imadabouzu

It can't stop the usage, it can raise the cost of doing so, by bringing in legal risk of operations operating in a public way. It can create precedence that can be built upon by other parts.

Politics and law move slower than and behind the things it attempts to regulate by design. Which is good, the atlernative is a surveilance state! But it definitely can arrange itself to punish or raise the risk profile of doing something in a certain patterned way.

Honestly, almost anything can work. Some, sort of flash card system, and some, sort of input in the language that you enjoy. I use Anki and yes it's trash but I have never found spending anymore than the least necessary time on the tech of language learning worth it.

The crucial thing, in my experience, is that language acquisition only works if you're paying attention because you actually care about the material in front of you. I think a lot of people make the mistake of only studying aspirationally and well beyond their current capacity, forgetting how to be a child and be highly curative and explorative. Weird shit, even practically unuseful shit, is surprisingly better than you'd think.

Fwiw, this is also why I -do- think it's important to talk more frankly about where science is moving towards ala things like FEP or scale free dynamics. An alternative story on things like what energy, computation, and participation really means, is useful, not for prescribing the future, but the opposite: putting ambiguity and the importance of participation back in it.

The current world view, that some how things are cleanly separated and in nice little ontological boxes of capability and shape and form, lead to closed systems delusions. It's fragile and we know it, I hope. Von Neuman's "last invention" is wrong because most, unfortunately, most "smart people's" view of intelligence has become reductive in liu of a bigger picture.

In addition to our sneers, we should want to tell a more robust story about all of these things.

Kurzgesagt

Yeah I'm not surprised. Kurzgesagt has always had that sort of forced, fragile, veneer of optimism and scientific inquiry that can only be described as "all I can imagine about the future I read about in the 60s".

This definitely reminds me of something I heard in the above video, which I think is super important. Like of course things like memory or computers are metaphors. But like, isn't everything metaphors? To your point, the "computation" of a transistor is in fact our interpretation of an activity that obviously isn't actually the thing we're seeing it as. Even a von neuman machine isn't actually, a turing machine -- it has practical limitations that theoritical turing machines don't!

But just because something or anything is a metaphor, doesn't mean it isn't useful. It's just, incomplete.

I definitely don't claim anything about consciousness. But I also don't think think things have to be conscious to be interesting, or for me to care about them.

Hell, my mom is dead, and definitely not conscious. But I still think about her and care about her. And my memories of her, still impact my life and behavior in strange ways.

I get where you're coming from, and I'm not trying to make normalizing reductive claims that things -are the same-. But things that are different by some means can also share things by other. I think it is a useful perspective to have.

Computation and computer metaphors are helpful, atleast to my thinking. But even I don't argue that it's a privileged position. Lots of words and metaphors can work.

We might as well call the moon a computer since it is ‘calculating’ the effect of a gravitational field on a moon sized object.

Yes. In fact, that's sort of my point. There is no privileged sense of computation. They can be different even if they do, have invariants.

But as far as all the other process a brain does (breathing/maintaining heart rate/etc.) describing that as ‘a computer’ seems such an abuse of notation as to render the original definition meaningless.

I tend to agree that often times, the terminology of 'attendance' is better than the terminology of computation, but I don't think that there isn't -any- meaning in keeping the computer metaphor, because I do think it has practical implications.

At the risk of going down another rabbit hole, I'd really say that the Free Energy Principle does a pretty good job of showing why keeping a wide, but nonetheless useful, definition of computation on the table can, be useful. As in, a principled tool that can shed some light on scale free dynamics (and not in a absolute, definitive answer to all questions).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQk0AHu_nng

Maybe another reason I'm ok with the computer metaphor (in which we retain the lack of privelege, and in which the attendance metaphor is kept), is that it does sort provide us some interesting technical intuitions, too. Like, how the maximum power principle effects the design and building of technology of all kinds (whether it's chemistry, electronics, energy, gardening) , how ambiguity (that is, the unknowable embedded environment) is an important functional element of deploying any sort of technology (or policy, or behavior), and how, yeah.

One day, the fact that simple and even slow things (like water, or the moon, or chemicals, or rocks, or animals) are capable computationally, but attend to different things, is in fact. Going to be meaningful and important.

RE: the ip perspective on brains,

From my perspective, science is catching up on this - in pockets. It goes under a lot of different names, and to be honest it's be around in many forms for a long time. I highly, highly recommend catching up on Dr. Michael Levin and related work on this. There is still levels of speculation here, but there's hard science and empirical observation that broadly, the neuro story on memory synapses doesn't work. The alternative, that nearly every part of the body is both capable of independent problem solving and memory, puts actionable medical alternatives on the table.

The long story is that memory appears entirely to be opportunistic. Memory can and is stored in virtually everything that a body gets access to, internally AND externally. The brain's main function is to re-imagine and reinterpret memory, not to be dictated by it. A memory isn't a fact in a broad sense, it's a dynamic that acts on the body. This is different in many ways from the hard division we try to make in modern computer design (although I'd argue that even the difference between memory and instruction in von neuman design continues to fall apart over time).

That said, and i realize this is semantic linguistic issue, but I do believe brains are computers, but only in the broadest sense of what computation could be, not in the highly specific sense of them being digital von neuman devices. What's often missed in discussion about a computational world view is being clear to the reader that there is no privileged sort of computation. There's nothing at all special or privileged about what our digital von neuman machines are, other than in a sense them being metabolisms that are functionally different than us.

When I express that brains are computers, I like to add things like, "in the sense that dance is computation, or politics is economics, or matter is experience, or money is culture." Which is to say they can be different and yet the same, depending on entirely the perspective of what you mean by something "being" anything at all. (It's similar to why ontologies are both useful but always wrong).

The bitter truth though is that I don't think there is anything privileged about the human brain either -- but that doesn't come in the sense of there being no difference. I think quite the opposite, seeing many of /the other things/ as being capable, but being in its own sorts of attendance and meaning, provides much more rich questions of "why are we different, then?" Certainly more than presuming that it is capability of any particular thing that separates us from the other things.

Ultimately, I love artists because I want an ecosystem of art and artists and art admirers, and because I think respect should transcend form, not seek reductively the most commoditized realization of it.

In many ways... isn't this what indigenous cultures already more or less believed?

A certain class of idealists definitely feel this way, and it's why many decentralized efforts are fragile and fall apart. Because they can't meaningfully construct something without centralization or owners, they end up just hiding these things under a blanket rather than acknowledging them as design elements that require an intentional specification.

I tend to agree. "No gods, no masters, no admins!" should never mean no assembly and no organization around constraints. Admins jobs isn't just to be capricious. Admins are there to set a tone and maintain it. There are places for random group chats of noise but honestly, pruning, as in gardening, is how you maintain organization. It doesn't feel great to be on the end of pruning but like seriously it should rarely be taken personally when we're talking about something like social media.

It’s just looking for a God or an afterlife without turning to religion.

Yes. Because they sneered so hard at /other/ things creating and living in their own meaning, the sneer came full circle, and they find themselves in a simulated jail being sneered at by things that sneer at things that create and live in their own meaning.

Basically, they looked in the mirror and sneered.

Oh absolutely! This is the entire delusion collapsing on itself.

Bro, if intelligence is, as the cult claims, fully contained self improvement, --you could never have mattered by definition--. If the system is closed, and you see the point of convergence up ahead... what does it even fucking matter?

This is why Pascal's wager defeats all forms of maximal utilitarianism. Again, if the system is closed around a set of known alternatives, then yes. It doesn't matter anymore. You don't even need intelligence to do this. You can do with sticks and stones by imagining away all the other things.