BCS (0:40 - 0:44)

One of them being that I haven't done my homework for a reason I want
to try to explain, actually.

...

BCS (1:51 - 2:57)

We'll talk anyway. And I have a question about substance.

...

BCS (3:47 - 4:15)

So I was struck when I wrote the postscript note to our last
meeting. By how I was framing everything.
In terms of. Well, actually, I don't even remember the last note. Hang
on a second.

Maybe I should take a look at it.

HST (5:25 - 5:25)

Right.

BCS (5:26 - 5:53)

All right. So yeah, I've got it. Right:

  [Email sent 2024-06-08
  A quick thought about what I said in our last conversation. 

  I described my imagination of a “machinic person” by comparison with 
  current ideas … the pure mechanism of classical science, then “rationality” 
  with reference to Frege and logic etc., then normativity and the current 
  paradigm of deriving it from evolutionary fit, etc. 

  But I think at least some versions of G,A do something completely 
  different. They start with (my version of) the blooming buzzing confusion, 
  and talk about the emergence of creatures from that.  S-region and O-region 
  stuff from the Objects book (though I no longer like those names), deixis 
  from the differential equations, etc. 

  For short, call these the *historical* and *metaphysical* approaches.  What 
  I talked about at the end of our conversation (on Thursday?) was the 
  historical story.  When I re-read the G,A drafts, I am going to see whether 
  they fit neatly into either of these two categories, or a mixture, or 
  something else, or what.. 

  Just mulling.]

So as in the first [sic] paragraph, I say, call these the "historical"
and "metaphysical" approaches.

And what I have not done is read any [earlier versions of the
manuscript]. So what you think you have or what you know that you have
is something like version 11. Is that right?

HST (6:09 - 6:18)

That's correct. 2009 version 11, which I would say in terms of this
dichotomy is entirely the historical approach.

BCS (6:19 - 6:19)

Okay.

HST (6:19 - 6:37)

And I think that's consistent with the note at the top, which says

  "In previous versions of this, I tried to produce a metaphysics, which
   would underpin what I'm talking about, but didn't get far enough to
   make it worth reproducing or something like that."

BCS (6:38 - 6:41)

And I did say "in previous versions of this".

HST (6:41 - 8:23)

Yes, it is:

  "A number of manuscripts have been circulated under this title over
   the last 15 years. Right. This one lacks any sketch of a worldview
   exhibiting the characteristics described."

I presume that means described below as it were. 

  "Somewhat in response to the first version, which tried to provide
   such a view without explanation of what was interesting or mattered
   about it. If it seems worthwhile, I may someday incorporate all the
   various versions into a single" [HST: long, it says] "short monograph."

BCS (8:34 - 10:57)

Right. Okay. Well, that's very helpful actually to me.

Bob @?, thank you for finding that. Yes, I think that longer monograph,
the yet to be produced longer monograph is what I feel as if we're
aiming at. And I don't actually know whether I made any attempt to say
that these lead to the same view.

I have actually thought about that. Okay. So, let me actually recite
from memory four or five sentences and tell me if they ring a bell.

Have you ever read them? Goes something like this. Start at the
beginning.

That is, start at what those who'd like to start at the beginning
start with. @? Bosons, fermions, quarks, assemblages pressed into atoms
and molecules and DNA and so on and so forth. And then the second
paragraph saying, of course, something like that's not a beginning.

Many will argue, whatever. And then something like, but actually it
doesn't matter where we start. We'll end up in the same place.

So, in the media there would be something like other people would say
start with stories or something like that. Anyway.

HST (10:58 - 12:12)

I see what you're saying. Okay. I mean, I think it's important that
you, well, it changes where you go next to have something like the
storyline, because otherwise it's all just about where you cut the
physics.

And that I think is not enough. That's just what I think of as, I had
a version of this conversation last week with my regular Quaker
interlocutor. There are these two questions, which I believe, which I
tend to attribute to Kant, but I may get wrong.

Why is there something rather than nothing? And how would I live my
life? And if you talk to Dominicans, for instance, they will happily
talk about one or the other, but usually find it challenging to see
what the relationship is between likely answers to the first and
likely answers to the second.

That's another way of saying what it is you're trying to bring
together, I think.

BCS (12:12 - 13:08)

I think so. Yeah, I think so. And I think what I put in the note after
the historical approach is sort of a story about how our understanding
of fermions and bosons, as it were, has been pressed into service as a
grounds for normativity and maybe objectivity and so on and so forth.

I don't think successfully, but there is... @?

HST (13:08 - 13:13)

That's really the first large paragraph in the email.

BCS (13:14 - 13:19)

Right.

HST (13:20 - 13:32)

Well, the pure mechanism of classical science, then rationality with
reference to Frege and @? logic, then normativity, and the current paradigm
of deriving it from the evolutionary field, etc. Right. @?

BCS (13:42 - 15:20)

Yeah. So then the argument would go something like this, that the only
tenable version of the metaphysical approach, well, sorry, the only
tenable version of both approaches ends up being indistinguishable
from the tenable version of the other. And one crucial factor in that,
I believe, is that both stories have to do justice to our being here.

HST (15:22 - 15:31)

You know the thing, which I think is very bizarrely labeled, the
anthropic principle?

BCS (15:31 - 15:32)

Right.

HST (15:32 - 15:42)

Which attempts to dissolve the first of the Kantian questions by
saying, because if there weren't something, we wouldn't be here to ask
the question, so get over it.

BCS (15:45 - 16:03)

Yes, but I think that the anthropic principle is misapplied radically
because they try to understand what the world needs to be like in
order to support life or inquiry or something like that.

HST (16:05 - 16:31)

... [For example] that Planck's constant is what it is, and that if
you varied it by not very much in either direction, nothing would
work, isn't something that needs explanation because it evidently is
the case.

BCS (16:31 - 16:31)

Right.

HST (16:32 - 16:52)

... I don't think that changes the availability of both projects,
essentially.

BCS (17:06 - 17:53)

I think that's right. And I actually think, you know, this is... Well,
I'm going to have to agree to the long rather than short [see at 8:23 above].

I'm assuming if I go down this pathway, but I actually think the
fact... Well, as I put it, which is transparent to nobody, the
ontological warrant for the epistemic fact that we use differential
equations to express physical laws is actually... I mean, I don't know
if I said this in the objects book, but anyway, underlies the Dysus @? of
the world, which I think is fundamental to consciousness and self and
various things like that.

HST (17:56 - 18:08)

[In the Objects book you talk] about the importance of "slop".

BCS (18:09 - 18:11)

Yeah, no, that's a different thing.

HST (18:11 - 18:14)

That is a different thing. Okay. Nevermind then.

Rasson.

BCS (18:20 - 18:25)

What's the... Rasson regardless? @?

HST (18:26 - 18:26)

Yeah.

BCS (18:27 - 19:54)

I'm not sure I should accept the regardless just now, but yeah, the
Dysus @?deixis? stuff is, I think, important to self. And something else that's
interesting, this is going to sound a little bit like a non-sequitur,
but I think it's not for obvious reasons. The fact that LLMs are based
on language is, I think, possibly consequential, but possibly not the
reason for their success.

Because I think the power of them stems from the fact that the
relationality that they encode is so stupefyingly huge that all the
content of the state of the network is bizarrely non-conceptual in the
sense of that. ?@

HST (19:58 - 20:16)

Absolutely. I mean, they got somewhere by not being
representational. Well, not being _explicitly_ representational. That
no amount of additional funding to Doug Lenat and company would ever
have gotten to.

BCS (20:17 - 20:25)

Right, right. Exactly. How to say that well is not trivial, but I
completely agree.

HST (20:26 - 20:44)

Yeah, I mean, it would be useful in the indefinitely unforeseeable
future to have a conversation involving Fernando Pereira about this,
because...  He was here six months ago, and ... he was expanding .. on
his anger about the fact, about the impact of his own company's work,
indirectly in terms of OpenAI @?, but in ChatGPT and so on. ... He's
very angry about the way in which people are treating the natural
language problem as having now been solved and or being soluble only
by the technologies of LLMs. But what he did for us in that
conversation, and I wish I had recorded it, was give me a much clearer
sense of the scale of the base model. And also the scale of the
priming that it gets in order to make it a question answerer.

BCS (22:56 - 22:57)

Prompt engineering.

[digression on LLMs and question-answering, base models, the
difference between GPT-3 or GPT-4 and ChatGPT, the translation of a
human query into a prompt @fix this@ ] 

HST (28:33 - 28:35)

Anyway, sorry, that is taking us away now.

BCS (28:35 - 29:59)

No, not entirely, because there was a title of a talk I was thinking
of putting together, something like the nonverbal meaning of words. If
we talk about, not only about Sussman, but let's say, and what he
meant by empirical or something, but just we talk about... Well,] the
things we're talking about, the three parts, the base model, the delta
that turns it into a question answering machine, and the prompt
engineering that turns a particular prompt into a particular prompt,
basically, particular question into a particular @?