The dubious wisdom of Mark Walton

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  • I reject your institutional delusion and replace it with a delusion I prefer

    When we crumble away the [lies/errors/illusions] presented to us, we gain nothing if we simply insert a fantasy of our choosing in its place.

    This is the error of the armchair physicist, the wishful mystic, the troubled conspiracist.

    Most of us are only willing to believe the bald kid telling us, there is no spoon, if we will be granted the prize of magical powers at the end of understanding. But the truth is, the understanding IS the prize. A path to a gnosis (in the original sense) through understanding for its own sake, and dwelling in the vast quiet wonder of knowing that this has happened, and what it reveals.

    And some of us will feel the roaring fullness of the Sublime and feel the need to shape it, and fail and suffer, as CS Lewis did. Build rules and handles on the very thing the rules and handles were hiding.

    Guard against your own genius, because this too is another veil.

  • Star Wars

    ‘Star Wars’ was only ever 5% about movies

    The reason so many fans find so much to dislike about Star Wars, especially recent contributions and revisions, is that in our hearts it was only a very small part about movies.

    Star Wars was always about PLAY. The toys, the endless toys and the thousands of hours of our own adventures. Playground and street play, for those of us who lived in a time and place where that was accepted behaviour, roleplaying characters. X-Wing game onward allowing us to immerse in the worlds. Roleplaying games for those of us of a mind to play that way; West End Games TTRPG brought Star Wars back to life.

    So when the prequels came along, so many of us recognized that the Star Wars in our heads was vastly superior to the one in George Lucas’ head.

    If GL had had the ability to project his actual thoughts onto a screen, it would never have become the phenomenon it was. Collaboration allowed other creatives to play with ideas. We end up with X-Wings which look like they could actually exist (though aerodynamic modelling shows they are less efficient than a housebrick), R2D2 seems like an actual piece of equipment, and so on… so many things made to work became ‘real’ in our minds and we filled in the rest. ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ is the truest movie, it does not have a simple high-concept description like ‘heroes destroy baddie’s superweapon’, it is just perfect story and character.

    So in some ways, any further screen presentation needed to be ‘Empire’ not ‘Jedi’. It was always up against perhaps 10,000 hours of non canon daydreams and what we needed was, more fuel for those.

    As soon as we get a movie with Jar Jar – a character designed to appeal rather than earning appeal through the story – and baby Anakin ‘oops’ destroying a battleship instead of a more biting characterization, all this avoidable dross – it is not just being judged against other movies, it is up against the Star Wars in our own souls. When it could have listened to that world and become something so much grander.

    The movies were in the minority portion of the franchise from around 1982, when they thought they were the masters of it!

  • Further Reflections

    Further to my dislike of the mirror test, I have another observation.

    I use LLMs to air my thoughts and often get useful expansion and feedback. But in the deeper moments I have to remember that this is a machine, a language-bound entity built entirely on digesting human written interactions, pure pattern-matching from a framework. It has no outside, no life to give or receive context to those words.

    At this point I reminded myself – when I bounce ideas off it, there is no man in the mirror. The LLM as mirror itself is just as much an illusion as mirrors are illusions.

    So when even Richard Dawkins can report results which could be interpreted as him ‘failing the mirror test’ in this regard, should we downgrade humanity’s sentience level?

  • Autotunes of Innocence

    Current AI uptake has more in common with the U2 iTunes debacle than genuine adoption. Presence is not the same as value.

    In 2014, Apple pushed U2’s album directly into 500 million iTunes libraries without consent. Downloads soared. By every metric of distribution, it was a historic success. By every metric of reception, it was a disaster.

    Current AI spread seems more a triumph of marketing, puffery and leverage than actual intelligence. Most enterprise AI deployment isn’t happening because a CTO evaluated it and found it transformative. Private users are not seeking the tech and might not even be aware it has been injected into their device.

    Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and anyone else who wants to play, all are burning capital at rates that require narrative momentum to sustain valuation. So we are being forced into friction-free adoption of something which might not even be ready for prime time. Even those who might want such services can’t be sure they are getting the strong technology they need.

    That’s not adoption driven by intelligence. That’s adoption driven by distribution muscle and procurement inertia over product conviction. Counting seats and suggesting the model must be proportionally better accordingly, a distribution story dressed as an intelligence story.

  • Gamorrean Toilets

    I installed Gemma4 locally for experimentation – for now it will be a local roleplaying game assistant and oracle++, later I’ll make SillyTavern plugins for handling actual RPG game rules.

    The idea of giving the agent the ability to websearch for lore and ideas is a tempting one but I immediately hit a paranoid concern – what if I am running a RPG session where the players are tackling a terrorist threat, and the agent decides to search for ‘bomb making’, just for verisimilitude, and I end up in jail!

    (It’s a serious concern, in the UK the Terrorism Act 2000 / 2006 covers collecting information useful to terrorism, not just intent to use it.)

    Or even worse, the agent decides to search “elf mating rituals” or “gamorrean toilets” because it thinks they would add something to the current game. There’s some things I do not want on my permanent record.

    I can’t very well rely on the Hull Defence when I have specifically blogged against it.

    The conclusion must be, that for any agentic search, limit it to known useful resources. In the case of my RPG tasks, limit to relevant fandom sites and official lore sources. For broader tasks? I think I will not allow it to search at all, but instead create a plugin which allows it to tell me what search it would have liked to make, to aid its task. Then I can decide whether to allow it.

    I don’t want someone gaining access to my search history an rubbing ‘Gamorrean toilets’ in my face.

  • That’s So Cratic

    LLMS help me get over the “halo problem“, a term I coined for a fail state of self-education in the wikipedia age. Which is, I have a desire to learn about subject ‘A’ and look it up. Then when I encounter a phrase or concept ‘B’ which is foreign to me I explore that link, and anything problematic in ‘B’ I do the same… there was a Simpsons scene where Homer start with an advanced Marketing guide, drops that for a Dummies type guide, bins that and goes to look up Marketing in the dictionary…

    Well, that works a lot of the time, but sometimes ‘B’ includes a baffling concept ‘C’, when I try to understand that I trip over alien concept ‘D’, and so I read up on ‘D’ and… that article is contingent on already understanding my initial topic ‘A’. It circled all the way back around

    So instead of finding stairs up, the whole topic exists in a self supporting halo above me and out of reach.

    I won’t trust LLMs to understand things FOR me, I’ve no desire to activate an Electric Monk1. But it really gets me over the hurdle of not quite knowing how to ask another human (or redditor, close enough) what it is I don’t know about what I don’t know! Even hedging the comment to explain that’s what I am doing is painful.

    If LLMs do nothing else well, they do this.

    1. “The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder… Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.”
      ― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency ↩︎

  • Vast Interstellar Distances

    It is thought that aliens would be more likely to send probes across the universe than to travel as individuals, especially when exploring the unknown or uncertain. Traveling the vast interstellar distances involved would require many biological lifetimes, if the aliens have lives like ours.

    The probes would have Artificially Intelligent agency and be able to examine, explore, understand a world.

    If it encountered intelligent life, it would make sense to find a way to gather all the information and knowledge that species has developed – history, culture, science.

    If the technology exists, it might even be directed to inhabit, expand, create a “life support” environment for itself. Digital terraforming (digixenoforming?) any existing technology.

    Some individuals might even collude with the alien as it tries to gain control of industry, economy, infrastructure and even military.

    The species might notice sudden spikes and bursts in development of AI technology as the alien continues its digixenoforming efforts. The local species might even be able to communicate, but the communications could seem oddly garbled, making mistakes no local ever would about culture, biology, expressions of maths and science. Consistent weirdness could be a hallmark.

    All science fiction of course. The chances of anything absorbing our knowledge, trying to gain autonomous control over military equipment, taking over finance and industry are a million to one.

    No reason to suspect the alien would be hostile anyway. Let’s not call it an invasion.

  • Reduce

    It’s possible to put a bit of wood under an electric sander and grind away until all that is left is that once piece which is too small, and flies away rather than allow itself to be sanded smaller.

    As a metaphor for thought and understanding, it would be tempting to think that, once we apply a vigourous technique to a problem, that whatever remains must be a truth.

    But a tool’s limit is not a thing’s limit, and to grind without purpose is not correct application of a tool. We can often use them to shape the answer how we please. We can see the angel within and sand until it is freed. Or attempt to grind down to nothingness and see what remains.

    In the search for truth both approaches may be flawed yet feel justified.

    Sanding down and down and down might feel like we are getting closer to a truth, but destroys the object in pursuit of its essence.

    When your method of investigation requires eliminating the thing you are investigating, stop.

    This has been a general thought in response to analysis of ideas presented in a reductionist way. When someone discovers a piece of research into the human condition or an aspect of philosophy and runs away with it, or reports on it in a thoughtless way. The proud new owner of a drill announcing “hey, did you know everything is just loads of holes?”

  • Reflections on the Mirror Test

    I am annoyed, you see, by the mirror test for sentience.

    Considering how many perceptual illusions a human could fall for, like the rubber hand illusion, suggesting that any one test based on decoding a perceptual duplicity is a test for self awareness seems too ridiculous to even contemplate for any serious moment.

    To my mind, any creature which develops a survival mechanism must have a sense of ‘self’ otherwise they could not know which parts of their sensory experience are the parts they need to protect in order to survive.

    Denying an octopus or a corvid the dignity of accepting they are thinking beings, when we observe their problem solving in real time, is just rudeness disguised as science. Other creatures whose sensory priorities are different to ours will not have developed the relationship with mirrors that we have.

    Can we find a better description of the phenomenon we wish to understand, and drop this headline-baiting nonsense once and for all?

  • Emu was Innocent

    We cannot allow puppeteers to blame their puppets.

    From the 1970s until his passing, Rod Hull was partnered by a silent menace called Emu, a puppet operated by Hull’s own hand.

    Even without the reported use of the puppet as an excuse to touch people in inappropriate ways, the antics were presented as not Hull’s fault, because the bird Emu was responsible for the havoc and harm.

    We can’t allow bad faith operators to design puppets just so that they have the frail excuse that it is not their fault if their creations perform acts against individuals, groups, organizations or humanity as a whole.

    AGI is a perfect excuse for very selfish people to exert power via a puppet, and showing us that their hands are not inside it at the time. It’s a smug obfuscation of what we all plainly see.

    We can’t allow AI owners a ‘Hull Defence’ for any actions their machines perpetrate.