I miss scarcity

I recommended  "the knowledge machine" because everybody here can read it...it is basic and fun to read...And the author revealed how superficial are most technocrat thinking about "science" in  an easy reading way like a novel...

Others deepest books on knowledge, the more important, are far too dense, big, or hard to be swallowed up in few hours...

A.I. "non linear" maths for artificial self development was written in the book "nanobrain" i posted about above... The maths there goes deeper than LLM maths and this approach by Anirban Bandyopadhy was put together even before LLM success...

Now for philosophy studies i discovered with time and pain, that understanding its limits and possibilities, we must study history of philosophy but it is not enough. We must study linguistics and semiotics. But it is not enough. We must study mathematics and the most advanced possible. But it is not enough. We must study  deep thinking  mystics of all religions,"symbolic forms" in general art history,litterature history , miracles, OBE, NDE. But it is not enough.

We must miraculously stumble on the right set of books which are unrelated with one another and mostly not often quoted compared to mainstream thinkers or classical one which we must study too to understand the forgotten one.

Just a single example  how the availability of a writer and thinker may matter ?

The greatest linguist since Panini is not Chomsky but Gustave Guillaume whose ongoing edition total 27 books and more to come  and are not translated in English. I begun to study him 35 years ago when only few of his books were published , i photocopied typed manuscripts...

If i had not studied him i will have no  clue about language so deep he is...

His work with his main tool anticipated cognitive philosophy many decades before it appeared and his main tool: "binary tensor" is the germ of the Neural network thinking before they appeared.

I could align many dozens of other example why an unknown thinker matter more than many known one which we must study also anyway to understand unknown one...To catch something absolutely necessary non-nexisting in other books..

Sometimes important thinker are classical underestimated one and very well known already:  Someone not studying Goethe method of thinking or Peirce  semiotics for example  will have great difficulties to figure out something deep about phenomena. Compared to these two giants alone (there is many others)   most analytic philosophy appear ideologically  simplistic.

If you had no idea about what means poetry deeply, forget understanding even linguistic...And even history (oral culture before history for example cannot be understood by studying prose and prosaic  history)

Number theory and geometry matter so much it is the same as poetry, no insight in them makes philosophy akin to newspaper level...( add to this set theory and category theory)

I am interested by acoustics not because i want to settle my room,( its was done) but because hearing theory matter for consciousness studies by  the way ...

Etc.....

I’ve been fascinated by philosophy since I took it in high school in the ’60s (we actually had a teacher with a doctorate in philosophy at our high school). I minored in college. My emphasis has always been metaphysics and epistemology. But the big systems of philosophy never had a foundation I could believe. While "I think therefore I am" is very clever. I just found if fell flat as a foundation of existence. I decided to forget all that stuff and see if I couldn’t start from scratch. So for a number of decades I tried to look around me and find the "in"... the place to start to understand reality. Ultimately it took me to consciousness... I realized that was the place to start. So many of the kids that started out when I was young also asked the same questions... and became neuroscientists and studied different aspects and have been putting a really good picture of what it is. Completely by coincidence my partner of forty years (last Friday) has a PhD in Cognitive and Developmental Psychology. Funny... when I met her, I never realized so much of my core interests would ultimately fall into field of study. 

Anyway, so I have read and listened to dozens of books and lectures on Popper, and many of the other contemporary philosophers. Including on information theory, machine intelligence, consciousness... quantum physics... etc.

 I can follow them when I am reading them, but usually it does not fall in place as a concrete piece of the puzzle for me. In philosophy there is a lot of just thinking without an object... and the brain is very object oriented. That is why, when we actually get to know something about the subject, it ceases to be a part of philosophy becomes its own science. The details of this stuff also tends to disappear from my brain within a week.

BTW, I got a copy of The Knowledge Machine  and have made it through a couple chapters. I’m not sure how much further I’m going to get right now. I have read quite a lot on scientific inquiry... a lot of it is pretty abstract and applies on the margin, the edge of scientific inquiry... when we are trying to get our heads around quantum physics or multiverses.

With a dim understanding of your last quotes and the field in general... I’ve read some of that stuff and it is wonderfully theoretical and interesting academically  My personal feeling is not very relevant to what we are doing with AI, the alignment problem and its possible outcome. It strikes me that this stuff applies to traditional coding... at enormous scale not the way AI works. Somewhat analogous to linear flow Turbulent flow. Linear flow can be described by linear equations... it takes a completely different math of chaos theory talk about turbulent flow. 

@goodlistening64 

I looked at philosophy the same way... not a great way to make a living. Although fascinating. 

Push the button for an AI is simple. Like the example I gave earlier where the AI could not get out of the CAPTCHA screen. so it contacted a humans on line and said they would pay them to do it... claiming they were handicapped but needed it done... the people did the work for the AI without knowing the real reason,. And this example is trivial. When we are the simple minded ones... manipulating us to do stupid things is easy. Look around how well we are at doing it ourselves. 

Some simple ways. Organize crews to go fix an emergency problem in the silos. Send orders to all commanders authorizing this, send details to the crews... send orders to the silo managers the at the keys are disabled and need to be tested because of a bug. 

Authourize and send a crew in for an upgrade and connect the silos to the internet so the AI can circumvent systems to prevent lunch. 

Go ask and AI... it will probably give you lots more an much better ideas.

@mahgister 

We certainly agree that the world is incredibly complex and a deep understanding of dozens of disciplines is required to assemble a good understanding of reality and understand how we perceive it. It is clear we both have understanding with emphasis on different disciplines. One of the facets that you seemed to have explored more is on the relationship between numbers and the real world. I think I have one of those dense books sitting on my shelf being ready to be read. It’ll be interesting if I have any epiphanies out of that. But my reading list is huge as I find more to read and think about the more I learn. 

@mahgister 

I think I know what I am trying to say. Your world view is too speculative and abstract to make concrete predictions as to what is and is not possible in the future with an evolving technology. Particularly in light of the empirical evidence and progress made in the AI world over the last 20 years. 

It is a great synthesis from multiple disciplines of the foundation of reality and information. But it is a theory... a theoretical world view. Not a heavily tested, corroborated and scientifically accepted paradigm. So, it is very worthy of consideration but not one that can be relied upon to rule out the outcome of using  technology that is being developed that is heading into an unknown solution space where it is easy to construct scenarios that can result in human extinction. 

I acknowledge that humans tend to predict negative outcomes on things they do not fully understand. I think at one time it was held that breaking the sound barrier would result in a catastrophe and the CERN Supercollider would create a black hole that would consume the earth. 

But in this care a significant number of scientist who are creating this technology are loudly decrying the open and unregulated development of SGI. I have heard / read from many of these. This is a threat that should not be dismissed. Especially in a world with politicians that think at the sixth grade level that are in charge of the world of technology and war. Yes, I was purposefully being generous.