Consciousness
There is a paradox which points out that if a species fails to change, it will die out, but if it changes, it likewise ceases to exist. The same issue faces all of us: if we do not change, learning and growth is impossible. If we do change, does not the current Self cease to exist, in an important sense?
Michael Levin • Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue
He is introspecting, but he’s not introspecting by meditating on his existence or talking to a therapist (though maybe he should); he’s introspecting by acting on the world. He’s introspecting by doing stuff and then observing how it makes him feel—as if he was running a million small experiments trying to figure out the composition of this object... See more
Henrik Karlsson • Two Kinds of Introspection
There’s some parallel here to how Michael Levin is thinking about testing intelligent systems. You can’t be a “passive observer”. You have to actively change the environment of the system and see how it reacts.
Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
—John Stuart Mill
—John Stuart Mill
Henrik Karlsson • Everything That Turned Out Well in My Life Followed the Same Design Process
“To live is to be other. It’s not even possible to feel, if one feels today what he felt yesterday. To feel today what one felt yesterday is not to feel—it’s to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost. To erase everything from the slate from one day to the next, to be new with each... See more
Access Denied
I believe—and again, these are bold generalizations, but generally substantiated—that nature is fractal in its structure. What that means is that a pattern occurring on a given scale can be expected to occur on other scales; very different. Simple example: an atom is a nucleus with electrons spinning around it. A solar system is a star with atoms... See more
Culture and Ideology are not Your Friends
Would it be wrong to call this some kind of multi-layer competency architecture?
And someone like Piaget has studied this phenomenon in the development of the drawing styles of young children, and believes, then, that a child essentially—in the spirit of the old song that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—the child develops through these cultural phases. You know, from the iconic hieroglyphic to the flattened—I can’t remember... See more
Build Your Own Damn Wagon
Damn. I’ve always wondered about this. “ontogeny recaps phylogeny” - how does that fit in with Ken Wilber’s “levels of thinking” stuff?
Dissipative structures are these special situations which arise in nature where order is actually preserved far from equilibrium. That’s the technical way of saying it. In other words, equilibrium is where you get to when you let go, and then you drift toward death, disintegration, decay, equilibrium. And sooner or later, in the old paradigm, all... See more
Build Your Own Damn Wagon
This is blowing my mind. This stuff in combination with Levin’s work is very, very interesting.
I think law allows freedom because freedom means you go outside of law. But law doesn’t allow novelty, exactly. That’s a slightly different concept. So if you take seriously this idea that the concept of law can be replaced by the idea of habit, then suddenly you’re not in a Newtonian machine, a soulless cuckoo clock of natural laws. What you’re... See more
Build Your Own Damn Wagon
So I claim that teleology is a subset of the spectrum of intelligence. And what I mean by intelligence is this: William James gave a nice, very cybernetic definition of intelligence. He didn't talk about brains. He didn't talk about what problem space was involved. He said it's the ability to reach the same goal by different means.
Reach the same
... See more