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Sabbatical

I’m going on sabbatical for a couple of weeks. There’s just too much going on in my life right now for me to take any time to do regular posting here.

Posted in miscellaneous.

Busy

Sorry things have been light lately, between studying for a re-certification, getting ready for a new certification, doing a little travel and using the new grill, I’ve found I just don’t have enough hours in the day.

Things should start settling down in the next few days. I’m working on a new “Shit That Keeps Me Up At Night” essay and that should be up by the end of the week.

Posted in miscellaneous.

How A Woman Marks Her Territory

Woman Marking Her Territory

‘Nuff said.

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Happy Memorial Day

What a fantastic weekend it has been so far. BBQ yesterday at a friend’s house and I’m grilling steaks tonight on my new grill.

Doesn’t get much better than that.

Posted in miscellaneous.

Busy Bee

I’ve been pretty busy these last few evenings. I’ll try to get an updated post in the next couple of days, but I’m not promising anything…

Posted in miscellaneous.

Shit That Keeps Me Up At Night, Part 1: Sythetic Intelligence

So, I imagine you are asking yourself, what exactly is it that keeps Phil up at night? Personal dramas aside, there are quite a few topics that spin their way across my noggin chasing away any chance of somnolence. These are the anti-sheep in the pastures of my mind.

Artificial Intelligence

Let’s be clear here. I’m not referring to systems that act intelligent. Current parlance uses AI as a reference for anything from expert systems to adaptive networks to learning systems. At their core, these systems are simply calculators that act in a purely logical manner. They either solve problems (natural language communication, playing chess, deep simulation) through brute force –faster and more processors– or by employing a set of heuristics to arrive at a solution. Many times these “AIs” can appear quite subtle, but at their core they are still glorified pocket calculators.

To be fair, those systems are essential stepping stones. They help us refine, in an epistemological way, the dead ends, the false premises, and more importantly, the foundations of learning and intelligence.

No, what I’m talking about could perhaps be best described as Synthetic Intelligence. Deep Blue, IBM’s amazing chess playing computer, can defeat a grand-master, but no matter how incredibly it performs at no time can it ever be described as actually “thinking”. At the most basic, it’s simply iterating through nested decision trees and selecting the optimum move as described by its predefined ruleset. Deep Blue is a direct, linear descendant of the clockwork automata of the 18th century.

Conversely, SI would actually be a creation that could think. Cognition. Encountering the unfamiliar and being able to negotiate it using both deductive and inductive reasoning. But SI would be more than that. It’s a leap from Mount Epistemology into the Abyss of Ontology. Would an SI actually be?

Ultimately, the question that arises is whether an SI would be conscious. This is not just self-awareness. Quite a few animals can be described self-aware. My cats, Cecil and Beanie, could be seen as self-aware, but I doubt I could ever convince anyone they are sentient. Which at the heart of the matter is what is meant by consciousness.

Now, I plan on getting into consciousness and emergent behavior in a later post, so we’ll leave that topic for now. For this post, let’s assume that yes, in the future we will create (or be the midwife to) an SI that could be described as a sophont. In my long-winded way, I now raise the big question. The one that keeps me up at night.

When a sentient system arises, will we recognize it for what it is?

We, ourselves, are not isolated systems. We exist in a world where there are countless biological systems that are closely related. I am speaking, of course, of homo sapiens sapiens. We all have a common environment. We, barring developmental or physical impairments, all process it in the same way. We have a common experiential basis for communication. If I say the sky looks blue, you will know that I am talking about the nature of something that is experienced through the sense of sight.

Now think about an SI. It will not really be of the mundane world the way those of us in meat-space are. In fact, it will exist in the Platonic Realm more fully than we ever could. It will reside in a virtual universe where it, in and of itself, is transcendent. An SI’s environment would be the SI itself, encompassing the totally of everything it is. What would be the common experiential ground that we could meet on?

For me, this question will never be anything more than a cause of insomnia. I’m sure the people on the cutting edge of this research could answer that question far more surely than I ever could. I’m a dilettante, nothing more than a dabbler. And that’s all I’ll ever be when it comes to SI, because frankly, the math involved scares the bejesus out of me.

Posted in science/technology, shit that keeps me up at night. Tagged with , , , .

One Word Review of The Day The Earth Stood Still

Really?

Posted in miscellaneous.

Miscellany

If I remember to take my real camera tomorrow, I’ll have some updated pictures and an expanded post regarding the Chair of Doom!

Posted in miscellaneous.

The Chair… Of Doom!

I had a chair snap at the base plate during a teleconference with the UK the other day. Landed with a thump on my back. Loud enough that the guys on the other end of the call went, “What was that?” Ended up staying home for a day, but other than that A-OK. Just a slight spasm. Other conference/huddle rooms are littered with chairs in this state.

This is what you get when you go with the lowest bidder.

Chair Of Doom

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In Which I Expend An Inordinate Amount of Thought Regarding A Word

And that word would be: gnash. As in:

I gnashed my teeth in impotent fury

Isn’t it a strange word? I found myself saying it over and over again until it no longer sounded like a real word to me.[1] It’s almost onomatopoeic in its construction. I imagine it would be a eerie clacking sound like that weird toothy Cenobite in the Hellraiser movies.[2] It’s a word that I’ve read many times[3] , but never really used. In the first place, it’s not really a word you can drop into casual conversation. It’s like trying to use the word rue, hither or whelm.[4] But more importantly, I was never quite sure what the damn word meant. I’d be reading a section that had this:

Lord Guy du Bad of the Land of the Pointy Goatee tightened his hand on the hilt of the Generic Sword of Doom and gnashed his teeth at the words of Baron Hero Von Hero.

This is what was going through my head:

Lord Guy du Bad of the Land of the Pointy Goatee tightened his hand on the hilt of the Generic Sword of Doom and *mumblemumbled* his teeth at the words of Baron Hero Von Hero.

So finally, after all these years, I looked the damn thing up.

It turns out, as these things usually do, I was totally wrong about the word gnash. And it’s quite a let down.

gnash |na sh | – verb [ trans. ] – grind (one’s teeth) together, typically as a sign of anger

Huh.

So instead of being something involving much flashing of teeth with accompanying dramatic sounds, it’s simply rubbing the old molars across each other. In anger. Of course, now I know why in certain TV shows and movies, sometimes actors have this weird… pulsing thing going on near where the jaw meets the skull when they are trying to show restrained anger.[5] I always thought it looked they were chewing a piece of tire rubber or something. Instead, it appears they were actually gnashing.

  1. Strangely enough that also happens to me with the word grass. []
  2. And no, I couldn’t tell you which one. There’s so much flaying of the skin and emoting of the Pinhead about “Delicious Pain” that they all kind of run together in my head. Incidentally, the Cenobite that had CDs embedded in his flesh and used them as a kind of shuriken was always my favorite. []
  3. Almost always in fantasy novels []
  4. These are other staple vocabulary words in fantasy. []
  5. Seriously, with some actors it’s so pronounced it looks like a small animal is trying to burst out of their face. It’s waaay distracting. []

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