Kitt

Thinking about cognitive error-correction/Evo-AI, freedom + constraints, progress culture ● currently writing some amalgamation of fantasy and scifi

[Kitt @CausalCulture]

@ernsterlanson Your enthusiasm is infectious!

[Kitt @CausalCulture]

@perigean @NeilHudsonexp Ontological status: counterfactual

Confirmed.

[Dennis Hackethal @dchackethal]

ChatGPT is not a step toward AGI. It’s a detour at best.

Most people seem to have given up on cracking AGI and artificial evolution at this point.

But there’s an exciting discovery waiting to be made.

What if there’s a different mode of computation that we don’t understand yet? What if that’s the reason for our failures to simulate evolution and intelligence?

The mode we all know is what we might call ‘dogmatic’. It’s uncritical, mindless. It’s what the trials in evolution are made of. But not the selection.

Selection is where the other mode comes in. It’s a *critical* kind of computation. That’s where genuine selection/elimination of the trials, of the dogmatic code, happens.

All known approaches to programming are dogmatic. That’s why our programs at best *look like* evolution. Writing evolution with dogmatic code basically puts it in a straight jacket: of course it can’t be creative.

I don’t know if the introduction of critical computation means our understanding of computational universality is wrong. Maybe it is. The more conservative answer is that there’s a specific way to write dogmatic code that results in it being critical. But that sounds like a contradiction.

All this is obviously a far cry from an actual solution to AGI/artificial evolution, but I think the best we can do at this moment is to come up with various ways to phrase the problem.

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

A Restore Britain Government will repeal Starmer's social media ban and let parents parent.

[Kitt @CausalCulture]

Bizarre and frankly, quite terrifying.

The calm assurance and certainty of someone controlling others in the name of 'safety'.

How many more times must we run this experiment?

[Jess Brown-Fuller MP @JessBrownFuller]

Some tricky conversations this evening about the impending social media ban.
‘I don’t even know who this government guy is’
‘Keir Starmer’
‘Keir Starmer, what does that mean’

[Conjecture Institute @ConjectureInst]

Another preview of our upcoming article about Conjecture Institute Fellow @PaulRRobichaud's research, the history of the relevant ideas, and Paul's career path:

From the moment Paul attended Gille Brassard's lecture, it would take Paul a full nine years to develop all of the mathematical details he would need to complete his three-layered proof of local-realism.

Because he was in the process of creating new fundamental knowledge that had never before existed, there was no way to predict where his work was heading.

There were even long stretches of time when Paul did not make any progress or otherwise had to fix mistakes that he had made.

Neither Paul nor any checkbox-insistent administrator could have possibly known just how long Paul’s research would take, whether or not it would bear any fruit, or if the final outcome would be ‘worth’ any particular grant.

Yet with only the freedom to pursue his interests, Paul delivered.

“Many people didn’t consider me ‘productive’ during that time,” Paul says. “Often I would just learn about this or that piece of math that had nothing to do with local-realism. I’d go months without writing anything. I would just explore fundamental mathematics for the fun of it. Sometimes I’d get lucky, and something I’d learned ended up being useful in my work, as happened with algebra.”

It is worth noting that the output of the titans of science would not survive today’s publish-or-perish culture.

Charles Darwin took two decades to publish his theory of evolution by natural selection, and Isaac Newton needed about as much time before releasing his own theory of classical physics.

Had they been pressured to release their work at arbitrary times and in arbitrary chunks, the world may have rejected their work as being too half-baked—which it would have been, precisely so as to appease those who demand mechanical output over genuine solutions.

[Ernst @ernsterlanson]

https://t.co/18Xpzx5zu2

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

30,000 veterans! Amazing. They all look so civil. So stoic. So Anglospheric. After seeing unimaginable horrors and tragedy, they're all in their best suits for a reunion of former enemies.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

There is nothing more powerful than well-informed optimism. It has to be well-informed though. The "everything will be fine" type of optimism may also be somewhat useful, but it's not as useful as the "Hmm, what if we tried x?" kind.

[habibi @habibi_uk]

The "anti-racist" wonders we are all supposed to revere. “Follow your leader, shoot yourself like Adolf Hitler!" "What do we do with Tommy’s crew? String them up like Mussolini.” “Shoot them in the neck like Charlie Kirk!”

A celebration of murder in London, today.

[Kitt @CausalCulture]

Everything @mehdirhasan post is divisive, untrue, or designed to push a woke, victim based ideology which is a trojan horse for his own islamism.

You don't need to imagine Mehdi.

Pretending similar chants and attitudes don't exist is pure fantasy.

Find another line of work.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

I'm trying to imagine Muslim kids chanting something similar about the Jewish or Christian faiths at a rally in London. The Prevent folks, counter-terrorism police, the entire British media would be all over the story, asking why Muslims are so extreme & brainwashing their kids.

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

@joshxhowie There are followers of Islam who are heroes in the IDF.

They are radically unlike him.

We need to use language that makes it possible to distinguish conveniently between the two. Between good and evil. Regardless of what he self-identifies as.

[Mazelit Airaksinen 🎗🇺🇸 🇮🇱 @Mazelit_]

Eden Nimri (22) bravely fought Hamas on October 7th on her own, still in her pajamas, as she stood at the entrance of a bomb shelter to protect those inside. She shielded 17 girls.

All 17 of those girls were spared, Ynet reports.

When Eden's ammo ran out, she literally fought the terrorists with her bare hands, survivors recalled.

She gave her life to defend Israel and her friends. Eden was only 22. Her bravery will never be forgotten. May her memory be a blessing 🎗️

[Kitt @CausalCulture]

@ToKTeacher 🤣🤣

[Tom Hyde @tomhyde_]

I want to quit my job and work on my book, Wonderism, full-time. Below is my application to a popular online grant. If this sounds of value to you, and you have the means to support me, please do reach out. If not, please consider reposting.

Q. What is your story?

I am a writer interested in the connection between reason and aesthetics. I am, in a sense, that combination personified. In school—like so many students in state education—I was faced with the choice between science on the one hand and art on the other. Between logic, laboratories, and stable career prospects; against literature, libraries, and much less of that. They are immiscible fluids, oil and water, we are told, one part passion and the other part rigour, as likely to mingle as diesel in lemonade. But I wanted to do both. I wanted to write about reason and write about it beautifully. This is, I think, far more faithful to the spirit of science than lab coats and calculators; reason as a purely cerebral process is a largely modern misconception. It is intimate, delicate, romantic. How could knowing the world be any different? Karl Popper, the foremost epistemologist of the 20th century, was right when he said that ‘Science is most significant as one of the greatest spiritual adventures that man has yet known.’ This has been, and remains to this day, my guiding inspiration.

After school, I studied geology at University College London. There I read John McPhee’s “Annals of the Former World”. A journalist, not a geologist, McPhee wrote personally about a subject that appeared most impersonal. He had wondered, as a child, not merely what brought the placer gold from the Yukon mountains down into the rivers that divided them, but, far more deeply, “what had put the gold in the mountain to begin with?” This was intended both literally (orogenic gold deposition is mostly the result of hydrothermal alteration of the surrounding fabric rock) and metaphorically (how can beauty inspire us to know?) I took both meanings to heart, and after graduating, moved to Australia to work as a mining geologist. This might appear strange for a writer most interested in art. But it is, in truth, a great source of inspiration for an aesthetic theory in constant contact with the physical sciences. Gold, I have learned, borders quartz; and beauty, I am confident, is a concrete part of this world.

Outside of my academic and professional pursuits, I am interested in philosophy, popular science, science fiction, poetry, and writing. I was inspired by the books of David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf and consider myself an optimist in his style: problems are inevitable; they are soluble; people are both fallible and improvable; there is no inherent limit to the amount of progress we can make through conjecture, criticism, reason, and knowledge.

Q. What is your project?

I have suggested that the separations between reason and feeling are manufactured and, inevitably, false. I have also outlined the problem as precisely that clash (or family of clashes): reason/feeling, thought/passion, logic/instinct, sense/sensibility; their various applications: science/art, industry/nature, technology/biology, synthetic/organic; and other related divides: materialism/spiritualism, naturalism/supernaturalism, utility/beauty, function/form… These proposed dichotomies (and others) are a modern deconstruction of an older dispute: between The Enlightenment of the 18th century (representing reason and science); and Romanticism of the 19th century (representing emotion and art). Today, this schism has exceeded conventional wisdom and has been ossified into dogma; it has been codified into equally extensive, exhaustive, and at times exhausting slogans: “head vs heart”, “hot vs cold”, “the rider and the elephant”, “left brain and right brain”, “type 1 and type 2 thinking”. The result is to excise meaning, feeling, inspiration and significance from material, mechanical, technological progress; and to fuse it inseparably to mystical, irrational, primitivist stasis. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. This is the problem I am trying to solve.

My proposed solution is a new philosophy. Wonderism.

There are two meanings to the word wonder: wondering and wonderment. The former is curiosity, imagination, and reasoning in the face of mystery. The latter is astonishment, adoration, and inspiration in the light of discovery. This simple polysemy contains within it every facet of human thought and every feature of the problem described.

I want to write a book. Called Wonderism.

A rough-sketch outline is as follows.

PREFACE (“What put the gold in the mountains?”)

This will be a personal introduction to myself and my relationship to both science and the arts.

INTRODUCTION (“In Wonder It Began”)

This will be an investigation into the history and nature of the concept of wonder. The Greeks called it “Thauma”. Indeed, Plato himself said that all philosophy begins and ends in this unified concept. (Popper would later go on to say: “What matters is neither methods nor techniques—nothing but a sensitiveness to problems, and a consuming passion for them; or as the Greeks said, the gift of wonder.) And the philosophical divide between Plato’s spiritualism and Aristotle’s materialism can be viewed as the progenitor of the problem as described.

BOOK 1: An Ode to Inspiration (“Catching Fire”)

This chapter will be a series of short stories exploring the process of inspiration and using the central icons of fire and flight. The first bird, first campfire, first balloon flight, first stone placed at the foot of The Statue of Liberty, first SpaceX rocket catch. All are literal and spiritual applications of “catching fire” to mean both ignition and inspiration. This will be a modern promethean epic told in short form.

BOOK 2: A Comparative History of Enlightenment and Romanticism (“Songs of Lightness and of Love”)

This chapter will be a comparison of The Enlightenment and Romanticism, focusing on their epistemologies, their unification under Karl Popper’s critical rationalism, and its own elevation into Wonderism.

BOOK 3: Terrorism (“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”)

This chapter will explore the erroneous applications of wonder. The opposite of wondering is boredom. And the opposite of wonderment is terror. You can plot this on a "political compass”-style graph to yield four quadrants: Wonderism, Scientism, Terrorism, Mysticism. The title is taken from Goya’s famous inscription and his statement: "Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders". It will cover religious irrationality, scientific and other secular authoritarianism, sophistry, slavery, and war.

BOOK 4: Art (“The Language of Wonder”)

This chapter will cover art as the key mode of communicating emotions. It will focus on semiotics, the philosophy of symbols, and art as an alternative to language. It will also explore “the great un-mystery” of art (namely beauty) and aim to debunk various fallacies surrounding it. Finally, it will outline some tenets of a Wonderist style, prose in the immediate, but all forms more generally. As I have explained above, I want to “Wonderise” the mundane through aesthetics. This is one of the core tenets of the work: namely that, in order to communicate well, one must not merely say the thing but sing it also. I intend to do both.

BOOK 5: A Guide to Radical Humanism (“Man the More”)

This chapter takes its title from an inversion of Byron (“I love not man the less, but nature more”). It aims to be an optimistic tour-de-force in the Deutschian tradition: people are universal, the glory of the universe.

The remaining material is undesignated pending structural decisions. It includes an aesthetic and heroic theory of romance (i.e. person to person relationship; love); a list of my picks for the modern wonders of the world; the Wonderist manifesto; and more.

I am currently employed full-time at a salt mine. The work is physically demanding and doesn’t leave much time for research. I would use any support as a means to quit my job and work on the book full-time, systematising my research, developing the philosophy, and accelerating the writing process for a 2026 first-draft. I would hope, with your sponsorship, to make the new year my very own “annus mirabilis”.

A year of wonders.

[Kitt @CausalCulture]

@DavidDeutschOxf It was very nice to read this post and the clear separation he made in it.

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

A very welcome set of comments. Though I don't think those people all have "low IQs". "Nut jobs" is more accurate, but still doesn't explain the phenomenon.

[Indie Game Joe @IndieGameJoe]

This indie dev is making a game where you can literally play as Ancient Egyptian wall art.

- Switch between a 3D archaeologist and living 2D art
- Survive puzzles that fight back
- Progress by mastering both worlds

It’s called Fresco. This mechanic is genius.

[Kitt @CausalCulture]

Beautiful

[Carlos De la Guardia @dela3499]

Navigating the Vastness of the Possible

To understand the power of the mind, first forget the brain and its firing neurons. Look instead to the starry vastness of the cosmos.

Then look further, into something far larger, darker, and more complex: the set of everything that is possible. In that set, the present and past of the cosmos is but a speck, for only a tiny fraction of all that is possible has yet come to pass.

In that infinite realm, powerful minds sail and soar with ever greater speed and sophistication - confronting limits and overcoming them. Lesser things manage only to squirm a little up the hill where they started, leaving most of infinity untouched.

To understand the power of the mind is to understand that realm and how its vastness can be tamed and navigated. That is the great task our brains and neurons manage to achieve, and which must be understood in its own right, independent of our earthly, mammalian, primate biology.

[Kitt @CausalCulture]

@ToKTeacher Ye, i agree. I don't understand all this fear and AI doom about it automating our creativity.

Have any of them actually used it? A very useful tool and 'pet' which can be directed, but nothing without the steersman guiding and correcting it.

Hype is good for market cap though..