Theme: Causality

  • Well done. Minor improvement: A theory consists of (a) a narrative explanation o

    Well done.
    Minor improvement: A theory consists of (a) a narrative explanation of the causes of (b) a set of observable, measurable, behaviors (state and changes in state). I usually describe this as the two sides of the coin: positiva (narrative) vs negativa (measurements).


    Source date (UTC): 2024-07-03 22:00:26 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1808621849074442396

    Reply addressees: @FredSondheim @theseoblogger @meharmsen @RichardDawkins

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1808603922552271278

  • Evolution over time. Apes have white skin. Dark skin is an adaptation to the exc

    Evolution over time. Apes have white skin. Dark skin is an adaptation to the exchange of body hair for heat dissipation for persistence running – which is how we (less heroically) were able to kill large game. Africans have lower metabolism as well. Most visible in african vsโ€ฆ


    Source date (UTC): 2024-06-25 21:13:07 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1805710840009736475

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1805705558189817919

  • RT @AutistocratMS: Their brain cannot systematize causality makes them draw rand

    RT @AutistocratMS: Their brain cannot systematize causality makes them draw random connections and their evasion of responsibility leads thโ€ฆ


    Source date (UTC): 2024-06-12 18:58:00 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1800965794861375580

  • Yes. In the hierarchy of assemblies of matter, new operations emerge at sales we

    Yes. In the hierarchy of assemblies of matter, new operations emerge at sales we call disciplines, just as they do in the hierarchy of mathematical geometries and their projections.


    Source date (UTC): 2024-06-08 07:31:27 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1799343467979813347

    Reply addressees: @getsqt @ToKTeacher @gravitontensor @DanielWhiteson @getairchat

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1799337680234561609

  • Correct. But is it or not the search for first principles? And why is it easier

    Correct. But is it or not the search for first principles? And why is it easier to develop the first principles of chemistry – it’s largely solved. And why engineering?
    Because they’re easier, because we can observe and deduce at those scales, were in the foundations of physics we lack the instrumentation, and in say, proteins we run up against extraordinary complexity.

    I won’t get into how physics stopped making models and is using mathematics without understanding the first principles of math, but it’s rare to find even a mathematician that does.

    Reply addressees: @Adam_W_Sawyer @ToKTeacher @gravitontensor @DanielWhiteson @getairchat


    Source date (UTC): 2024-06-08 07:29:03 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1799342861764153344

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1799340329218249114

  • Thats nonsense. It means you falsify theories by test of construction from irred

    Thats nonsense. It means you falsify theories by test of construction from irreducible premises.
    Science is reducible to the search for first causes, which result in first principles from which all resulting operations at all subsequent scales emerge.
    You may think creativelyโ€ฆ


    Source date (UTC): 2024-06-08 06:59:11 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1799335348075454500

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1799320411970457690

  • Depends on what you mean by catastrophism. If you mean the disturbing regularity

    Depends on what you mean by catastrophism. If you mean the disturbing regularity of great dyings, or the dramatic geological and climatological consequences on life with disturbing regularity, then I mean, that’s pretty hard to disagree with.
    The electric universe is another bit of nonsense even if there is a grain of truth here and there the conclusions drawn from those grains of truth are nonsense.
    There isn’t a lot of mystery left at the large scale for mankind, our evolution, or even the evolution of earth, or the evolution of the solar system.
    That doesn’t mean we know everything, but we aren’t missing the exciting stuff we wish we found. In fact, just the opposite. instead we have a deeper understanding of the psychological wants for those exciting things even though they don’t exist and there is no evidence. ๐Ÿ˜‰

    Reply addressees: @SankohaProjekt


    Source date (UTC): 2024-06-06 23:50:51 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1798865165670060032

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1798863269568114712

  • You’d think so but I would need to see very strong evidence that we know how the

    You’d think so but I would need to see very strong evidence that we know how the mother’s immune system attacks what cells, when, and then how to prevent that first, and otherwise, how to supplement T while at the same time not producing autism.


    Source date (UTC): 2024-06-04 21:02:42 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1798098072565666020

    Reply addressees: @AndThird70475

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1798088199526658239

  • Continuing my feedback to conservatives: OBSESSIONS There is a term for the cons

    Continuing my feedback to conservatives:

    OBSESSIONS
    There is a term for the conservative tendency to justificationary reductionism called “monocausotaxophilia” in psychology, and “monocausalism” in philosophy, and people who use it “monocausalists”.

    The Market Competition For Political Solutions
    Meaning that there are always a multitude of competing networks of people moving the aggregate direction of a polity, and as such there are multiple causal axis producing a circumstance that is only marginally in the same direction with main fat ‘tails’ of causality dragging behind it each of those networks.

    Both Sexes Fail To Cognitively Scale For Different Reasons
    While we continually express the frustration with women who do not comprehend that emotions do not scale in the absence of the interpersonal ability to regulate behavior – we fail to recognize that a signifiant population of conservatives, while capable of systematizing cannot systematize competing interests at scale. So both sexes are often equally incompetent to judge the behavior of organizations at sale and the near impossibility of doing so by incentives alone.

    The Problem of Scale in Voluntary Orders
    That there is the problem. People in networks do not have full alignment. Only sufficient incentives to maintain their ability to cooperate sufficiently to survive. Not to do teh best, but to survive amidst the competition between a multitude of self and other interests.

    The Masculine and Conservative Point of Failure
    So my point here is that conservatives cannot seemingly imagine the difficulty of organizing networks of people with only marginally overlapping interests to produce some end or other by cooperative means – because all such means have cooperative costs.

    Why Is This Even More Problematic than in the Past?
    Why is this a problem for so many conservatives? Desocialization, Undersocialization, and economic class stratification, so that so many of our people have no experience working in an organization of any scale AND in proximity to those who have to make decisions at scale, AND the high investment by those who make decisions in helping men how to make decisions at scale, when there are increasingly divergent interests among the people at all scales.

    Yet at the same time loyalty networks and compensation networks and self interest networks mean that at any time even the most hierarchical organizations must satisfy some clientele among the members as well as external players, more so than others.

    Simple version is that without military traiining and participation men cannot imagine the problem any more than women without four or five children can think as rationally as a man.

    The Problem of Our Political Order
    And we have no king, no nobility, no aristocracy, no head of the manor to appeal to. We cannot appeal to or expect results from our senators and representatives unless we have vast amounts of money or the capacity to threaten their reelection. And even if we could they could never overcome the various interests inside and outside of the government necessary to bring about resolution of our injustices. Worse, despite rule of law and judicial supremacy, we have no separate court for collective pursuit of prosecutions against the state bureaucracies. The agencies have no responsibility for their regulations and processes to pass legislative approval. And there is no way of altering them when they are irresponsible and harmful.

    Overcentralization means over failiure of networks of discordant interests.
    This is largely because the federal government has take upon itself the work of the states, disempowering the states, thus preventing the states to function as a market for the production of commons using competing ideas, and disempowering the people from obtaining action from the states. And from the evidence produced by the states, to alter policy at the federal level.

    The Resulting Conservative Behavior is Moralizing Rather than Operationalizing – Becuse they don’t know how to do something without moral uniformity: intuition. The same problem of emotional intuition that plagues women but the male version. Just as female oppression equals male conspiracy for the same reason.

    Conservative Scale Blindness
    So my point here is that conservatives cannot seemingly imagine the difficulty of organizing networks of people with only marginally overlapping interests to produce some end or other by cooperative means – because all such means have cooperative costs.

    Resulting Dumb Ideas
    And so most conservatives propose rather childish simplistic solutions that would work at interpersonal sale in some small business but cannot work at any scale in ether an enterprise, an industry, or a government.

    And so conservatives don’t know how dumb they are, even IF they’re profoundly moral in their dumbness, and in doing so see conspiracy instead of complexity due to scale beyond which a deliberative government can function.

    Dumbness Creates Opportunity for Evil
    And as such bad actors seeking to take advantage of the dysfunction of such a system both overtly and by merely following rational incentives whether they understand the consequences or not, and whether they understand that the consequences they favor are capitalizing or capital destroying for others – and as such effectively a crime against the people and their states.

    The System Isn’t Working As Designed – It’s Been Appropriated by the Financial, Clerical, and Global Talking Classes made possible by the postwar conversion of anglo-germanic demonstrated competency and loyalty to credentialists without demonstrated competency or loyalty but self interest.

    So it is false to say the system is working as designed instead of the systems at play work in parallel, cooperation and competition with one another given the influences and power dynamics at plan in that system between those networks of people.

    Power is What Matters
    Then the problem of fixing the present troubles, is obtaining and preserving sufficient monopoly of power to suppress the harms while fostering the goods.

    And we have discussed how to do so. It’s not a mystery. It’s not even hard. The only problem is the power to do so.

    The Conflict Among Conservatives
    Now, I’m aware of ongoing conflict over the direction and purpose of my work the people who work with me, the organization as a brand and the people who follow our work, and those who are aware, and those who are affected by it whether consciously or not.

    And the Psychology and Incentives Behind Conservative Behavior
    So what you might find funny I find a bit .. well, annoying … because I recognize both this conservative bias to simplistic reductio conspiracy, and I recognize it is an expression of powerlessness, and I recognize that among the powerless, such ‘sticks’ are useful for beating the bushes for attention and building communities of attention.

    Consequences
    The result of which is audience capture, and one’s stagnation in service of that audience capture rather than the goal of producing material change with the audiences that not only haven’t captured you, but the audiences we need to reach who have the ability and agency to actually bring about any change – precisely because they AREN’T social and economic outcasts losers and lost boys.

    What To Do?
    On the other hand, and I’m workin on trying to say this with the most love and care that I can, because I do love and care for almost everyone I come into contact with who expresses any interest or understanding of the work, and even more so those who invest in it and try to put it to work.

    Upgrades Are Part of Growing Up
    But, you know, when you go through life, when you build friend networks, when you build volunteers organizations when you start companies, buld industries, start intellectual movements, political parties, and even proto-armies, you start with ‘what you can get’ and ‘upgrade’ as you mature in value and legitimacy until you have sufficient legitimacy to influence outcomes among the people who have the capacity to influence outcomes.

    Legitimacy Lowers Acquisition Costs
    We are at the cusp of legitimacy. However, because of that we are also at risk of illegitimacy. And that illegitimacy will result from alienating those people who have the ability to act and cause change because of people who do not – and who do not, because they are demonstrably under-socialized, antisocial, dysfunctional, or psychologically unfit, which includes just as many on the right as on the left.

    Our Burden Of Proof Is Heavy Enough Already
    It is bad enough that we have to make the feminine-jewish-abrahamic-marxist argument even if we are explaining it as a normal sequence of development, and that we can ‘cure’ it as well as fix the economy.

    But when we exert overly aggressive attention to niche, questionably scientific, and often conspiratorial claims, that demonstrate the individuals advancing and following these claims are simply underdeveloped, and when their underdeveloped demonstrations of being out of control in life appeal to ideas and wants irrelevant to the goal of reforms, then we are damaging legitimacy.

    We are not claiming that the degree of agitation and the bubbling rage are illegitimate. If anything they are so.

    We are not claiming that conservative objectives are immoral, if anything, just the opposite.

    We are claiming that rallying around something too stupidly simple to really matter at grand scale, just because you can grasp it, and obtain positive emotions from doing so – that produces illegitimacy for you, for those you associate with, and of course, those movements that seek to produce material change among people who are not so exasperated, frustrated, and angry that they latch onto the meaningless because it is all that they understand and can demonstrate their aggressions by arguing in favor of.

    So, Reals over Feels
    And that illegitimacy can’t happen no matter how much ‘feeels’. you want. We need reeelz not feeels.

    Hard Choices: Immediate or Delayed Gratification?
    We have at times turned over people who are subsequently successful. We have affected others who are again, successful in their niches. We have had people leave over emotional issues. And cast out others over potential of canceling. Even others who simply can’t and don’t want to keep up. We have also ejected people who were, despite their energetic advocacy, mentally unstable and a risk.

    Turning Points
    But we are past the R&D stage, and in the production and distribution stage, and so those fringe people with emotional and psychological, or obsessive needs had to go; those who caused disruption had to go;Those with competing interests had to go; and unfortunately those with niche obsessions, or those captured by unhelpful audiences, may need to move along and continue their journey without us and without association with us in order for us to continue to seek legitimacy.

    Time is Pressing
    And we need to do this fairly quickly given the Overton window and the rate at which we are producing content and hopefully if we continue at this rate, we produce a publication which in turn gives us extraordinary legitimacy even if it’s only among those with the intellectual capacity to then use it as a tool themselves to capture an audience.

    My Changing Position
    So, you know, I’ve been very ill for a long time and these things were acceptable at that point, especially when I wasn’t sure I’d be here to finish the work and I’d hoped to seed enough people that my departure would at lest not end the work.

    The Choice
    But at this point with both the conferences under us and the quality of the work we’re producing, and the rather fascinating spread of our influence which at present is subtle, then anyone who is no longer a fit for the pursuit of legitimacy has to make a choice. It’s ‘on mission’ or on your own mission.

    All Choices are Good
    And just as I have spun off many startups from my own, maybe others can begin their startup with their interests.

    Self Defense
    But what’s not going to happen is the positive feedback loop from the lost boys despite it’s psychological rewards, prevent us from legitimacy, raising revenue, and having a material impact.

    Tough Love
    Love y’all, but (humor) we have to understand that you need to upgrade your friends when you go to college, and maybe again after; and you need to upgrade women to keep them under 25 ;), and you need to upgrade your staff to keep them revenue making, access better and more customers, and hire better people; and of course you need to upgrade your associates such that they don’t prevent future upgrades. ๐Ÿ˜‰

    Conservative Adulthood
    It’s time to grow up and seek delayed gratification in order to obtain the returns on investment that are higher over time. ๐Ÿ˜‰

    Cheers


    Source date (UTC): 2024-06-03 00:37:18 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1797427302202060800

  • Dr Michael Levin (@drmichaellevin), (All); Great Paper. Thanks for open access.

    Dr Michael Levin (@drmichaellevin), (All);

    Great Paper. Thanks for open access. (Really.)

    And of course I agree that Dr Levin’s work, demonstrating the influence of electromagnetic charge, which serves to illustrate that evolution not only finds a way, but it finds every way possible to assist life evolve complexity. This added dimension of causality caused me to update my own work.

    However, this paper gave me pause. And it’s not necessarily negative feedback about this paper, which is correct, even given Michael’s tendency to apply the utility of professorial attention-seeking of students (and readers) by implication of wonder to that which would better be stated without it. ๐Ÿ˜‰

    Michael Levin (@drmichaellevin) from Tufts has just published, Andrew Budson (@abudson) from BU and Harvard has just published. And I could list a dozen more attempts at exposition in popular science – most of which are tragically embarassing. But Jeff Hawkins (@JeffCHawkins) at Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience and founder of Numenta (and inventor of the Palm Pilot) has been working with these ideas for almost two decades. And while I started writing neural networks on “ancient iron” using assembly language, I’d say most of the innovation that I rely on when I teach the foundations of cognition is based upon his synthesis of neuroscience.

    The only rather fascinating aspect of LLM’s is the use of brute force, using massive volumes of text, and massively expensive computing power (and energy), to make use of the ordinary grammar, consisting of (a) the first principle of the universe’s evolution: continuous recursive disambiguation of disorder into order, into (b) continuous recursive organization of bodily movements, (c) into continuous recursive disambiguation of navigational way-finding, (d) into continuous recursive disambiguation of thinking (e) into continuous recursive disambiguation into speech as Chomsky’s ‘universal grammar’. A process itself which consists of evolutionary computation of complexity by continuous recursive disambiguation of disorder into order. ๐Ÿ˜‰

    So it turns out that phrases, sentences, paragraphs, narratives, arguments, and proofs, are, by their grammar (rules of continuous recursive disambiguation) and thus their organization of references alone, in sufficient volume, are, specifications for actors, objects, spaces, backgrounds, possible actions and navigation through them: Episodes of all scales – whether concrete, imaginary, or abstract.

    But why does each generation of academics have to ‘rediscover’ that which we knew one or two generations before, then claim it’s a novel discovery?

    And what does that tell us about our education, disciplines, and institutions?

    In the eighties and nineties those of us who worked on the application of neuroscience and cognitive science to our futile attempts at artificial intelligence given the paucity of available memory, storage, and computing power explained the development of memory as an economy of connectivity within the biological ecology of the body. And when explaining memory’s behavior we used the development of traffic patterns before during and after the mass introduction of motor vehicles.

    I mean, we wrote mathematics, software, simulations, and games to illustrate it. Our problem, since the AI winter of the 1980s, which I was a part of, has always been hardware, and the remaining problem is still hardware – at least until the neuromorphic hardware revolution that’s been gradually developing out there produces a viable product – which will collapse the entire pre-calculated compute economy that’s animating the financial sector as we speak.

    Even Joscha Bach’s (@plinz) recent tweet “We finally have a theory of representation”, I find both true and odd, and a bit disturbing, because, between what we’ve understood by design of higher dimensional manifolds in mathematics, neural networks, simulations, and most obviously three dimensional real time simulations of the world (games), with their backgrounds, objects, actors, eye-head direction, body direction, movement direction, speed, bodily volume, and events, composed of triangles, surfaces, and reflectivity – and more so with hexagonal surface navigation: all of which are precisely what the hierarchy of the brain produces by precisely the same means: triangles. (and I’ll skip explaining why the universe has three dimensions plus time for the same reason – because that’s a whole different rat hole.)

    Around 2005 and 2006 I worked with team out of Microsoft one of whom had worked on the flight controls and navigation for the B2 Bomber which is impossible to fly without computer assistance, and another (like me) who was a quite sophisticated tools, software, and operating system architect. At that point, the use of graphics cards for vector processing had just been emerging. We discussed the model of the manifold, the use of threads of short and long term running agents (unlike LLM’s). We discussed the impact on Google’s search and revenue model.

    The problem was the amount of money necessary to produce both the software and the hardware. And I could not at that time ether (a) divert that much time from my existing businesses, (b) feel confident enough that we could raise that amount of money without producing a working model, which would take six months to a year full time by at least a small team. So we understood. … And we weren’t alone.

    As far as I know the most important information we’ve learned in neuroscience is the organization of the layers of the neocortex, the organization of micro columns, columns, how axons seek dendrites first through chemical signature and second though synchronicity, and the ‘insert, retrieve, update, delete cycle of axon, axon terminal, and dendritic computation’.

    After that all the valuable information that really mattered in understanding consciousness was the complexity of the hippocampal region in producing competition, coherence, parsimony, and indexing that could be used for long term association of such complex networks.

    And after that, and precisely the one thing – though likely quite obvious – that is left to explain, is ‘if that’s all neurons and nerves do, then what information are they transmitting that results in our conscious experience? “Memories of memories all the way down.”

    So the point I’m trying to make is perhaps less obvious: that in my work I continuously and disturbingly run across claims of insight and discovery that are from decades to generations if not centuries old.

    And that’s often because compartmentalization of disciplines has mandated ignorance, and the volume of nonsense publications obscures prior research in other fields.

    It’s far worse in technology because of the vast increases in the number of new people in each field on a regular basis has diluted knowledge to the point where every four years or so we produce a new generation of nerds who think they’re inventing, when all they are doing is compensating for – all too often – the absolutely horrific architecture of the browser and its means of running streams of text as software that never saw a compiler and for whom sufficient test cases to replace a complier are deleteriously costly.

    And don’t get me started on physics which is proud of it’s mathematical rigor without having the faintest idea what the foundations of mathematics consist of and the limits of mathematics vs computation and operation.

    At least in economics, we fail all the time, so we are extremely conscious of the limits of math. So physicists come to economics and tell us what we’re doing wrong. Mathematicians provide tools to physicists to enable them to do more. And those of us who work in the epistemology of such complex things, fail repeatedly to reform mathematics to take account for the superiority of computation and simulation in producing reducibility beyond that which mathematics cannot.

    After all the universe is discrete and mathematics … well, it doesn’t do that well. ๐Ÿ˜‰

    Cheers
    CD

    Michael Levin’s new book isn’t available yet.
    Publications ( long list )
    This Topic:
    https://t.co/djRYBirr6o
    Papers:
    https://t.co/J24lnUpjkx
    Preprints: https://t.co/pMYR7QxUDd

    Andrew Budson
    https://t.co/1Gr5VERopr

    Reply addressees: @drmichaellevin


    Source date (UTC): 2024-06-03 00:20:46 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1797423142895337472

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1796477278169514472