Arquivo para a ‘Cognition’ Categoria
Urgent: agreement against lethal AI
20
Jul
Newspapers and magazines around the world are giving a breakthrough for the future of the world
and AI for the second time more than 150 companies and 2,400 people from 90 different countries sign an agreement not to participate in the manufacture, use and trade of autonomous weapons including Google DeepMind, XPRIZE Foundation and Elon Musk.
It is to hold the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence that ended yesterday in Stockholm, Sweden and the compromise pact was organized by Future of Life Institute.
Almost a year ago specialists in AI and robotics signed an open letter to the United Nations to suspend the use of autonomous weapons that were threatening us with a “3rd revolution in the war.”
They pointed out at the time that “autonomous robots” mean weapons that can identify, target and kill autonomously, that is, no person makes the final decision to authorize lethal force: the decision and authorization on whether or not one will die is left to a system or algorithm on a deadly machine.
Australian professor Toby Walsh of the University of New South Wales stressed that the new lethal weapons involve ethical questions: “We can not hand over the decision about who lives and how it dies for the machines.”
Professor Walsh was among a group of Australian researchers in robotics and artificial intelligence who in November 2017 asked Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to take a stand against the artificial intelligence weaponry.
All serious researchers in this area are certainly supportive and vigilante.
Nagel, physicalism and the being
11
Jul
All modern physicalism, the Greek physis is something else, is essentially reductionist, for “every 
reductionist has his favorite analogy, drawn from modern science” (Nagel, 1974).
Although Nagel does not define what is physical for him, he says verbatim in footnote, he states that “beyond interesting, a phenomenology that is objective in this sense may allow questions about the physical basis of experience to take on a more intelligible form “(Nagel, 1974).
Although Aristotle called the pre-Socratics “physikoi“, this has nothing to do with the modern conception, just as physis can not simply be translated by nature.
Two authors who spoke about this Greek concept, for Jaeger: “the word also includes the original source of things, that from which they develop and by which their development is constantly renewed; in other words, the reality underlying the things of our experience, “while Burnet, in turn, states that” in the Greek philosophical language, physis always designates what is primary, fundamental, and persistent, as opposed to secondary, derivative, and transitional”.
It is these conceptions that most closely approximate Nagel, but it can be said that his concept is almost ontological: “But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that is to be that organism – something that is to be for the organism. ”
But the important and definitive concept of Nagel is that it may make sense to ask what it is like to be a bat, but it is not conceivable to ask what it is like to be a toaster, physics has limits and if you can go deeper, here about Terrence Deacon’s “Incomplete Nature: the mind emerged to matter”.
Nagel, Thomas (1974). “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”. The Philosophical Review. 83 (4): 435–450.
AI learning with animals
03
Jul
Beavers, termites and other creatures build structures in response to environmental problems,
the idea of using these strategies in autonomous robots was made by researchers at the University of Buffalo. In the new system the robot continuously monitors and modifies its terrain to make it more mobile, similar to the beaver that reacts to the water flow building a dam, what kind of intelligence is this, Thomas Nagel would ask what it’s like to be a beaver?
The problem is not so simple and the algorithms must change when there are unpredictable and complex spaces, for this resorted to a biological phenomenon called stigmatics, which is an indirect co-ordination reacting to a problem, biologists and zoologists study this. Researchers using this new algorithm, equipping the robot with a camera, a specialized software and a robotic arm that lifts and deposits objects, placed bean bags of different sizes around the area, in 10 tests, the robot changed from 33 to 170 bags, each time creating new ramps to reach their destination.
A release of this work is on the University of Buffalo website, and the paper will be presented last week (June 25-30) at the Robots: Science and Systems conference in Pittsburgh.
Absurdity and the evolution of the virtual
28
Jun
The term absurdity used by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, and serves as the “confusion” 
of Lucien Sfez, but Nagel finds this very human and went so far as to say: “Absurdity is one of the most humane things about us: a manifestation of our more advanced and interesting characteristics, “and this is very humanistic.
We have already posted here the refutation of Jean-Gabriel Ganascia on Artificial Intelligence, although the name may not be its own, the debate heated up with robot Sophia who received the Iraqi citizenship, but in a marketing move, and the use of “virtual assistants voice, “such as Cortana, Siri and Google Now.
Now the Amazon “toy” Alexa starts to enter the home, and it has a greater potential because the universe of Internet of Things (IoT) is growing and will speak.
Returning to Nagel, absurdity is not a hindrance to him, but an affirmation of humanism in his book “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974), he claims that it might make sense for you to ask yourself how you should feel to be a bat, but it would not make any sense to wonder how you would feel being a toaster.
This means that all this limitation they want imposed on machines is, contrary to what seems an anti-humanism, a rejection of the evolution of the means of production and of knowledge, wrapped with a sentimentality about “the human” in times of inhumanity .
Speaking in evolution of Nagel’s critical view of Darwinism and also of neo-Darwinism, though he sees its usefulness in the scientific debate, to which he states: “One of the legitimate tasks of philosophy is to investigate the limits of even the best developed and most advanced forms. of contemporary scientific knowledge.
It may be frustrating to recognize, but we are simply at the point in the history of human thought in which we find ourselves, and our successors will make discoveries and develop forms of understanding we do not dream about. ” Recalls Teilhard Chardin’s phrase: “the whole future is better than any past”
Can a butterfly wing strike cause a tornado?
13
Jun
The so-called butterfly effect, arose from an article by E. Lorenz in 1975 in an
atmospheric forecasting journal and for this reason was a long time concealed as a “phenomenon”.
The first question is this, there is even this article, because it is so little mentioned even more in Brazil since the name of the country appears in the title: “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set off the Tornado in Texas? “, yes the article does exist.
The other two questions posed by Lorenz himself are: if a single butterfly could generate a tornado, the earlier or subsequent wing beats could also cause the millions of other butterflies as well, and if they could cause they could also avoid them.
What Lorenz proposed in general terms + and that minuscule perturbations do not increase or decrease the frequency of events like tornados, the question he puts in his article is that the immediate influence of a single butterfly can make the presence of a tornado evolve in two different situations, being able in some very early instance to decide its presence or not.
This small event can be fundamental, linked to others, able to modify the regime of the winds and the temperature in a vast region, would spend hours and the meeting of the masses of air can provoke a heavy rain in areas that before was determined sun.
Hence Poincare enunciated in 1908 as “sensitivity of the initial conditions,” but it must be said that the formulation of Lorenz’s chaotic systems distanced itself much from what is called nonlinear systems in mathematics, from the idea that linear is the most common, while unstable or chaotic are unconventional.
Most systems are unstable, and this is fundamental, Heisenberg of whom we spoke in our previous post, said: “quantum physics has defeated the causality and certainty that stable and predictable systems offer us, its phrase is famous:” Physics quantum provided the definitive refutation of the principle of causality. ”
Small actions, in human systems, can also cause huge differences and lead human systems to stability or not
Postmodern dualism
07
Jun
Hegel is too tedious even for those who dominate philosophical discourse,
and I think in particular that the question of objectivism x subjectivism, natural x cultural, and other questions posed by thought of modernity, and which are current in everyday life, is already at another point.
The point I place is that of the infernal dichotomies of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: “Cannibal metaphysics: lines of poststructural anthropology” (Katz Editores, 2010), although there may be a Portuguese edition, a Spanish edition, translated from French, fell into my hands .
It caught my attention because he begins the book on issues that I think are fundamental: the return to things, perspectivism, multinaturalism and anthropological schizophrenia.
The beginning of the first chapter “Anti-narcissus” confesses that he abandoned the idea of making a book to write about it, as Borges did, and he posed a question: “what should be the conceptual anthropology of the peoples that he studies?” “Differences and internal mutations of anthropological theory are explained mainly (and from a historico-critical point of view only) by structures and conjunctures of social formations, ideological debates, intellectual fields and academic contexts that have emerged researchers ? is this the only relevant hypothesis? It would not be possible to proceed from a perspective that shows that the most interesting of the concepts, problems, entities and agents introduced by the anthropological theories have their origin in the imaginative capacity of the societies (or of the peoples, or of the collectives) that propose explain? “(Viveiros de Castro, 2010, p.14).
To these questions he finally penetrates the infernal dichotomy which I consider essential in modernity: “It will not be where the originality of anthropology resides, in this alliance, which is always equivocal but often fruitful, between conceptions and practices from the worlds of the” subject “and of the object” ? “(Idem).
The anti-Narcissus question then is epistemological, that is, politics, and the author states that if everyone is more or less in agreement that it requires a decolonization of thought, and in this lies the anti-narcissus.
Viveiro de Castro’s speech is consistent because he affirms that the “other” is always thought and “invented” according to the sordid interests of the West, and then will discuss “perspectivism” and “multiculturalism”, it is impossible to synthesize them in a post, then we only punctuate these perspectives,
Viveiro de Castro’s speech is consistent because he affirms that the “other” is always thought and “invented” according to the sordid interests of the West, and then will discuss “perspectivism” and “multiculturalism”, it is impossible to synthesize them in a post, then we only punctuate these perspectives, called by the author of “cannibals” or metaphysics of predation.
Perspectivism is the idea that every theory is particular and depends on the “perspective of the subject,” or multiculturalism is the idea of the “coexistence” of many cultures in different regions, but both lack and a “decolonization” of thought, so the dichotomy remains .
The dualism of Kant
06
Jun
Although Kant made a critique of Descartes, he did not penetrate the
question body and consciousness (or mind as many want), but in what he considered the core of Cartesian thought to be the “representation” of things (phenomena):
“All our intuition is no more than the representation of a phenomenon; the things we perceive are not in themselves as we perceive them, nor the relations between them are in themselves as they appear to us;
It is by what he calls a “thing” that can be confused as the phenomenon, but it is the thesis that the human being has a kind of software in his head that interprets the world: the brain is not a container to where they are ” tossed “the objects of the world, he” naturally “processes the culture of the world and sees it in a certain way.
If I lived in our time I would say that it is a painting, not a photograph, and yet I would say that the two are “representations” because it is not possible to conceive the objective reality, only subjective, that is, in the subject’s mind, dualistic
Its kind of dualism is the opposition between the concepts of “derived intuition” on the one hand, and “original intuition”, on the other hand, not an original culture but intuition.
Already the “derived intuition” is, according to Kant, the “sensible intuition” of the human being; and “original intuition” is the “intellectual intuition” that Kant says is divine and not cultural.
Do not be happy the religious, although most understand this as “transcendence” and gave in the “vague” religiosity of today, which states that any intuition is of the “Holy Spirit”, without relation to objectivity, here is the Pure Kant.
The great Kantian problem that will reflect in philosophy, that which Marx said of the old Hegelians, where Man and God are in totally separate realities and without some possibility of ontological interaction, is the “dead” God.
The Kantian thought that I consider the most essential is that:
“And if we take from the center our subject, or even the subjective constitution of the sensibility in general, the whole constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, as well as space and time, would disappear because, as phenomena, they can not exist in themselves, but only in us. ”
When modern physics discovers that space and time are not absolute, Kant’s center of gravity is “swayed” and objectivity is questioned because the subject becomes part of the phenomenon, so it is not only representation, but “ontological” part.
The rationalistic dualism
05
Jun
The basis of all Western rationalism lies in Cartesian dualism, its most essential
foundation being in res-extensive and res-cogitans, at bottom is the idea that there is a “thinking” and a “bodily” substance, mistranslated as body-mind dichotomy, in fact in terms of current philosophy is the idea that separates corporeity from historical consciousness.
Gadamer treated this in a very thorough way, first separating romantic historical consciousness, analyzing Dilthey, and then the question of theory and practice, commending the theory, against the “practitioners” who are basically modern empiricists.
Extensive Rex is what we call a thing as a material substance, while res cogitans is the thought substance, or thinking thing; in fact, the body-mind dualism is the psychophysicist, which can also be thought in present terms as body-consciousness.
The Cartesian code then what is it? is something that does not suspend the ego, the self of contemporary individualism, so it may also be called ego cogitans, as some authors do, case of Husserl and Gadamer.
The ideas that Descartes have phenomenological roots are mistaken, the reading of Husserl’s text: “from naive objectivism to transcendental subjectivism,” thus finding the “absolute rational foundation” of all positive sciences is a hasty interpretation, since they will be questioned and “included at a single stroke in the parenthesis of the epokhé,” it being known that the epokhe, as well as prior to Cartesian thought, had for ancient philosophy a complete “emptying” of categories and of the ego itself to penetrate a-letheia.
So the being of the cogitans is not, to be essential, but only residual; , not because of the transcendental reduction to “every conceivable entity for me and every sphere of being of such a being” to the absolute ego, but through logical and mathematical abstraction, having nothing to do with the transcendent.
Husserl is clear in pointing out that in § 10 of Cartesian Meditations entitled “How Descartes lacked transcendental guidance,” it is possible to grasp the pure self and its cogitationes.
The cogito ergo sum is therefore not an epokhé, for it does not suspend its own ego and its preconceptions and the tabula rasa which will be an addition of Kant will also have problems.
The first quantum computer hub
30
May
The North Carolina State Unit was chosen by IBM to have the first Quantum Computing Hub
(Q Hub that became part of IBM’s Network Q), as well as the first networks linking some universities.
On December 5, 1969, ARPANET joined the Research Agency of the US Department of Defense, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) at Menlo Park, the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and the University of Utah (photo).
Students, faculty and researchers will be able to access IBM’s 20-bit supercomputer to solve classic computing problems that would take a long time to process, now they will be done in a few minutes depending on the problem.
Bob Sutor of IBM Research said “we can not create a computer with 10% of the Earth’s atoms, but even so, with the quantum computer we can represent exactly this information”, according to a post on Techinician Online.
IBM’s plan is more audacious, with Fortune 500 companies and universities working to solve larger problems more quickly through the Q Network, while NC State will be collaborating with local organizations to solve complex equations.
NC State faculty are developing both undergraduate and graduate courses to use quantum computing to build their knowledge in anticipation of the hub’s operational debut this fall (in September).
We are so connected this way
24
May
The so-called “small world” phenomenon, worked on and addressed in Social Network Analysis (not to be
confused with social media) is the idea that everyone can be connected through only six degrees of separation, and this has inspired not only scientists , but also artists, journalists, business people and the general public since the idea emerged in a 1990 John Guare play.
Despite recent appearances of this concept in the media, illustrating the widespread belief in universal connectivity, there is also controversy over the same claim, and Barabási’s non-scale model is one of them, though his book Linked: the New Science of networks (2009) is the best reading of the topic.
Two examples cited are “Xing,” a network of potential subscribers referring to the idea of ”six degrees of separation,” and the attempt by the American television network ABC to conduct its own version of an experiment to test the same idea , through a “six degree” charity initiative using the concept on their website in an attempt to collect donations to a network of various charities.
Although Milgram’s experiment has already dealt with the subject, a manuscript by Pool and Kochen (Contacts and influence Social Networks, 1 (1978)) circulating around 1958 would have been the first version of the idea, but it was only published 20 years later, then not everyone gives credit.
The important thing about Pool and Kochen’s work is that they tried to give a mathematical structure to their “contact networks” following the path of other theorist as the mathematician. Rapoport (Spread of information through a population with socio-structural bias: I. Assumption of transitivity, 1953).
One prank to take this test is to use “Bancon’s Oracle” (by Kevin Bacon) on oracleofbacon.org and get the connection of Pope Francisco with Toshirô Mifune, for co-performances in films, the pope has already participated in two movies (see above)
