Retrospective 2024-11

This is a retrospective of week 11, 2024 (2024-03-11–2024-03-17).

As I mentioned last week, I’m currently working on a review of Robert Rosen’s book Anticipatory Systems.

This week, I’ve started reading Bjørn Ekeberg’s book on Metaphysical Experiments. Ekeberg’s focus is on the metaphysics of cosmology and the key assumptions that underlie the mathematical treatment of its theories and experiments. Bjørn Ekeberg’s writes:

…Galileo’s invention…[was] to dispense with the actual world in order to render a universe calculable…

—Bjørn Ekeberg, Metaphysical Experiments: Physics and the Invention of the Universe

…twentieth-century theoretical physics…consciously attempts to free itself from the shackles of the phenomenal and the observable in favor of a purely mathematical realm of explanation.

—Bjørn Ekeberg, Metaphysical Experiments: Physics and the Invention of the Universe

You need, in other words, to simplify the actual world in order to render it calculable.

Bjørn Ekeberg proposes four logics as images of thought (my emphasis in italics).

…I propose these four logics—analogic, autologic, metalogic, and hypologic—as images of thought… Whether these logics can be turned into a more comprehensive theory is perhaps the subject of another book…

—Bjørn Ekeberg, Metaphysical Experiments: Physics and the Invention of the Universe

I’ve also started reading Tom Atlee’s new book on Co-Intelligence this week. Tom Atlee has the following to say about co-intelligence and life’s coherence, complexity, whole-ness and part-ness (my emphasis in italics):

…any dynamic whole…has characteristics different from those expected from “the sum of its parts”, and its parts behave differently depending on the nature and condition of the whole within which they function. …
We find the same…wherever we find aliveness and other forms of irreducible, responsive, evolving complexity.

—Tom Atlee, Co-Intelligence: The Applied Wisdom of Wholeness, Interconnectedness, and Co-Creativity

Throughout life, we find the part influencing the whole and the whole influencing the part – and each part and whole manifesting qualities of both part-ness and whole-ness. …virtually everything is both a whole in itself and a part of many other wholes.
This way of seeing and thinking is radically different from the linear worldview of isolated, distinct, solid objects and beings impacting each other. …we can begin to see any given thing or situation as a manifestation of evolving relationships, contexts, flows, and processes.

—Tom Atlee, Co-Intelligence: The Applied Wisdom of Wholeness, Interconnectedness, and Co-Creativity

In co-intelligence work, “wholeness” refers primarily to the inclusive, ever-evolving coherence of life, the way it all fits and hangs together. This includes the various parts and aspects of life and the relational dynamics between them. A parallel inquiry includes the coherence of wholes themselves, as evolving complex processes that dance and learn with and within their contexts. These expressions of coherence – of unity and difference dancing together – underlie familiar concepts such as health, integrity, wholesomeness, holiness, and other holistic concepts.
In my work with co-intelligence, I find it most useful to hold wholeness as both central and not precisely defined. I experience it as something we need to “get the feel of.”

—Tom Atlee, Co-Intelligence: The Applied Wisdom of Wholeness, Interconnectedness, and Co-Creativity

The wholeness lies within, between, and beyond the parts.

The wholeness of things includes their parts and what lies within, between, and beyond those parts; and, when we consider living beings…, we must also take into account … their unique aliveness – as well as their unique contexts and histories. …We are challenged to move beyond a focus on their separateness and utility to us, to their unique character, value, and place in the whole.

—Tom Atlee, Co-Intelligence: The Applied Wisdom of Wholeness, Interconnectedness, and Co-Creativity

I’ve listened to an interview with Yann LeCun this week. Yann LeCun has the following views on Artificial Intelligence (AI):

We’re fooled by their [Large Language Models’] fluency. We just assume that if a system is fluent in manipulating language, then it has all the characteristics of human intelligence. But that impression is false. We’re really fooled by it.

—Yann LeCun https://youtu.be/5t1vTLU7s40?feature=shared&t=3290

The type of reasoning that takes place in LLM is very, very primitive.

—Yann LeCun https://youtu.be/5t1vTLU7s40?feature=shared&t=4287

The world is not as easy as we think [cf. Moravec’s paradox].

—Yann LeCun https://youtu.be/5t1vTLU7s40?feature=shared&t=7616

Almost every action that we take [as humans] involves hierarchical planning in some sense. And we really have absolutely no idea how to do this [in AI]. … There’s zero demonstration of hierarchical planning in AI, where the various levels of representations that are necessary have been learned.

—Yann LeCun https://youtu.be/5t1vTLU7s40?feature=shared&t=9371

Hierarchical planning in AI would require that the AI system is turned into an Anticipatory System (cf. Robert Rosen). We have no idea how to program this.