HN user
No, it's folk science. It isn't vague, it's an illusion. Cognition is false on all counts because it's folk science impregnating science and CS (and philosophy). Read his argument carefully, don't just select a downstream argument, that's not scientifically viable. Cognition doesn't exist because it's based in the lowest res meaning possible. Sequestered cause/effect, it's a magic trick. Like LLMs.
It's wax fruit because we know the term cognition is bunk as intelligence:
Cognition is wordless, dude. The entire premise of it is built upon layers of sharp wave ripples that integrate memory from sense, emotion and landmark/non-landmark.
This is wax fruit. It's like sportscasting what cognition appears to be doing from a post-hoc, using things already patterned.
Brains are none of those things. Thoughts aren't about things, there's no content to thoughts, and what it expresses, it behaves nothing the way computers do. https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...
The brain is nothing like a computer.
If you're bringing up emergence when I've already raised ideas of ecological relations, then it's you who must be very confused about the conversation we're having.
It's not a mind body problem, unfortunately, it's problem of hard indeterminism. We lack free will but the universe is not necessarily deterministic. Chaos has some level of intervention, like quantum darwinism, or gravity probability that is expressed somewhere between physical and process. This may be the interzone both share that is where the gateway exists, how DNA emerges, how neurons are evolved. The material may be inseparable both at origin and inexorably from the process, making the material simply the partner to the process. So materialism may simply be an illusion by itself.
As all our explanations are immaterial, they are post hoc observations, to claim any direction to the role of material is to sportscast the existence of material. There is no consciousness without the process, the material may be secondary as its explanation is a process as well.
We haven't found the format that finds the material in its place yet, whether its eliminative materialism, or another state-process pairing that cuts materialism down to a partner role. The jury is still out, but materialism isn't the answer.
A word is a material? You can show me the brain state that corresponds repeatedly and with continuous accuracy a single word? I don't think so.
You can train a computer to correspond to an individual's idiosyncratic brain state for their word voxels, but no one has yet to reduce the material to a single repeatable voxel state.
“We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.” Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024
The problem with the materialist POV is it doesn't solve the most basic question of brain states. No not everything is a material.
There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that require material to some extent, but are not material themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not even be a requirement of life. We may just be material sinks.
Wrong. Materialistic only got us to a level. Now we're looking past materialism in neural reuse, coordination dynamics and ecological psychology and neurobiology. The causes are out there in contradictory correlations.
The brain isn't hardware, it's biology and oscillation and integrations in optic flow. It can't be dichotomized into hardware or software.
The bottleneck is epistemology via semantics. It's inherent to words which many things to different people. LLMs have no chance against semantic diffusion and chaos. They're subject to them unless some status-bearer decides the semantic.
Politics is over until we solve the initial condition, by placing syntax above grammar. Action over meaning etc.
Tech accelerated, horizontalized and automated units that could barely keep their meaning loads stable at printed paper, radio and TV.
Everyone should have seen this coming.
Wealth is arbitrary post settlement. Show me a currency from 700AD still traded on a regulated market. In that sense, wealth is a decadent category the West will be destroyed by, look at the current state of oligarchy, particularly tech. There's little if any ecological parity in these displays of wealth and extraction status.
My ideology is the replacement of symbols with measurement. I have no relationship with politics, which is clearly a dinosaur still walking the Earth. Politics will vanish in the post-symbolic like a disease we cured easily.
No economics is like any word, it's arbitrary, that is HOW it needs a definition that varies from state to state.
"Economic theory has never gotten any better at prediction. Its explanations are always after the fact. The mathematical models economists have devoted themselves to for more than a century can’t be improved to enhance their empirical relevance." Alex Rosenberg
The deadness of the West is so unusual, as if the whole enterprise was for self-extinction of a way of poetically enhancing words, narratives and myths/religion. The West was simply a temporary state.
The west assumed individual happiness (politics, entertainment, biographical myth making, celebrity) was the path to collective happiness. But of course, in our agentic languages, that was simply the hydra of our undoing. The west was like a temporary infection that colonized and dominated more collective people, but now we will be subsumed if we don’t destroy the world in a suicidal urge to dominate
As a post-symbolic, post-causal thinker (not a "socialist" which is also political nonsense), economics is purely the translation to settlement coercion for the production of Myth of the State/center-worshipping ("richest citizens in the world" in what sense? cash? real estate? these are arbitrary variables).
Until we move to measurement (ie analog) rather than binary statistics (which is still merely a project based in counting, yes, 1,2,3) then we are totally informationally emasculated.
There is no such thing as economic science. If you can find an empirical, demonstration of mental events, biology, correlating value through arbitrary means, I'm all ears. Until I see proof, this is witch doctor level thinking hoisted onto the West as a self-immolation project.
Of course, both scientific approaches of history and myth are the work of fabulists. eg Jung, Campbell. The point is to examine the myth and then history as the source of causal illusions.
“The myth is the prototypal, fundamental, integrative mind tool … to integrate a variety of events in a temporal and causal framework.” Merlin Donald
That's folk science, what Donald is describing (he admit this in Origins of the Modern Mind).
Remember that the causal framework must be evaded to reach scientific correlations, where multiple contradictions can lead to knowledge. Myth and history were addictive hiccups that trapped humans in way simplistic explanations.
We evade this "plain English" silliness, like economics, or go bust.
That's simply the function of narrative using words. How can anything built subjectively in symbols and cause and effect reach consensus, correlational objectivity?
They can't. Language is for confirmation bias first and foremost. It embeds the illusion of subjective perspective in every statement.
We quit language, replace it, or go down for the count.
"It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world, and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world, it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions – the unrepeatable and the unpredictable – are what technology abolishes. The feeling is one of loss of the world." Knausgaard
You don't even grasp what that paper is. It's not an op-ed, it's a theory/review article with empirical evidence that's increased many percentages since it was refused publication, now it's a primary approach in neurobiology. Read carefully.
Math may be able to model those things momentarily, but ultimately "all models are wrong yet some are helpful" so YES math has no relationship to behavior, it cannot reference it. It can only symbolically (arbitrarily) model it.
We're talking about "you obviously can reason about politics in the same way one can reason about anything else that doesn't behave rationally, like fish"
Stick to politics, that's the thread, engineer.
Math has no relationship to behavior, nor do almost all terms used to describe behavior, engineers should have already grasped cog-sci is folk science.
If engineers remain uneducated in this way, you'll become sycophants led as lemmings by cult figures like Alexander.
What's coming: Spatial intel (not Apple spatial computing) is a top-down/bottom-up direct perception that everyone participates in. It bypasses binary, renders it obsolete. Makes AI look puny and overbuilt, needs only analog and only partially. Wipes away the symbolic interruption we've been addicted and dumbed down inside.
It's simply the end of the the symbolic era's low meaning load. The sentence is dead. The metaphor. Whatever low-grade semantics we suffered under is coming to a close and a new form/format of meaning-units are needed.
The results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), found that, on average, reading scores for 12th graders were 10 points lower in 2024 than they were in 1992,
Not a proponent of virtual. The virtual is a mistaken path to reach the brain's topology, it's inherently 2-D. So the path is probably a hybrid between post-symbol and topological integration, ie 2-D screens.
He didn't grasp that speech and text were the same in terms of arbitrariness, and he couldn't see that narratives are basically illusions in terms of their meaning-load. We know from neurosci any event has two dimensions of meaning, where it carries in past memories already formed, and how it creates local memory in formation. Both are probably limitless, yet narratives ascribe intent and cause and effect to essentially turn us into meaning zombies, forever revisiting the same unidimensional intents and meanings as if they are applicable to real events. They simply aren't. Literacy is dead for reasons McLuhan could not have imagined. He never reached the leading edge of demythologization, which is where we are, and how literacy dies.
We're symbol sleepwalkers, their arbitrariness is a meaning sink. Literacy is essentially mind-control by severely limiting the semantic resources words and narratives provide. Literacy makes us into minions. Post-literacy should have arrived with Chinese or Mayan glyphs (900BC/800AD) and conformed the West's sense of individualism with the concatenation capabilities of the East/MesoaAm, but the West's valuation of the arbitrary extractive processes and potentials of symbols and metaphors for economic and political control were much too addictive and sedative. Our only chance is to overthrow symbols and literacy to engage in direct perception of reality. This is a postcard from the edge by a medieval scribe.
..at some point a direct contact must occur between knowledge and reality. If we succeed in freeing ourselves from all these interpretations – if we above all succeed in removing the veil of words, which conceals the true essence of things, then at one stroke we shall find ourselves face to face with the original perceptions..
Ernst Cassirer The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
..when the tools for creating the content of the virtual world become good enough, all of a sudden you have a new, shared objective world where people can co-create the interior with a facility similar to language. And this is what I call post-symbolic communication, because it means that instead of using symbols to refer to things, you are simply creating reality in a collaborative conversation, a waking-state, intentionally shared dream. You're going directly to the source, avoiding the middleman of the symbol and directly apprehending the craftsmanship of that other person combined with your own, without the need for labels.
Jaron [interview with Jaron Lanier] Wired 1.02 1993