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Re31: What's Happening That Matters - WM5

Retraice^1

A simpler world model.

Air date: Thursday, 27th Oct. 2022, 12:15 AM Eastern/US.

World Model 4 was like...

There's natural intelligence (NI) which is equivalent to threat modeling. Within NI there's the self (we are survivors and thrivers), our motivation (fun and doom), and the major decisions (whether to change the world or the self, and what to do about nature's campaign against living things). Outside of NI, there's nature (physics and natural selection), strategic intelligence (game theory) and artificial intelligence (computer control, or Turing-machine cybernetics). Got it?

World Model 5

Now, let's put it differently: There's what is (ontology); there's what is happening (physics, motion of the stuff that is); and there's what matters (what we care about, mostly our instinctive motivations, morality and ethics, though theory does play a role, sometimes a big one.... and Frankfurt's `what we care about', `volitional necessity', really does seem to be separate from morality and ethics).

What is

o self^2 * self model: survivors and thrivers * motivation model: fun and doom * essential decisions: + Two life: Change world or self? + One death: Life is precious. What to do?

o nature (which is physics, selection, and not f-ing around (NINFA)) * inanimate dumb stuff (roving black holes, avalanches) * animate dumb stuff (corona viruses, lions, tigers, bears) * animate smart stuff (humans, aliens?, machines?, AI, game theory, strategic intelligence)

What is happening

(...amongst What is) * experiences + consciousness^3 + religious experience^4 * selection (of all things, based on reproduction, not survival per se^5) + inanimate dumb stuff (black holes, universes^6) + animate dumb stuff (lions, tigers, etc.) + animate smart stuff (humans, machines, AI, game theory, strategic intelligence)

What matters

(What we care about (...amongst What is happening (...amongst What is))) * what's `good' (RTFM)^7 * survival ("there's no morality if we're dead. So...") * experiences + `fun' and `doom', but: o Experiences are being snuffed out or made into hell constantly and everywhere (the problem of `doom', i.e. suffering and death, which is not `good', not (R)ight). o Hence: # threat modeling (micro, partial, individual, local, global) # decisions (two problems of life, one problem of death).

Addendum: sex

Selection and reproduction are obviously about sex. But consider our relationship to machines according to Marshall McLuhan:

"To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it. To listen to radio or to read the printed page is to accept these extensions of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the `closure' or displacement of perception that follows automatically. It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the servomechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his clock.

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to the motor car."^8 [emphasis added]

Does this imply that we are creating machines that will replace us? No. The bee is not creating plants that will replace the bee; the executive's clock will not replace the executive. But are we `numb' to how we're being changed, while keenly aware of how we're changing technology? Is it even logically possible to think outside of this relationship in which we find ourselves, unless we run off to the woods and cease it altogether?

_

References

Blackmore, S. (2005). Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0192805850. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780192805850 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780192805850 https://lccn.loc.gov/2004027966

Hoffman, D. (2019). The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN: 978-0393254693. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0393254693 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0393254693 https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006962

James, W. (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience [with Biographical Introduction]. Digireads.com, Kindle ed. ISBN: 978-1596257306. Originally published in 1902. This Kindle ed. 2011. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781596257306 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781596257306 https://lccn.loc.gov/2021767638

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Gingko Press. ISBN: 1584230738. Originally published 1964. This ed. 2003. https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mclu_n3p7 Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=1584230738 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+1584230738 https://lccn.loc.gov/2003012174

Retraice (2022/10/23). Re27: Now That's a World Model - WM4. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re27 Retrieved 24th Oct. 2022.

Retraice (2022/10/24). Re28: What's Good? RTFM. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re28 Retrieved 25th Oct. 2022.

Simler, K., & Hanson, R. (2018). The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780190495992. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780190495992 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780190495992 https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004296

Footnotes

^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice

^2 All this is from WM4: Retraice (2022/10/23).

^3 A difficult topic. For an introduction, see Blackmore (2005), and for a quick take, see the old-woman young-woman illusion.

^4 See James (1902) p. 276 ff., "The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed....", and really all of Lecture XX, the concluding chapter.

^5 Simler & Hanson (2018) p. 31.

^6 Hoffman (2019) pp. 56-57, citing a 1992 paper by Lee Smolin. See Cosmological natural selection (Wikipedia).

^7 Retraice (2022/10/24).

^8 McLuhan (1964) pp. 68-69.