A short discussion about basic level concepts

I first encountered the idea of basic level categorization from Lakoff and Johnson's "Philosophy in the Flesh". I understand this is not a view held only by these two authors. I am also aware that Eleanor Rosch, perhaps with George Lakoff mentioned here, formulated the Prototype Theory in the early 1970's.

Basic level concepts have been defined by Rosch as: "that level that has the highest degree of cue validity". This has a symbiosis with embodiment. That which we would define as a basic level concept (bird, chair, fruit, child, adult, ...) is done so with relation to our physical relations with said concept. A bird is something which soars above our heads, has legs and feet similiar to our own but skinnier, and has wings in place of our arms. A chair is something we bend our knees to sit down on and then are at a level such that our feet rest on the ground. There is more to it than I have mentioned, but these were used as rudimentary examples.

I originally brought up "Philosophy in the Flesh" because technology and scientific inquiry were described in a manner which was novel to me. Many aspects of technology, maybe even all, were described as our ability to bring more and more structures of the natural world into our realm of basic level concepts.

We have not evolved to directly perceive the celestial bodies of our solar system or the molecular systems of our bodies, but we do perceive them.

I remember the first time I saw Jupiter with a respectable telescope. My first reaction was something like: 'My goodness, I feel like I could reach out and grab it.' This is not an uncommon sentiment. After all, is this not what the powers of technology do for the scientific entrepreneurs? It brings aspects of the world previously unknown to a level where we feel we could 'reach out and grab it'.

Not long after my joy at seeing Jupiter at such an un-natural proximity, I experienced a chilling sensation as I tried to extrapolate what was seen in the telescope to what I knew was actually there.

I now come to the primary point of this post. I am writing this in reaction to the more and more prevalent use of the words 'information' and 'design' in reference to DNA. When studying DNA, scientists use tools to bring this structure to a level where it can be characterized at a basic level. (When I use the term characterize in this post I mean it to be in the cognitive sense not the scientific one.) Once more is known about DNA, it becomes apparent where to look above and below for its causes and affects.

Therefore, whenever an individual uses terms like information and design with reference to DNA, and I say this with all due respect for individuals making this argument, they must remember that they have no direct perception of this structure. What they are speaking of is something that exists only after it has been brought up to their level of perceptual ability. In order to fully know the causes of DNA structure one should bring the lower levels of DNA categorization up to observation. Do not take the small amount of knowledge you have obtained about DNA and fill in the gaps with knowledge you have about people and paintings. People and paintings do not behave in the same manner as DNA. DNA does not even exist in the same perceptual framework as architectures and buildings. Do not stop with the basic level of what you have found. Keep going if you really want to know.

What this effectively means is that a legitimate inference can not be made about DNA using everyday natural basic level concepts. DNA exists in a world where things may very well behave very differently than what we are used to. I say: ‘may’, because I simply do not know. What I do know is that it is folly to assume that the practical knowledge I picked up as a toddler is appropriate to use to analyze the causes of micro-machinery.

I will always be skeptical of individuals who spend more time pronouncing that they know the truth than they spend searching for the truth.

The Illusion of Immediacy and it's Implications Regarding Free Will and the Higher Cognitive Function

Mental processes take time. All of them.

The effect of this can be called the illusion of immediacy.

You see someone walking toward you, or rather a car heading toward you. You would like to assume and naturally do assume that what you are seeing is happening at the very instant that you are seeing it.

The reality is that you can only ever see something after it happens.

The most crucial reason for this is because everything mental takes time. Not only is this due to the fact that impulses travel along the neuron at no faster than 120 meters per second, but the formation of a stable thought is not instantaneous and takes time to resonate (albeit on a scale of microseconds).

Due to some thoughts having cross-modal patterns the "higher" thoughts literally take more time to resonate and become a noticeable thought.

My proposition:

Due to the fact that these higher functions take longer, we are more aware of the formation of that thought. This is opposed to lower leveled functions such as sight, hunger, and pattern recognition. The difference between higher and lower functions is that the higher ones have more modalities which many times include some lower functions. It is this reason why higher functions take longer; they can only form after the lower ones.

This all leads one to say things like: I can not control whether or not I perceive that block as a block, but I can control how I act toward it. Sentiments of this type are merely due to the fact that the higher functions take more time and we are then more aware of its formation.

This leads to the highest level which is the sense of self. This sense of self is not a part of the brain/mind because it is the brain/mind. This is why we can not see it or at least not aware of its formation as we are with other cognitive functions.

Francisco Varela wrote on page 41 in his book Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom and Cognition:

In other words, the cognitivist challenge does not consist simply in asserting that we can not find the self; it consists, rather, in the further implication that the self is not even needed for cognition.

You have no more control over your behavior than you do over your sense of sight. Or, to put it another way, you feel that your sense of self is in control of the other cognitive processes on another level than those processes simply because your sense of self is the control. I know this may sound kookie, but one's sense of self, and therefore free will, is the system itself instead of in it.

This is why cognitive science does not see the sense of self. It is looking for a part of the cognition. The study of this cognition (cognitive science) therefore exists on the same level as the sense of self. I know this sounds antithetical to what was presented above, but the main point is that just because science is a study of the world does not mean that it can control it.

Charlie's Disclaimer:

I must add that living your life under this pretense will most inevitably lead to nihilism. Let me say that I do not mean for this to be seen as an advocation for a nihilistic lifestyle. We would be in a poor state indeed if responsibility were not expected of each individual. My point is that due to cognitive science's tackling of subjective experiences; it is objectively blind to the most fundamental subjective experience. This should not quelch the validity of a sense of self. Perhaps I have not thought thouroughly enough about this issue, but it seems to me that a scientific understanding of subjective experience is different from a subjective understanding of subjective experience.

The constant smirking of dolphins should have tipped us off

The following is an excerpt from an article in Discover magazine.

"Their constant smirking should have tipped us off, but we were so damned in love, dazzled by the glare from those latex-smooth exteriors, charmed by those adorably wobbly tail stands at Sea World. [...] Now, however, if a team of scottish marine biologists are to be believed - and if you've ever dipped even a toe into a body of scottish water you have some sense of those people's rigor - dolphins are not to be trusted. They gossip. We know this because we know their names. Each bottlenose individual identifies itself by a unique pattern of clicks along the lines of woo-woo-wee-wee, or even woo-wee-woo-woo-wee-woo. What was not known until the Scottish research, however, is that a pair of dolphins use the name of a third dolphin when that third dolphin isn't present. In other words, dolphins gossip."

I just had to post this one.

Extropy: Pantheism

While enjoying an espresso and a book on cognitive science at the lovely Gutenberg Cafe, I had a provocative idea I would now like to share with you.

Is AI an emergent property of any tech-species? To put it another way, is AI inevitable given a species which can manipulate parts of the physical world, i.e. technology?

I believe that it is. It all stems from the properties and products of recursive processes. This also has to do with autopoiesis. Once the tiniest most simple instance occurs, an explosion of intelligence has to happen, barring any apocalyptic event.

I see it proceeding as follows: life stems from nature and the ingredients which comprise this planet, then human level intelligence stems from life and the ingredients which comprise organic chemistry, then artificial intelligence stems from human intelligence and the ingredients of metal and silicon.

This progression should be obvious, but is it inevitable?

Now I am really taking the concept of autopoiesis and running very far with it but it was originally introduced as a way of describing self-sustaining life and any other dissipative structure. I saw the convenience of this definition simply as life supporting life. Instinctively keeping one's species in existence and all that Darwinian hullabaloo. The original 'motivation' of life has always been to keep itself alive. This is how evolution came about because with a changing environment some separated areas of life learned how to keep themselves alive better than the rest. (I now slightly digress to ask for some pardon regarding my anthropomorphizing the chemical processes of DNA and mutation. I am doing so to help make it apparent that we are experiencing the same force of nature but seems different because we are sentient and natural selection is not.) As I was saying, life became so good at keeping itself alive it became able to manipulate the environment so that it would be easier to stay alive. This of course refers to us.

Now is where it becomes interesting. Humans have created artificial intelligence and are currently working to make better ones. Why? Humans do this because AI tends to be very good at making living easier for the humans. Humans have invariably continued the process of life keeping itself alive. Not only that, humans have made it much faster. Some say exponentially so.

Now I know you are going to ask how AI has made it easier for you to stay alive. I would respond that what it means to live is much more sophisticated to a human than it is to any other form of life on this planet. We have reached a level where if one had access to any large compendium of information as is normal in any developed nation, one would be able to leave the hustle and bustle of the city and "live off of the land" without any problem. Some have even tried this. I make this point to make it obvious that we have reached a ceiling with regards to evolution through natural selection. Natural selection will not be able to make it easier for our species to survive. We have created our own form of evolution. The evolution of ideas, principles, and information. Our collective minds have made it so easy for our bodies to survive that it has turned on itself and raised its own expectations. We seem to have to keep moving, which may be more evidence supporting the embodied cognition school of thought.

I thoroughly enjoy the concept of extropy, as informal as it may be. It is such a beautiful view of life. The opposite of entropy. While entropy increases disorder in the universe,extropy increases order in a particular neighbourhood. While entropy starts out as a rapid change and slows down as it dissipates, extropy starts out as the slow evolution of life and speeds up as it progresses.

The biggest critique of entropy is that it seemingly tries to nullify the second law of thermodynamics. This, however, is not correct. The second law is only interested in very large systems, i.e. the universe. Extropy, or rather the description I have here, deals primarily with increasingly smaller systems. The human civilization may expand up to and even beyond the solar system, but intelligence is not defined by how much space its proponents take. It is defined by ability and amount of organization. A system can increase in extropy without increasing in size. Consider the Big Bang as an example of entropy along with the fact that the universe is still expanding; while considering the pulling together of mass to form planets as extropy.

I share all of this because it has portrayed to me the world and life in general in such a sublimely beautiful way only a pantheist could experience it. The advancement of intelligence and order in general is the quintessential anthropic concept. It preceded us because we are products of this propensity for autopoiesis to develop self-aware systems. This thing called life has not been given to us by some higher power. We are not children in a playground given to us by some omniscient parent. We were born from non-conscious star dust. To quote Carl Sagan we are: "star stuff contemplating star stuff". The secrets of life are not being governed and hidden from human eyes. They are here and we are immersed. Maybe the future is not variable and can be predetermined, but if it is we are the only ones responsible.

The Emotion Machine

While I am still reading Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid I have interluded said reading with the reading of a similarly themed book titled: The Emotion Machine. It was just recently written by one Marvin Minsky.

Minsky probes deeper into the question of natural intelligence. Don't look for simple explanations: he believes "we need to find more complicated ways to explain our most familiar mental events"; we need to break our thought processes down into the most precise steps possible. In fact, in order to truly understand the human mind, Minsky suggests, we'll probably need to reverse-engineer a machine that can replicate those functions so we can study it.

I love this book the more I read it. It may be dangerous to post about it before I have completed the book, but it is not of the type to finish in one sitting.

What I love most about reading this book is that I invariably formulate theories to describe or solve the problems and situations he presents in the book. He structures the reading such that after many of the problems he introduces he simply states that they need to be solved because they haven't been so far. I like this as it motivates me.

Upon writing this I have realized that I seem to be attributing this method of presenting ideas to Minsky himself when in fact they are due to the fact that the time this book was written no such solutions are in place. Still, the book has helped me to recognize that I have just been guilty of self-reflection. That recognition is of course a type of recursive self-reflection, a self-reflection-reflection if you will. Who or what should I attribute to the fact that I just recognized a SRR (Self-Reflection-Reflection)or even that I recognized a SRRR which leads to recognition of a SRRRR ad infinitum. Perhaps there is some truth to the infinite regress of the homunculus, more on that in a later post.

I will leave you with an excerpt from a review which can be found on Amazon's site for the book. I warn you, it could be considered controversial for anyone with a sense of self, i.e. everyone, and any Stoics out there.

Thus, [Minsky] rejects the idea of consciousness as a unitary "Self" in favor of "a decentralized cloud" of more than 20 distinct mental processes. In this view, emotional states like love and shame are not the opposite of rational cogitation; both, Minsky says, are ways of thinking.