Human intuition sees reality through a deceptive lens. A lens that is biased to seek objects rather than noticing processes. Modern language shares this noun centric bias.
The notion that species were fixed and never changing was ubiquitous in Darwin's time. Darwin broke this deceptive symmetry in arguing that all life was connected through a process we now know as evolution.
During Einstein's time matter was thought to also be fixed and unchanging. Einstein broke this deceptive symmetry that matter itself had a continual exchange with energy. Hence he formulated his famous relativistic equation E=mc^2.
Revolutions in science occur when we see beyond the deception that our minds create to describe reality. It is our minds that are deceptive. Reality has always been a process, our minds however insist on viewing everything through a noun-centric lens.
This breaking of symmetry is what Daniel Dennett @danieldennett calls the strange inversion of reasoning. It is a reflection of systems that achieve competence without comprehension. Darwin, Turing and Hume are examples of this counterintuitive kind of thinking.
Humans think of the world in nouns because it is easier to reason about the world (i.e. see the causality) through just a few objects. We do not have the computational circuitry to see the particularity of the world and follow the causational invariance that leads to things.
Emergence, the interaction of many parts to create a whole that is greater than the parts, is an unintuitive notion that challenges our rational thinking habits. But emergence is everywhere if you choose to see it.
Rational thought has carried modern civilization from the enlightenment 30 generations ago to our modern world. However, citizens of this world are in a losing battle to understand the exponential growth of science and technology.
Humans have always created fictional narratives of the world to make the sense of the world. The success of science to discover reality is a consequence of insisting that our narratives be tested against this world.
It is the error-correcting that makes science powerful. It is this feature as well as systematic thinking that was essential in the development of any civilization that lead to the acceleration of progress by the enlightenment.
Unfortunately, we are at the stage in technological evolution that the things humans invent are beyond the comprehension of a majority of humans. Humans w/o training in systematic thought and combined with ignorance of how things work are left with an inability to grok the world.
Our educational system has failed us on a massive scale. We have ossified hierarchical intellectual disciplines that are driven more by self-preservation than seeking the truth. We have humanities that have shunned rationality because they were never taught about complexity.
Nature just like complexity is intrinsically deceptive. Humans by contrast are deliberately deceptive. Social equity rides on our abilities to convince others of our mental models. It is always easier to convince someone who knows that their own mental models are not working.
Mental models that do not work from the human perspective are only revealed through our lack of success. Unfortunately, this is deceptive because one can have the correct mental model and still be mired in poverty.
Anyway, those in situations of scarcity are the ones most prone to be sold a mental model of reality that is advantageous to the seller and detrimental to the buyer. In the modern world, the craziness of the idea is not related to its viral properties.
This is because there is a massive population of hosts that have yet to develop the intellectual immune system required to understand the information age. The antibodies that protect us from disinformation is non-existent in most of society.
The failure of pandemic response of so many countries is a testament of our inability to understand an adversary that has exponential growth. The coronavirus is not the only thing growing exponentially, technology has the same behavior.
Our inability to respond to climate change that is driven by our exponential technological growth is evidence of an inability to grasp complex systems.
This is because most people have only a noun-centric language and can only think in a noun-centric sense. Dennett's inversion of reasoning is labeled as 'strange'. Our salvation as a species depends on strange thinking.
The interview with CNBC of @chamath is a much watch because there is so much insight hidden underneath.
There are many things that caught my attention. The one thing was the abstraction that hedge fund strategies are all 'momentum' plays. What it seems to imply is that the marshaling of resources at an opportune time drives the future behavior of a stock.
From basic physics, we know that momentum is mass times velocity. So any 'momentum' tactic employs the variation of mass, velocity or both. Wrt stocks, mass is money and velocity is speed of trade.
Constructivism is perhaps the most important idea that will shape the future of humanity. The ills of society are a consequence of the willful ignorance of constructivism.
There are two important definitions of constructivism, one comes from mathematics and the other from psychology. The mathematical definition leads rejects the law of excluded middle. It's relevant in understanding causation.
The psychological definition: "Humans actively construct their own knowledge, and that reality is determined by our experiences as a learner."
@gershbrain Almost there. Just as the word 'create' glosses over too many things, the word 'generalize' does that too. What is need is an idea that straddles between the two.
@gershbrain Your argument against create employs a degenerate notion of create (i.e. brute force copying)(degenerate in the math and physics sense). The notion of creation is that there is some competence (however developed) that leads to the replication of the features of the target system.
@gershbrain But in this word create, is an entire logic of constructivism. An intuitionistic logic to more precise. The cognitive dissonance in the quote is that Feynman was a theoretical physicist.
Lazy Twitter: Is the phrase 'symmetry breaking' unintuitive? Just asking because I like using the phrase.
Yes, I agree that it's a difficult phrase to parse. That's because you have to understand what symmetry is meant for physicists and how it is used to analyze a system.
Then once you've understand what symmetry means, you introduce a notion that is not the opposite of symmetry (i.e. antisymmetry) but rather a verb that says the original symmetry transitions to a state of non-symmetry. The process of breaking is what interests physicists!
Does artificial anthropocentric intelligence lead to superintelligence?
When I use the term Artificial General Intelligence, my meaning of 'General' comes from the psychology definition of the G-factor that is tested in general intelligence tests.
It is an anthropocentric measure. The question that hasn't been explored in depth is whether a "human-complete" synthetic intelligence leads to a superintelligence. The prevailing assumption is that this expected.
I prefer it to mean, human-complete intelligence. This of course doesn't mean super-intelligence. It just means it's a kind of artificial intelligence that has the same capability as humans.
But does an AI with human-level cognitive capabilities very quickly evolve into superhuman AI that can solve everything? I will be wary about statements about 'solving everything'. The universe is open-ended and thus, it is impossible for something to solve every problem.