Mastodawn

RE: https://mastodon.social/@coreyspowell/116270760514177310

This is dangerous and idiotic hubris.

The underlying fallacy is simple: our tech overlords live in their own delusional map of the world, and they are so caught up in their own bullshit "philosophy" that the world is a computer, to be controlled and manipulated at will, that they don't even see the territory anymore.

Small vs. large worlds, as I describe in my book:
https://www.expandingpossibilities.org/an-emerging-book.html

We must go #BeyondTheAgeOfMachines, not into a digital trap.

AN EMERGING BOOK

AN EVOLVING TABLE OF CONTENTS 0. Introduction 1. Manifesto 2. 12 Theses 3. The Age of Machines 4. Death to the Demon 5. A Large World 6. Mechanistic Maps 7. Church-Turing-Deutsch 8. The Lost...

EXPANDING POSSIBILITIES

Yogi Jaeger Jan 20

RE: https://spore.social/@yoginho/115899940657336915

Just one more boost for this wonderful conversation about a science for the 21st century, beyond the view of the world as a machine:

https://youtu.be/lL0bkHQeanY

Highlights from the conversation are available here:

https://youtu.be/C0e5qcBnJ5E
https://youtu.be/oHOGdAbXL-k
https://youtu.be/We25VbAN7pw
https://youtu.be/UdEl3CmzU3A

#philosophy #science
#BeyondTheAgeOfMachines

Yogi Jaeger Nov 21

We are now adding PDF versions of the chapters of #BeyondTheAgeOfMachines to the website, so you can read them offline:

https://www.expandingpossibilities.org/an-emerging-book.html

Chapters 0-2 are done already. The others will follow over the next few weeks.

Spread the news to your online-reading-averse friends!

Example below from:
https://www.expandingpossibilities.org/2-12-theses.html

Show thread

Yogi Jaeger Nov 16

@ela

Thanks for your kind feedback. Rosen is a difficult read, but I'm trying to make his take on the skillful art of modeling more accessible in my (still emerging) book #BeyondTheAgeOfMachines:
https://www.expandingpossibilities.org/an-emerging-book.html.

AN EMERGING BOOK

AN EVOLVING TABLE OF CONTENTS 0. Introduction 1. Manifesto 2. 12 Theses 3. The Age of Machines 4. Death to the Demon 5. A Large World 6. Mechanistic Maps 7. Church-Turing-Deutsch 8. The Lost...

EXPANDING POSSIBILITIES

Yogi Jaeger Oct 27

William Wimsatt is the best philosopher of science of recent times. And the most underrated.

I'll be posting more quotes of his in this thread as I'm going through the book for my chapter 13 of #BeyondTheAgeOfMachines, and a paper that I'm writing.

Our daily Wimsatt quote gives useful advice to philosophers of science about giving advice to scientists. What we want is a philosophy that is useful to science, not condescending, but also not purely descriptive ... (quote 👇)

Yogi Jaeger Oct 21

Bill Wimsatt is the best philosopher of science of recent times. And the most underrated. I'll be posting quotes as I'm going through the book for my ch13 of #BeyondTheAgeOfMachines, and a paper that I'm writing.

This one is so long that I'm posting it as a picture. Not easy to parse, but if you understand what it says, you've made a huge step towards understanding the multi-perspectival (but not arbitrary!) nature of scientific knowledge construction.

Yogi Jaeger Oct 20

This one simply says: science isn't perfect, but it adapts like nothing else.

"A naturalistic worldview of the genesis and operation of functionally organized evolving systems is heuristics all the way down — as far down as entities or configurations of them are products of selection."

Yogi Jaeger Oct 15

William Wimsatt is the best philosopher of science of recent times. And the most underrated. I'll be posting more quotes as I'm going through the book for my ch13 of #BeyondTheAgeOfMachines, and a paper that I'm writing.

And another one that's bleedingly obvious, but apparently not to some philosophers and silicon-valley types:

"We aren't God and we don't have a God's-eye view of the world."

Yogi Jaeger Oct 14

Today's quote is kind of obvious. But most philosophers still ignore it:

"We need a philosophy of science that can be pursued by *real* people in *real* situations in *real* time with the kinds of tools that they *actually* have — now or in a realistically possible future."

Show thread

Yogi Jaeger Oct 6

I've argued here that purely formal symbolic frameworks (like "computation" or "inference," which is really the same, if we consider both to be stochastic) *cannot* give you true agency:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07515

And I explain in the last section of this appendix to my book #BeyondTheAgeOfMachines, why the #FEP cannot capture evolutionary or living processes completely (like any other formal approach):

https://www.expandingpossibilities.org/a4-limitations-of-mathematical-modelling.html

Artificial intelligence is algorithmic mimicry: why artificial "agents" are not (and won't be) proper agents

What is the prospect of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI)? I investigate this question by systematically comparing living and algorithmic systems, with a special focus on the notion of "agency." There are three fundamental differences to consider: (1) Living systems are autopoietic, that is, self-manufacturing, and therefore able to set their own intrinsic goals, while algorithms exist in a computational environment with target functions that are both provided by an external agent. (2) Living systems are embodied in the sense that there is no separation between their symbolic and physical aspects, while algorithms run on computational architectures that maximally isolate software from hardware. (3) Living systems experience a large world, in which most problems are ill-defined (and not all definable), while algorithms exist in a small world, in which all problems are well-defined. These three differences imply that living and algorithmic systems have very different capabilities and limitations. In particular, it is extremely unlikely that true AGI (beyond mere mimicry) can be developed in the current algorithmic framework of AI research. Consequently, discussions about the proper development and deployment of algorithmic tools should be shaped around the dangers and opportunities of current narrow AI, not the extremely unlikely prospect of the emergence of true agency in artificial systems.

arXiv.org