[Metadata: crossposted from https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2024/04/koan-divining-alien-datastructures-from.html.]

Exploring the ruins of an alien civilization, you find what appears to be a working computer——it's made of plastic and metal, wires connect it to various devices, and you see arrays of capacitors that maintain charged or uncharged states and that sometimes rapidly toggle in response to voltages from connected wires. You can tell that the presumptive RAM is activating in complex but structured patterns, but you don't know their meanings. What strategies can you use to come to understand what the underlying order is, what algorithm the computer is running, that explains the pattern of RAM activations?

Thanks to Joss Oliver (SPAR) for entertaining a version of this koan. Many of B's ideas come from Joss.

Real data about minds

Red: If we want to understand how minds [...]

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Outline:

(00:59) Real data about minds

(05:58) RAM divination

(11:02) Greens problem

(14:33) Themes of investigation

(19:05) J-trees

(22:47) Parochial abstractions

(27:20) Grown in a lab

(28:15) Morals of the story

(33:51) Self-given

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First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.