Concepts don’t exist — as objective, phenomenological, cognitive, or neural structures

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

The case for removing concepts from cognitive science and AI research

It can be difficult to convince someone that concepts don’t exist. Everyday experience appears to provide overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Concepts are not only intuitively perceived to be active in daily life, they are also a widespread feature of theories across AI and cognitive science, where they are assumed to be necessary for symbolic and logical thought¹. Most who read the title of this post would be tempted to brush off the argument as patently, demonstrably absurd. It’s akin to trying to convince a European 500 years ago that God doesn’t exist, when everything around them appears to be evidence of, and indeed presupposes God’s existence. Any contrary argument is likely to be taken as the result of sophistry or word-wrangling, or because some critical piece has been neglected.

Despite their seeming obviousness, it is worth noting that there is still no complete and unambiguous explanation for what concepts are, or how they work on thoughts —and indeed how to program them into AI. The human ability to learn and create concepts is multifaceted and complex. AI theories and implementations generally only touch on one or two of its features, while neglecting large numbers of counter-cases. This has lead some researchers, notably Lawrence Barsalou, to suspect that the way we think of concepts is flawed. Perhaps the whole notion of concepts — as a native mechanism for grouping experiences — is untenable.

source

This article is well-worth reading. Below, I have made a few notes based on my reading of it. To my eye, it demonstrates the existence of consciousness as a thing, the existence of a very real subjective world, the high probability that this subjective world is not entirely confined in your head, that consciousness is a primary of existence and not confined to our brains, and also, importantly for this website, why FIML works so well.

(The sections in quotes are from the article.)

Firstly, concepts: they exist within consciousness and are used to reason, analyze, communicate, organize, and so on. They are probably a features of consciousness itself, depending on how you define them. They need not be stable.

Secondly, FIML:

To begin with, there is no scientific experiment or empirical observation that can be used to prove that any given concept “exists”, and by extension that concepts exist at all.

No. FIML practice provides unlimited empirical observations that concepts exist. FIML is a scientific experiment and can easily be repeated as many times as you like.

To objectively prove that any given interpretation matches reality, you would somehow have to compare your subjective mental concepts against an objective view of the real situation. But the latter isn’t possible.

Yes, it is possible. FIML is precisely that—a means ‘to compare your subjective mental concepts against an objective view of the real situation’.

FIML accomplishes this by allowing two subjective consciousnesses to objectively compare their mutually ‘subjective mental concepts’ against each other. To claim that ‘an objective view of the real situation’ can only be achieved by some other means is absurd. The very best means to objectively compare subjective states is to have two honest informants compare them based on a shared micro unit of communication in the real-world in real-time. This is what FIML does.

The discreteness of concepts is a built-in requirement of language itself, one that does not necessarily reflect what an individual mind is doing.

Continue reading “Concepts don’t exist — as objective, phenomenological, cognitive, or neural structures” →

The Forgotten Dangers of Ultrasound

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Story at a Glance:

•The medical field has had a long history of exposing mothers to “treatments” that harm their infants. After decades of work to stop the routine x-raying of fetuses, the “safe and effective” practice of prenatal ultrasound (US) was adopted in its place.

•While US is thought to be safe, there are decades of research showing it can harm tissues. Initially, this was well recognized, but as the ultrasound industry took off, it became a forgotten side of medicine, and research in this area became almost impossible to conduct.

• There is a large body of evidence showing fetuses are particularly vulnerable to US. Most concerningly, dozens of trials were conducted in China immediately prior to mothers planning to have abortions, which showed giving an US beforehand clearly damaged fetal tissues.

•The harms of US are dose dependent. Unfortunately, in 1992, despite widespread concerns about the safety of prenatal US (e.g., CNN did a program on it) the FDA chose to raise the permissible US levels 8-fold (and often more). Given that the studies showing the dangers of US were conducted at levels far below the original threshold, this increase is quite concerning, and may have played a pivotal role in the outbreak of chronic childhood illnesses that occurred around this time.

•Conversely, the benefits of prenatal US are often vastly overstated, and in many cases put mothers on unnecessary “treatment” plans which harm them and their infants.

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‘They must realize the Vampire Ball is ending’ — Putin

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I hope Trump will do everything he can to get along with Putin and repair Russia’s horrible estrangement from the rest of Europe. It is Europe, NATO and USA that drove Russia away rather than form a mutually beneficial and friendly alliance with them. In fact, Putin himself showed interest in Russia joining NATO in 2000. It was evil to drive Russia away, dog them like this and provoke wars. I hope Trump and his people see this scenario and take action to fully embrace Russia as a major part of Europe and Western civilization, which is their incontrovertible historical heritage. ABN

‘The Black Swan Election’: Trump’s Campaign Chiefs Tell Their Inside Story

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…Let’s talk about Trump as a cultural phenomenon because I think of two things. The McDonald’s drive-through and the garbage truck, both things that broke into the pop culture conversation, even beyond our world. Could any other candidate do that?

Fabrizio: MMA fights. Joe Rogan. We think of them as very specific things, but the symbolism — It says something about him that she couldn’t capture.

Where she’s doing the big speech or having the big debate, the conventional warfare, traditional campaign tactics. Donald Trump goes to the McDonald’s drive-through. But in the year 2024, when we’re all living on our phones, a big speech at the Ellipse vs. Trump at the drive-through, which is going to break through?

LaCivita: Donald Trump is a man who has made a large part of his living in a visual medium: TV. He understands that politics is a visual medium. And so he looks at everything through the prism of that. And your average candidate for public office doesn’t look at the world that way.

He’s also a celebrity.

LaCivita: Defined outside the realm of politics. He has his own persona and definition outside of politics.

And because of that, some of the stuff he says …

LaCivita: He gets away with, he does.

He’s not graded as a politician. He’s graded as a celebrity.

Fabrizio: I know this is going to sound counterintuitive, but when he says stuff that makes people go — (grimaces) — it only reinforces that …

LaCivita: … He’s not a politician, exactly!

…Is there one big thing that you think we’re missing in this campaign that was enormously consequential or at least significant?

LaCivita: You guys have written about the impact of the assassination attempt. But I don’t think people give enough credit to the fact that the world has a visual. It’s an iconic visual. But I don’t think people have given enough credit to that visual.

Him holding up his fist.

LaCivita: And what that visual means. And what the visual conveys. Not only about him, but the country as a whole. Americans get knocked down, but they always fight back. And that visual is as quintessential America as the fucking flag is.

Fabrizio: I am always amazed, I’ve learned not to be amazed, but he has this ability in most cases to put his finger on something. And you say to yourself: “Where did he come up with that?” But he just does. Then you test it and, holy shit, he’s right.

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Excellent interview. Fun read. Well worth reading. ABN

People say ‘the Holocaust is one of the most well documented events in history’

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People say “the Holocaust is one of the most well documented events in history,”

…. But it’s really not documented at all. In fact when you actually dig into the documents you realize how the evidence points into the other direction. Evidence like

-Hitler never ordered the extermination of the Jews

-the allies never spotted any “killing camps” when doing reconnaissance missions

-the allies broke the German codes and were listening to their messages, and heard nothing about death camps.

-all the “death camps” were only on the Soviet side. How did the allies manage to not find any? Why do we believe the Soviet communist?

-there is no physical evidence that Jews were gassed to death

-the worldwide Jewish population numbers did not decrease.

– the entire holocaust narrative is based on ludicrous constantly changing eye witness testimony

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Besides all the many reasons to not believe the official story, since it is illegal to doubt this bit of history, I believe we the plebs are morally obligated to doubt it and research those doubts to our own satisfaction. The linked article provides a few of the major areas of doubt, if not total contradiction. ABN

Scientists reveal breakthrough… and tell why thousands of women with breast cancer may soon be told they don’t need ANY treatment

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Roughly 56,000 British women each year are given the terrifying news that they have breast cancer.

It’s a life-changing diagnosis not least because, almost always, it is followed by invasive biopsies, surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and hormone treatments that, in younger women, induce the menopause.

But could all that be set to change? Indeed, could many thousands of women told they have the disease not need a jot of treatment whatsoever?

The provocative answer, according to a growing number of the world’s leading specialists, is yes. The results of a major trial, announced last week, showed it was perfectly safe – perhaps even a better option – to simply ‘watch and wait’ with certain breast cancers, known as ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS.

No surgery, no medication – just a check-up twice a year. DCIS are tiny tumours, confined to the milk ducts in the breasts, which usually cause no symptoms and cannot be felt.

They account for about a quarter of all breast cancer diagnoses and most are discovered only during routine mammograms (breast X-rays).

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