ᛕᎥᕼᗷᗴᖇᑎᗴ丅Ꭵᑕᔕ @Kihbernetics@qoto.org

>In a society dominated by commoditized relations and alienated values, the attempt to close science off from its relations with the values of its contexts makes a tortuous kind of sense. All the same, however, this undialectical and decontextualizing activity seems ultimately to betray an implicit allegiance to a now venerable religious, psychological, and philosophical tradition: THE QUEST FOR THE ABSOLUTE (as the early nineteenth century phrased it). Indeed, this particular characterization of *the impotent in pursuit of the impossible* may fittingly stand as an epitome of the Imaginary and even morbid quest of the academic discourse for what we might call the *System of Systems* — for the ultimate closed system where desires are facts and All is One. 😀

A truly remarkable thinker
**Anthony Wilden** - ***#System and #Structure***
*Essays in Communication and Exchange* - Second edition (1980)

A classic on #AL and #AI from #HHPattee written back in 1995 when polymer folding was still a *computationally intractable problem*😀.
Still, his thoughts are as powerful as ever.

"Artificial Life Needs a Real Epistemology"

https://www.academia.edu/3075569/Artificial_Life_Needs_a_Real_Epistemology

#HA_Simon's watchmaking parable about #Tempus (a lousy artisan) and #Hora (an industrial manufacturer) is missing the third watchmaker, #Aeon, that, after many years of trying, has found a way for the watches to build themselves.

Like #Tempus, #Aeon is also an #artisan because the watches are built from scratch using raw materials, rather than being assembled from prefabricated modular components.

Despite being blind, Aeon is a much better artisan, because these watches, besides (self)building themselves, are all in working order right from inception, and have the ability to preserve their best, *stable intermediate forms*.

The quest for new *"#limitless"* energy sources isn't (or shouldn't) be about *hoarding* and having more of something even if it is not needed.
It is about the #power to do ***more with less*** which is essential for both groups of people mentioned in this piece: the ones that depart on the #exploration of new worlds as well as the ones that remain to deal with the problems on this one.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-01-19/why-understanding-limits-is-the-key-to-humanitys-future/

>Furthermore, anthropologists report that many of the remaining hunter-gatherers are “fiercely egalitarian”, deploying humour to subdue the ego of anyone who gets out of line: “Yes, when a young man kills much meat he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors,” one Kalahari hunter told the anthropologist Richard B Lee in 1968. “We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/12/humans-were-not-centre-stage-ancient-cave-art-painting-lascaux-chauvet-altamira

Hunter-gatherer, #DemandSharing societies, in which there is no reason to hoard more than one currently needs, are highly #individualistic as well as #egalitarian.

From:
*Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots* by **James Suzman**

Source:
Maturana H. R. & Guiloff G. D. (1980) The quest for the intelligence of intelligence. Journal of Social and Biological Structures 3(2): 135–148. https://cepa.info/555

A compelling approach to #Intelligence back from the 80's that does not rely upon #ProblemSolving or #GoalOrientedBehavior as do most of the contemporary doctrines of #AI and #AGI.

#HRMaturana #Autopoiesis #DynamicalSystems #Communication

In #Kihbernetics we distinguish between three control functions (levels):
1️⃣ #Regulation the purpose of which is maintaining the system's #homeostasis,
2️⃣ #Control for finding an optimal path (and way of utilizing the regulators) to fulfill a given #goal, and
3️⃣ #Guidance (governance) providing direction.

Korzybski's famous remark that "the #map is not the #territory" because people regularly confuse conceptual models of #reality with reality itself, and its derivatives such as "all models are wrong" originates from regarding the #model as a #blueprint or picture ***describing*** that reality.

The #model is instead a #recipe (instruction) or a #tool for helping us navigate the terrain, what Maturana would call a #GenerativeMechanism with which each one of us is able to create our own image of reality depending on what we "want" from the terrain we are navigating through.

#Problem Dissolution, #RAckoff

"A #PhilosophicalSolution of a problem proceeds by showing that the troublesome questions rest on #MistakenAssumptions."

#BRundle (2004) - "Why there is Something rather than Nothing"

>As business struggles to adapt to a rapidly changing world, managers are bombarded with a bewildering array of schemes for how to be a boss and make an organization tick. It’s tempting to be seduced by *futurist fantasies where every company has the culture of a startup, and where employees in wacky, whimsical office settings, liberated from hierarchies* and bosses that oppress them, are the foundation for breakthrough performance.
>
>***“Get real,”*** warn Nicolai J. Foss and Peter G. Klein. These fads ironically lead to micromanaging and, often, to disaster. Companies and societies, they show, need authority and hierarchy to coordinate work, including creative work. And, *counterintuitively, Foss and Klein illustrate how the creative use of authority and hierarchy helps companies to be more agile and flexible*, enabling educated, motivated people and teams to thrive.

https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Why_Managers_Matter/e6ddEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

"The Turing test is not a good test for testing the supposed "intelligence" of an artificial system. This is well known in the Artificial Intelligence scientific community (I analyze this issue in my book “Cognitive Design for Artificial Minds”, Routledge, 2021). Trivially, one of the problems of the test concerns the fact that it is entirely "behavioral": that is, it looks only at the final behavior (the output) of a system without analyzing what are the mechanisms that led to that output."

Translated with: "Simple Translate" Extension for Firefox:
https://simple-translate.sienori.com/

#AI, #ChatGPT, #LLM, #LanguageModels

#Life is a necessary condition and comes before #Intelligence which is in turn necessary for the acquisition of #Language:

>Language use is an aspect of human collective behaviour, and it only makes sense in the wider context of the human social activity of which it forms a part (*Wittgenstein, 1953*). A human infant is born into a community of language users with which it shares a world, and it acquires language by interacting with this community and with the world it shares with them.

Trying to "reverse engineer" intelligence from LLMs seems like a futile endeavor. Instead of #AI, it may be more useful to redirect efforts to building #ArtificialLife (#AL)

When we say that
>we are asking the model to remind us of the lyrics of a well-known nursery rhyme, ... what we are really doing is asking it the following question:
>>Given the statistical distribution of words in the public corpus, what words are most likely to follow the sequence “Twinkle twinkle ”?
To which an accurate answer is “little star” 😀

https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03551

According to #WRAshby, #Regulation is blocking the flow of #Variety from the (environmental) #Disturbance to the (internal, #System protected) #EssentialVariable. There are two primary forms of blocking the effect of the disturbance on the system:
1️⃣ Passive (by sheltering from), and
2️⃣ Active (on par with)
From:
W. Ross Ashby (1956) - An Introduction to Cybernetics, (Chapman & Hall, London) - available electronically from:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html

Systems thinkers use a number of different terms for the three basic concepts in the "system's triad" so that we have a "real system" as opposed to the "conceptual system" which is sometimes also called the "mental model" which is again different from the (real) descriptive or simulation model. In #Kihbernetics we make the distinction between #Machine, #System and #Model unambiguous following the rules specified in the works of #WRAshby and #HRMaturana

Ashby warns us against our first impulse to point at the pendulum and say 'the system is that thing there' because this has a fundamental disadvantage in that "every material object contains no less than an infinity of variables" from which "different observers (with different aims) may reasonably make an infinity of different selections."

Therefore, there must first be given an #observer, and a #system is then defined as "any set of variables selected by that observer from those available on the real ‘machine‘".

#HRMaturana defines a #system, as "a #configuration of #relations that an #observer abstracts in the flow of #interactions and #transformations of a #collection of #elements distinguished in the observers daily living" that is "spontaneously or artificially #conserved" in its #dynamic within some "#domain of concern" of the observer.

So, in Kihbernetics, the triad looks like this:

Reading this recent (2022) article from Fritjof Capra:
The organization of the living:
Maturana’s key insights
included in the latest Constructivist Foundations volume 18(1): 005–011

https://constructivist.info/18/1/005

and I am continually bewildered by the fact that no one in the #Constructivist field figured out yet that #Autopoiesis, although necessary, is not the sufficient condition for #Life.

All #LivingSystems are in fact #DynamicalSystems with memory made of #Material, #Energy, and #Information structures participating continually in both auto- and allopoietic processes.

In fact, the recursive, #Autopoietic processes of learning and growth depend only on (are "structurally coupled" with) the linear #Allopoietic work processes dealing with all the things (resources, waste) in the system's environment and producing the externally observable #behavior of the living (dynamical) system.

The (Newtonian) #Physics or #ClassicalMechanics of #ChangeManagement according to the #kihbernetic worldview:

The #Force required to put the change in motion is proportional to its #Mass or how large the change is; because the bigger the change the more #Friction it creates. The #Gravity, or how immediate the necessity to change is, will also increase the friction of the #ResistanceToChange.

However, once the change is put in motion, the #Acceleration produced by the mass's #Inertia will start "pulling" the change by itself and only minimal force will need to be applied to #Control that the change is moving in the right direction and/or with the right speed of change.