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.

Why Artificial Intelligence (a misnomer) is More an End than a Beginning

I have worked in IT for a large portion of my various careers. Always the sort to abstract to the highest level of generalization, it has seemed to me that the most fundamental aspect of digital technology has been to provide an engine or pump, if you will, for sucking wealth "upward".

Now as Thomas Piketty once did demonstrate, wealth has always had that tendency. But digital tech is an accelerant. The more serious matter has been that we have all been robbed of local expertise. Once owners and managers of shops and farms; restaurants and markets, all have now been reduced to operatives - franchisees - of various enterprises whose operational intelligence is at the main office; at this point capitalism ceases to be. It's control of information that matters. No actual labor intelligence required.

Workers in our franchise outlets have been reduced to robotic drones whose every activity is programmed and monitored. While franchise owners are enabled to live a good life for their subservience, workers are reduced to a new category of peonage. And so the wealth and social gap expands, by some measures faster than it ever has. Which is not to deny that there can be some fun in menial labor, built on social engagement and maybe even petty subversion.

A new category of robber baron has been created; one without social intelligence or moral feeling along with a "gift" to work with logical pure abstractions. These "types" get hyped on coining new things by whose charms they can become fabulously rich. With digital tech, the hallmark has been to get the attention first and figure out the monetization later. Which is also not to deny the fun that may be had along the way, and not to mention actual hard work. 

Monetization has typically resolved itself into advertising, which was once the handmaiden to capitalism, but is now more properly want-creation in a world where the incremental costs for one-time actual useful things has reduced essentially to nil. Use value has reduced to want fulfillment. An ouroboros vicious circle if ever there was one!

Now I live in a flowing sea of words, many mediated by my smartphone, and it would be tempting to employ some LLM AI to distill those words all down to something bitesize. It's no mistake that wordsmithery has bloated to the point where writers deploy cleverness to expand and extend florid and enjoyable language to occupy as much of your attention as possible. Or so it seems and feels. 

Likewise, it can be nice when AI pops up a summary instead of a ranked list of weblinks. Never mind that it's very often diametrically wrong since, for a moment longer, I can tell when that happens. 

One vaguely wonders where all that lost key-term auction revenue will disappear to now that our first on the list is often our last. But that's always been the game; first get our attention and then once you have the crowd owned and contained, figure out how to monetize (an uglier word there never was!). 

Walmart's originating strategy was to deploy Wall Street-grade investment money to destroy local business by buying the monopoly value of price-control over time. That strategy depended on destroying local businesses, but hey, the strategy is reliable. Upon my stunned motorcycle visit to Walmart's hometowny drugstoreish Shrine, I had to take note that Gerald Ford had awarded some sort of medal to old Sam Walton. 

Where and how will this process be stopped? Surely not by our ever-ascendant oligarchy which lives on the high megayacht side of this equation. The rest of us are willingly bamboozled and enthralled. 

I'd say that the resolution is the tech itself. To understand that, we must first get hold of the difference between life-processes as those undergird human so-called "intelligence" and the logic-machine processes which undergird so-called artificial intelligence. 

This distinction is built on the on/off 0/1 reality of digital machinery which cuts such machinery off from the continuum of living creatures. Machinery guided by human needs and controls may still participate in the web of life, though not after it amplifies our destructive side according to some fractal and fluid boundary existing somewhere between an ax and a forest harvesting set of machinery. 

Digital is divided from emotion by definition (forthcoming below!)  and thereby from all life-forms. Notably, there is no morality without emotion. There is only entropic decay. To live and let live requires moral choice for humans. Our defining feature is moral intelligence; compassion more than triumph.

So please, imagine machinery without any human guidance. That is precisely what AI promises, even as it promises to make the fabulously rich even more fabulously rich. We have yet really to understand the differences and distinctions between human intelligence as problem solving (which is always post-decision) and human intelligence as moral intelligence.

For starters, human decisions seem always to be made pre-consciously. There is plenty of neurological evidence for this. By my definition that means that decisions are made emotionally. Our brain is basically a generalizing engine which forms concepts which have emotional valence. Many of these concepts can be fitted to words. If we were to wait for the calculus of categorization before reacting to the presence of a hungry lion, I would be dead each and every time, haha! Instead, our body reacts preconsciously to fear, by way of a finely orchestrated and practiced set of actions. Ditto with our brilliant ideas. The aha! is always emotion-filled.

But the excited and excitable proponents of AI have quite literally no idea what they are giving away of their own humanity. They are numb to the evident fact that what they consider their personal endowment of intelligence - wealthy people are fond of calling it "merit" - is a social grant and not an individual  possession. 

AI will always make its decisions - its language choices - without benefit of emotion. Bereavement from emotion has long been the honored paragon of Western Manly Man. The polls - any polls - demonstrate effectively what I mean. 

We've already had lots and lots of practice - much of it by way of religion which ascribes linguistically-based dogma to God's supposed words - in the delegation away from personal responsibility and accountability. The modern artificial-person Corporation - autocratic and fascistic internally - has provided the very best practice for this abdication. Our wonderful human intelligence will find a way to clean up corporate messes, or so we dreamily imagine. 

So yes, it is my contention that emotion is as primordial as are physical processes. Not all configurations of things acquire their shapes by force. In physics, we record this fact according to what we call the random processes of "nature" which happen upon conceptual forms willy-nilly across the vast expanses of time.

A better definition for random would be to ascribe to it the emotive force of concept-creation that is always beyond the ability of conscious mind to understand. In a Chinese cosmos, for instance, random happenstance is defined not as meaninglessness, but by its happening beyond the reach of mind. There is no socially intelligent mind which can encompass the ALL. AI is far deficient in that regard. There are indeed things we cannot know, 'else there would be bounds to the cosmos which there are not. 

And yes Virginia, there is God. Which is love and not reducible to any sort of Name. There is no A God or THE God, nor certainly any addressable maker-God. It is purest blasphemy to think that we humans can ascribe qualities to God according to the back-formation from ascribed words, just as it is literary blasphemy to reduce poetry to the conscious decisions of its maker. 

By the time that LLM AI is writing poetry (or drawing pictures) to which we ascribe the term beautiful, we shall know that we ourselves, by allowing a magic projection to seem real, will have become true and living robots, which is to say that we shall be already dead. 

. . . which is not to say, of course, that there can't be artistic creation embodied by someone's playing around with AI. But please do take note of the generic amoral quality of the kinds of disruptive money-making AI frauds perpetrated on the body politic. That sort of disruption needs to be reverted back to being plainly destructive and not that wet-dream sort of disruption beloved by capitalists - if there are any proper capitalists anymore. There is nothing good about deep fakes which mean harm.

Well, OK, so I shall always try try try again. Pretty much like swimming upstream against a waterfall, but you know that the weather is stronger than you as well, no matter how redundant the systems of your yacht.

Merit, Meritocracy, Curtis Yarvin, Catholicism and Luck

I've been a critic of meritocracy ever since I can remember. There are lots of us. My resolution has gone all the way back, or forward, into cosmology. While it is possible that SATs and IQ testing had a noble origin, like all such totalizing theories, both went retrograde once there was consequence to the measures. 

The SAT was once, perhaps, a way to move beyond wealth as a measure of merit. There might have been concern that geniuses would be left behind. Just now we are in the throes of a regime which believes itself a believer in merit, the chief exponent of which likely bought his way into college, paying others to take his tests and write his essays. 

I only learned of Curtis Yarvin today, by accident, being generally dismissive of such obvious idiots who derive their definitions from tech, a retrograde maneuver if ever there was one. I've known the Peter Thiels, the rest of the PayPal mafioso, and many others whose entire world view seems built on technological progress in service of wealth concentration; essentially likening themselves to ever more advanced AI. 

Of course my cosmology reinserts morality from the very beginning. Which puts me in mind of Catholic friend of mine whose visage is reminiscent of Yarvin's. These are believers in absolutes in all matters, who seem to hold the expectation that all will be revealed one day. Which is the basic definition for idiot.

Funny how standard issue intellectuals and scientists seem also to get caught up in the prospect if completed understanding. Honestly, please perish the thought.

Meritocracy is built on workaday cosmologies, which means simply that these ideologies extrapolate backwards from where we are. If you think the economy is the stupid all, then of course the wealthy are the ones with merit. Never mind that wealth is as often the product of sociopathy as of intellectual cleverness. I do wish all school-children would be told that all academic testing measures inherited social capital by proxy. There is no measure of what is inherent in those or any children. Love withheld reciprocates.

All success according to whatever cosmological assumptions is only relatable to whatever the cosmology is. Power structures reward affinity for power, and so forth. 

My little itty bitty meritless cosmology builds luck in right along with God as the all and not as a being. Being for God could only be a put-down. People in power are by that definition always dangerous to the rest of us. That's the very meaning of democracy right there.

Without being, God is neither in power, nor interested in power, nor anything close to being a dictator. God is love, plain and simple, and Godly merit is evidenced only by how we treat the least among us. Which would include the most foul, dangerous, and ill-behaved. 

By such measures, Trump and Yarvin and their ilk should be in jail and not in power. Treated well and loved by all, as likely or possible, but never allowed near any levers of power. All power must have government. A governor must be installed and replaceable. This is true in mechanics, in technology and in life generally. Things otherwise fall apart. AI represents the removal of any governor. That's it's only definition. 

AI ipso facto sucks ass.

Whatever! It's not like anyone is listening to the likes of me. 

And woe is me, I live in a big house, own a sailboat and a cool car. It's not like I ever wanted to live in a big house, but I like fixing things, especially houses and sailboats, and my peeps wanted me to live in a big house. I build value on the basis of taste and skill, according to values not my own. So I end up living in a house that doesn't feel like it's mine. 

Not so long ago, I worked on what needed working on with relish and energy. I woke up knowing what I wanted to do, and I did it. Not so much any more. It hurts even to think about starting any projects. And the old sailboat I restored - wrecked my knees along the way.

So I have this difficult balance to navigate between and among desire, want and the myriad shoulds which creep in when your body ages. As in I should want to go sailing, but I don't. 

I have no way to know if this stopping up of desire is based on a kind of depression or if it really is mostly physical. I do know that machines wear down and out with use, and require maintenance, respect and recalibration if you want to enjoy them. 

I also know lots of people who consider their bodies as more like the machinery they run as opposed to they themselves and them. I just can't think of my body as other than myself. I don't run my body and more than I can run AI.

Now I do think there is something morally deficient in treating machines as something to be used up and tossed away. Funny thing about living things is that when you use them they get stronger, so long as you're judicious about it. But that equation changes as we age. 

I get virtue-shamed all the time by people nearly my age who have an exercise regimen. Ditto by people who fix their pains with surgery. It sometimes feels like they simply don't want to hear my complaints, which I mostly suppress because of that, or don't know how to deal with the complaints of the old and unwell. They tell me I should see a doctor, which I would if there were anything very specific the doctor thought he could put his finger on.

The only specific is trouble sleeping, but I've had all the basic tests and beyond that it's about as attractive to treat as chronic fatigue syndrome for doctors, or so I imagine. I can solve my problem sometimes with Unisom or a weed gummy, but both of those wreck my next day. And those who urge such things on me are users, so don't know what I'm talking about. I have no desire to be high any significant part of any day.

Now if you think that AI is anything other than machinery, I've got a bridge to sell you. Sure AI gets "stronger" with use, except that it also eats its tail like ouroboros does. As deployed, AI is machinery for pumping wealth toward those who already have it. There are no morals involved in that sort of machinery. Turn it on and let it go! You have no responsibilty for the harm it might cause!

AI doesn't get old, depressed, or worn out. I suppose that you suppose that AI will be continuously developed and that the development will be in the direction of "progress." You might therefore suppose that it will make things better for us all, maybe because you don't think we living humans are up to the task. 

I wonder what would make you think that we might relinquish our moral behaviors to AI. Well, for starters Donald Trump is a kind of AI who pretends to be human. Not having been prepared for that particular extreme of grandiosity, you might even think him worthy of making decisions on your behalf. Now we can watch and see how well that is going. 

AI is not life, will never be life, though like a premature supernova it will consume human society as relentlessly as a wildfire fueled by bitcoin, the currency of techno-sociopaths. Sure, yeah, I once did think that Elon was kind of cute. I was an early visitor to the Tesla museum-shop in Seattle, which was rather like the home-town five and dime in Walmart's home town. I entered from the wrong direction, and had no idea what Walmart was, nor certainly what it would become. 

We're all slow like that, but the beast does ultimately reveal itself, no? With sound and fury, signifying nothing.

America on Psilosybin - Good Night and Good Luck

The misapprehension that the brain was a calculating logic machine endured until the so-called LLM AI achieved AGI liftoff. This happened once non-techies, meaning socially well adjusted creative types, took over app conception and creation. AGI did the coding. Things went wild. The cores melted down.

There are statues now to Trump, celebrating him as a force of nature; one of the gods. He'd dismantled the military industrial complex and destroyed the American empire. No political process was up to the task of instructing the country to cease and desist automobile driving, single-family nuclear homes, multiplying screens. Only nature was up to the task. Natural disaster does the job every time.

And, bonus, our political system was also updated to prevent such a force of nature in the form of a man ever to take hold of it again. Not much different from building a house to keep out the elements. That was shortly after global corporate control was supplanted by local investment. Global collapsed and local took over. An amazement of wealth returned to our cities and towns.

The streets are full of walkers now, the roads, piece by piece, retrofitted for bicycles and mass transit. Beauty is returning, trala trala.

The human mind never had all that much to do with logical problem solving. It - and here I'm including the brain - was a generalization machine. Not so needlessly complex as the computers humans created and made had become, which did the job of problem solving much better than any organic mind could. Still much more complex than anything man-made could ever be. As complex as the cosmos, in fact.

Generalizations are as simple as the apprehension of similarity in the perceptual world beyond the skin. The brain spins those perceptions around, clustering them into nameable and primordial concepts. The mind, in the main, responds emotively to the match between perception and conception which it is the brain's job to orchestrate. Just one unintended consequence is the ability to problem-solve.

Machines, corporations, the economy, have no emotion. Their problem-solving looks like glass and steel skyscrapers in which nobody sane wants to live. It takes an incredible lack of imagination to consider one's mind a CPU. Mind as CPU is phenomenally retrograde. 

Those who'd lived through the transformation marveled at how much nicer it was to live in streets full of walkers and bicycles and a very few trolleys on restricted tracks for longer distances. The passage from plush automobiles through autodriving app-hailable cars to not really wanting or needing to go anywhere happened precisely as quickly as the disappearance of want-creation as an industry. Within a couple of generations. Wants of that sort are as mechanical as a windmill, though much more difficult to fix.

Amazingly, whole world generalizing was enhanced and not denigrated by this contraction away from what once was called progress. Universal translation had already reduced the globe to a village, which meant that live performance and art came alive again. Over there became as boring as in here used to be. The problems which had once been humans' main motivation disappeared as problems, once it became obvious that life was not a problem, or a set of problems, to be solved. 

* * *

I paid a lot of money to watch the first ever live and global broadcast of a Broadway Production. By 'a lot of money' I mean a tiny fraction of what it would cost to see the play live, bringing along with the subscription over a hundred new channels to my screen. Like watching football (Go Bills!) on my wall-sized projection screen, I can enjoy the game without all the F-bombs, which are now so built in to bro-talk. I can understand the "play" because I can hear the commentary and watch re-runs.

Same deal watching a Broadway production. CNN couldn't help themselves, deploying oodles of electronics, giving me closeups and absolute clarity of sound. The production itself was a mixture of filmed renditions of the actual TV presence of Edward R. Murrow's subjects, if none of the man himself. It was a marvel of perfect execution.

... absent was the magic of live theater, which I imagine was also absent in the theater itself. Really? A film star now takes the Tony? He didn't act any differently than he does in the movies. What I watched was a movie of a play. What I want is local theater that I can afford to be engaged in. I mean kudos for the ability to recreate live over and again, without the outtakes of perfection.

Local stores within walking distance selling locally made wares. Who knew! Local theaters present plays with global resonance. Wealth descends like rain.

These last several hundred years of so-called progress have, in the main, been a concentration of wealth upward with digital technology being no different from an accelerant on a house fire. Our President can now make millions or even billions from his office while he's in it. He no longer has to wait until he makes book in retirement.

The entire CNN spectacle was apologized for as a righteous take-down of a man in office no longer so petty as the Junior Senator from Wisconsin. A man magnificently more dangerous. In just the way a tornado is dangerous. God help you if you're caught up in his whirl. The twister is so powerful that your very soul will be flung away, leaving the dummy core of Botoxed and plumped cartoon realization of your nothingness.

Have you no decency!?

Old Age

I am joined
In a militant detachment
By myself
Redundantly patting my parched
Pecker package
Dry
Rank and defiled

Pecked letters

Mirror image
Assigned without achievement
To the accomplished ranks

A part
Without the hair to hold
The heat and moisture in
Pat pat tappety tap
I resonate without a fret
Without a stop
Without atone

Ment
Without completion

To
In
Con
De
Flate
Evermore

Phtttt

Twang

Artificial General Intelligence is Not Around the Corner

All the AI gurus have taken to saying that Artificial General Intelligence is just about here. Maybe a year, may be two, maybe tomorrow. What's really just around the corner is awareness of that in which human intelligence consists. That will be transformational, and maybe even this quest for AGI will have been helpful in our dawning awareness.

Our dawning awareness shall include our awakening to the fact that the weather, the earthly pushback and even the volcanos and earthquakes gather their energy inside of us, if, unlike me, you believe in that insider/outsider distinction. 

Trumpism is, of course, a force of nature. To the extent that we don't know what to do about our complicity in earth's destruction - I just helped my daughter buy a sports car, ferchissakes - we also must celebrate MAGA insanity as the identical force that a tornado has when it tears through a community. Thank you Agent Orange for prodding our awakening! We so innocently sanctioned your spewing.

I'm just guessing, but people involved in AI have probably had the experience of feeling really smart. They're among people who are also really smart, but they just somehow get it better and faster than everyone else. 

I once ran a school for gifted kids and never did figure out how to resolve this conundrum of goodness's self-awareness leading to its self-destruction. If I had, the school would still be alive and promoting and instilling all those humane human tendencies which characterized the innocent direction of the lost and forever departed so-called American Century. We knew not what we did.

What they're good at, these AI titans, is something godawful boring to the rest of us. No, don't include me, I too was mesmerized by my first encounter with networks, and proceeded to spend an unforgiven godforsaken chunk of my life on them.

Naturally, these people, we these people, assume that intelligence is like what they have. But what if they're all really amoral, like AI is amoral. Meaning here that there's nothing "inside" the AI that generates moral acts and behaviors, but it's rather taken in from the handling they do of language and other artifacts. They might be able to project a shadow of human morality, but wouldn't be able to initiate a moral act on their own? Or if they would, it would have to be derivative.

One example of amoral behavior is that of the tech titans and especially of the titans of AI, when they go all out for themselves. Would any of them do what they do if there was nothing in it for them? And if they think that their work will make the world a better place, why aren't they willing to accept the opinions of others on that score? Simply because they have no need to. In our world, the economy stupid, is the proxy for humanity. Our wants are toted up for us, and along we go, merrily or not.

AI is the oldest story in the cosmos. God forsaken.

Well, OK, so the rest of us mostly are cheering them on because we largely think and believe that tech is good and AI could be good as well, especially if it becomes better at problem solving than humans are.

But what if humans are the problem that needs solving? Collectively, we all are supposed to thrive on recognition. On standing out. That's our interpretation of the cipher of evolutionary genetics. AI can do so much better than we can with that or any kind of ciphering. Oh please God turn us over to an AI engineering of our future! Please guide our DNA. Oh.

Maybe there's a difference between a stand out artist and a standout money-maker? Adrian Brody plays long-suffering Jewish geniuses in The Pianist and The Brutalist, and wins two academy awards. Living life in an antisemitic hell. Can there ever be too much beauty in the world? There can certainly be, and already is, too much technology.

It's not just the surveillance capitalism which Shoshana Zuboff calls out. It's the network effect, where each of us wants and needs to be where the rest of us are. But post-digital, none of it can be called capitalism when only one thing needs to be made with zero labor for the rest. Now it really is become a zero-sum game, with almost all of us losers when the winners win so big.

It's not even so much the dispiriting as caused by immiseration within the dynamics of inflationary costs and expectations. It's the more direct immiseration of the spirit when you know there's nothing all that special about yourself. When it's all a lottery.

Sure there's a bit of schadenfreude when trollish boring geeks like Musk and Zuckerberg and Cowbezos are haplessly lured into revealing their ghoulish innards by the likes off Trump. But can that compensate for their criminal appropriation of the vectorial commons for themselves?

I myself see a dangerous sub-text in Brody's roles. That some of us are simply superior, smarter, morally better. That some of us are guided by a compulsion of rectitude. But the suffering is human and he never makes a direct argument that his roles are more deserving of a better life than all of his fellow sufferers. He too mainlines heroin.

Anyhow, machine intelligence is a one-way street. It embodies the assumption that more intelligence is a good thing and the we humans can continue to behave as beastly as we do because super-human intelligence will make it all good. When what we really need is a Jesus Christ figure to bring us down from our anti-earth high. The problem to be solved is indeed ourselves. Maybe we can do it once the nature of human intelligence is revealed to enough of us. Only then will the utterly repudiated actual Jesus come back to life. JD Vance is sufficient alone to goad His IHS return to us.

Hell is a lousy concept, though maybe it worked for all those years. Anyhow we're bringing more hell down to earth than we care to admit. Yes, sure, life is better for more people than it has ever been before. But if it all ends in a hellish mess . . . it does none of us any good to externalize this evil.

How can we deter smart individuals from craving recognition and the power that goes along with it? Without personal hell? Without actual hell for the rest of us? I wish I knew. In what humanity consists.

Let us pray.

Sensory Deprivation and Hallucinating AI

Remember sensory deprivation tanks? Loss of sensory balance and awareness leads to hallucination, akin to taking certain drugs.

Now the profiteers of AI claim to be baffled by increasing rates of what they call hallucination as AI develops, expands and improves, according to the laws of profiteering. But hey, eating their own dogfood, isn't it obvious that AI would have even less ability than humans to differentiate actual speech and writing from the artificial kind?

We live inside an emotion deprivation tank now. The soulless heartless hucksters are in charge, put there by feckless upholders of a status quo which was very good to them. Very good to those in power. Congratulating themselves past the guardians to hell. We the holders of mystical merit. The bogus gift was held out with both hands to the hucksters.

We face a meltdown and the profiteers won't let go. They can't let go. The entire cosmos is in the throes of fake meritocracy based on a kind of asocial intelligence. Humans are tending in the direction of LLM ourselves. As though we need any of this. Of course Bill Gates, who sounds actually sane in comparison to his wildly opportunistic wealthy peers, thinks that AI can solve all sorts of research problems. He thinks his mind is his brain is a CPU. Weird!

Yes, they will study the mystery of AI hallucination even as the instrumentation "progresses." Yes, they will devote megawatts to instrumenting our lives for their profits and many of us will buy it. Without paying directly, of course.

Even as the globe convulses in tribalistic linguistically and ethnically based Neo-nationalism, we in these United States are losing our bearings. We were once proud of the dream, the principles on which this new-style nation state was created. All men. All people now, and what? We want to resurrect a nation created under a white God for White Men only. 

As American poetic authors have always known, The Confidence Man has always been lurking, always there to feed on our enthusiasms toward worldly success. Always there to flatter what we never had and lost in its true season. 

While these may feel like the end times, they are actually a Brave New World, struggling to be born. This center cannot hold.

Review of Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century's only plausible metaphysics by Bernardo Kastrup

Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics by Bernardo Kastrup
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kastrup is brilliant, and this book provides an excellent exposition of the metaphysics behind his cosmology. His theorizing usefully dispatches several of the nuttier directions that dogmatic physicalism has taken. Along the way, he provides an excellent elucidation of what information theory is and what it isn't. I've been craving that since forever. Not to mention putting A.I. in its place.

The trouble is that although he claims Occam’s Razor as his guide, he introduces still more needless complexity with his flip-flop from physical to mental; thinking that he’s reduced complexity by claiming that all of reality might reduce to a single principle, which is mind.

I have more than a little sympathy for this maneuver, but in fact Kastrup glides past a more basic distinction between perceptual and conceptual reality. By replacing the substance of physics with mind-only, Analytic Idealism actually re-enters woo-woo mysticism rather than to escape from it.
In the end, Kastrup has conducted a sleight-of-mind 'against' himself; he fools himself in almost the way that he accuses physicalist scientists of doing.

Kastrup is right about many things, and his insights have enabled him to challenge accurately many of the stranger cosmologies of his physicalist colleagues. But that doesn't quite stop him from his own weird conclusions.

In brief, Kastrup substitutes an inside/outside duality for the now antique mind/body duality for which Descartes generally receives credit or blame, depending on one's disposition. Mind/body maps to concept/percept while inside/outside creates an entirely unnecessary complication about that aspect of mind which cannot consistently be claimed to be inside, and that which is demonstrably outside.

Kastrup’s usage of his newer term "alter" to describe our individuated interiority is useful, though not meaningfully different from Descartes' usage for mind once inside and outside are introduced.
In Kastrup’s “analytic idealism,” alters exist in a field of “subjectivity,” built on the analog of a possible grand unification theory for quantum electrodynamics, where there would be a single quantum field upon which all that we perceive as physical has no separate ‘substance’ from the field. A wave is an action on water and is nothing without the water. It has no substance, and is the very meaning of abstraction once we call it into being. Abstraction is a conceptual maneuver whereby concepts are taken from physical reality.

No actual circle exists in nature, any more than numbers can be imposed there without some degree of abstraction. But the concept of the circle and the power of numbers to help with prediction and therefore with understanding are both undeniable. Sure, a circle is the stuff of mind, while we may perceive only approximations. It’s the matching of percept with concept which composes understanding.

While there may not be any actual and perfect circles in what I would still call the physical world – the world of substance – there are plenty of structures whose description is equivalent to their actuality. Molecules, for instance, whose structure is identical from one to the next such that each is individually indistinguishable. But they do have a describable form.

‘Field of subjectivity’ is only meaninglessly different from ‘field of objectivity.’ The meaningful distinction is between conceptual and perceptual reality.

As do many who descend from the world of information technology, and in his case also the kind of Quantum Electro Dynamics which energizes CERN, where he once worked, Kastrup uses the inaccessibility of personal thoughts to others/outsiders – the secrecy of our thoughts and feelings – to prove his inside/outside distinction.

He then goes further, and for me beyond the pale, to replace the sensible apprehension of the boundary of skin with a fairly, to me, specious metaphor of a “dashboard.” In many ways - and this is surprising to me - Kastrup is himself stuck in the Western set of imperatives as much as are those physicalists that he ridicules.

"Alter" is his metaphor for how individuals - chips off the cosmic mind of analytic idealism - are individuated. We are likened to the seemingly separate selves of those who suffer dissociative identity disorder, or what used to be called multiple personality disorder.

One of the weirdest of Kastrup's moves is that he posits a reality apart from perceptual reality (as conventionally considered) that is more real than what we perceive. I suppose the metaphor is that the physically real is composed of unperceivable parts; subatomic particles, in a vast emptiness, say, pervaded only by a quantum field.

According to him, those “particles” are actually eddies in the subjective field without substance of their own. Quantum fields may be more both/and than he thinks though, which might even scotch the dream of completion for a Grand Universal Theorem. Not every literate human culture is quite so obsessed as the West is with history as unitary progress toward completion.

He attributes our misperception - our inability to perceive actual reality - to the perceiver inside our perceptual apparatus having only a dashboard by means of which to perceive. We can’t see reality in itself. Well, of course we can’t. Reality as we perceive it is also composed with concepts, which are mind extended into matter.

But Kastrup then goes so far as to say that the things of our lived experience from behind our dashboard wouldn't exist without someone there to perceive them. They exist in mind and not in matter, remember. He thus reintroduces the gracefully moribund mind inside the mind corroborating sensory inputs. The mind behind the inner screen is a free floating "alter." A mind inside a mind in infinite regress.

Abstraction is real. The physical is real. One is conceptual while the other is perceptual. Putting both on the same side in a universal field of subjectivity is where Kastrup stops following the principle of Occam’s razor. Analytic idealism is far more complex than a metaphysics allowing for both conceptual and perceptual reality; both mind and physical stuff.

In my usage, the only meaning for interiority is that there must be a physical divider for perception to occur. That's not the same as to say that there must be a perceiver "inside" or behind some screen. There is no real locus for the self inside of mind. Kastrup’s replacement of skin with screen, and mind with alter recreates a superfluous and unnecessary confusion.

Perception happens to a body as divided from the rest of reality by a skin and its organic involutions which form our perceptual organs. The mind of the perceiver has never been confined there, inside our skin nor certainly inside our skull. Kastrup and I seem to agree on this.

As do most scientific thinkers, Kastrup - who talks about emotion more than most scientists do, and certainly more than most devoted materialists ever would - still relegates emotion to being epiphenomenal to consciousness. He often conflates thoughts and feelings as things without extension. He claims to deproblematize the puzzle of consciousness by positing that mind is the whole shebang. So, no problem with consciousness being transformed or transmuted out of physical stuff!

But really, consciousness is just the apprehension of both conceptual and perceptual reality. A lizard knows a hawk when it sees one. Evolution adds the quickening of emotion to the apprehension of a hawk to short-cut conscious thought.

At some level higher than a lizard, something like re-cognition occurs, bringing choice along with reaction.

I confess that I don’t see the need for the usage of “qualia” that many philosophers see. Just because colors and flavors don’t exist in the thing itself, the fact that such so-called qualia are almost universally shared should be sufficient to put them on the perceptual side of things. Niggling about the marginal cases seems not much different from mistaking distortions for wholesale misperception, as Kastrup tends to do.

Those perceptions assigned to the category of qualia are rather more complex than simpler perceptions. I would say that the proof for their objective existence is simply that we can talk about them. And animals respond to qualia much further “down” the line.

I would say that concepts exist outside the individual mind, and that, therefore, emotion is fundamental and even primordial. Indeed, mind cannot be described without emotion. Any mind is as much about emotion as it is about cognition. I’ll even grant that Kastrup might agree with this.

But emotion requires at least as much definition as physical forces do. Here’s my radical maneuver: emotion is both real and as outside of mind as perception is.

In my usage, emotion is rather more like the false definition of gravity as a simultaneous force acting at a distance. That sort of physical simultaneity is better defined by a shared 'curvature' of space-time, as Kastrup urges us to understand. Emotion is defined by actual simultaneity without any physical force involved. Emotion is engendered by conceptual/mental and not perceptual/material movement. Emotion involves no physical force but is engendered by the matching of concept with percept, the apprehension of new concepts or the transformation of old ones. It is not a process which can exist within an asocial individual. For humans, emotion takes as much learning as does cognition. But unlike perception, emotion is felt directly by the mind. If mind is outside the skin, then so is emotion.

And furthermore, morality is no more a part of Kastrup's purportedly comprehensive analytical idealism than it is a part of physicalism. Kastrup’s ethics might be something like “we have to keep contributing to the cosmic mind.” In the same way, a physicalist might use the imperative to understand as the highest purpose for humanity.

But in fact, conscience is more a matter of fellow feeling. For humans, the recognition which engages conscience is enhanced by the highly individualized nature of faces and voices and stature and skin coloring.

Being me is still about outside and inside, and a bat or a human only knows what it's like to be me from the outside. And yes, I mean that I don't know what it's like to be me from the inside. I can't know myself without you who help me to know myself. Cogito ergo sum is nonsense, as we all know. My good friends know my thoughts much better than I do. That sometimes hurts. Don’t we hide from ourselves as much as we have secrets? And having secrets doesn’t indicate a thing about the privacy or insidishness of our mind. Sure, we put some of our thoughts behind a blind, and sometimes we blind even ourselves.

To repeat myself again and again, I make my claim for his fooling himself in part because of his strange - to me - reliance on the hackneyed usage of an instrument panel to describe our distance from understanding or even describing the world as it fully is. Like a computer screen and its icons as related to the workings of the actual computer, another of the metaphors he uses, we only know what is presented. Trying to interact directly with the inners of a computer could only get in the way of its usefulness. This "interface" between inside and outside is identical, I would say, to the dualistic distinction between mind and body, and equally useless as an explainer of anything. 

His screen metaphor confuses our perpetual shortfall from full understanding with a perceptual shortfall from full seeing. Indeed, I don't believe any adequate description for 'understanding' exists in his arguments.

Sure, there is more complexity to the world than what we can know, but almost none of this regards what most of us will continue to call the physical world. The contours of the physical world are as real as the conceptual relations beneath or behind or within those contours. Those interior contours of reality are, yes, mental, but as with the surfaces, they are the same to every understander. Instruments on a panel may refine our perception, but they almost never change its outlines.

The complexity we miss from behind our screens is really mostly social and intellectual. The sort of complexity that it's always hard to understand without actual engagement. It is indeed our physicalist researches which have, by way of measurement and calculation, enabled us to refine our understanding according to the materialist scientific method, to the extreme that we have.

Of course, there is complexity to the physical world which we cannot see directly. But we can certainly understand it by way of instruments connected to a dashboard.

Sure, we are limited in our perceptions by the fact that we don't see all frequencies of light, nor hear all frequencies of sound, nor taste all that might be tasted. But when we do extend our perceptions by use of those instruments which compose his metaphor, we have no reason to expect that the invisible - meaning not fully perceived - world would be drastically altered [sic] from that part of it which we do perceive.

And to perceive is not to understand. Instrumentation and numbers enable a deepening of our understanding of the physical world. There is no reason to suspect that the physical world is substantially different or other from what we perceive directly. And you will never know me by my guts. Do we see through or with a telescope? Our instruments allow us to make better predictions. The best part is that quantum physics puts a stop to our dreams of complete understanding. We cannot and do not stand outside the real world.

Understanding is a match between conceptual and perceptual reality. As regards the material world, that would involve the ability to predict behaviors based on an understanding of properties. Emotional reality depends, differently, on mutuality and simultaneity of a sort which can't exist in the physical world.

For a conscious agent having free will, emotion impels both physical motion away or against or toward at the same time that it instigates a mental quest for understanding. It is telling that Kastrup is involved in developing hardware for Artificial Intelligence. But, mirabile dictu, he is not so mystified by it as are those whose most precious dream is to get fabulously rich and powerful off it. Kastrup’s explanation about what AI is and isn’t is just as good and clear as is his explication of information theory.

If mind is all, then there can be no fundamental difference in mind depending on its substrate. Kastrup avoids the trap that the brain is the house of the mind. It's not just that AI has a difficult time with emotion. It's that the on/off nature of silicon logic gates divides such quasi-thinking from the extension that living mind has to the universe all around. Kastrup gives us this and then takes it away with his dashboard.

As the mind researcher Riccardo Manzotti urges us to understand, our memories are not contained in our brains, which instead loops our actual perceptions of actual things. Our memories are all around us. Visit a former habitation if you can find one that hasn't changed too drastically, and feel the memories rush in. Our brain generalizes from multiple perceptions to form concepts. Those concepts are also out in the world. We prove this easily by the languages which create our social being. We share conceptual reality.

It is specifically this conceptual reality which mind "imposes" on what we perceive. We organize the world into lions and tigers and bears, never mind that these are not always so distinct as our mind would like them. Those objects still exist if conceived differently by others. Sure, there is some raw stuff not yet conceptualized. But the reality that we've already conceived is as real as real can be, despite Kastrup's protestation that evolution requires distortion of our perception. Distortion does not make the world that we perceive unreal. Distortion is correctable.

Emotion is as real and external to us as is measurable and detectable physical reality. Indeed, the reality of emotion falls out naturally from Kastrup’s definition of reality as cognition. Mind before matter, as it were. And emotion before cognition.

I do think his discarding of matter complicates rather than simplifies his cosmology. Of course, matter is something, but it is not everything. Neither is mind. Contrasting with his usage for the parsimony of Occam's razor, I would say that to maintain the yin/yang of both mind and matter is the parsimonious course. Get rid of static outside/inside. Reality moves.

As illustration, consider that evolution has a direction which is, in rough terms, opposite to the direction of physical entropy. Indeed I would say that the physical enactment of time's arrow is defined by that interplay, and I would call the direction of life's evolution something akin to love or eros (for the materialists).

On-line, Kastrup has described his own uncanny experiences, which are nothing other than meaningful coincidence, which probably can't be proven or disproven, since it's only meaningful to those who find it so. But Kastrup has described his openness to such happenings after being convinced by his own analytic idealism. Likewise, evolution depends on random mutations - on happenstance - which is no longer so meaningless when taken in the aggregate.

Apart from the metering of entropy, material science has no explanation for time's arrow. And yet for all his analytical idealism, Kastrup still treats time in the way that historians do, and supposes a before and after for everything. Having experienced death a few times, I have the revelation that before and after collapse into a lifetime fully present. Kind of the way the Big Bang might or should be conceptualized, instead of trying to measure its distance from now across time. I would love to disabuse Kastrup of his fear of death.

Love is indeed the hardest guide for humans to follow, though most of us know it easily enough in opposition to, say, hate. From there, everything about morality can be built, no man-made dictates from a man-made God required. However, why not call the non-alterial [!!] all of analytic idealism - the cosmic mentation, if you will - why not call that God? What else to call cosmic mind? It does remain other to us, and always shall be. And God won’t be conscious until or unless there’s another cosmos. Ha! Bernardo and I agree!

Is it any wonder now that the world is in the thrall of conscienceless individuals? These are people without fellow-feeling, sometimes believing that they are following God’s dictates, and sometimes obeying the false consciousness of transactional materialism.


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