Recognizable Meaning
Drs Tim Scarfe and Keith Duggar recently (May 2023 or thereabouts) interviewed Stephen Wolfram on the proximity of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), in particular with respect to coupling ChatGPT, a feedforward but static natural language model of how humans currently use all available human knowledge, with downstream computation, which is capable of increasing human knowledge and which today is well-captured by symbolic programming using Wolfram Language.
The discussion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5WZhCBRDpU&t=1028) ranges from the nature of understanding to feedback into the model to computations without semantic or cognitive sense to Wolfram’s concept of the limit (entangled) on all possible computations (the ruliad) to living with computational irreducibility to conceivability and interestingness to positive science unintelligible to human beings.
One is reminded here of C G Jung’s 1933 characterization of the difference between psychological and visionary experience:
The profound difference between the first and second parts of Faust marks the difference between the psychological and the visionary modes of artistic creation. The latter reverses all the conditions of the former. The experience that furnishes the material for artistic expression is no longer familiar. It is a strange something that derives its existence from the hinterland of man’s mind—that suggests the abyss of time separating us from pre-human ages, or evokes a super-human world of contrasting light and darkness. It is a primordial experience which surpasses man’s understanding, and to which he is therefore in danger of succumbing.
The value and the force of the experience are given by its enormity. It arises from timeless depths; it is foreign and cold, many-sided, demonic and grotesque. A grimly ridiculous sample of the eternal chaos—”a crime of injured sovereignty,” to use Nietzsche’s words—it bursts asunder our human standards of value and of æsthetic form. The disturbing vision of monstrous and meaningless happenings that in every way exceed the grasp of human feeling and comprehension makes quite other demands upon the powers of the artist than do the experiences of the foreground of life.
These never rend the curtain that veils the cosmos; they never transcend the bounds of the humanly possible, and for this reason are readily shaped to the demands of art, no matter how great a shock to the individual they may be. But the primordial experiences rend from top to bottom the curtain upon which is painted the picture of an ordered world, and allow a glimpse into the unfathomed abyss of what has not yet become. Is it a vision of other worlds, or of the obscuration of the spirit, or of the beginning of things before the age of man, or of the unborn generations of the future? We cannot say that it is any or none of these.
Shaping—reshaping—The eternal spirit’s eternal pastime.
C G Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (p. 175-176)
We now ask, With the advent of AGI, and with its manifest architectural analogies with nighttime consciousness, how will human society of the upcoming epoch manage to incorporate Jung’s visionary category into its day-to-day fabric? Will we do better or worse than we do today? What will a theory of conversation do for us?
For a discussion of this essay with InflectionAI’s Pi, click here.
Machine Learning Street Talk, May 2023