ONT Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry
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Howard,
I am having to jump around, as your question
is way too big to encompass in a single scan.
Howard Pattee wrote (HP):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):
JA: I lament the chance that this discussion might take
a non-constructive and even anti-intellectual turn,
as it is mostly the task of constructing software
tools for the support and extension of our humane
intellects that is my main aim.
HP: There is nothing to lament but lament itself.
Creating machine tools to support the intellect
is an aim worthy of discussion. Where in the
course of inquiry, using any epistemic diagram
you choose, do you feel the inquiring mind needs
the most help? Or is it more modest to ask where
we could expect technically plausible software
(and hardware) to help the most?
JA: Ah, where to begin!? Being there is so much to do,
and we cannot do otherwise than to start as we are,
it may be the case that we can't do better than to
let all pick their own eigenvectors as the optimal
direction for them severally to go -- and yet that
incurs the risk of chaos if there be no other form
of community among them. Something I worry about.
JA: Here are some of the big problems that I see here:
JA: There is a field of activity, transected by several shifty lines:
1.a. <What people can do> Versus 1.b. <What people cannot do>
2.a. <What people do best> Versus 2.b. <What people do not do best>
3.a. <What people like to do> Versus 3.b. <What people do not like to do>
JA: The uses of technology worth having are those take some of the stuff that humans can do --
goodly, badly, or indifferently -- but out of which people no longer get much of a kick,
and shift these fardels so that machines will bear them.
JA: I am pretty much content to leave the creative stuff to people for a while,
since I have no clue how to automate it, and even if I did I would have to
ask whether it's creative stuff we like or creative stuff we dislike doing.
JA: The thing is that many activities of interest to us are cyclic or recurring processes,
and this means that we can often facilitate the whole cycle simply by identifying the
places where things are pinched a bit more than others, the points of high resistance --
no, there is no venturi flow here, it's a high viscosity current so far as I can tell --
and by loosening up these bottlenecks to whatever extent that we can. Still, not all
of the bottlenecks are ones that we can do much about, so we have to pick our bottles.
In view of these things, I am mostly focused on the barriers, blocks, boondoggles,
bottlenecks, briar patches, broken fields, bulwarks, caltrops, hurdles, obstacles,
obstructions, ramparts, rough spots, sandtraps, and walls that we keep on running
into as we try to move forward in our evolving inquiry. Whenever I run into one
of these blocks I have to backtrack to a point in our common intellectual orbit
where I can see the nature of the obstruction well enough to see a way around,
beyond, or through it.
Notice that this sort of work is often very different from trying to build imitation humans
or anything like that. In fact, though it is probably useless to tilt against the windmill
of a mere name like "artificial intelligence" (AI), my roots go back to the classical angle
of Ashby and others that initially disposed them to build an "intellectual amplifier" (IA).
| If this is so, and as we know that power of selection can be amplified,
| it seems to follow that intellectual power, like physical power, can be
| amplified. Let no one say that it cannot be done, for the gene-patterns
| do it every time they form a brain that grows up to be something better
| than the gene-pattern could have specified in detail. What is new is
| that we can now do it synthetically, consciously, deliberately.
|
| W. Ross Ashby,
|'An Introduction to Cybernetics',
| Chapman & Hall, London, UK, 1956,
| Methuen & Company, London, UK, 1964,
| Section 14/7, Page 272.
On To The Epigenetic Algorithm!
Jon Awbrey
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