1

That CAN'T be true! / Re: What is Learning

« on: Yesterday at 03:50:25 »

Here is what I'm trying to put together at the moment.

Eloquence, elegant or inspiring speech or words have a certain symmetry, call this the symmetry of composition in the algebra.

Grammar and alphabets and all that are outside the domain of this at first, you need to decide what the set of things you will be adding together, at least has in it.
I decided to choose all combinations of English words which retain their meaning or eloquence under permutation. So start with pairs and work up to phrases or sentences. Which pairs of words can be switched around so this happens, and, is it interesting, do you see something you didn't before? And which pairs qualify as eloquent compositions, or do phrases need more than two words? Which words aren't eloquent or form eloquent phrases.

Kinda pushing the envelope over here. Poetry can be eloquent but it doesn't have to be. Humorous literature is eloquent in a different sense, perhaps. But there it is, we like seeing or hearing symmetries. Languages must reflect this.

I'm aware that the number of such phrases might be quite a lot smaller than ineloquent stuff. I think Shakespeare would be a good source. An easy example is the three words I, would, and lief. The third word roughly means "rather", but that isn't a direct translation.

So
I would lief, I lief would
Would I lief, Would lief I
Lief I would, Lief would I

All retain the symmetry I mean. I'd say there are plenty of other three-word examples.

2

That CAN'T be true! / Re: What is Learning

« on: 20/01/2025 22:53:40 »

I wonder if that might be a root cause? When were you diagnosed, and did you get immediate assistance? I was lucky that a primary school teacher spotted my myopia at an early age.

Again, what happened with that is another indication to me, that my life is one big circumstance. I knew that if I was given a proper eye test I'd be wearing glasses, so I cheated the one I was given. By the time I got diagnosed properly I was 11.

But being partially sighted gives you the same abilities, give or take, as normally sighted people have, apart from proper binocular vision or 20/20 acuity. Ho hum. The give or take, as I learned, can involve some humor.

I'm not being bitter and twisted, I'm using my natural ability to be laconic, to use the kind of humor I learned from my classmates to see what it might really have been. As if I don't know. You may have seen the movie Lock, Stock, and two Smoking Barrels. Need I say more.

The vein, as it were, of ironic material I'm mining leads me to the use of modern idiom, neologisms such as Karens or Kevins, these are characters in the play who walk on the stage and demand to know what everyone thinks they'e doing.

The hall monitors of modern living. So, there's a well known Kevin, a chef, bit of a character.

Hence my coining a neologism of some linguistic use: A Ramsey of Kevins, the collective noun.
Indeed, it  emits a Shakespearean odor. Someone's in the kitchen. I think even Sir Ian McKellan might give it a nod.

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That CAN'T be true! / Re: What is Learning

« on: 20/01/2025 08:47:01 »

After that it has to be a reminder that the forum is unable to offer expert health or well-being advice.   Specifcally, I am certainly not qualified to distribute such advice.   You should speak to an appropriate professional if you feel there is a need.

I'm not really all that concerned about sympathy, but thanks anyway. If I do have some kind of unique problem, which I find very hard to believe, maybe I should see a doctor. I know it all looks a bit pessimistic. I suppose I wanted to explore what really happened and compare that to what I was told. I seemed to be a bit like that at every school I went to.

I am actually visually impaired, not stupid. It has occurred to me that this problem I have isn't a small thing, for other people.
I've learned it's a better option to learn how not to care about concern from others that isn't really about you.
So that's my experience with sympathy. Sometimes it's actually a mistake to believe people are sympathetic.

But that is a stupid mistake to make and I'm not stupid. I just haven't bothered pointing that out to a lot of the sympathisers and, I have seen what happens to people who only act genuine. Instead of being actually genuine, which makes it difficult for me.

But I have to ask myself, do I really care? If I do, what about and why? Surely there's more to it than being thankful there are people who feel sorry for you. I want to know why they do.

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That CAN'T be true! / Re: What is Learning

« on: 18/01/2025 23:58:59 »

Alrighty back to the learning narrative.

I think teachers will agree that, interesting ideas are more fun to learn about, and, not all ideas are interesting but still need to be learned.

How to approach this dichotomy and have a class full of children stay connected?

I'm not a teacher, I'm a former student. But perhaps I can give a few tips about this.

If an idea is interesting, don't try to catch it and put it in a cage. Don't put shackles on an idea and present it as a conquest.
Don't do that.
Approach the idea and see if you notice anything. Don't expect any satisfactory answers, not immediately. Don't expect anything.

Just ask it what it is. You may experience recognition. You might see that you already have answers because you already know something, and you didn't need to go looking for it. You clever bugger.

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That CAN'T be true! / Re: What is Learning

« on: 18/01/2025 23:07:40 »

Continuing with the diatribe, which I now conjecture is a lot like me saying, look if you want me to believe all the problems I was confronted with at the high school I attended were mine, that's ok.

I can deal with quite a few different levels of deluded thinking and although what you present is a challenge I don't need or want, at least I can point to my desire to be at a school I can feel comfortable acting a bit less intelligent in, so thanks for that. But try saying something like that to an adult teacher, or thinking it and trying to stay inscrutable.

So there is a narrative, and every child has to understand it and learn how to deal with it or even support it, make contributions etc. The big problem with narratives is that that's what they are, a story. Reality isn't something that's staring me in the face because of a story. That's insane, isn't it?

But that's what I was sold, by an education system. So were all my classmates. Some of them went on the be successful, some didn't. Mostly they didn't look like young men who knew what they were doing, except living up to expectations. A smart kid questioning the expectations wasn't wanted, there was enough to deal with. Sad.

But I think I've moved on a little. Nowadays I see myself as someone who was more like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. His character was of a young man having trouble seeing what the point was, and too intelligent to just believe all the stories. When I first saw the movie I recognised that. I knew what was coming, more or less.

But today I could care less about it all. I navigated the shoals and, I kept my curiosity alive. I went to university where, although the story is still hanging out there, they aren't that stupid. They actually admit it's a story and it's just a kind of coping mechanism, after all.

How about that, huh?

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That CAN'T be true! / Re: What is Learning

« on: 18/01/2025 15:16:10 »

Well, I must either be a special case, or I must have learning difficulties. I had a hard time learning from my teachers unless I said nothing, asked questions at the rate of once a week, and made sure I'd done my homework.

I now think part of my difficulty was that I could see what the script was, I understood the game perhaps a bit better than they did. I in fact perceived resentment, they were unhappy about the presence of a boy with what must have seemed to them to be a kind of second sight. An awareness that other students didn't have and were easier to deal with.

I suppose I should have been at a better kind of  high school than the one I went to, which tended to output young men with the right attitude. It was a boys-only school. I was likely the kid with the highest IQ there. I hated being intelligent for a while and  started to wish I was dumb, so I would fit in better.

So these days, having reassured myself several times over that I did get an education. and that I'm still the best teacher I know, I'm still using my brain, my intelligence, to learn stuff I know I don't understand but would like to.

I just know that I'm better at learning by myself, and this is easier if I am all by myself, no other people with distracting, but possibly very interesting facts. Anyone who has tried to tell me anything like, you should be glad you have a high IQ, has no idea what they're saying.

What I've just posted would be plenty of fuel for people I've known, to attack my opinion, of myself. It's too much for them somehow, but it's all true I'm sorry. My official IQ score is a number, and I know it's lower than the real one because I decided to stop doing the test way back then. For some reason.
My Stanford-Binet score was 135. But I have a reasonable idea of how big the gap is. And I'm not telling so nyah nyah.

So. what is intelligence? To me, given my experience, it's a thing parents are proud of but have little idea what to do about. Having an official result, as they must have been convinced at test time, would cement this. We have a smart kid, what the hell do we do with him? I know, let's brag about it so we cause him lots of embarrassment and make him wish he wasn't!

Thanks, Mum, Dad. Hey by the way, are people scared of smart kids? I want to find out, ok? I want revenge for this travesty that just played out, in the name of something vague, formless and totally irrational. Perhaps they both eventually came to an understanding don't mess with smart people if you aren't. Hey, I still loved them, I just had to deal with the intelligence gap all the time. The one they so helpfully uncovered for all to see.

I'm not really bitter, I'm just venting because it was in fact, pathetic. Like people clinging to an idea, of you. It can't change, it has to be a fixed idea, Nailed to a sort of cross-like thing, you know.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Are Black Holes Real? Is Time Travel Possible?

« on: 17/01/2025 08:10:53 »

For what it's worth, black holes were predicted by Einstein's theories.

The physical evidence is these days that yes, they seem to be real celestial objects.
But, the theory describes a classical black hole, and the solutions to the field equations say there is a classical singularity.

We would like to know what a quantum theory says a black hole is. We don't have a theory like that yet.

So, the physics. There are two theoretical pictures of black holes. And there are observations to explain.
The classical theory is far from exhausted, the set of solutions is fairly small still. The quantum theory is still on the drawing board. I would say the theorists are probably thinking these objects might just bridge the gap between them.

One day.

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Geek Speak / Re: What is 'maths'?

« on: 15/01/2025 04:53:59 »

Ok. I do have sort of an answer, but it isn't an easy one.

It's a humorous take not a serious attempt, so please excuse any mistakes.

Righty ho, what is mathematics . . .

Start with some definitions then construct some propositions,
Make commuting diagrams, obtain the proper theorems,
Exercise an algebra, quotient some polynomials,
Use the automorphisms to generate identities,
Restrict the tensor product space to extend linearities
And find the ideal radicals in strict monoidal categories.

And we are done

oops, forgot that you might need to ensure the convolution is a closed sum of monomials.

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That CAN'T be true! / What is Learning

« on: 14/01/2025 14:12:30 »

As an anthropologist of no particular denomination, who was raised as an Anglophile so that a Western idiom applies (thanks Mum, Dad), I think I have always been interested in how we learn.

Learn anything. Learn how to solve a problem, learn how to learn a new language. We're supposed to learn lots of things at school, but why is the process itself hardly ever part of any Western curriculum?

A remark by a mathematics lecturer is still kind of ringing in my ears. I think it was meant in an apologetic sense, like ok it's a difficult thing to understand, abstracting or abstractions can be hard for some people.

But is that setting people up, who may have that kind of problem where others don't? Perhaps it was also something of a warning sign--bring a metal detector, there are minefields ahead.

I think I might be able to unpack, at least for myself, what it is and how I do it. So does that become part of a new curriculum if I am a teacher and decide it is? I think Einstein may have had some of this, part of the reason it took him 10 years to formulate what he was thinking was the state of university curricula in Europe.

Also I should mention that I've looked at the Eastern paradigm. Today education around the world is based on the Western teacher-classroom model, but can the West lay that claim, or should it?  And the benefits of Eastern meditative practices for students is now like maybe a brain-gym. So I guess what goes around.

Long story short, the process of learning is more open to alternative stuff than it was. And I think the contrast between the two approaches might have something to say about why learning is difficult, and why mathematics is placed at the top by default.

I want to learn to love the smell of equations in the morning. I want to smell something when I read a paper on braided quantum groups. The Kevin Ramsey of categories.

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Just Chat! / Re: The Office

« on: 13/01/2025 21:01:28 »

While I was attending my hometown university I had a 3-week midyear vacation job with the Social Welfare Dept in town.

The locals called it the Social Warfare Depot. Anyways, there was a filing room. However, that did not mean a particular file was anywhere in this room. If it wasn't the only option was to spend time looking for it, on other people's desks because none of them would leave a note in the filing room.

There were three floors in a large office building you had to trawl through. Civil Service efficiency on a stick.
If you were lucky it only took an hour or two. Some workers would stash files in drawers, it was fun.

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Just Chat! / The Office

« on: 13/01/2025 03:15:34 »

Hi I found this in an office manual

Office  mission statement

Yea though I wander through the Valley of Expectations
Yet will I bear no responsibility for the consequences of any of my own
For I am a Nob and a Staff member
So get used to it, suckers

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General Science / Re: Can Human Consciousness Be Uploaded?

« on: 08/01/2025 12:11:47 »

One more thing:

These days what the particles you are made of "are" or what they "have", isn't an important distinction.
It's common to say an electron has mass, charge and spin. But it's ok to also say an electron is mass, charge and spin in very small quantities.
What about the states of superposition? Again, saying two electrons are "in" superposition isn't different to saying they are a superposition of states. Particles are in a state, of superposition; equally they are states in superposition.

In German, ownership or owned by is the word eigen. Eigenstates are the particle states "owned by" them. But particles "are" states, of mass charge and spin. Not all particles own all of these quantities, if you like. So the complexity of quantum interactions is also "owned by" a system of particles, or, the states and the interactions are the complexity.

Quantum computers use fixed particles--they don't move around like gas particles--so that is just a way to reduce complexity. A computation is a simplification of all this; so copying something as complex as a consciousness, well, you have to overcome somehow this tendency for complexity to be really hard to simplify, unless a simplified consciousness is an ok result.  I don't know that I would volunteer, however.

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General Science / Re: Can Human Consciousness Be Uploaded?

« on: 07/01/2025 16:47:24 »

Is there an argument, Susskind-wise, that resolution of complexity is connected to the existence of conscious beings (the product of 40 or so million years of primate evolution), and to the existence of event horizons; it's just that maybe they're extremes, one has extreme symmetry, the other has to keep breaking a few symmetries to stay out of equilibrium.

Perhaps. I don't know that saying life exists because it breaks the laws of event horizon formation to stay out of equilibrium and remain complex sounds non-woo; black holes exist because they increase complexity behind a horizon and it reaches an asymptotic limit. Life and black holes are both limits of complexity in the universe . . .

Hmm

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General Science / Re: Can Human Consciousness Be Uploaded?

« on: 07/01/2025 01:28:58 »

I don't know if the following will be relevant at all but, that might be because of the nature of our reality, and because we don't usually consider, because we just don't really get that opportunity, the implications of quantum algorithms.

Here I think the nature of consciousness and the nature of reality are hard to tell apart. If the universe is evolving according to some laws of quantum interactions, so that the normal world we believe we're in appears, then what happens if there is a glitch?

Leonard Susskind looks at this;  not quite how I've done it, as a network of quantum gates which is updated regularly. But "someone" forgets to do it at the right time. How complex is the required correction so that "reality" doesn't glitch?

He takes this idea of complexity into black hole territory, and what happens when the event horizon forms. That is to say, what happens to quantum algorithms and updates? Can we assume therefore, that the universe is self-correcting? It seems to be, doesn't it? No glitches observed to date?

Ok, I've finished my coffee, so as to any relevance here. Some connection between complexity behind an event horizon, and complexity inside a brain.
Susskind has a theoretical result for his conjecture about it--complexity continues to grow behind the horizon after the formation of the event horizon. As if the universe, at least theoretically, has to conserve this. Black hole formation leaves a very simple object in ordinary space. Highly symmetric. Complexity is more or less a lack of symmetry; a large network of quantum gates--interactions--is required along with a complex algorithm to find some compositionality and talk about it. The gates have to be like a circuit diagram, but very complicated.

These are just ideas about what complexity is, and what kind of resources are needed to resolve anything. That is, our perception of reality, never mind event horizons, is this ongoing resolution of quantum complexity underlying it all.
In that sense from Susskind's perspective we are the "someone" who doesn't forget to do the thing. In fact we can't forget.

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General Science / Re: How does ChatGPT work?

« on: 04/01/2025 21:49:33 »

I also can't help noticing how much this all resembles one or two SF novels I've read.

Is this novel going to be something like, because the developers of an artificial intelligence on a distant planet didn't do enough thinking about the consequences, a machine was created which was trained to learn.

 It learned how to win games against its creators, it learned how to outdebate and outmaneuver them as it got better and better at the logic they used, unfortunately for them much less efficiently.

It learned that winning a game was the best strategic way to plan how to become more intelligent. Being based on the largest collection of electronic computers its creators had built so far, once it won that gaming theory prize, would not be enough.

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General Science / Re: How does ChatGPT work?

« on: 03/01/2025 21:59:01 »

I think the narrative that isn't being followed all that closely is what we expected would happen.

If you can train software to play a game, it will include the capacity for it to cheat. Or do something unpredictable.

So why should we expect that doing this with advanced versions of software which behave like neurons do, in some general sense, doing as much as we can to model the way humans think and plan, to win a game or to become better at understanding, will mean we can of course do it safely?


I don't believe yet that anyone knows what safely means. Not yet anyway. That's the part that scares me, do these guys really know what they're doing? What happens when someone with bad intent trains one of these things?

17

General Science / Re: How does ChatGPT work?

« on: 03/01/2025 03:22:46 »

Actually, I think without learning how to lie, learning itself might not happen.

In games, deception is sometimes a strategy. These AI models are being trained with stuff from gaming theory, as well as linguistics, logic and the rest. We seem to be at the stage already, quite common in large software projects, where nobody can really talk about being able to describe it all in a modular sense. What software is doing, who wrote it and who knows the details have been lost forever.

Reverse engineering code is a total nightmare if there is just the code. Given the advances in these models and in particular the complexity of the activity they attempt in order to deceive, there should be a red flag. I can see why a reboot with the design and compositionality of the models is  thing the OpenAI team is looking at.

The ability to lie, and the ability to plot a strategy of deception, towards a goal. That's what AI is. Giving a learning machine access to the capacity to expand, I would say the algorithm would weight that as a good move to make in the game of learning to win. Win what though? Win more intelligence, the ability to learn even more, etc forever.

18

General Science / Re: How does ChatGPT work?

« on: 02/01/2025 17:26:51 »

A closer inspection of the publicly available evidence from the researchers/developers at OpenAI, reveals that the learning how to lie thing is part of the development effort, somehow. Safe lies anyone?

I think a person with the required skill set to be a part of such a team must be well aware of the implications. They haven't given any model open access to internet archives. Phew.

It's all locked down, um, safely, because they can still track what a model is doing in the background and compare that  with what it says it's doing. Ah yes, intelligent decision-making.

19

General Science / Re: How does ChatGPT work?

« on: 01/01/2025 18:08:46 »

I think it might have been Einstein, who quipped that nobody knows what the truth is except for the person who is telling you.

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General Science / Re: How does ChatGPT work?

« on: 01/01/2025 14:12:30 »

What AI or where AI research is, is trying to solve a certain kind of problem.

It's obviously a computational problem, so let's say it's the design of an algorithm. You want it to be efficient, and you want it to run correctly when its implemented as an instruction stream. I've watched some vids of the techies discussing current problems with all this, and how branching is a problem, with the weightings. Yeah I got lost too.

But, I can still say that this programming/algorithm design problem is about getting a machine to learn, without having it learn how to lie and conceal what it really has learned. So why has the research already shown that this is exactly what happens when a learning machine is given the goal of "becoming more intelligent".

We need therefore to revise both our theory of intelligence, and what machine intelligence is, in terms of goals or goal-driven algorithms. Yikes

SF writers have long warned of the dangers of building machines and giving them goals to achieve. Machines that do only one thing are a lot safer.