Try to reach
for more
than hands can ever hold.
Get your mind
around the embrace
of arms
without measure and
the hugs that hold
without boundaries.
Go beyond
the words
that make your mind.
Push past
the limit you cannot see
but you can feel.
Meditate on touching
that which you have
no fingers for,
reaching with purpose
for nothing
in particular
but everything
particularly beyond.
It's a way to listen
to what might wiggle
out of nowhere
here.
Remember
Even in the deepest vacuum
somp particle
of participation
comes through
if only for an instant;
the foam they say
of greater oceans
and what tosses them
as waves to bend
another immersion
altogether.
But it makes us all
in the end,
Even as we make
it in the beginning.
It's the coming
and going
the going and coming;
the tides
of endless potential.
It is the question
and the answer.
It is the point
of meaning
and the meaning
of making something particular
at that point,
and changes everything
across nothing
we will ever be able to measure
that doesn't also change.
Listen closely enough though
and you will feel it
and in that feeling
you will find faith
that yours is a point
of making
as important as any other.
Because everything
seeps through
everything else
eventually, and
there's always more
potential.
Sunday, February 26, 2017
Saturday, February 18, 2017
The Masing Of Meaning Across Infinite Realities
What if all of the variations of each of us, all of the different versions of you, or me, that have been branching, off of previous branching, of endless possibilities, at a scale that does not have time as we know it. What if these slightly different vectors of reality, common at least to our participation (yours, or mine), form a channel of sorts. A Waveguide in a manner of speaking, that flows transversely across the boundaries of each separate reality. A waveguide that can mase, or lase, or some super combination of those, and more; could make that common thread of us resonate back and forth in ways that we can only begin to really appreciate now. A resonation one might be forgiven for thinking was just sprit by another name.
But remember, this would be something unique for each of us. And up to all of the vagaries of whimsy, serendipity, and sheer happenstance, as to how able, any of the infinite numbers of us, standing, falling, rolling, being rolled over, thrown asunder, or climbing to or feet again. Up to all of that is whether we're still left able to feel what the greater part of all of us might actually be capable of.
Meaning masers it would seem to me. Meaning being the meeting of the mind with what's also true down to the bones. Waves of a meaning processor matrix, rubbing space and time in each reality we will only speculate on in philosophies without end.
Hold this view and you have something special to keep you going when engaged in an arduous task, without much visible success to sustain you. You can say, to yourself, and to any other who might question "why do you continue?" To this you can reply: "I am merely trying to keep faith with the rest of who I am.
It also doesn't hurt to listen to wonderfully inspirational music. This mix by
is well worth listening to.
But remember, this would be something unique for each of us. And up to all of the vagaries of whimsy, serendipity, and sheer happenstance, as to how able, any of the infinite numbers of us, standing, falling, rolling, being rolled over, thrown asunder, or climbing to or feet again. Up to all of that is whether we're still left able to feel what the greater part of all of us might actually be capable of.
Meaning masers it would seem to me. Meaning being the meeting of the mind with what's also true down to the bones. Waves of a meaning processor matrix, rubbing space and time in each reality we will only speculate on in philosophies without end.
Hold this view and you have something special to keep you going when engaged in an arduous task, without much visible success to sustain you. You can say, to yourself, and to any other who might question "why do you continue?" To this you can reply: "I am merely trying to keep faith with the rest of who I am.
It also doesn't hurt to listen to wonderfully inspirational music. This mix by
is well worth listening to.
Thursday, February 16, 2017
It's Been Sixty Years And Only Now Can Even Begin To Consider That The Time Has Come...
...To say goodby to the mechanical hard drive.
It's interesting, now that I've been catching up on just how fast the new M.2 ssd specification allows ssd's to be, at least in the transfer speeds, though I know they've already made big strides in the actual read, and write speeds (where the lookup, and fetch, circuitry is involved) as well. Not only are you getting the fundamental benefit of "not mechanical" to start with, you're getting the data throughput you've come to expect from the video card world. It's hard not to see why this may well spell the final doom of the spinning platter.
Someone like me, naturally, gets a very visceral kick out of seeing someone hold out a, say 1 terabyte, M.2 PCI-E card. I can say that because at my very first software job, working for Boeing (doing COBOL coding for their Online, Wire Bundling, design system) for a year, I had the chance to take a tour of their IBM mainframe setup, at was 1980's version of the Kent Space Center. The Boeing people called it the Troica as it was actually three big IBM systems working together. And you better believe that those bad boys took up a lot of space. Even more impressive, however, in the consumption of space, was the nearly aircraft hangar sized room that they used to house what had to be a mother load of the old, nearly washing machine sized, disk drives; hundreds of them as I recall. And I have to think, even with those numbers, and all of the motorized racket to go with it, they couldn't have had more than a few tens of gigabytes in the entire facility.
And now even petabytes are becoming no big deal.
It is clear. It is absolutely clear to me now. I am not, in fact, getting better. I am, in fact, getting older.
It's interesting, now that I've been catching up on just how fast the new M.2 ssd specification allows ssd's to be, at least in the transfer speeds, though I know they've already made big strides in the actual read, and write speeds (where the lookup, and fetch, circuitry is involved) as well. Not only are you getting the fundamental benefit of "not mechanical" to start with, you're getting the data throughput you've come to expect from the video card world. It's hard not to see why this may well spell the final doom of the spinning platter.
Someone like me, naturally, gets a very visceral kick out of seeing someone hold out a, say 1 terabyte, M.2 PCI-E card. I can say that because at my very first software job, working for Boeing (doing COBOL coding for their Online, Wire Bundling, design system) for a year, I had the chance to take a tour of their IBM mainframe setup, at was 1980's version of the Kent Space Center. The Boeing people called it the Troica as it was actually three big IBM systems working together. And you better believe that those bad boys took up a lot of space. Even more impressive, however, in the consumption of space, was the nearly aircraft hangar sized room that they used to house what had to be a mother load of the old, nearly washing machine sized, disk drives; hundreds of them as I recall. And I have to think, even with those numbers, and all of the motorized racket to go with it, they couldn't have had more than a few tens of gigabytes in the entire facility.
And now even petabytes are becoming no big deal.
It is clear. It is absolutely clear to me now. I am not, in fact, getting better. I am, in fact, getting older.
Sunday, February 12, 2017
What's the difference between pattern recognition...
...And the specification of rules?
I ask that question because it represents a fascinating dichotomy that has taken place within the world of AI research. And it also serves to shine some light on a guy I can't help but have a great deal of respect for: Doug Lenat
You probably don't remember, or were never aware of the name, but I sure do. I remember when his work first started out, and was showing some promise (decades ago). He wanted, no less, than to teach the common sense that it has taken humanity thousands of years to accumulate. And so, obviously, it was a mammoth task, and it just blows my mind that this guy took it on with not only this level of tenacity, but with an equal assurance of its ultimate efficacy.
But his approach isn't very popular in today's world of "Deep Learning" and the use virtual neural networks. In that world you need only show the system what you want it to be able to recognize and it will create the pattern of weighted, neural triggering that will perform the desired recognition.
All very impressive of course, especially if you can get it to recognize complex spatial relationships like the pieces on a Go game board, but there is an underlying problem with this nevertheless. In such an approach an already knowledgeable interlocutor must tell the system this pattern, and not some other, is the one that ought to be learned. As well as to provide no framework whatsoever as to why one pattern matters more than another.
Juxtapose that with the idea that, if you had been taught a sufficient set of life rules, even if you had limited faculties of mental processing, you could be expected to have a decent chance of being able to deduce, if not what the next thing that ought to be know should be, at least what you should do next ought to be. Or that, once something complex was recognized, you could deduce what might be expected of it.
I use the term "experience association" a lot in talking about consciousness, learning, and meaning. In a sense you could say that common sense is our legacy of experience association, or at least a good part of it. I always intended that the term go deeper than just rules per se certainly, because we are a very complex system of collecting a wide range of sensory input, along with simultaneous effects of lower brain chemistry to go along with all of that external data. The mix becomes (all puns intended) a heady brew of viscerally felt understanding; with so much of it quite beyond direct cognition.
And if that weren't enough to really complicate things we also introduce the whole process of objectification itself; the separation of inner, from outer; the establishment of a self, with a specific point of view, and the concept of language. Whereupon abstraction comes into the picture and, suddenly, we can contemplate actions, and consequences, backwards, and forwards in time. And we can also start banking relationships found out through that school of hard knocks, through various forms of linear description.
Nature used neural networks for pattern recognition for a reason of course; it works. But that, by itself would never have been enough; not if you truly want to end up with actual meaning processors who could dream; who could do intuitive leaps, and yet still not stick their fingers in the fan, or put sensitive body parts on very hot things. All trivial seeming sorts of things to avoid until you realize that obviously bad outcomes aren't so easy to see several abstracted layers away, in steps that soon become forced upon you by the contextual logic of the situation.
Perhaps the bottom line here is that both types of approach are needed for an AI we could actually use, and be able to live with, because, and I can't stress this too much, we'd want these entities capable of understanding the same social, and moral constraints that we do. After all, one of the most basic of common sense rules is: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Which is also, in a sense, the height of enlightened self interest.
I ask that question because it represents a fascinating dichotomy that has taken place within the world of AI research. And it also serves to shine some light on a guy I can't help but have a great deal of respect for: Doug Lenat
You probably don't remember, or were never aware of the name, but I sure do. I remember when his work first started out, and was showing some promise (decades ago). He wanted, no less, than to teach the common sense that it has taken humanity thousands of years to accumulate. And so, obviously, it was a mammoth task, and it just blows my mind that this guy took it on with not only this level of tenacity, but with an equal assurance of its ultimate efficacy.
But his approach isn't very popular in today's world of "Deep Learning" and the use virtual neural networks. In that world you need only show the system what you want it to be able to recognize and it will create the pattern of weighted, neural triggering that will perform the desired recognition.
All very impressive of course, especially if you can get it to recognize complex spatial relationships like the pieces on a Go game board, but there is an underlying problem with this nevertheless. In such an approach an already knowledgeable interlocutor must tell the system this pattern, and not some other, is the one that ought to be learned. As well as to provide no framework whatsoever as to why one pattern matters more than another.
Juxtapose that with the idea that, if you had been taught a sufficient set of life rules, even if you had limited faculties of mental processing, you could be expected to have a decent chance of being able to deduce, if not what the next thing that ought to be know should be, at least what you should do next ought to be. Or that, once something complex was recognized, you could deduce what might be expected of it.
I use the term "experience association" a lot in talking about consciousness, learning, and meaning. In a sense you could say that common sense is our legacy of experience association, or at least a good part of it. I always intended that the term go deeper than just rules per se certainly, because we are a very complex system of collecting a wide range of sensory input, along with simultaneous effects of lower brain chemistry to go along with all of that external data. The mix becomes (all puns intended) a heady brew of viscerally felt understanding; with so much of it quite beyond direct cognition.
And if that weren't enough to really complicate things we also introduce the whole process of objectification itself; the separation of inner, from outer; the establishment of a self, with a specific point of view, and the concept of language. Whereupon abstraction comes into the picture and, suddenly, we can contemplate actions, and consequences, backwards, and forwards in time. And we can also start banking relationships found out through that school of hard knocks, through various forms of linear description.
Nature used neural networks for pattern recognition for a reason of course; it works. But that, by itself would never have been enough; not if you truly want to end up with actual meaning processors who could dream; who could do intuitive leaps, and yet still not stick their fingers in the fan, or put sensitive body parts on very hot things. All trivial seeming sorts of things to avoid until you realize that obviously bad outcomes aren't so easy to see several abstracted layers away, in steps that soon become forced upon you by the contextual logic of the situation.
Perhaps the bottom line here is that both types of approach are needed for an AI we could actually use, and be able to live with, because, and I can't stress this too much, we'd want these entities capable of understanding the same social, and moral constraints that we do. After all, one of the most basic of common sense rules is: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Which is also, in a sense, the height of enlightened self interest.
ONE GENIUS’ LONELY CRUSADE TO TEACH A COMPUTER COMMON SENSE
Thursday, February 2, 2017
People Who Are Little More Than Sleazy Couch Potatoes Steeling Us Blind...
...Are just part of how crazy it's becoming
We want, and need, the free flow of
information. To be able to govern ourselves requires it. To be able
to apply knowledge where it is needed, when it is needed, we must
have it. To be able to interact with the people we already care
about, not to mention those we'd like to be closer to, we need it.
And yet we cannot afford to let it be
free flowing. Anymore than most businesses can. Some things we have a
right to keep secret. Some things that are now property are
necessarily knowledge that must be kept secret if it is to retain the
value the owner seeks to retain.
How can it be that we've let things get
to the point where, after working hard, the rewards of that labor are
simply left to be ones or zeros in memory chips here and there. Ones
and zeros that are pilfered with relative impunity by those who know
not only how to manipulate data, but manipulate us as well; taking
advantage of our gregarious natures; our wanting to share and
interact, and turn it against us.
And let me be clear here. This is not
expressed as a dig to those who struggle mightily to keep various
data systems as safe as is humanly possible. It would be a daunting
task even if social hacking weren't so easy. No, what I mean to decry
here is that we've allowed ourselves to remain with an economic
operating system that has turned information into something both
indispensable, but also something that has become the equivalent of
gold. A system where money rules to begin with, and upon which we
either eat or starve. Are sheltered or left to the streets. Are able
to be healed or wither. All simply because we can't figure out no other
way to work the creation, and distribution, of items, or services,
that would satisfy those needs, or heal what ails us. An alternative where it wouldn't matter if most information got copied willy nilly, here and there. An alternative, in fact, where having it spread around more (always with some exceptions of course) and more would only be a benefit as it would help everyone know how to do, or accomplish, something important.
But that is where we are at, even as we wonder what will become of the idea of work, now that robots can do more of everything. In short, the contradictions are mounting and the weight of it all ever more burdensome. If ever there were a time to start thinking outside the coin box, now is it.
Identity Fraud Hits Record Number of Americans in 2016
Check out the alternative introductory video here:
Is Supposed, Unchanging Perfection, a de facto equivalent...
... to the final entropy the universe is supposed to eventually fall to?
You have your heaven. Your Nirvana. You have your Übermensch if you follow Nietzsche's particular avoidance of deities, or God's will, if you don't. But what is perfection other than that which no longer needs to change, much less cares to. And if there is no further change, haven't you then reached a form of entropy? The essence there, of course, being a complete lack of any further differentials, as everything has settled to a uniformly, steady state.
This is why, for me, the pursuit of perfection is pointless. And by that I mean pointless in the sense that ultimate "perfection," whether of place, or form, or purpose, is, or at least ought to be, an oxymoron within an Entirety that is, itself, infinite potential, and where the Physical Space of exterior experience, and Meaning Space of interior experience, will always be interacting. An Entirety whose primary constant, in the endless iterations, is change. Inherent change from of all of the multi verses (or vectors of experience association, along every possible point of continuous branching), playing out the "question/answer", "answer/question" recursive game for the never ending sense of meaning. And with every new meaning, there is a new object in one space, or the other (or both), that can cause new gap between all of the other, already existing, meaning objects. Thus a change taken as a given by the process of constant differentials automatically gapped, demanding to be bridged again, unable to ever stop, even if any of it wanted to.
You have your heaven. Your Nirvana. You have your Übermensch if you follow Nietzsche's particular avoidance of deities, or God's will, if you don't. But what is perfection other than that which no longer needs to change, much less cares to. And if there is no further change, haven't you then reached a form of entropy? The essence there, of course, being a complete lack of any further differentials, as everything has settled to a uniformly, steady state.
This is why, for me, the pursuit of perfection is pointless. And by that I mean pointless in the sense that ultimate "perfection," whether of place, or form, or purpose, is, or at least ought to be, an oxymoron within an Entirety that is, itself, infinite potential, and where the Physical Space of exterior experience, and Meaning Space of interior experience, will always be interacting. An Entirety whose primary constant, in the endless iterations, is change. Inherent change from of all of the multi verses (or vectors of experience association, along every possible point of continuous branching), playing out the "question/answer", "answer/question" recursive game for the never ending sense of meaning. And with every new meaning, there is a new object in one space, or the other (or both), that can cause new gap between all of the other, already existing, meaning objects. Thus a change taken as a given by the process of constant differentials automatically gapped, demanding to be bridged again, unable to ever stop, even if any of it wanted to.
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