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Ehh, How Do You Say…
The use of fillers in language are not limited to spoken communication.
In American Sign Language, UM can be signed with open-8 held at chin, palm in, eyebrows down (similar to FAVORITE); or bilateral symmetric bent-V, palm out, repeated axial rotation of wrist (similar to QUOTE).
This is interesting to me because it helps differentiate communication which is unfolding in time and communication which is spatially inscribed. When we speak informally, most people use a some filler words, sounds, and gestures. Some support for embodied cognition theories has come from studies which show that
“Gestural Conceptual Mapping (congruent gestures) promotes performance. Children who used discrete gestures to solve arithmetic problems, and continuous gestures to solve number estimation, performed better. Thus, action supports thinking if the action is congruent with the thinking.”
The effective gestures that they refer to aren’t exactly fillers, because they mimic or indicate conceptual experiences in a full-body experience. The body is used as a literal metaphor. Other gestures however, seem relatively meaningless, like filler. There seems to be levels of filler usage which range in frequency and intensity from the colorful to the neurotic in which generic signs are used as ornament/crutch, or like a carrier tone to signify when the speaker is done speaking, (know’am’sayin?’).
In written language, these fillers are generally only included ironically or to simulate conversational informality. Formal writing needs no filler because there is no relation in real time between participating subjects. The relation with written language was traditionally as an object. The book can’t control whether the reader continues to read or not, so there is no point in gesturing that way. With the advent of real time text communication, we have experimented with emoticons and abbreviations to animate the frozen medium of typed characters. In this article, John McWhorter points out that ‘LOL isn’t funny anymore’ – that it has entered sort of a quasi-filler state where it can mean many different things or not much of anything.
In terms of information entropy, fillers are maximally entropic. Their meaning is uncertain, elastic, irrelevant, but also, and this is cryptic but maybe significant…they point to the meta-conversational level. They refer back to the circumstance of the conversation rather than the conversation itself. As with the speech carrier tone fillers like um… or ehh…, or hand gestures, they refer obliquely to the speaker themselves, to their presence and intent. They are personal, like a signature. Have you ever noticed that when people you have known die that it is their laugh which is most immediately memorable? Or their quirky use of fillers. High information entropy ~ High personal input. Think of your signature compared to typing your name. Again, signatures are occurring in real time, they represent a moment of subjective will being expressed irrevocably. The collapse of information entropy which takes place in formal, traditional writing is a journey from the private perpetual here of subjectivity to the world of public objects. It is a passage* from the inner semantic physics, through initiative or will, striking a thermodynamically irreversible collision with the page. That event, I think, is the true physical nature of public time – instants where private affect is projected as public effect.
Speakers who are not very fluent in a language seem to employ a lot of fillers. For one thing they buy time to think of the right word, and they signal an appeal for patience, not just on a mechanical level (more data to come, please stand by), but on a personal level as well (forgive me, I don’t know how to say…). Is it my imagination or are Americans sort of an exception to the rule, preferring stereotypically to yell words slowly rather than using the ‘ehh’ filler. Maybe that’s not true, but the stereotype is instructive as it implies an association between being pushy and adopting the more impersonal, low-entropy communication style.
This has implications for AI as well. Computers can blink a cursor or rotate an hourglass icon at you, and that does convey some semblance of personhood to us, I think, but is it real? I say no. The computer doesn’t improve its performance by these gestures to you. What we might subtly read as interacting with the computer personally in those hourglass moments is a figment of the Pathetic fallacy rather than evidence of machine sentience. It has a high information entropy in the sense that we don’t know what the computer is doing exactly, if it’s going to lock up or what, but it has no experiential entropy. It is superficially animated and reflects no acknowledgement to the user. Like the book, it is thermodynamically irreversible as far as the user is concerned. We can only wait and hope that it stops hourglassing.
The meanings of filler words in different languages are interesting too. They say things like “you see/you know”, “it means”, “like”, “well”, and “so”. They talk about things being true or actual. “Right?” “OK?”. Acknowledgment of inter-subjective synch with the objective perception. Agreement. Positive feedback. “Do you copy?” relates to “like”…similarity or repetition. Symmetric continuity. Hmm.
*orthomodular transduction to be pretentiously precise
The Doctor Prescribes Brian Eno – Blog of the Long Now
The Doctor Prescribes Brian Eno – Blog of the Long Now
In the video, Brian Eno brings up two points which relate to the last posts about intelligence, wisdom, and their relation to entropy.
“I think that one of the things that art offers you is the chance to surrender, to not be in control any longer”.
Right. That makes sense. Art debits the private side of the phenomenal ledger. The side which is concerned with the loaning of time to be returned to the Absolute with interest. Wisdom, especially in the exalted forms of Eastern philosophy, is all about surrender and flow. Dissolving of the ego. The ego is the public interface for the private self, and the seat of the kind of intelligence addressed by causal entropic forces – machine intelligence, strategic effectiveness. Important locally but trivial ultimately, in the face of eternity.
On the other side of the ledger is the chance to strive and control using intelligence. Western philosophy tends toward cultivating objectivity and critical thinking. It is a canon of skeptical intelligence and empiricism from which science emerged. Clear thinking and resisting the desire to surrender are what debit the public facing side of the ledger. Art and Science then, are the sense and motive of human culture…the tender and tough, the wag and wegh, and yes, the yin and yang.
Eno also says “The least interesting sound in the universe, probably, is the sine wave. It’s the sound of nothing happening. It’s the sound of perfection, and it’s boring. As David Byrne said in his song, Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. Distortion is character, basically. In fact, everything we call character is the deviation from perfection. So, perfection to me, is characterlessness.”
Aha, yes. Tying this back to the Absolute, it is the diffraction, the shattering of timelessness with spacetime (aka Tsimtsum) which creates the third element – entropy. The Absolute can only be completed by its own incompleteness, and entropy is the diagonalization of experience into public facing entropies and private facing reflections of the Absolute…quanta and qualia, science and art.
Intelligence Maximizes Entropy?
Intelligence Maximizes Entropy?
A new idea linking intelligence to entropy that is giving me something to think about.
“[…]intelligent behavior emerges from the “physical process of trying to capture as many future histories as possible,”
This sounds familiar to me. I have been calling my cosmological model the Sole Entropy Well, or Negentropic Monopoly, in which all signals (experiences) are diffracted from a single eternal experience, the content of which is the capacity to experience. I think that this is the same principle in this paper, called “causal entropic forces”, except in reverse. I wrote recently about how intelligence is rooted in public space while wisdom is about private time.
I think that causal entropic forces are about preserving a ‘float’ of high entropy on top of time. It’s like juggling – you want to suspend as many potentials as you can at “a” time and compensate for any potential threats before they can happen “in” time. Behind the causal entropic force, it seems to me that there must always be a core which is not entropic. That which seeks to entropically harness the future is itself motivated by the countervailing force for itself – to escape the harness of entropy.
None of this, however, addresses the Hard Problem. To the contrary, if this model is correct, then it is even more difficult to justify the existence of aesthetic sense, since all of the public effects of intelligence can be explained by thermodynamics.
Article: “A single equation grounded in basic physics principles could describe intelligence and stimulate new insights in fields as diverse as finance and robotics, according to new research.
Alexander Wissner-Gross, a physicist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cameron Freer, a mathematician at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, developed an equation that they say describes many intelligent or cognitive behaviors, such as upright walking and tool use.The researchers suggest that intelligent behavior stems from the impulse to seize control of future events in the environment. This is the exact opposite of the classic science-fiction scenario in which computers or robots become intelligent, then set their sights on taking over the world.The findings describe a mathematical relationship that can “spontaneously induce remarkably sophisticated behaviors associated with the human ‘cognitive niche,’ including tool use and social cooperation, in simple physical systems,” the researchers wrote in a paper published today in the journal Physical Review Letters.“It’s a provocative paper,” said Simon DeDeo, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, who studies biological and social systems. “It’s not science as usual.”Wissner-Gross, a physicist, said the research was “very ambitious” and cited developments in multiple fields as the major inspirations.The mathematics behind the research comes from the theory of how heat energy can do work and diffuse over time, called thermodynamics. One of the core concepts in physics is called entropy, which refers to the tendency of systems to evolve toward larger amounts of disorder. The second law of thermodynamics explains how in any isolated system, the amount of entropy tends to increase. A mirror can shatter into many pieces, but a collection of broken pieces will not reassemble into a mirror.The new research proposes that entropy is directly connected to intelligent behavior.“[The paper] is basically an attempt to describe intelligence as a fundamentally thermodynamic process,” said Wissner-Gross.The researchers developed a software engine, called Entropica, and gave it models of a number of situations in which it could demonstrate behaviors that greatly resemble intelligence. They patterned many of these exercises after classic animal intelligence tests.In one test, the researchers presented Entropica with a situation where it could use one item as a tool to remove another item from a bin, and in another, it could move a cart to balance a rod standing straight up in the air. Governed by simple principles of thermodynamics, the software responded by displaying behavior similar to what people or animals might do, all without being given a specific goal for any scenario.“It actually self-determines what its own objective is,” said Wissner-Gross. “This [artificial intelligence] does not require the explicit specification of a goal, unlike essentially any other [artificial intelligence].”Entropica’s intelligent behavior emerges from the “physical process of trying to capture as many future histories as possible,” said Wissner-Gross. Future histories represent the complete set of possible future outcomes available to a system at any given moment.Wissner-Gross calls the concept at the center of the research “causal entropic forces.” These forces are the motivation for intelligent behavior. They encourage a system to preserve as many future histories as possible. For example, in the cart-and-rod exercise, Entropica controls the cart to keep the rod upright. Allowing the rod to fall would drastically reduce the number of remaining future histories, or, in other words, lower the entropy of the cart-and-rod system. Keeping the rod upright maximizes the entropy. It maintains all future histories that can begin from that state, including those that require the cart to let the rod fall.“The universe exists in the present state that it has right now. It can go off in lots of different directions. My proposal is that intelligence is a process that attempts to capture future histories,” said Wissner-Gross.The research may have applications beyond what is typically considered artificial intelligence, including language structure and social cooperation.DeDeo said it would be interesting to use this new framework to examine Wikipedia, and research whether it, as a system, exhibited the same behaviors described in the paper.“To me [the research] seems like a really authentic and honest attempt to wrestle with really big questions,” said DeDeo.One potential application of the research is in developing autonomous robots, which can react to changing environments and choose their own objectives.“I would be very interested to learn more and better understand the mechanism by which they’re achieving some impressive results, because it could potentially help our quest for artificial intelligence,” said Jeff Clune, a computer scientist at the University of Wyoming.Clune, who creates simulations of evolution and uses natural selection to evolve artificial intelligence and robots, expressed some reservations about the new research, which he suggested could be due to a difference in jargon used in different fields.Wissner-Gross indicated that he expected to work closely with people in many fields in the future in order to help them understand how their fields informed the new research, and how the insights might be useful in those fields.The new research was inspired by cutting-edge developments in many other disciplines. Some cosmologists have suggested that certain fundamental constants in nature have the values they do because otherwise humans would not be able to observe the universe. Advanced computer software can now compete with the best human players in chess and the strategy-based game called Go. The researchers even drew from what is known as the cognitive niche theory, which explains how intelligence can become an ecological niche and thereby influence natural selection.The proposal requires that a system be able to process information and predict future histories very quickly in order for it to exhibit intelligent behavior. Wissner-Gross suggested that the new findings fit well within an argument linking the origin of intelligence to natural selection and Darwinian evolution — that nothing besides the laws of nature are needed to explain intelligence.Although Wissner-Gross suggested that he is confident in the results, he allowed that there is room for improvement, such as incorporating principles of quantum physics into the framework. Additionally, a company he founded is exploring commercial applications of the research in areas such as robotics, economics and defense.“We basically view this as a grand unified theory of intelligence,” said Wissner-Gross. “And I know that sounds perhaps impossibly ambitious, but it really does unify so many threads across a variety of fields, ranging from cosmology to computer science, animal behavior, and ties them all together in a beautiful thermodynamic picture.”
What exactly is our life?
Quora: What exactly is our life?
How do you see the life?
Your philosophical explanation. How should one look at what he experiences, he sees, he thinks? How to live it?
What is the purpose of life we have been given and how to find it? How do you make most out of it?
In one sentence and explanation of this sentence. What is life, really?
Our life is perception and participation in experiences of particular aesthetic qualities.
Perception and participation are, in my opinion, opposing modes of a universal primitive, which I call sense.
Who and what we are is the product of countless nestings and interleavings of experiential capacities, diffractions of sense. As Homo sapiens, we are a centuryish long experience, seemingly ‘folded in on ourselves’ on several levels: Personally, socially, culturally, anthropologically, zoologically, biologically, chemically, and materially. That’s not including possible super-personal ranges of sense. More important than the complexity and the holarchy however is the simplicity and identity.
Contrary to both Western-mechanistic views which under-signify subjectivity and Eastern-spiritual views which I think over-signify subjectivity, I propose that life is always in the juxtaposition of the generic anesthetic of public bodies and the proprietary aesthetic of private experiences. My conjecture here is somewhat panpsychic or panexperiential – matter, cells, organisms, etc are all associated with some kind of interior experience which are hidden from each other by physics. Physics is actually perceptual relativity – nature defining and describing itself in an expanding array of sense modalities, and simultaneously contracting and obscuring sense through spatial attenuations such as scale incompatibility, distance, crushing and scattering.
The point of all of this as pertains to the question is that with the Western view, we have lost our native coherence as beings in our own right. Instead human presence is decomposed and de-presented into aggregates of sub-personal and impersonal behaviors; evolutionary, biological, computational. My view is that just because we find it easier to pin down forms and functions outside of our own subjective experience does not mean that the universe finds our personal day-to-day experience any less of a legitimate phenomenon than the comings and goings of quarks or galaxies. In our success at having graduated from religion and philosophy by focusing on our own insignificance and flawed sense, we have unintentionally turned our erstwhile objectivity into an anti-anthropomorphic anthropomorphism. We reject all that is personally significant in favor of an a-signifying, anesthetic, mechanism…which unfortunately has, in my opinion, begun to show some unpleasant side-effects for human life.
If you ask me, then, what we should do with this life as human beings in this place at this time, I think that it is to reclaim our authentic status as whole participants in a significant human life. We are to understand, now, that although the exterior of the universe is mechanistic and entropic, the interior is quite the opposite. The human condition is extremely tricky, and it seems that everyone seems to be missing some important piece to their own puzzle so that it is not so simple to say ‘Carpe diem’ and save the world. Everything fights back and slips through your fingers, ignores you and dissolves into regret…or else rockets into success leaving your unable to appreciate the struggles of others. It’s… weird. Isn’t it?
Why do pitches separated by an octave sound “the same”?
Answer by Paul King:
This phenomenon is called “circularity of pitch.”
Once a tone has gone up one octave, it seems to be “back to where it started” but “higher”:
As others have mentioned, this effect is derived from the overtone structure of natural sounds. The “richness” of a natural sound comes from several overlaid frequencies, each of which are an integer multiple of the base frequency or “fundamental”, and the reason for this has to do with the physics of how sounds are produced by vibrating objects like strings and vocal cords.
The reason that shifting up one octave “sounds the same” is that the overtone structure of a tone and the same tone one octave higher (all frequencies doubled) is almost the same.
Here is the frequency spectrum of a violin string (the horizontal axis is frequency, and the vertical axis is”power”). The first “bump” is the fundamental and the ones to the right are the overtones:
Shifting this tone up one octave amounts to stretching this spectrum to the right by 2x. When this happens, the spectrum will be almost identical except that every other overtone will be missing. The tone thus sounds almost the same (activates the same frequency-sensitive neurons in the brain), but with a higher “average frequency” and “thinner” due to the missing overtones. This is illustrated here by stretching the above image horizontally by 2x and showing the overtones that line up:
If these two tones are played together, they reinforce each other and will merge to sound like a single note but with a different timbre (different frequency spectrum).
This circular relationship between frequency and pitch leads to the “circularity in pitch judgement” illusion called the Shepard scale in which a chromatic scale of notes seems to rise forever. Audio demo here:
The animation accompanying the audio shows how it works: The frequency spectrum is shifted to the right, increasing the perceived “pitch” (chroma), however the power envelope, and thus the average frequency (height), is held artificially fixed the tone does not actually climb higher. The net effect is this:
Perhaps the creepiest version of this illusion is the never-ending falling tone auditory illusion, here: http://asa.aip.org/sound/cd/demo…
To show just how intertwined overtones are with the perception of scale, pitch, and octaves, it turns out that when a piece of music is played on a “stretched scale” (one octave stretched from 2x frequency to 2.2x), the music sounds horribly out of tune and wrong. But if the overtone structure of the notes being played is synthetically stretched by the same amount, the music sounds oddly in tune again.
I think that this reveals a lot about the nature of sense in general. Rather than calling these perceptual surprises ‘illusions’, I would say that they are examples of how conflicts are resolved among multiple levels of sense and sense-making.
In particular, I think that the fact of overtone dominance in tone perception tells us about the Top-Down nature of sensation, where larger wholes or gestalts are interpreted at a higher priority than granular, low level sensation. I think the illusion more likely is in the confidence that we have for our expectations about what perception actually is. When we assume that physics is an observer-independent reality with pockets of privacy containing approximations of that reality, then we overlook the possibility that physics is indivisibly both private and public, universal and proximal. This is the more accurate model in my opinion.
Overtones show us the nested nature of perception where our sensitivity plays an active role on many levels. It’s not just a matter of data accumulating in structures, but of encountering our own local experience of eternity as a rolling ‘here and now’. Like the perpetual floating peak of circular pitch, our here and now is only the most obvious range of a larger phenomenon united by likeness.
Our personal range of awareness yokes together a fugue of sympathetic echoes, both from repeating pasts and the promise of novelty from possible futures. These sub-personal and super-personal ranges are bound by instantaneous space and eternal time, respectively. The more sub-personal you get, the more you are talking about the experiences of organs, tissues, cells, and molecules in spatial relation to each other as bodies, objects, or random machines. The more super-personal you get, the more we refer to timeless themes of inspiration and teleology.
Physics can teach us how to understand the mathematics of ratios and the mechanics of wave, but in its current legacy form, physics can’t explain the physics of ratios themselves, or the mechanisms which drive us to perform the production of acoustic pressure waves. We are dazzled by the perfection of the ratios, but we no longer care what they are actually ratios of.
Data and Dualism
“Define “dualist” and “supernatural.”
Many years ago, I participated in a USENET discussion about whether data structures in computers existed. The debate raged on. One side argued that they did, because look, there they are in the code. The other side argued that they did not, because at the machine level, it was just 1’s and 0’s represented by voltage levels. No consensus emerged.
Now, we know everything about computers, and if we cannot answer such a question about them, what hope do we have about the brain and mind, about which we know almost nothing?”
Not to dredge up any bad memories from USENET, but I think my framework provides a conclusive way of understanding the issue. Unfortunately my model also predicts that many people, because of their specialized intellectual focus, may not be able to understand the model.
The question of whether data structures exist in computers can be resolved this way:
1. Since we are not the computer, we can only talk about the behavior of the device on different levels. With our own mind, we can go much further.
2. In the case of computer data, we can say that voltage levels (which are really statistical averages of electromagnetic dynamism…the extent to which matter pushes and pulls matter) exist in a geometric sense of bodies across space. This is the literal presentation of microelectronic structure. If we anchor our intellectual inertial frame in exterior geometric realism, then it is the 1’s and 0’s which are the representations – unreal except for our labeling of them. There are no literal ones or zeroes in a computer, rather they are in the story which we tell ourselves to enable our control over semiconductor arrays.
3. If we anchor our intellectual inertial frame in the algebraic-sequential presentation instead, then the logic behind the Boolean instructions are the relevant reality as they can be exported into many different mechanisms. The specific materials and geometry which are used to execute instructions are only there to serve the encoded information.
This should explain why both sides are correct and incorrect in their own way, but neither side understands the other’s point of view. The issue of our own consciousness escalates this problem to a new level, as not only is there the same antagonism between geometric-topological materialists and information-theoretic idealists, but both of them together are equally blind to a whole other axis of non-commutative qualities related to perception and participation.
For the Explanatory Gap, we really have two orthogonal dualisms, Western arithmetic-physicists who see the universe from the outside in and what I might call Eastern spiritualist-idealists who see the universe from the inside out. The same principles of reconciliation apply here, but the application of them is even more inflammatory. The solution involves a profound relativism which recontextualizes the literal and figurative, fact and fiction, in a way which challenges many (all?) established religious, philosophical, and scientific assumptions, birthing an entirely new view of cosmos and psyche. It is a hard sell, but I suspect that unfortunately it may be the only solution which can actually work.
Mathematics of Mind
“This is your sense of consciousness – it’s a mathematical relationship among causal elements, and so the mindfulness of the monk or the agony of the cancer patient, those are all different polytropes in this very high dimensional space, and you measure the size of them, the size of the conscious repertoire by the number phi (Φ).” –
Christof Koch on the Neurobiology and Mathematics of Consciousness
Good stuff for the Easy Problem…still no Hard Problem solution. If high dimensional polytropes can represent agony or mindfulness – why have agony or mindfulness? What translates them into experience and why?
I still have not seen anyone recognize that the assumption of impersonal micro-structures translating into personal non-structures might be unfounded. When we underestimate consciousness, it becomes a synthetic product rather than the ground of being from which we cannot escape. Mathematics exists in consciousness, but consciousness, if it could exist in mathematics, would have no reason to exist in any perceptual forms. Data is data. Why would mathematical functions do all of this decoration?
I suggest that consciousness isn’t built up from nothing by tiny parts, it is recovered from everything by sensitivity.
Multisense Realism 
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