Show newer

> Unlike the Cartesian argument that living beings are like man-made machines, Kant was the first author who defended the view that organisms are deeply different from machines because their parts and activities are non-separable, and the functions of these parts are not externally imposed, but rather intrinsically determined.

*Moreno & Mossio*
Biological Autonomy - A Philosophical and Theoretical Enquiry

They might **behave** (function) similarly to machines, but the real difference is how they are **produced** and maintained.

Control in always has to come from the outside or is exerted, not internally onto the elements that make the system but onto something else outside of the "control" system.

Even such brilliant thinkers as , one of the "fathers" of could not escape this profoundly ingrained "cybernetic" assumption:

>" means, literally, self-law. To see what this entails, it is easier to contrast it with its mirror image, or **external law**. This is, of course, what we call . These two images, autonomy and control, do a continuous dance."

**Francisco J. Varela** - *Principles Of Biological Autonomy*

mechanism.ucsd.edu/teaching/f1

Show thread

Control theories such as (Perceptual Control Theory), which are based on , are primarily focused on the control loop closed through the system's and have little or no concern for the more important, internal motor loop controlling the system's and cycles.

>The natural history of systems which exhibit as a characteristic phenomenology shows that they share one universal feature suggested by : organizational closure, i.e. indefinite recursion of component interaction.

(ibid. p79)

Show thread

> - the assertion of the system's through its internal functioning and self-regulation.

- *On Being Autonomous: The Lessons of Natural History for Systems Theory*
in:
*Applied General Systems Research* - 1978 - (ed.)
p. 77
link.springer.com/book/10.1007

>In hierarchical societies, mockery is often associated with bullies whose power exceeds their moral authority. But it is also a tool of the weak, a means to pillory those in power and hold them to account. In the Ju/’hoan case this is best reflected in the traditional practice of ***“insulting the hunter’s meat.”***

Suzman, James. Work (p. 162). Penguin Publishing Group

Show thread

With Musk, Biden is here just using an old, proven, hunter-gatherers' method to get booming young hunters in line 😎:

news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-said-

“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."

theguardian.com/artanddesign/2

Some authors consider the not a good test for finding out if an is really “intelligent” because the test is "*purely behavioral*" and looks only at responses without investigating the mechanisms that produced them.

I think that asking for the "mechanisms" would in fact introduce unnecessary bias and invalidate the test. The test is solid in principle, it is just that we have to come up with some better test cases (scenarios).

is usually described with as in the article below comparing the works from and :

journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full

Basically, what vector space semantics says is that the meaning of a message depends on the provided by the sender's and the receiver's .

As they are two different physical entities they will obviously be in different states, so the two meaning can never be *exactly* the same.

Show thread

>"Shannon's theory of information ignores . In his communications study, he was only interested in whether the bits transmitted reduce the in a receiver about the sender's state"

Or reducing the uncertainty about what the sender was **meaning** to say?😀

aeon.co/essays/what-can-schrod

>One of the main themes of the present book is the confrontation
between Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, Wiener embodying the ideas of control, mastery, and design, von Neumann the ideas of complexity and self-organization. Cybernetics never succeeded in resolving the tension, indeed the contradiction, between these two perspectives; more specifically, it never managed to give a satisfactory answer to the problems involved in realizing its ambition of *designing* an autonomous, self-organizing machine.

Show thread

>"The aim of cognitive science always was - and still is today- the mechanization of the mind, not the humanization of the machine."

*Jean-Pierre Dupuy*
***The Mechanization of the Mind:***
*On the Origins of Cognitive Science*
google.ca/books/edition/On_the

Ashby's principle of requisite states, in fact, that the variety of the system must be large at least as the variety of the system .

As an *external* can never have the full picture of the *internal* variety of states the controlled system can find itself in, it is obvious that, for control to be , the controller must be an integral part of the same self-organized (controlled) .

Show thread

Informational Closure in the Human and the Machine: #cybernetics

If one were forced to define information in this regard, it would be something to the effect of “information is that which has the potential to elicit a response.” But here is the catch, what elicits a response is not the information, but the internal structure of the machine.

harishsnotebook.wordpress.com/

People often interpret *Ashby’s Law* (after W. Ross Ashby) as if the *system*'s internal states must have the ***same level of variety*** as its *environment* in order to survive, which implies that the system should be able to *respond* (react) to every little disturbance from the environment.

This is not completely true because, on the lowest, , level, the system blocks from an (environmental) reaching the (internal, system protected) in two ways:

1️⃣ isolation (sheltering) from most environmental disturbances, and

2️⃣ reaction to (parring with) the remaining disturbance that managed to *break through* this passive protection.

from "Intro to "
pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.htm

Except for the fact that nothing in the content of the article explains the preposterous title of **Known Unknowables** (*if a thing is unknowable how can one know about it?*) the article is an excellent read about the evolution of or what calls ***Objectivity in Parentheses***.

aeon.co/essays/four-scepticism

Natural evolves from , not the other way around, so it is rather naive to expect may somehow "spring out" from a , no matter how good they become at producing sophisticated and grammatically correct wordings.

theatlantic.com/technology/arc

Stages of according to :

4️⃣ Incompetence: I think that I know what I'm doing, but I don't;
3️⃣ Conscious : I know that I don’t know;
2️⃣ Competence: I know that I know;
1️⃣ Unconscious : I am doing it without thinking.

Show older
Qoto Mastodon

QOTO: Question Others to Teach Ourselves
An inclusive, Academic Freedom, instance
All cultures welcome.
Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.