More on Quines

More on Quines. Still intrigued about Quines (even though I still don’t know why it’s relevant here – ever experience just knowing it is ? – Nash / Beautiful Mind – see earlier). Miscoranda gave me the original link. This new link eventually leads to the classic ACM Turing Award lecture by Ken Thompson.

I can see the self-replicating aspect relevant to genetics / evolution, learning / AI and to trojan horse viruses. Something which (in data) contains something defining it’s function (in code). Something akin to RDF here – subject / predicate stuff – content and intent – intension and extension ? I give in for now.

Interesting interview with Ken Thompson under the circumstances. [Quote] … simple yet powerful … see primitives and recognize their power to build structures …. When I see a top-down description of a system or language that has infinite libraries described by layers and layers, all I just see is a morass … interesting conversations, where two people think they are talking to each other but they’re not. They just miss, like two ships in the night … words …. meaning different things to both sides … PAC is vastly superior to MP3 … nobody who actually uses computers today knows what an operating system interface is … the same thing with Microsoft: Until something comes along that makes them irrelevant, the entry fee is too difficult and they won’t be displaced …. Anybody who says there’s no more innovation in the world is doomed …. why on earth travel to Russia to fly a Mig-29 ? …. How often does the Soviet Union collapse? It Who wouldn’t do that? When things like that come along, I’ll take them. They’re fun. [Unquote]

Repurposing ?

Repurposing ? From Sean B Palmer [miscoranda], a quote from Tim BL under his “Aphorisms” list.
[Quote] If you say what you mean rather than what you want done with it, you can repurpose it so much better. [Unquote]
Not sure I agree with this one as stated, but there is something in the spirit. Dennett’s Intentional Stance suggests (as I do) that “intention” or “motive” is a key aspect of “meaning” whenever anybody issues a communication. The important thing would seem to be to ensure that the original intent is captured with the record, rather than being the content of the record.

Houskeeping

Just published final version of the Pinker – Blank Slate review.
Created a comprehensive bibliography – an extensible who’s who, who published what works, who expressed what thoughts, who cites who, and who quotes what by who.
Not quite ready for publication yet – technology issue – currently a couple of Excel spreadsheets only.

Cornflowers – Too Blue for Logic

My axioms were so clean-hewn,
The joins of ‘thus’ and ‘therefore’ neat –

But, I admit
Life would not fit
Between straight lines
And all the cornflowers said was ‘blue,’
All summer long, so blue.
So when the sea came in and with one wave
Threatened to wash my edifice away –

I let it.

“Cornflowers” by Marianne Jones

[via James (Gerry) Gerard-Wolff]

Too true – need to work on this dichotomy between the real-world logic and complexity with all it’s emergent semantics and properties and the human rationalisation towards simple syntax and neat rhetorical “logic”. Rational and Logical are becoming overloaded words !

Previously:

Jan 2002: BCS Cybernetics SIG, Cognition and Quantum Computing

=====

Post Notes:

Jan 2003 – I have a long standing “Computation / Rationalisation as Compression” reference to Wolff’s pages on “SP” and “Compression” on my resources pages – but avoided further direct reference due to the activist politics, but this remains an interesting resource. What does Wolff make of Lomborg, I wonder ? I see Wolff presented recently at the BCS special interest group on AI at Peterhouse Cambridge (10th/12th Dec 2002) – the plot thickens. Wolff makes references to early Pinker and reacts against Chomsky’s “language is too complicated to simulate” stuff.

Sept 2023 – I notice Gerry is still active with his “SP” Theory.

Aside – fascinating in the Jan 2003 note above I refer from Jan 2002 to Jan 2003 as “long-standing” – little did I know 🙂

S for Simplicity … as in compressing redundancy out of any information.
P for Power … as in maintaining / optimising its explanatory value.

And with his cognitionresearch.org domain still active too, and as recently as February 2023 a paper published in MDPI:

The SP Theory of Intelligence – and Its Realisation in the SP Computer Model, as a Foundation for the Development of Artificial General Intelligence
– by J. Gerrard Wolff.

Sadly the BCS-Cybernetics SIG (British Computer Society – Special Interest Group) on Cybernetics and Fundamental / Quantum Information, which first introduced me to people like David Deutsch, Brian Josephson, Peter Marcer and Peter Rowlands as well as Gerry Wolff became defunct, and they recently suggested their AI-SIG would be most appropriate to resurrect such interests?

=====

Rationalisation as Compression

Been reading Pinker, Dennett, Rousseau and Rawls in the break. Forming a view of rationalisation as compression (after simple equals powerful idea). Pinker refers to the entire left side (?) of the brain as the “baloney generator” designed to produce convincing sounding “arguments” in difficult situations. Humans have an innate comfort with the “rational” and dislike of the “irrational”, needing rationale to explain experience. Often the rationale may be a gross simplification, simple near-term logic, basic correlation, even an analogy, with little or no true causal connection with the real situation – almost certainly also a mechanism for recording, recalling and reconstructing knowledge in ways that minimise the mental resources needed to do so (Keep it Simple Stupid). Shared (innate) intuitions of folk physics and folk psychology, mean that this is an important mechanism not only for recording and recalling knowledge, but also for sharing and communicating knowledge (with other humans). However important to communication, such rationale must not be confused with scientific reasoning concerning the truth of underlying cause and effect. True for all (apparent, human) “intents and purposes”, but false in any scientific sense of fact.

Still can’t get out of my head the significance of the fact that the evolution of the human brain – optimisation of physical wiring patterns – is way behind the evolution of knowedge in the last 100’s and 1000’s of years and the explosion in information and communication in the last 10’s and 100’s – exactly as one would expect given timescales of genetic evolution reinforced, against alternate mutations, over many generations. Rationalisation is the best (evolved) strategy our little brains currently have (may ever have) for dealing intuitively with an overload of information and mounting complexity of known, potentially true, relationships.