Hard problem, Egregores, and AGI

 Given a different frame, a hard problem can become an easy / easier problem. Or point to a different way to understand the "problem". One way to think about consciousness or the hard problem of consciousness is to think of it as an egregore. With a certain combination of neural structures with certain features / characteristics, an egregore is created. We identify that as a "self" or our consciousness. Since we have such a direct experience of it, we have so many words for it - self, I, ego, my name, your name, .... There are many egregores which we have no names for, e.g., family egregore, ethnic egregore, national egregore, mob egregore, .... We can be parts of these egregores, however, we don't have a direct experience of them as an entity since we are only a part of that egregore. Our memory, our senses, etc., don't have a sense of their identity as they are parts of our egregore / consciousness.

From this framing arises the question: what are the necessary and sufficient sub-parts for the creation of an egregore? This may be a useful direction in the study / creation of a strong agi. We have early inklings of intentionality in creating egregores, e.g., metanoic teams ( a team that is greater than the sum of its parts). We don't seem to have deterministic processes for creating metanoic teams. However, on occasion we are do create them on occasion with some degree of intentionality. We are also getting inklings of how to do this from synthetic biology, genetic studies, biology, ...

YATOT - Yet Another Thought On Thought - orders of realities

 More thoughts on the previous post. We are trying to understand what this existence is about, why, what, how, ...

• Story 1.0 ( aka religion ) - Why is predominant. There is a creation story that narrates the why. The why is a veil on the sacred - that which is unfathomable, not to be understood. The how and what is limited by what the why story allows. The feedback loop of story upgrading is slow - centuries and millennia, partly because the absoluteness of the why is a temporal dampener.
• Story 2.0 ( aka science ) - How and what is predominant. Why is relegated to secondary contexts, e.g., theory of evolution explains the why of different forms, their origins, development, etc. The feedback loop speed increases to generations or less. The old priesthood maintains its stories in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary - Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions.
• Story 3.0 - The sacred / mystery is re-introduced. The feedback loop becomes variable - very fast for some situations and very slow for others depending on the potential gains / harms from the change that responding to the feedback would engender.
• Story 4.0 - Consciousness starts creating and becoming the why, what, and how of other contexts, universes, simulations, .... There is bifurcation - creation of alternate universes in virtual reality and explorations in this reality. 
• Story 5.0 - unification / integration / exploration of the bifurcated realities - consciousness begins to create new life forms. Gives these life forms capabilities. These capabilities lead to these new forms starting Story 1.0 again for their reality.
• The recursion is infinite (?). It just keeps going. Where are we in this recursive frame? Which order of reality are we in? If it is turtles all the way up and the all the way down, which one is our turtle.

YAT - Yet another thought on religion / science

 Religion and science are generally put into juxtaposition to posit some idea / hypothesis. Another way to think about the difference between the two in terms of simple structural differences that distinguish one from the other. One can think of science is version 2.0 of trying to understand this reality / existence.

• Religion has a narrative of why and how existence / reality came to be, what it is about, and where it is going.
• Science has a narrative of how existence / reality came to be, what it is about, and where it is going. The why is demoted to specific contexts, e.g., evolution, creation of life as a process beginning with exploding stars, ....

So, if we see them both as attempts to understand and make sense, then we can say the difference between the two is that science has a faster feedback loop. Science narratives have to be validated by evidence. And new evidence can invalidate accepted narratives. Religion's feedback loop is much slower - centuries / millennia for religion and only a few generations or less for science. 

Since it is humans that are practicing / using both these narratives, the behavior is human behavior. Both try to sideline, eliminate any deviance from the currently accepted narrative. Structurally, both processes have their priesthoods, gatekeepers, fundamentalists, ....

Science / Religion

Came across an interesting article trying to distinguish between science and religion.  Unfortunately, the author falls into the pattern he is decrying - us / them. Scientists can be just as fervently dogmatic as religious true believers. They have ruined careers / lives of others because they did not follow the current scientific models / dogma. This continues to happen pretty regularly. Also, he totally leaves out that binding to dogma does not have to be religious dogma, it can be any ideology such as fascism, communism, trumpism, .... These are all non-religious ideologies. Science has its own dogma about what is real and what is not. Although, one can say, as the author points out, that it a self-correcting process. What he doesn't point out is that that self-correction can take a generation or more. Which is an improvement over religion's century / millennia long binding to dogma with little self-correction or upgrading.

Another model to think about these issues is that each one of us is at a different level of development and hence need. Each of us needs an anchor  / foundation to build our lives around. Children's anchors are their parents and parental authority. Adults can substitute other authority figures, e.g., priests, popes, mullahs, gurus, to be their authority figure. This is a way of conserving energy. One can call it cognitive off-loading. Letting somebody else do our thinking and reasoning takes a lot less energy. And nature tends to take the path of least resistance and minimal energy utilization. This pattern is built into the fabric of existence.

So, with a developmental model as the base, the issue becomes how do we help each other be more reasonable, think more clearly, pay attention to the feedback that the universe continually provides us to help us grow. One of our features is the remarkable ability to filter out feedback the universe is giving us and continue our "dogmatic" path no matter how much pain and suffering it causes us and others.

And yet another factor at play is our starting / base state as we think / act on these things. Are we in a state of care / love / compassion. Or are we in a state of looking for a blemish - what is wrong - that would justify our dislike / disgust / hate / ... The starting state can make such a difference in our thinking / reasoning. Perhaps, recognition of this dynamic is what led various spiritual traditions to extol the value of love / agape.

And in the midst of all this confusion about what is going on and why, if we are able to pay attention to the moment, there can be this sense of awe at this existence - we have no absolute idea what it is all about and yet here we are, breathing?

Non-linguistic thinking

 Noticed a pattern in the social sciences. The toolset of the humanities is language and the vocabulary that is available in language. However, reality is far more complex than any language can capture. So, there may be phenomena that are there but they are "invisible" because our languages do not have a word for them. A possible example are Lagrange points. We discovered this phenomenon through mathematics and physics. We have no direct experience of these points. So, if we think of a complex mathematics describing social phenomena, there may be all sorts of phenomena that these maths "show" that we may have no language vocabulary for. However, just as we have not name these points, new names will arise for these patterns.

So, can we begin to be more intentional in thinking beyond a language framework. Perhaps thinking in terms of forces at play, grouping of things, and emergence of features from those forces and groupings. And how scaling modifies the forces and characteristics of a system?

The Importance of Bullshit

Numbers of people use "bullshit" as a way of describing narratives that they disagree with in a rather pejorative way. I would suggest that, as Yuval Harari points out in 'Sapiens', that myths / narratives, with no tangible substance in the real world,  were what allowed us to form ever larger groupings - from tribes to villages to towns to citties to nations to a global 'civilization'. The side effect of all these groupings was the technology and comforts we enjoy these days. So, one way of phrasing this is that bullshit is the manure that fertilized our development to our current state of existence with our capabilities to reach the moon, mars, and beyond. In that sense, the value of bullshit is immeasurable.

Meaning, Words, Deep Structure

Words, nouns about abstractions, can be considered to have a deeper structure than their surface meaning. Take a word like fundamentalism. It is typically applied to a fervent(?), true believer(?) in some tradition / religion, particularly, some belief that the speaker of the word does not ascribe to.

We can deconstruct the word fundamentalist/ism to a degree of binding between an agent / person and a belief system. This can then be applied across multiple contexts / any context. A scientist can be a fundamentalist. As can an economist, a doctor, a politician, an engineer, a biologist, ..... Different agents can bind to their models of reality to such an extent that they filter out any anomalous data / evidence.

This deep binding to a perspective can be a feature or a bug. It is a feature when one uses it to devote one's full capacity to explore a particular domain. It is a bug when this binding filters out all evidence to the contrary.

A Story about a story

In "Sapiens" by Yuval Harari he mentions that we create "fictions" that are the glue that allow us created tribes, cities, nations, civilizations, ... We can apply the notion of fiction to Harari's narrative. In a narrative, we decide what to put in the foreground and what to put in the background. His story puts as "individuals" in the foreground. However, we can create similar narratives with different foregrounds:

• Civilizations as foreground - the universe uses building blocks to create structures. First, the universe is created by the building blocks of particles, atoms, ....  Then, those create life, Life then creates more complex structures such as packs, tribes, cities, nations, civilizations, .... The trajectory here is that at some future point, the whole universe will be alive / conscious with these blocks that it is creating.
• Processes - when two cells communicate, they signal each other with some electrical, chemical, ... signals. Each cell interprets that signal and does its thing. There is a communication protocol - signal and what the signal means. Our languages are building blocks to create signals and communicate. These languages than become the blocks to create narratives / stories. With this process in the foreground, we can hardly say that the protocol is a "fiction". It is what is used to create more complex structures. Similarly, gravity is a glue that holds moons, solar systems, galaxies, together. We can't see it (intangible), yet we feel its effects all the time. Similarly, we don't see the glue (narratives) that bind us into groups, yet we feel their effects all the time. With this narrative, is it reasonable to say that the glue is "fiction"? Different glues have different attributes and capabilities. Sometimes we confuse the content of the glue with the "process" of gluing. The process is quite real as far as real goes for us.

As always, ymmv (your mileage/narrative may vary)

A Story

Our book club read "Sapiens" by Yuval Harari and had some interesting conversations about the narratives we create and how our current set of narratives seem to be leading us to an existential cliff. Waking up the next morning, another narrative arose within me.

YAN (Yet Another Narrative): We seem to be caught in a Lilliputian dilemma - which end of the egg is up. Deists have created god(s) in our image (pretty messy) that give meaning to everything. Atheists, on the other end of the egg, say our existence arises out of random fluctuations of quantum foam and has no intrinsic meaning (meaningless). Both sides lose sight of the egg. Here we are in this existence. And perhaps the real question is what are the attributes of the "egg"? The attributes of the egg are all around us, in fact there is nothing but the attributes of the egg. Here are a couple of attributes:

• "Infinite" diversity - wherever we look, high (big) or low (small), we keep discovering new forms, structures, processes, ....
• "Processes" - things unfold in a causal chain. Some unfoldings have good results, some not. How do we create better(?) processes with better(?) results? We do both. Some of our "greats" have said that processes driven by "love / kindness" have better outcomes. They have not figured out how to enact those processes except in small instances. Neither have we. Perhaps there is more to this process (narrative) design than we have yet figured out.
• ..............

As always, ymmv (your mileage/narrative may vary)

YAP (Yet Another Pattern) from Jordan Peterson structures

I have been listening to a number of Jordan Peterson videos and reading some of his material. What he is saying is well articulated. He backs up his analysis with a deep study of the subject area - very impressive. However, there was something about his meta model that was causing me some cognitive dissonance. I have been trying to understand the source of that dissonance for some time. Every time I listen to him, I find him insightful, honest, and very genuine.

Science vs Religion and Context

There are lots of groups dialoguing about science in religion. A lot these conversations seem to me to miss some rather basic contextual points: