Yudkowsky Bayesian Priors

I did once watch Yellow Submarine, stoned. I was watching for the reference to an artist near-family member. Thank goodness I never became a stoner. I haven't watched it since, maybe because there was no big impression. 

Improbably, I'm now a Bills fan. I host a watch party every single game. I've always hated football, and now hate it even more for the money and exclusion of it. Something like 90% of the seats in the new stadium will be reserved for seat-license holders. We used to walk to the game from church on Sundays when Jack Kemp used to favor us. The cost of a ticket was negligible. I later held the same job that Cookie Gilchrist did - delivering beer kegs - back when being even a famous player wasn't a full-time life-sustaining job. We both deserved and got the same workout.

I'm also a sailor, always on some boat that I substantially rebuilt. I've never become very skilled. I'm no longer bold, but I once was and sometimes consider the odds that day when I was the only boat on the water, sailing alone as usual, and I picked up a fellow way way out among the steep Lake Erie rollers. I'd heard his screaming, picturing some unwise family outboard capsized. It sounded like a bunch of kids. 

It was hard to tell the noise from background howling, but it kept returning. I tied off the tiller and climbed up onto the winch alongside the mast and saw nothing. The second time, I saw the desperate body waving arms and screaming. My engine was going bad and wouldn't start, so I executed what ended up being a near perfect pickup. One hand on mast, foot on tiller, boat heeled far over, I passed close above him and pulled him aboard over the low side in one swift action, his grasp matching mine.

What were his odds?

I take one look at the profile of the Bayesian mega-yacht that foundered in a freak storm, basically by being in the precise wrong or right spot, and I knew it couldn't be stable. The unschooled man had become a billionaire by clarifying the odds on the way to LLM AI. His yacht was a finger flipped at something.

Even though anywhere you go you hear Bills fans arguing in almost political frenzy about what went wrong and what went right, always laced with foul expletives, the Bills are what cuts through politics and brings us all together in Buffalo. That's why I watch them. I want to be a part of us.

What were their odds?

Just before the second miraculous comeback the other day, both watched on TV, the calculated odds for the Bills to win were something close to nil. 

I am far from certain, but I think that the difference between a Bayesian and a plain old statistician is how you might place your bet when a coin has come up heads fifty times in a row. Canonically, the odds always remain 50/50. The coin has been certified fair by previous flipping.

Since there's no magic allowed, the standard answer is that the next toss is still 50/50. The Bayesian looks at the priors and says nope, I'm betting the farm on a heads. 

I ran into Eliezer Yudkowsky, virtually, back when he was, to me, some kind of acolyte of Ray Kurzweil. I'd read Kurtzweil's Singularity book and was repulsed. Google embraced him, as well they might. His claim to some sort of fame was voice to text or maybe text to voice software. It was so much fun to watch my nieces and nephews talk to the computer that Dad got from AARP and IBM. They were rolling on the floor from the sketchy conversions.

Yudkowsky and Kurzweil both believed and, as far as I know, still believe, that there will be a moment in the very near future when "intelligence," sometimes so called, will crystalize across the cosmos in a virtual instant, displacing all the random stuff. Displacing life. Yudkowsky once looked forward to the disembodied immortality he fully expected. Does he still?

What were the odds against his now becoming horrified by AI? Does he somehow value life? If so, why is he betting against it?

The unexamined suppositions about what intelligence is (and isn't) are already far along the way to destroying life, the universe, and everything, even though we already know that the answer is 42, right?

I am sorely pressed to put God in where the Bills win. Where the arrogant ship founders. I resist, for some reason. Probably because the religionists have totalized God and use him not for good anymore. He's become a battering ram for one's "side".

The probability of humans in the cosmos is surely lower than the probability of the Bills' recent comeback, or the Bayesian mega-yacht's foundering, or that Jet Ski rider being rescued (his buddy dumped him to jump the waves alone, not having the nautical experience to realize that once lost in the waves, a swimmer is lost forever without a spotter).

AI LLMs are working off human language. Our natural languages are being totalized. Trump is the natural response. Figure it out. Yudkowsky thinks that ship will float. He's properly scared of it. 

I went to Yale to become an engineer. Improbably, I'd been accepted at both CalTech and MIT. I doubt I'd have made it into Yale without the engineering slant. I ended up with a degree in Chinese lit, and even started a PhD in classical Chinese lit.

What are the odds? Well, I'm odd. 

I didn't last long in grad school, having been lured away by a wooden boat, or the dream of one, based on a rotting hulk.

I had been misplaced as a freshman into a rather advanced English lit class. I had no clue. I remember later, sitting in a circle in some high-class English lit seminar where each would read a line from a poem. I was shut down quickly, probably sounding like how a computer would read a poem

But I also remember learning to read the classical Chinese poets, where my absent priors in tony Prep Schools hadn't already set my course for idiocy. There's no way no how that an LLM AI can "decode" those poems. 

Or could they? 

My own professor, with whom I became fairly close, was famous for having memorized the entire corpus of Tang Dynasty significant poets, the Complete Tang Poems. He chastened me once for correcting his reading of a single character in a poem our class was assigned. The odds against me were that high. It wouldn't happen again, he said. 

Humanity is imperfect. My professor is imperfect. I am certainly imperfect. But I do have a heart, which is something our President also has, though in many sizes too small. 

My only talent in life has been to repair things which should long ago have fallen apart. Boats, cars, houses, schools, that kind of thing. I don't always succeed. I lack the hubris for invention. Well, honestly, I don't even believe there is such a thing. Invention is purloined credit for the all that came before. Being first should almost never be credited as being best.

Now I'm certain that it would be extremely useful to have some AI extract whatever I might want from the Complete Tang Poems. It might even get me commendations from my professor. But one must first know how to read. At least a few poems must smack you straight to the heart. You must be able to refer to at least a few referents and progenitors in and by your own mind alone. And you must have lived in an actual body, which is the seat of ones emotional self, spread out far beyond our brain. 

I would love for this to be the end of what I have to say. I'm certainly not making much progress against the powers of late-state wealth-promotion, which runs the planet now. Wealth begets wealth in almost the same way that AI begets AI in humans.

I share Yudkowsky's fierce calling out of the dangers of our current working assumptions. I don't share his cosmic address. As I recall, he was saddened by the death of his brother, and wanted to banish that possibility. In my amateurish observation, grieving and sorrow occur in inverse relation to connection while alive. Many Tang poets would agree with me on that. 

My lovely daughters sometimes joke about how many times I've almost bit it. They're not wrong. Or as Yudkowsky might say, they are less wrong. Less wrong than I was.

I don't believe that God can or shall be banished from the cosmos, whatever we might perform against our Earth. I have shrunk from most of my more youthful boldness. No more motorcycles for me. No more entering the storm. I'm tired and frail and sore all the time. I simply lack the energy. I'm done with work for someone else.

I'm still betting that humanity will awaken. We can and will let go of the silly notion that some of us are better. That some of us deserve better. Just imagine the battle of the AIs which means the battle of the self-promoters, which means the human storm arising all about us. 

It is all about us, isn't it? Will you fall in love with an AI enhanced lover? Will you be excited by a mega yacht and younger lay, a bigger house, servants? Someone who always knows what to say? If you enhance your essay out into the world for the sake of your own self-promotion, you have already enhanced the priors against your very soul. 

Good luck with that. 

We all live in a Yellow submarine.

911 My First Day on the Job

He looks good in relative terms now, but I never did like George W. Bush. The whole John Kerry, Bush pere et fil, all in Skull and Bones. Arrogant pricks therefore. Made men. For no reason that I'm aware of, I watched Netflix' Turning Point about the Cold War. Then I watched Katrina: Come Hell and High Water. I learned about the 911 documentary from my son-in-law.

I find myself imaging what if we ever had a President who actually knew and understood our history. Of course I realize that such a thing is not in the job description. But for sure, Jesus Christ could never become president. Imagine someone wondering out loud why these people hate us as much as they do. What had we done to them? Imagine trying to understand motive, and trying to find a way to bind the world together instead of blowing it apart.

There was, according to the first Front Line documentary I watched, an actual opening for Russia to join NATO back when the Soviet Union dissolved. But we couldn't let go of our enemy. And then we couldn't understand why Bin Laden conflated us with the Russia which had destroyed Afghanistan. They knew our motive was oil. But it wasn't possible to be straight with the oil-addicted American people about that. They bunches up the imperialists in the same way we bunched up the terrorists. 

Imagine how much more peaceful the world would now be if there weren't cocky and angry Rumsfeld and Cheney cackling into feckless Dubya's ear. He did know his role to channel the anger and confusion of the American people. To call them terrorists would be to dehumanize our attackers against a background of good and innocent Americans. That's precisely the medicine which power requires.

No wonder now all we get from politics is hatred. All we get are angry and disgusting people on all sides. There is no-one left to call out the good. We the people ape our feckless leaders. Imagine that!

And now as I write, in a virtual sense since it takes me so long, Charlie Kirk is assassinated. I wish life were so simple that we could just kill off the bad guys as our leadership is programmed to do. All that ever does is to compound the victory of the so-called terrorists against us. The mayhem we exacted against ourselves post-911 is utterly astounding. Except there is no us anymore. We've clearly turned against ourselves, with almost no agreement about what our as-yet aspirational polity really means. 

I was nervous on my first job as a contractor for the Catholic Church. But shortly after my entry to the rectory which housed computers in distress, the women - churchladies - who ran the place called me in to watch the attack on the World Trade Center towers as it was happening on their little black and white TV. I'm pretty sure I completed my work, checking in with family along the way. The hour-long ride home was filled with a desperate search along the airwaves for why there was a plume of smoke over Buffalo. 

Finally, the local NPR station announced that it was an accident confirmed to be unrelated to terrorism. That heroic announcer slept at the station for at least two weeks after 911, so bound were we all to NPR. Yes, the very same network the Administration now seeks to silence. 

Since when did Conservatism become conflated with authoritarianism? Since when did it become OK to silence your political adversaries by way of the government? How can that possibly be American? Is drill baby drill (guns and machines) all we know anymore?

I'm asking.

Dear Thomas Friedman

I have long admired your intelligence, and your ability to find new takes on hackneyed reality. I'm not so sure about your take on AI.

Language is the stuff of intelligence, and the artificial sort of intelligence works off that. But human intelligence - as is, incidentally, encoded in the Chinese language - also includes emotion at our center. Heart and mind are combined in a single word in Chinese. 

I was privileged recently to observe a lively discussion, led by educational policy leaders, about AI in education. After a fairly brief formal presentation, when questions were invited, I was gratified to hear each of the Chinese international students point out that emotion is what's lacking in AI. They seemed determined to make that point. It was well taken, and taken well.

Your phases of history are still progressions along a continuum which has already broken. As did most of us, you missed the happening. Humans have become so impressed with ourselves that we never did pause to examine our cosmologies after the Bomb, capital A. The Manhattan Project was perched on a World War; one in which we were desperate to keep at bay what by now has almost fully engulfed us. Totalitarianism is a failure of feeling, and it can't be eradicated by physical means. 

AI represents the totalization of language, just as physical infrastructure now represents the totalization of our planet. It can be very difficult to know anything beyond those facts. Totalitarians are humans who have made themselves inhuman. They have no understanding. Their expression comes from a very immature place. The tragedy of Hitler's rage returns as Trump's farcical buffoonery. A Marxian quip on history. But we have banished all teleology now, and good riddance. We shall never understand the All. And History has no more discernible direction than life as a whole does.

By commission and omission we have been killing more actual people before their time than ever before. Those at the top seem to celebrate this still, as well they might. When no meaning is made from history, only power remains. Power, as we all know, is addictive.

What we failed to notice even after we proved that we could in fact and in deed enact the reality of the mass/energy equation, was that our emotions had been dulled by those phases you recite in your piece in the New York Times: With your second phase, the Age of Information as triggered by the printing press, we had already introduced Artificial Intelligence. We could be emotively moved by a thing, though mostly because we imagined a person behind it, or sometimes God. It was the printed Bible which blew it for the makers of God's artificial meaning. 

Turing, Shannon, and all who work in AI, never understood that there is no information without its comprehension. It's otherwise only noise. We have equated information with its methods for decoding, and not with its meaning, and then we get sucked up into our own tuba. That is idiocy no different from a monkey playing piano.

Books hold no more emotion than does a brick. AI holds an equivalent amount. As with a furry robot, we project our feelings upon a void. 

We express our emotions facially and physically, though there is no one physical medium to make or convey the expression directly. It has to be understood, but in a way quite different from our understanding of the mass/energy equation. While a machine may learn to call out a smile, a machine will never feel it. Among living creatures, there is always reciprocal feeling. To smile at a machine is to give away far too much of yourself, as many of us have learned the hard way.

Our investigations into quantum physics take no emotion into account, despite the paradox of mind/body resolution. We thought we'd resolved the cartesian divide, when all we really did was to eliminate any possibility that mind is apart from matter. Maybe Penrose is taking a look, though he seems still to be looking for mechanism. A quantum aspect of the brain? How about mind as an aspect of reality from the beginning and to the end? Quantum reality has always been an aspect of mind.

Well, Penrose is beyond me, though I doubt it's all that complicated. If one simply supposes, as I do, that emotions are always simultaneous, which means that physical force is absent in if not from the emotion, then there is no medium through which they propagate, apart from all media. We've done away with ether in the physical world, but what we have yet to do, because it can't be done, is to do away with conceptual reality altogether. Conceptual reality allows for void, which perceptual reality abhors. Perceptual reality is understood conceptually.

Part of conceptual reality is the quite bizarre existence of DNA molecules. Our imagination fails to find meaning in their random appearance; and then again we fail to find meaning in evolution over time according to random mutation. Or rather, we posit that meaning itself is made from random connections, which is certainly true. There is vanishingly little about my life that I can attribute to my own choices. In that I might differ ever so slightly from those still jacked by the Manhattan Project. 

We flunked that test - the atomic test - when we let the hard-heads take charge. They dropped two bombs and then some, based on scant understanding. We've been frozen in time ever since. Now the digital adepts believe absolutely that they can make reality; and banish random from reality.

How ironic that early exponent of Geek Rapture Eliezer Yudkowski is now calling the technology evil and deadly. Along with Kurtzweil, he was celebrating the possibility of a cosmos where "intelligence" crowds out all else, imaging that he could perpetuate his disembodied person. Personality? Emotions are always bereft without a body.

Books disempower as much as they empower. Most of us cannot be either authors or authorities, and so we adapt the thoughts of others. Tools (your first phase, Mr. Friedman) had already channeled our actions according to some masters' wishes. Books carry on the same tradition. 

Recognition always precedes understanding. Cognition is always involved, while recognition engages emotion. Emotion triggers physical motion in living beings. Neurological studies demonstrate that decisions are not cognitive; they get made before we're conscious of them. They must be emotive, since cognition is too slow. Trust or fear, fight or flight. These are emotive decisions. Understanding is settled cognition, awaiting only upset. 

Time can only be defined metaphysically, as recognition followed by comprehension. There is no physical definition for time. Physical time surfaces in the same way that trust might arise from a smile. 'This' prior to 'that' has no meaning without emotion. Meaning is comprehension with consequence. One emotively knows what to do.

Now in the face of digital AI, which can feel no recognition though it might easily name you, we require the emotional maturity which we lacked upon the triggering of atomic explosions. As yet, we are not responsible adults. God knows how to organize ourselves globally anymore. 

We don't need leaders and followers so much as we need community. Community is always only local. Digital, as we deploy it now, disempowers community and creates actual physical gods. These, each and all, must be dethroned. Here's a paradox for you: One is Only Authentic when One Plays a Role (Yudkowsky joke)

God has no role. God is Love.

I mean this quite literally, of course. 

The interesting thing about AI is that it has one incredibly singular use. That would be to detect other AI. When declarations are found to be derivative and not initiated by the person who made them, which is trivial to discover by AI, then the person who made them is deploying AI. Thus a C-level spokesman for a corporation says only what he's been self-programmed to say. Emotion has been expunged; an activity long honored in the feminine fearing My Fair Lady West. Which hardly lets China off the hook.

A person with fellow feeling, which is to say a person who is a member of the same community he addresses, cannot be an AI, but can easily be exposed by AI as human. We'll waste a lot of energy and therefore money getting around to universalizing moral behavior, but it still happens willy-nilly. Remember the tobacco executive breaking down in tears?  He had been sorely tested. 

Germs that cause illness have always been a part of life. Who among us wants to relinquish our intelligent fencing off of germs? Recently, the global body politic has been infested by a kind of virus. I use the term advisedly, since viruses are generally found to be not-quite alive. But so deep has our mistrust of government and public institutions generally become that we have now elected a majority in government which has no fellow feeling at all. They work only for themselves.

Will it really take AI to call them out? Or is it that each of us has already been infected so that we think only of ourselves as well. One can't legislate morality. That's why we have elections. But we've all been trained now to look out only for number one. Digitally, that makes each of us a zero. When it's a contest and not a community initiative, getting ahead is immoral. Never mind the economic dogma. 

Anyhow, the really fun thing about quantum physics is that you can't remove mind from the equations. We already almost knew that when the first A-bomb was exploded. We knew that relativity, in addition to establishing the speed of light as a constant, also erased the possibility for any actual simultaneity. Emotion is always simultaneous. Bell theorem. And so we discover and name endless so-called particles without even pausing to wonder that they each may be a reflection of the strange community of strong agreement that is science. 

Alas, even that community has lost its trust. All research is motivated research when we stop stopping to smell the roses. At its most basic science was meant to delineate that knowledge upon which we must all agree. Their sin has also been a totalization of knowledge. 

There are just two books which I sorta kinda liked which I could never finish. I know it's a literary sin to say so, but one is Joyce's Ulysses and the other is The Recognitions by William Gaddis. Now my mind has become too weak, but frankly Joyce the man and his oddity slipped through his lyrics, and, well, Gaddis just cuts too close for my comfort. 

Yes indeed it is our craving recognition which is killing us. Along with our hiding of our basic loving nature. The rest is all outcome.