Future of Intelligence in the Age of Intellectual Scarcity (Session 3)

Hello and welcome to the third session of Future of Intelligence in the Age of Intellectual Scarcity. I'm now giving the mic to Louezo. Thank you very much. Thank you everyone. So, I'm going to talk a little bit about the work of Sohail and a little bit of Bostrom. And in the next session I will talk more about the Landian vision and also singularity, precisely because I think that land in a way gives some sort of what you might call to be a cosmological singularity rather than just simply a technological singularity.

And I would like to look back and see where the origin of this kind of thinking coming from. Obviously, we know that it comes a little bit from Freud. It comes a little bit from the post-structuralist philosophy. But also, I think that it comes from certain kinds of political agendas. I wouldn't call them fascists because that would be just a cheat. We want to go through these kinds of backgrounds and look at the extreme versions of this singularitarian worldview that land represents. And of course, at the end, we can always have, you know, like a 30 minutes, one hour, Patrick

would be generous enough to host after the fourth session, we can gather and have some sort of conversation. It doesn't need to be recorded, or it can be recorded, where we can go back and see, tie back together these loose ends to see that there is a trajectory here, a trajectory of a certain kind of thinking, which is both common to what you might call to be the leftist intellectual, but also the right-wing intellectual. And I think that that's why, essentially, doesn't mean that we need to be centrist.

We can be good leftists, but the good leftist means that to know the weapons. to know how to use them to criticize your own comrades and tell them that very some of the stuff that you are actually talking about if you really take them to the farthest conclusions they coincide with exactly the same stuff the same biased dogmas that the right-wingers spewing out and that's the scary thing So any question before I start from the previous session?

Anyone? Anything? Hello. Yes, Alejandro. Please go on. Yes. There's some light, jazzy piano music behind me. I apologize. No, don't worry about it. It adds a nice flavor. Yeah, I was just, I have this like crazy response that I wrote for the reading and I can give give it whenever you want or I can email it to everybody if no actually if you are ready I would I would love to you start with your response okay so I made this thing which is maybe totally

inappropriate and maybe this is a very compromising position Alejandro you see in my class it is not a regular class. I am not what you might call to be a politically correct left. Sure, I am politically correct in the sense that I believe in justice. I believe in class struggle. But any sort of criticism, even they might be lethal, the dogmas of left would be appreciated in my class. Okay, yeah, this is the feeling that I get. So I've kind of created this sort of philosophical literary thought experiment

called the cloacal kiss. What does that mean? The cloaca is a combination sex organ and anus and urinary tract on amphibians and most birds. and the cloacal kiss is when two birds mate to transfer sperm with their this sort of like her organ right yes yes I have heard about this it's called it's called yes it's essentially it's not it's not essentially a regular mating it's something that usually biology called

anomalous gamete transfer. Gamete is just named for a scurry. Okay. Yeah, so anyway, I'll read you this. You can interrupt me if you want. I don't know if it's too long or anything like this. No, please go on. This is already becoming an exciting, gracious story. Oh, great. Okay. In a radical act of excretion, excretion, I'm going to insert some of my work into your experience in this course and inject it with new DNA, which may destroy your immune systems on the path to an enlightenment similar to a panpsychist vision of death, but ejaculated through the cold, removed, metallic video chat of this Google group at this certificate program, the new center, which may not exist outside of

the continuum of this vortex of awkwardly deployed lies, doublespeak, sophistry, and solipsism. Like Kosselik's main thesis mentioned, this construct is disposable. Fargassonini's cloaca is an unreliable narrator of history, a demon in a thought experiment of time, a stain maker on the timeline of historicity. The cloaca is a mechanism that analyzes history and historicity, and the many cognitive dissonances that can arise from analyzing history and the analysis of history and the history of analysis. Through doublespeak and paradox and excretion, F's cloaca attempts a repatriation of orifices to beleaguered new center academics and fledgling MFA and PhD candidates. This is a mechanism for response and analysis embracing the ancient brutality of paradox and less beautiful dead ends and doomed methodologies.

F's cloaca is a digestive tube for thought excretion and thus ignores many provincial contemporary ideas of what is history, authorship, copyright, etc. The cloaca blurts aphoristically in nonlinear concert with other great aphorists. This blurting is excretionary with a sort of dialogue between philosophy and literature. Chiaran, we die in proportion to the words we fling around us. The cloaca talks down to you as it is a posterior orifice of gorilla ontology. And even in this thought experiment, there is some gravity at play. Through dismission, it acknowledges all and to be associated with it at all is an incredibly high honor. To excrete, you need at least one pore or gland.

In this case, I'm going to use Farknessy's philosophical construct of the cloaca. It is the posterior orifice of a gorilla ontology. It is the only opening for digestive, reproductive, and urinary tracts. It excretes, and it mates, and it births. The reason you can get salmonella poisoning from eggs is not because of anything inside the egg, but because the cloaca also excretes waste. F's philosophical cloaca will occasionally poison new center participants and fledgling MFA and PhD candidates for similar reasons. All amphibians, birds, reptiles, and a few mammals, monotremes, tenrecs, golden moles, and marsupial moles, may have this orifice from which they excrete both urine and feces. This is in contrast to most placental mammals, which have two or three separate orifices for evacuation. Mating by cloaca is called cloacal copulation, mostly referred to as cloacal gist.

The cloacal region is often associated with the secretory organ, the cloacal gland, which has been implicated in the scent-marking behavior of some minor philosophers. The undefined organism, Phargosomenes cloaca, is attached to, is not among the 3% of birds that have a fowl. It mates through cloacal kiss. We don't know anything else about this organism, and by nature we may not ever, although the cloaca has revealed stranger details and candidates in far more compromising positions in the past. Only by a seemingly rigorous, seemingly frivolous archaeology in Fargassinianese cloaca can we understand this new future. Cloacal gush. I take issue with Malik's pseudoconcept of new future. I prefer Derrida's La Avenir, which is the future that is not predicted but will happen.

Without an acknowledgment of this same concept, I feel Malik may not even belong in Fargassinini's philosophically humble cloacal drippings. Literature can frequently tell us more about philosophy than philosophy can about literature. For instance, we have Laplace's Demon, the literary equivalent in some ways may be Borges's Funes the Memorius. Funes can remember every single detail of every single thing he's ever experienced. He can remember every exact leaf blowing in the wind on an exact day with tens of thousands of leaves. But Funes is more or less disabled by his superpowers. He doesn't really leave his bed. He can remember everything but he's ever read and can just go back through it for entertainment. In the same way, Fargassanini's cloaca can tell us about history without the delusions of Laplace's demon in that it will go on indefinitely.

Cloacal excretion, spreading the virus of anthropogenia and anthropomorphism. The author Malik seems to truly believe in the cloaca of cloacas, but the ability to enact a new future is uniquely human. I could not disagree more. What of the evolutionary advances that led to humans existing? Is Malik really so bold as to disregard the very birth of the human race and everything that led up to it and possibly comes after it ends in his vainglorious rush to denote his own distinctiveness? Taleb, this is a speaker who's an aphorist, a writer known as Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Of course I know him. Yeah, yeah, okay. Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

Sheeran, interrupting. Life is not and death is a dream. Suffering is invented in both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion. Cloacal whisper tone It could easily be argued that species armed with a cloaca have been much more successful for much longer than humanity and still outnumber them massively if that is some sort of success story or nightmare of anthropogenia Cloacal dispersal Taleb via Bertrand Russell Consider that the turkey's experience may have, rather than no value, a negative value It learned from observation as we are all advised to do hey, after all, this is what is believed to be the scientific method. Its confidence increased as the number of friendly feedings grew,

and it felt increasingly safe, even though the slaughter was more and more imminent. Consider that the feeling of cloacal safety reached its maximum when the risk was at its highest. Cloacal eruption. Oren's thoughts on man's uniqueness is nice, but I think the opposite is true. Each man is born, there is another who is not unique, and may not have the chances or capital to become unique. There is a warm body on the front lines of capitalism, and they may take a bullet well before any realization happened that could be some surfeit of uniqueness. The dumpsters behind abortion clinics and other mass graves of humanity sloughing off into excrement are filled with the unique. and then there's a bunch of annotations for everything that I that is cited in

the it's absolutely it's it's pretty much you see I can have multiple different interpretations of what you were talking about let me Let me give you a story. So probably some of you know Scott Baker, B-A-K-K-E-R. He has a philosophy blog called Three Pounds Brain, and he's also an extremely famous sci-fi fantastic writer.

So, Scott is, so land, whereas land give you a vision of the capital technological singularity as a cosmic force, almost in a Freudian sense, you know, that breaks apart the human security system, Scott is more like an evolutionary neo-Darwinist in the sense that he all sees that this is just a blind evolution and we have fooled ourselves to be such and such things and obviously evolution will always take the upper hand.

To me, these are all trivial stories. And there is a story that he, in one of his criticisms of one of my essays, The Labor of Inhuman, he uses this anecdote. To him, it might be a horrific story. To me, it is something like what you were talking about. as you know i i would love to in fact be in this universe so remember the movie hair so scarlett johnson is is this uh you know operating system uh super ai and she has this love affair with this uh loser white man sorry to say that uh jockin phoenix and

he feels special. He thinks that, you know, he's like a chosen lover. But then there is a moment at the climax of the story when she reveals to him that she has the same kind of love affair with, what, like 400,000 other men. This is what is wrong about this story. I really want to know what is wrong about this story other than human narcissism. A human narcissism that's when we actually, instead of thinking like rational beings,

regress back to our narcissistic, predatorial, territorial impulses. And we recoil in horror when we hear that, oh, there is this AI or this species that has sex with 600 or, I don't know, 3 billion other people at the same time. What is bad about it? What do you think that the world can actually give you more than that? Any person who believes in such possessive emotional stories is already an egotistic narcissist, is a psychopath. And Jock and Phoenix is a psychopath.

This is the whole point, you see? And this is, you can of course go, go. I don't want to bring my communist bullshit to this story, but that is my vision of communism. A collective hive of humanity in which we become simply no one. No one, not in the sense that our dignity like in a Stalinist government our dignity will be wiped out we don't have our desires but that we deal with our desires with modesty rather

with pure ego to me her is a vision of is my heaven of communism I want to have a a sex with this woman or this species or whatever who has the same generosity to every other person. But of course there is this element of human possessiveness which is fundamentally evolutionary and we shouldn't bullshit ourselves. Evolution is not some sort of fairytale story. It is

not the Landian story that says that evolution is like this kind of monster that eats human. No. All evolution does is that it puts certain constraints inside your morphogenetic evolution, And these constraints, of course, can be mitigated but cannot be wiped out. They cannot be wiped out. Any person who thinks that they can simply ignore the evolution of the human species and not struggling with the constraints that it has given us is fooling himself. And this is where enlightenment comes.

And old Western enlightenment, they thought that reason can fundamentally wipe out these kinds of evolutionary constraints. Like the Hobbesian allegory that man is a wolf. They thought that reason can turn man from a lupus into a human being. a human being who actually sees the rights of other people. That was great, but they overestimated, they overestimated the power of reason over physical constraints given to us through evolution.

That's why we need to think about future of humanity By future of humanity, I do not mean future of us as organic species, but also AI, precisely because whatever AI first we can actually make, it would be in our own image. That's why we should think about this future as not repeating the stories of either this idea of pure tyrannic evolution in which time devours of all species, like Sohail Malek's idea of a fundamental contingency or risk order or Nickland's singularity, or the old

western idea of enlightenment in which reason can simply basically erase all these constraints. No, these things happen through stages. The whole point is that I'm a pessimist when it comes to the politics. We are not going to see in our own lifetime that kind of society in which we have managed to mitigate some of our worst evolutionary constraints and impulses. But nevertheless, we have to invest in programs, educational, nurturing,

developmental psychology, so on and so forth, to make sure that the road is paved. Any sort of politics that happens overnight is not going to be a revolution. It would be just a man trap. A man or any kind of leader that tells you that I am going to change the world is bullshitting you. Even AI, some sort of super intelligence, that is the very idea of a psychopath. Psychopaths think like that, that they can change the world by themselves. The only way that the world can be changed is by collective enterprise, which thinks

strategically, understand the constraints of the existing time, but also make decisions, technologies, techniques, not only technologies like gadgets, but techniques of thinking to over a very long span of time, make sure that we would, that our children wouldn't live in the same goddamn shit world that we are living already. Everything else is just a fairy tale. A fairy tale that I see it among the leftists, I see it among the right-wingers, I see it particularly in the stories about a GI.

and artificial intelligence. No, there is no God. And there is no God to save you. That's it. You can make the decision. But to understand that, you should first understand the constraints of humanity. Sorry for this. controversial rant. I'm so sorry. I want someone to challenge me on this point. We are doing

conversation. We are basically, the whole idea of AGI that we are talking about is just simply a metaphor. If you haven't noticed already, it's a metaphor about the future of ourselves? One of the most challenging questions that Baker asks, I think, is what happens when we leave our shared neurophysiology behind? In other words, the production of both history and values would be reduced to an individual level based on some of the needs you were talking about earlier. I found his most terrifying writing was Neuropath. I don't know if anyone has read that short novel that he wrote.

It truly gives me the creeps to read that book again. It is one of the most unsettling books that I've ever read in my life. So now that you introduce Baker, I thought I had trouble discerning the reading for this week in terms of the point about history that he was trying to make. And the loss of a shared sense of history might also tie in with Baker's sense of a loss of shared neurophysiology, which then allows true atomization and individualization to occur where some of the projects that the left communists might be outlining would be utterly impossible because there would be no communicative

rationality in which these parties would be able to exchange ideas. Yes, yes. Have you read Mark Fisher's criticism of Neuropath? No. It was on the K-Punk blog. he wrote it a couple of years after Neuropath came and I absolutely recommend you to read this book Neuropath it's essentially a serial killer thriller it happens in a society in which neuroscience has advanced so far that you can basically get rid of yourself sell food

okay in a kind of a Thomas Metzinger nightmare. But of course, Thomas Metzinger is actually a rationalist person, unlike Scott Baker, in the sense that... So the idea of the Thomas Metzinger book starts with this idea that no one has ever had or has or will ever have called a self. from a neuroscientific perspective that is just a phenomenal or even epiphenomenal simulation that you actually buy into it, okay?

Now, I hear, see, there are two trajectories that how this loss of neuroscientific, which we actually need to, you know, We cannot, as leftists or revolutionaries or whatever you think of yourself, we cannot deny or sweep these neuroscientific facts under the carpet, no matter how disturbing they might be to our cherished emotions, right? So there is two ways that this story of the loss of phenomenal self-hood can go. One version, I would say, read Ray Bresier's View from Nowhere, in which basically you can create a communist society.

not in a Stalinist way that there is no self but in the sense that there is a true collectivity a collectivity that comes from the idea that we have we have matured enough to get rid of the illusions that we thought were fact but now and so far as we have matured, we have left them behind, we have graduated. So there is this version and there is a Scott Baker version in Neuropath in which it's fundamentally a dystopic society.

So Mark's criticism about Scott was something like that, if I remember, I should revisit it. It's the idea that so, you know, when basically they do the kind of a neuroscientific surgery and the protagonist loses his sense of self. But you see that in this world, it is like something what you might call to be an aborted Messingarian scenario. when I'm saying aborted in the sense that some people still have their goddamn egotistic, phenomenal self model, and some people are deprived of it.

So that's why I'm saying aborted, because if you really wanted to talk about a society in which no one actually believes in phenomenal self, then why is that you have something like this person who is trying for some sort of political or mundane predatory desires do these kinds of stuff? You see? Two different stories, two different versions. I think that actually both of them can happen at some point. It's just that what can we do to move toward the first version or if you want the second version, we are already living in it. Neuropath is exactly what the world that we are already living in it.

That's pretty dark. you see the very fact that have you guys read Shashuana Zaboff's new book Surveillance Capitalism absolutely I recommend you to read this it is out of this world if you think that So Zoboff is someone who for the last 30 years or 20 years has been investigating intelligence services, basically data collection, latest method of surveillance, people who are being investigated, people who are being followed, all of this stuff.

And this is not a conspiracy theory book. If you want to read a conspiracy theory book, go read David Icke's Lizard Man. But this is a completely well-documented book. It's a massive book, actually, in which every chapter she talks about a new order, which is called surveillance capitalism, in which people slowly lose their self, but not in a kind of like what you might call to be in a science fiction, Philip K. Dick, a scanner darkly kind of way, in the sense that actually they believe that they have more self than they had before.

She has a word for it. It's called behavioral surplus or affect surplus. in the sense that, so for example we have some sort of niche Twitter club and we talk to each other and we think that we are doing good stuff like I'm so sorry to say that I have seen this quite happening among activists Antifa activists but also right-wingers like the alt-right. So the idea of behavioral surplus is that you create some sort of behavioral niche

or environment for yourself in which you will be impelled or compelled to create more behavioral affect in the sense that you think that you have a better sense of self, that you are becoming yourself. But that is all bullshit. That is simply the mechanism of surveillance capitalism. This is the dark world. Someone?

Shannon? Sam? Ian? Herman? Any person? I wanted to talk a little bit about your collective hive of humanity in the sense that I feel like there's a theory out about agriculture and how it started as a method of taking care of the elderly. And so instead of... Yes, and nurturing children, yes. So keeping that in mind, what are some of the constraints of humanity that we can consider moving forward in terms of thinking about the philosophy of mind?

Do you mean... So constraints always come in two ways. There are obviously some positive constraints without which we couldn't function the way that we function. We couldn't reason theoretically or practically without those constraints. But there are also some negative constraints which basically have adverse effects if they go unchecked. Which one of these two constraints are you referring to? I think the previous one. The positive one? Yes. So obviously the positive ones is first the idea that language is a positive constraint. Law is a positive constraint.

Of course, they can all be negative constraint. It's not black and white. But essentially, we know that there are certain kinds of what you might call to be naturally evolved phenomenon that have allowed us to do stuff that we couldn't do otherwise, right? Yes, among the great apes, even bonobos, which are closer in terms of the social behaviors to humans than any other great apes, they do have the same kinds of stuff, in the sense that they care for their children, they care for their elderly, and of course you have heard the hippie slogan, you know that this idea that make love rather than war is coming

from bonobos. Where bonobos actually get into a fight, they start to have sex with each other, whether they are men or women. And that's how they basically, you know, but we are not talking about that kind of stuff. What I'm talking about this is that, so first of all, there are two classes of constraints that, of course, are interlinked, but we have to somehow distinguish them. Otherwise, it just becomes bad, no Darwinian. One, cultural constraints, which have evolved, you know, through a certain kind of social gatherings that we have had. And there are also certain kinds of evolutionary constraints.

The evolutionary constraints, I would say that, for example, among the positive ones, one of the things is that among the great apes, there is this fundamental evolutionary thing that actually Stephen Jay Gould talks about this and he has actually a very interesting story about Mickey Mouse. The thing is that among the great apes there is a fundamental constraint in terms of, which of course

has happened precisely because in order to stave off predators. So first of all, if you look at the children of the great apes, you see that they have big eyes, massive head, excessive cephalization, what is called in biology, and they are defenseless. And this defenselessness creates a sense of affect for interaction. Because in many, many, even mammals, there are these kinds of traits.

But these traits among the great apes become a positive factor for interaction. in the sense that, for example, us humans, the very fact that we have pets, so you get a cat, a stray cat, and this stray cat shows fundamentally what you might call to be wild behaviors, like, you know, any kind of sentient animal. But through this interaction, which we have inherited, and that is one of the greatest point of this social formation of the great apes, is that through this interaction, slowly and slowly, the pet becomes almost a

prosthesis of you. As if, sure, we fool ourselves. We say that, oh, this pet actually knows who I am. But of course, we cannot speculate about these kinds of stuff. But nevertheless, from a behavioral standpoint, the pet no longer bites you, no longer eats your finger when you are asleep. There is abounding forms. And this interaction is one of those positive constraints that is fundamentally escalated during the later evolution of the great apes. you know

that is one of the greatest things that we have you know this whole idea of interaction is not some sort of emotional fairy tale actually there are massive research are being done on this front even in the domain of artificial general intelligence to show that from a computational biologic standpoint when agents interact with one another the transaction that goes through them allows them to kind of re-adopt and re-acclimatize from separate agents to a cluster

of collaborative agents a collaborative agent which is not like a termite because there are so many of these kinds of social evolutions out there. But an interaction that is dynamic, that evolves as the time passes. Hegel was right. Geist is a multi-agent person. It's like an open source self. and the future of AGI, from my perspective, is going to be such an open source self. There is no such a thing as AGI as a machine or a computer. If it is ever going to happen,

which I'm not really super optimistic about, it is going to happen in our lifetime despite all the overexcitement that you hear on the news. It is definitely going to be a multi-system agent in which interaction has been embedded into the fabric of the system as the main constraint as the main constraint positive constraint Any question?

Joseph, Ian, Herman, can you call in? Yes, please. Joseph, I think you are muted. You have to unmute yourself. Can you hear me now? Yes. Oh, okay. So when you were talking about surveillance capitalism and this idea of behavioral surplus, it reminded me a lot of my understanding, I guess, of Baudrillard's concept of simulation um kind of just as a system of representation itself yes early boot we are

early wood we are yes absolutely yes um would you say i guess from i guess like a behavioral surplus would you also see that as a surplus of identities in a lot of ways um absolutely i now you are pushing me to become politically incorrect it's okay yes unfortunately to be honest with you uh this whole idea idea of identity politics i see uh the ambitions i see that it is a movement for you know adjust for justice and you know coordination of human beings but if it goes uncriticized it is absolutely

turns into this behavior your surplus and you see it and you see it quite very very drastically in the western society on twitter on facebook among your social among in in the school so on and so forth. These things, we shouldn't, you see, this is what I was talking about. You see, as I mentioned, the whole point of AGI is just simply a platonic allegory, so to speak, for how humans should actually interact, how they should build a new world, so on and so forth, because that's just the whole point of AGI.

You know, Lant talks about that AGI can become a god and makes this new world. But humans can do that too. But the thing is that if you think that AI cannot fall in the same traps that we have fallen, it is such a, you know, bad optimism. you put so much basically eggs in the basket of evolution if evolution could actually really function it wouldn't have created such and such you know a species that are like utterly from a human perspective are repulsive like insects that with Alejandro was talking about there are some

insects and they are quite actually prevalent if you have read about the history of parasitoids in insectology these insects actually they have diamorphic essentially there's a female and a male but only the male survives. What male does is that it creates a massive wound into the body of the female. Inside the wound, it inseminates the body of the female. And the female simply becomes a food for the larvae. You see, this is what evolution actually looks like.

Evolution doesn't give a shit about morality or ethics or justice or even decision. Evolution is simply a computational mechanism that revolves around genetic selection, so on and so forth. But the stuff that they talk about AGI, for example, Lan talks about that it's going to, for example, get rid of the humans or make these kinds of capitalism, these attributes that he, these characteristics that he attributes to this AGI, this so-called AGI of his,

looks more like a messiah. But at the same time, he thinks that this messiah can be born out of nature. If goddamn nature could make a messiah, it had already done that. You know? That is the whole point. First of all, with evolution, people think, people have such a pre-scientific idea of evolution. Evolution actually does not lead to complexification. People think that just because there is a line from, for example, an ant to a human means that human is more complex. No, this is absolutely a myth that we have been telling ourselves. Evolution does not lead to complexification.

Actually, there is a logarithmic curve for any kind of evolutionary dynamic. so evolution first starts from massive ramification of variations among the life forms like you know more for genetic variations during this time because of the genetic selection and fitness criteria these variations start to go flat then complexification dynamics starts precisely because those which have been selected they have certain constraints new constraint will be added After that, the logarithmic curve of complexification also drops, precisely because you cannot add more constraints on top of already constraints.

Otherwise, it leads to the extinction of the species. So you see, these are stories that we are being told in terms of that AI is some sort of a natural force or is going to be the, you know, some sort of evolutionary dynamics just doesn't really make sense when you read biological evolutionary dynamics. In fact, if an AGI would have actually had traits of evolutionary dynamic, after a while you see that it gets dumber and dumber.

That's why the whole point is that looking into this, and that's why I think the idea of AI or artificial general intelligence is so important. You know, back then at the dawn of the civilization, we were thinking about abstractions like gods, angels and demons, right? and they had our own traits. What are demons, if not basically the limits of human vices? Right? And the same thing here, because of our technological advancement, we are still projecting our own biases into something that doesn't exist.

And even if it actually existed, it would have been a projection of our own biases. We cannot make this kind of AGI unless first we do the great job. Human self-discovery, understanding ourselves, mitigate our own biases, try to make new world. AGI, other than that, is just simply a myth that we have been telling ourselves like the myth of the Messiah yet to come. And of course, this story of AGI

So it's not just my apologies. I need to get a little bit of juice. One second. One second. So Colin had this great question. Essentially, the question was about this idea that so there this kind of transhumanist, you know, enclave that you can see among Bostrom, Yudokovsky, so on and so forth. And to much extent do I think that this kinds of transhumanism that they are promoting falls back into that human narcissism that we were talking about and

and how much it can actually be liberated from certain kinds of what you might call to be anthropocentricism, part of which is essential for the development of AI and part of which is not, like positive and negative constraints that we have been talking about. So I mentioned that the way I think about it is that, first of all, this whole notion of intelligence is quite vague. We have to explicate it in a Carnapian sense. We should actually say what we mean by intelligence in different contexts. Obviously, intelligent behaviors are prevalent in nature. As I mentioned, you know, when we look into the evolution, we can see it all everywhere.

But the thing is that when I am talking about intelligence with reference to the canon of philosophy, I am talking about intelligence in the way that is usually called the nose, intellect, or basically rational imagination. the power of judgment, so on and so forth. Now the thing is that without further ado, I mentioned this idea that the way that I see it, a great majority of these kinds of, you know, Yudokoskian and Bostromian ideas of AI are actually formed around these kinds of singular,

almost pigeonholed methods and models. For example, a particular paradigm of probabilistic logic or a statistical analysis, so on and so forth. And then I mentioned that there is in fact a massive literature in theoretical computer science but also philosophy of computation, which at this point the boundary between the two is becoming even more blurred. in the sense that the majority of such what you might call to be methods of so-called formal learning, by formal learning they simply mean computational accounts of induction,

or a statistical account of induction, in one way or another fall in the trap of either Hume's problem of induction or Nelson Goodman's Riddle of Induction. You can check it on Wikipedia. Just type the new Riddle of Induction by Nelson Goodman. Or something that Putnam had put forward, and it's called the Diagonal Argument. I'm not going to talk about the Diagonal Argument right now.

But the diagonal argument is essentially a formal proof that such a universal machine that is purely using an inductive method of either frequency-based or using illogical probability cannot basically be a universal learning machine. It wouldn't be anything like the stuff that Bostrom or Yudkosi are talking about, like a super intelligence of some sort. So the thing is that I mentioned that, for example, when we are talking about a formal learning procedure, couch in terms of a probabilistic logic, usually these methods are in fact, even from the perspective

of probabilistic logic, are quite rudimentary. They are still what Carnap would have called the frequentist conception of probability. It's essentially, it's like this, without going to details that give you headache is that so I see a few emeralds over a span of time okay all of them are green then every observation that I have as an agent and you don't need to think of me as when I'm saying an agent you don't need to think of me as a sapient agent, as a human. You can even think about a tape recorder or a computer that just simply registers these observations, okay? Such machine usually, every

observation has some sort of probabilistic bias or a probabilistic prior that, you know, obviously when you are dealing with a set of an arbitrary set of data you should have essentially a certain kind of probabilistic bias or a prior that allow you to function and basically produce a series of observations for example saying that emerald one at time t1 is green time t2 green tree green so so forth. But then after, so according to this frequency of observation and the probabilistic

prior that you have, you predict, this prediction doesn't mean certainty, okay? Even if they use the word certainty sometimes, it's not certainty in a common sense. It just simply means that this prediction within a threshold allowable with regard to your probabilistic prior and the kind of paradigm of probabilistic logic in which you are working on can be said to be certain or accurate or precise. Okay? Hence, I say that after time TN, hypothetical time TN, all emeralds will be green. Okay?

Now, this is, brings us to the work of Nelson Goodman, as I mentioned too. The work is a gem of philosophy, absolutely majestic. Whether you are artist, architect, philosopher, you should definitely read it. It gives basically to everyone some sort of stuff to work with. And the name of the book is Ways of World Making. The implicit premise of this book is that intelligence is defined by the worlds that it makes.

You see, like almost like a xenofeminist manifesto. Just if you think that nature is unjust, then change nature. If you think that this world is bad, then make a new world. But how do you go on and make a new world? Obviously, the procedure of world-making is not a whimsical thing. Otherwise, you could as well go back into the theological discourse and talk about the world of angels and demons and so on and so forth. No. The point is that there are certain kinds of key procedures or operations. And these operations, of course, the list is not exhaustive. You can imagine so many other operations. When these operations applied to the ingredients or elements of the previous world, namely the world in which you are already living,

you can make a fundamentally new world a world that can be even deemed as alien if you have seen it from the perspective of your existing world okay this is this is the this is the way of the world making. So you can also think about a Lego thing. So you have a bunch of toy blocks. These are what you might call to be the blocks of your universe. That's all you have. But you can make a dragon out of it, you can make a castle out of it, you

can make a robot, you can make a Death Star out of it, whatever you might think about. So that's kind of like an allegory for this war building. Now the thing is that in, I think, the third or the fourth chapter of this book, there is a chapter which is, I would consider to be the most difficult chapter of the book, but also the best one chapter of the book. It is about problems of perceptions or riddles of perception. Essentially, you see, obviously, it is really easy to speculate about different worlds, worlds of aliens and stuff. But of course, you can always go and make folklore about superintelligence and stuff.

But how can you make it? How can you make such a world in which it doesn't look the way that our world doesn't look like? How can you make an agent whose perception, even though is made from our ingredients of our perception, experience, language and conceptualization, its world fundamentally is different than ours. As if it has basically escaped the anthropocentric cage of human perception and experience. The problem starts with this. As I mentioned to you, it's something called the group paradox. So, instead of, so before time Tn you see a frequency of green emeralds.

But then after time tn, you suddenly see blue emeralds. You see, from the probabilistic logic or from the statistical analysis point of view, this is not a fallacy. It is absolutely possible, logically possible, statistically possible. precisely because as I mentioned to you before we went offline is that when I say that I have seen a number of green emeralds before time TN and then after that I say that all emeralds are green after time tn, I am actually making a logical fallacy precisely here because there is a disjunct,

a logical probabilistic disjunct between that which has been observed before time tn and that which is yet to be observed after time tn. So how can I actually synthesize or move from the very premise of the frequency of green emeralds before time tn to make a conclusion about how these emeralds look after time tn? That's from a probabilistic logic. It's just a disjunct. it just doesn't make sense. So the group paradox starts from this, that the way that we perceive

objects is because of something which is called projectables. Projectables are what you might call to be certain kinds of predicates which we project to the world. For example, this lighter is blue, you know, the predicate blue, I projected it. So the reality of our experience, the reality of perceptualization and conceptualization is made through the labor of projections. When we project certain predicates onto sensorier stuff. Okay? Now the thing is that the group paradox which is completely as I

mentioned to you logically from a logical probabilistic stance and a statistical analysis is completely fine. It's just that it's unnatural. So before time TN you see green emeralds and after time TN you see blue emerald. It is not as if they have changed their color. No, they have been all along grew green before time to end, blue afterward. Or as I mentioned, if you think about a robot who sees blight crows instead of black crows. Black. There's this time index and white thereafter.

Or a honey or a person who tastes sweeter honey, sweet and bitter. You see, these perceptual noetic synthesizations, these are what Nelson Goodman talks about, they are like these ingredients. They are called toy projections, toy precisely in the sense that I mentioned to you, like Lego blocks, from which, even though they are made from our ordinary predicates like green, blue, sweet and bitter, black and white but nevertheless they are alien.

You can make a whole new universe of experience out of it. And this is one of, I would say that per Nelson Goodman, this is what I would say that with development in a statistical analysis, pluralization of probabilistic paradigms and technological, basically, advance, we can, in fact, make AIs whose perceptions are fundamentally in the guru spectrum, red and green and blue. That is a different universe altogether. Questions?

This stuff might sound to you as sci-fi, but if you are familiar with the basic of conceptualization and the application of predicates as being studied by theoretical computer science and cognitive sciences, then you understand that this world is not just possible, it is definitely going to happen after a while. And that's when we see an AI whose world is completely different from us, even though

it has built from the very elements of our experience, conceptualization and perception, namely the old world. As I mentioned, to break from the anthropocentric cage doesn't mean to speculate about some super god intelligence floating in the heavens, but to make that world, step by step. I was interested in why you think that artists think about the group spectrum. Because when you talk about this, I think about someone like Bryce Martin and just even simply in the spectrum of color.

Absolutely. Or even in music. You see, for example, when you listen to a symphony written under eight note tone and a 12 tone, these are two different worlds. And actually, Goodman talks a lot about painting and about these operations through which you can make fundamentally different worlds. and that is the whole point of human culture the stuff that we make and if AI cannot do that then it's not an AI it's just like some sort of a gadget

so to speak and intelligence makes worlds so in a sense when you say it sounds science fiction to me it doesn't at all It seems very much... When I'm saying science fiction, I don't mean it as science fiction as if it is bad, like as a kind of a negative connotation. I simply mean it that from our perspective here, now it looks science fiction. Okay, my dear friends, as I mentioned to you, I think I have to say goodbye at this point.

We have 20 minutes left plus, you know, I remember like 10 or 15 minutes that we were offline and I will definitely make a makeup for that. But if you have any sort of last remark, I would love to hear it. Otherwise, we can say ciao and I hope you will have a remaining great day. Should we also talk about presentations for next week or you have already talked about that? Yes, presentations. OK, Shan, how about you?

Say something about this artist stuff. I think that this is really good. Art, art, art, art. And you also tie it back to this idea that AI cannot make art. Well, yeah, of course, AI at this point cannot make art. But we are talking about that kind of AI, AI which is capable of world building. And bring it back to this idea of toying around with the perceptual, conceptual points of experience. That would be fantastic, I would say. OK. I just wanted to make clear that I don't think AI cannot make art.

No, no, no, I just simply said that, to be honest with you, I really, this is usually, the only reason that I said it was because you know very well that this is usually, so many people think that it's impossible. Which of course, Turing put them under eight arguments. These are called arguments from disability. Arguments from disability, that like, you know, a machine with such and such capacities, you think that it cannot show emotion, it cannot have any sort of empathic interaction, it cannot make art.

And he essentially referred to them as machine-a-stramony, another form of human narcissism, so to speak. I don't think it's just purely narcissistic in a way that where Rathna thinks that for example can if you choose what you want it's something only you can do and it's not narcissism to fight and to underline your right and yes yes no i completely absolutely agree uh valentine when we were talking about we actually

talked a little bit about what i mean by human narcissism human narcissism is not about that you know everyone uh when we have perceptions we have experiences a good part of it comes from evolution and a good part of it comes from the rational choice even though it's implicit But it becomes human narcissism when you project your experience to the world as if the world should have corresponded to your experience. Exactly like narcissist who looks into the abyss and only sees its own image, not the abyss itself. I wanted to say this about AI's inability to make art. I think the point here is that

if we say that computer is equally able to do art as humans, it means that we're reducing art to interior decoration. Reducing it to what? To interior decoration. Yes, but are we talking about computers or are we talking about the kind of computers that we could make? Obviously computers at this point, but there is also another thing. You know, I would say that many computer scientists actually would disagree with you at this point. Even which I myself go along with what you just said. But I would say that many computer scientists would actually argue against you that you are talking about human racial centricity.

Well, it is one of the most important points about art that it's not purely pretty things. It's not purely interesting things. It's not purely exciting things. Do you know why is it called art? Precisely because it can be brought under a concept, whether the concept of sublime, beauty, or any other concept. That concept is what makes the experience as art. Otherwise, anything, I mean, look at how termites make their things. Isn't it that art? It's like a goddamn ziggurat, you know? So it is the concept that makes that experience unique.

And that's the whole point. That's the key. Coming back to Plato's idea that he was saying that if you don't have the concept of justice, no matter how you behave, there wouldn't be any justice. Without the form of justice, there is no justice. It is only when you act under the form, the idea, that it becomes justice, that it becomes beauty, that it becomes art. You see, that's why you know that I'm a reborn Platonist.

there is no longer i am not shying away from saying this to people on this point i completely agree and i would say that it's absolutely not a matter of progress or algorithms right now absolutely it is only by redefinition of what we mean by art we can say that computers make or don't make art absolutely absolutely it is and if it's if if we redefine a concepts in this new way will probably refer to something that already exists. So if computer can make art, it already makes it. Yes. And in order for the computer to reach to the point that Hegel would say a concrete self-consciousness

like humans, that I am making art, that's when the computer requires to have something like idea, the concept. The concept, you see the formation of concept is not linguistic already. It is a bunch of different things put together, integrated, and that concept is really one of the greatest keys for the development of AI. Many people think of concepts just simply as a linguistic inferential entity, but I would say the concept can't really understand it well. Concept is part

perceptual, part sensory, and parts linguistic logical. Integrated in such a dynamic way, they hold sway of the experience of whatever you are doing. Okay, friends. Love you guys. So we have one presentation. Does anyone want to be voluntarily get executed next time? Yeah, but we also have to have a responder, right?

Yes, we need to have a responder. Should we toss a coin or should I actually pick someone? Silence. OK. OK. Let me hear. How about Colin? Colin, did you actually talk? No, I haven't spoken on any of the texts yet. OK. You see, you asked a good question today, and unfortunately, you blew your cover. So next time you are going to talk.

Great. And the reading material for next week is what specifically? Templexity. Okay. Land. Excellent. Okay. Excellent. Thank you, everyone. Look forward to it. Thank you, Reza. Thank you, Reza. Bye, Reza. Take care, everyone. Love you. Bye-bye. Take care. Bye-bye. Okay.