider "*free will*".

@AndrewMurphie@indieweb.social

Each one of us is undoubtedly the product of our genes and shaped by the history of all the interactions we had in life, but this sounds a little bit over the top, doesn't it?

>Then look at the forces that brought them to the professor’s office, feeling empowered to challenge a point. They’re more likely to have had parents who themselves were college educated, more likely to hail from an individualistic culture rather than a collective one. All of those influences subtly nudge behavior in predictable ways.

Students with uneducated parents coming from a "collectivist culture" are less likely to challenge authority? I beg to differ.

Also, "*more likely*" and "*trying not to be a jerk*" are not quite deterministic statements, and all the processing and choices I make unconsciously are made by no one else but me and free of any external influence.

This is so wrong I wouldn't know where to start.

>Hurricanes are ‘selected’ based on their ability to perform functions dictated by the environment, the researchers found.

Gimme a break!🤨

#M_Polany in "Life's Irreducible Structure" (1968) points out that using deterministic #machines to explain "the physics of #life" is backward thinking, because machines are devised and built by humans to resemble organisms and to serve the purpose of their design, and can therefore only be a #biological, not a #physical analogy.

>The organism is shown to be, like a machine, a system which works according to two different principles: its structure serves as a boundary condition harnessing the physical-chemical processes by which its organs perform their functions. Thus, this system may be called ***a system under dual control*** (*emphasis mine*). Morphogenesis, the process by which the #structure of living beings develops, can then be likened to the shaping of a machine which will act as a boundary for the laws of inanimate nature.
...
In the machine, our principal interest lay in the effects of the boundary conditions, while in an experimental setting, we are interested in the natural processes controlled by the boundaries."

Or in other words, we are interested either in the *control* #rules of the machine or the physical #laws of *causality* that make the machine work.

Wiener was wrong. There is ***no*** #communication ***in*** either the animal or in the machine, only #control by the application of #constraints to their inner flow of matter and energy.

Communication is established ***between*** animals and/or machines, and, as Shannon correctly recognized, requires an independent communication #channel susceptible to the environmental disturbance called #noise.

In order to be able to communicate animals and machines must share a common #language or cipher #rules used to code their respective messages. Communication is always one-way and does not require feedback. The sender has no control over the message after it is sent through the channel.

A special case of communication is #observation where the communication is established between the observer system and phenomena in its environment not necessarily produced by other systems "languaging".

A dynamical system with #memory with the ability to learn and adapt to its environment or to change it will need at most these three #control mechanisms:

1️⃣ The #internal immediate control (#regulation) of state variables essential for preserving the stability or #homeostasis of the system. This is a simple #reaction of the system to a perturbance, like, for example, sweating when the core temperature of the body increases beyond some preset margin.

2️⃣ The #proximal control of the surrounding environment is used when 1️⃣ is overwhelmed and there is a need for the coordinated engagement of different lower-level regulators, the #measurement (tracking), and negative #feedback control of multiple time-dependent variables like for example, when taking off layers of clothes, moving the body into a shade, or taking a cold shower until the temperature gets again within limits.

3️⃣ The #distal, long-term, open-loop control with delayed feedback is the highest form of control, like for example when building a house with an HVAC system that will remove the necessity for a continuous employment of proximal control (2️⃣) by creating a private controlled environment.

All #living systems feature this 3-layered control architecture, with the only difference being in what degree the activities on each level are the result of #conscious deliberation as opposed to a natural, innate behavior.

The thought experiment in this interesting 2019 article from Michael Lachmann and Sara Walker on the contrast between #life and #living is not representative, because von Neumann’s UCs are non-#autopoietic and don't print *themselves* so can't #grow and #evolve.

>Imagine you have built a sophisticated 3D printer called Alice, the first to be able to print itself. As with von Neumann's constructor, you supply it with information specifying its own plan, and a mechanism for copying that information: Alice is now a complete von Neumann constructor. Have you created new life on Earth?

https://aeon.co/essays/what-can-schrodingers-cat-say-about-3d-printers-on-mars

The difference lies in the fact that UC "mechanisms" are not operational until their production is fully finished and any #error will most probably prevent the mechanism from working, while most living and growing "assemblies" can work and repair themselves while they are growing.

The bottom line is that life cannot be ***created***. It has to ***emerge*** from mechanical non-life.

People often "blame" Shannon's theory of #communication for completely ignoring #meaning, maybe also because Shannon himself stated that "*the semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering aspects*"😀

However, if one recognizes that the #information content as defined by the #entropy is the measure of #uncertainty in a receiver about the sender's #state when producing the message, can it perhaps be interpreted that the receiver is trying to #understand what the sender was #meaning to send?

The information the sender encodes in the message is never the *same* as that the receiver decodes from it on the other side of the channel.

Below is Shannon's description of the standard #transducer used for encoding and decoding the information in messages. The block diagrams are my rendering of the description (F is a "#memory" function):

#Consciousness as "deliberate #thinking and #cognition" should be easy to explain, but only by the conscious agent itself. There is no way an outside #oserver can identify if an agent's behavior is conscious or not.

>#Intuition — what seems “#obvious and #undeniable” — may **not** be #trustworthy. It may seem “obvious and undeniable” to someone interacting with ChatGPT that it is communicating with a conscious agent, but that assumption would be flawed.

https://bigthink.com/the-well/human-consciousness-womb-after-birth/

@Daniel_Van_Zant

Yes. Modeling is a relatively late (computational, representational) addition to the human predictive toolbox. We are better equipped to predict how things behave by comparing them with the one thing we intimately know how it works (us). So, if we see things behave "as we would in a similar situation", they must be conscious like us.

The seggregation of individual agents into classes helps to alleviate some of the complexity (dogs behave differently than birds or AI, etc.) but, again, trying to find out (model) "why" some agent behaves the way it does is time-consuming and has no obvious benefit for my survival if it does not show me how I can control or change that agent's behavior to suit my needs.

The only thing I can possibly do is consider the agent a "black box" and use a behavioral approach, as opposed to functional modelling.

Anil Seth thinks "*Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea*" because
>*our minds haven’t evolved to deal with machines we believe have #consciousness.*

On the contrary, I think we are *"genetically programmed"* to ascribe intent to anything that *"wants"* to communicate with us.

He is also saying that:

>*Being intelligent—as humans think we are—may give us new ways of being conscious, and some forms of human and animal #intelligence may require consciousness, but basic conscious experiences such as pleasure and pain might not require much species-level intelligence at all.*

If, as he says, "*intelligence is the capacity to do the right thing at the right time,*" any organism that has survived long enough to procreate must have some kind of intelligence, regardless of its consciousness.

Wrt "*basic conscious experiences such as pleasure and pain*," IMO they are conscious **only** if the organism is intelligent enough to suppress the urge of an innate "*genetically programmed*" response to pain or pleasure in order to achieve some "higher goal," even if it goes against the original goal of "to survive."

The bottom line is that consciousness is **not** just a function of intelligence. Machines can become much smarter than us without becoming conscious.

In order to be really #conscious, a machine would first have the experience of being #alive and the desire to remain in that state, have some #agency and #control over its internal and external states, the ability to develop short and long-term goals and plan and execute complex time-dependent actions to fulfill those goals.

Anything less than that is just a clever simulation.

https://nautil.us/why-conscious-ai-is-a-bad-bad-idea-302937/

The purpose of #design is to #create new or/and different #artificial structures (artifacts), so speaking of design makes sense only if it is in the context of other creative #production activities such as writing, painting, engineering, manufacturing, etc.

Klaus Krippendorff has a nice description of the difference between #object and #artifact and the relationship to Gibson's #affordances in this 2007 paper published in "Kybernetes":

https://researchgate.net/publication/45597493_The_Cybernetics_of_Design_and_the_Design_of_Cybernetic

However, he is wrong, IMO, in accentuating the difference between #scientists and #designers.

Every designer is often a scientist in "describing what can be observed" and every scientist also has to design new hypotheses, theories, and experiments for the "not yet observable and measurable".

@jkanev

Sure, safety and security are important, but they must **follow** the research not define it.
Machines can cause harm only when in operation.

IMO the best (only) way to assure security and safety is confining #AI to the language (consulting) domain, preventing it from having too much agency such as "pushing buttons".

Also, if it becomes too smart it is useless to us, and I'm sure we'll find a way to "dumb it down".

The truth is that intelligence is never a precondition for getting into a position of power. Quite the opposite.

Some wise words from John Dewey about #Intelligence and #Power written back in 1934:

A few "gems" from #WR_Ashby on the "accumulation of adaptations":

>"A compound event that is impossible if the components have to occur simultaneously may be readily achievable if they can occur in sequence or independently...
Thus, for the accumulation of adaptations to be possible, **the system must not be fully joined**.

>The idea so often implicit in physiological writings, that all will be well if only sufficient cross-connexions are available, is, in this context, quite wrong."

I recommend reading the whole book ($20 on Amazon) but if not, here is a good overview of some interesting parts:

https://www.panarchy.org/ashby/adaptation.1960.html