The dubious wisdom of Mark Walton

Category: Reflections and Philosophizing

Here I gather the deeper thoughts and reflections on Life, The Universe, and Everything.

If I don’t let this stuff out there’s a danger I might turn to Poetry, and none of us want that.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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 ↩︎

  • 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.

  • People do not start their lives when they are born.

    People do not start their lives when they are born. For a while, your life is no business of your own; you are a flesh and blood machine designed to poop, and if you are lucky, someone will love you beyond all sanity, and keep you safe and warm. Eventually you will die, and the consensus is that when this happens, the world will be none of your business, all over again.

    At times in between, we come alive. Some people remember the feeling, a sudden realization that “oh, this is me, I am real, these things are in fact happening to me and I am an active, genuine ‘thing’ in the world!”. Often we live for a while as real people with agency, then snooze back into mere function. For some, routine is measured and controlled, a choice, part of a fulfilling life; for others it is an autopilot or screensaver, from which they occasionally re-awaken, sometimes to their dismay. If a person allows themself to snoozily drift too long, they will wake up in a life they would never have chosen: an unwelcome career, restrictive debts or mortgage, unfit body, unhealthy relationship or deep loneliness.

    Sometimes, people assume that whatever has happened before, is the truth of the way things are, and must continue to happen. So, they do nothing about the parts of it which make them bored, or unhappy, or cruel or pointless or dull.