Cognition is wordless, dude. The entire premise of it is built upon layers of sharp wave ripples that integrate memory from sense, emotion and landmark/non-landmark.
This is wax fruit. It's like sportscasting what cognition appears to be doing from a post-hoc, using things already patterned.
You're right about substrate. But you're missing the point about utility.
I'm not debating the term is wrong. It IS wrong. I agree. THat's kind of my point. I'm saying a wrong term is yielding measurably positive results and it's being dismissed because it's not right.
For whatever reason, the term works. When "Cognition" is paired with Plato's modes and a single line of guidance, there's a big point improvement.
Measurable.
Replicable across models.
It seems, from what I can tell, to give the LLM the right lens to look through from the outset and therefore sends it down the right path early on.
If it's wax fruit, prove it. I am totally up for being proved wrong and someone showing me that those few words don't make a big difference.
Again, I agree. Cognition is way too vague a term.
You're actually making the argument FOR what I'm saying.
From what I can see, Buzsáki says "cognition" is bad for neuroscience BECAUSE it's philosophically loaded.
Doesn't that reinforce my point that it's good for LLM engineering PRECISELY because it's philosophically loaded?
Basically, if cognition is philosophically inherited then maybe that's why it's working for LLMs with Plato's model. Because training corpora are philosophy-heavy?
No, it's folk science. It isn't vague, it's an illusion. Cognition is false on all counts because it's folk science impregnating science and CS (and philosophy). Read his argument carefully, don't just select a downstream argument, that's not scientifically viable. Cognition doesn't exist because it's based in the lowest res meaning possible. Sequestered cause/effect, it's a magic trick. Like LLMs.
You keep reinforcing my point. Absolutely true that folk psychology impregnates CS. I mean, look at Churchland. Totally spot on with stuff being flawed.
I am not disputing that. It is flawed. I agree. But what if those flaws impregnate a system to the point they produce functional utility? Because when a system is trained on that same folk psychology, it can yield measurable results.
This isn't about "does cognition exist", or even "is cognition correct". It's about "what happens when you stop listening to theory and start looking at empirical evidence that seems to show that these structured relational patterns are producing measurable differences." If its distinguishable empirically, does it matter if it's "folk science", "vague" or "an illusion".
If I add 10 words to a prompt, regardless of what any expert says, and it actually produces better quality, isn't that worth exploring?
Anyway, let's see what independent testing shows. We might be hitting a philosophical impasse.
Wrong. Materialistic only got us to a level. Now we're looking past materialism in neural reuse, coordination dynamics and ecological psychology and neurobiology. The causes are out there in contradictory correlations.
A word is a material? You can show me the brain state that corresponds repeatedly and with continuous accuracy a single word? I don't think so.
You can train a computer to correspond to an individual's idiosyncratic brain state for their word voxels, but no one has yet to reduce the material to a single repeatable voxel state.
“We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.”
Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024
The problem with the materialist POV is it doesn't solve the most basic question of brain states. No not everything is a material.
There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that require material to some extent, but are not material themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not even be a requirement of life. We may just be material sinks.
> There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that require material to some extent, but are not material themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not even be a requirement of life. We may just be material sinks.
I understand.
There is a however a flaw in that thinking.
There is no oscillation that exists outside of some material/medium to oscillate. I agree it is important to distinguish the water from the wave. There is no light wave without the photon.
Thus - I strongly suspect - there is no consciousness without the brain (or similar medium).
It's not a mind body problem, unfortunately, it's problem of hard indeterminism. We lack free will but the universe is not necessarily deterministic. Chaos has some level of intervention, like quantum darwinism, or gravity probability that is expressed somewhere between physical and process. This may be the interzone both share that is where the gateway exists, how DNA emerges, how neurons are evolved. The material may be inseparable both at origin and inexorably from the process, making the material simply the partner to the process. So materialism may simply be an illusion by itself.
As all our explanations are immaterial, they are post hoc observations, to claim any direction to the role of material is to sportscast the existence of material. There is no consciousness without the process, the material may be secondary as its explanation is a process as well.
We haven't found the format that finds the material in its place yet, whether its eliminative materialism, or another state-process pairing that cuts materialism down to a partner role. The jury is still out, but materialism isn't the answer.
Do you thing emergent properties are somehow not materialist? Do you know what the word means? Do you think it means only things that make a noise when you knock on them exist? You seem to be very confused about the conversation we're having.
If you're bringing up emergence when I've already raised ideas of ecological relations, then it's you who must be very confused about the conversation we're having.
I mean, the brain is hardware as in we can take things like neurons and force them to do things like computation in a standalone fashion (biological computer). An FPGA would be the closest non-biological thing we've created. It's hardware that can be programmed like software.
Maybe we need a new acronym. Self Programmable Neuron Array. SPNA.
Ah, psychologists contriving arguments on why the brain isn't some particular thing or another. Or, that "phycologist learns about fuzzy edge/component compression"
The bottleneck is epistemology via semantics. It's inherent to words which many things to different people. LLMs have no chance against semantic diffusion and chaos. They're subject to them unless some status-bearer decides the semantic.
Politics is over until we solve the initial condition, by placing syntax above grammar. Action over meaning etc.
Tech accelerated, horizontalized and automated units that could barely keep their meaning loads stable at printed paper, radio and TV.
As a post-symbolic, post-causal thinker (not a "socialist" which is also political nonsense), economics is purely the translation to settlement coercion for the production of Myth of the State/center-worshipping ("richest citizens in the world" in what sense? cash? real estate? these are arbitrary variables).
Until we move to measurement (ie analog) rather than binary statistics (which is still merely a project based in counting, yes, 1,2,3) then we are totally informationally emasculated.
Wealth is arbitrary post settlement. Show me a currency from 700AD still traded on a regulated market. In that sense, wealth is a decadent category the West will be destroyed by, look at the current state of oligarchy, particularly tech. There's little if any ecological parity in these displays of wealth and extraction status.
My ideology is the replacement of symbols with measurement. I have no relationship with politics, which is clearly a dinosaur still walking the Earth. Politics will vanish in the post-symbolic like a disease we cured easily.
No economics is like any word, it's arbitrary, that is HOW it needs a definition that varies from state to state.
"Economic theory has never gotten any better at prediction. Its explanations are always after the fact. The mathematical models economists have devoted themselves to for more than a century can’t be improved to enhance their empirical relevance." Alex Rosenberg
The deadness of the West is so unusual, as if the whole enterprise was for self-extinction of a way of poetically enhancing words, narratives and myths/religion. The West was simply a temporary state.
The west assumed individual happiness (politics, entertainment, biographical myth making, celebrity) was the path to collective happiness. But of course, in our agentic languages, that was simply the hydra of our undoing.
The west was like a temporary infection that colonized and dominated more collective people, but now we will be subsumed if we don’t destroy the world in a suicidal urge to dominate
> Wealth is arbitrary post settlement. Show me a currency from 700AD still traded on a regulated market. In that sense, wealth is a decadent category the West will be destroyed by, look at the current state of oligarchy, particularly tech. There's little if any ecological parity in these displays of wealth and extraction status.
Is this meant to be post-modern? Whatever you feel about wealth, wealthier citizens overall are happier and have a better quality of life. Do you think people are clamouring to immigrate to the West for the weather?
> I have no relationship with politics
LMFAO. Dress it up all you want. You're either ideological or you aren't, you can't have your cake and eat it too. You're free to criticize Capitalism and/or Liberalism, but in doing so you can't pretend you believe in nothing that can be defined in political terms.
> Rosenberg quote
Economics doesn't try to predict what policymakers and irrational actors do. But it's generally good at forecasting some effects from changes along specific dimensions; if it wasn't, microeconomics and central banking wouldn't matter. If the interest rate increases 10 points overnight, what happens - nothing?
We're already verging on decentralized, and we've been horizontalizing since 1995. If you're not aware of these trends leaving behind models, discarding politics, recognizing the narrative seclusions of economic policy, then you have your head in some 20th C think-tank or consultancy immobility syndrome.
These things are dinosaurs. States are looming as extinct, religion, history, myth, storytelling are ancient tools. I'd start looking around outside of the C suite.
Think what's already under development that disintegrates out stodgy ideas of "wealth", currencyless societies, tokens, analog measurement replacing binary, syntax instead of grammar.
Ye olde Friedman-Galbraith (and any edgy sounding theorist) promoting currency, quant, interest, game-theory about economies are witch doctors that have already been unmasked by scientists. I've linked one above a few entries up.
Think for yourself, don't toe the line into senescence. Don't replay your father's tired ideas about wealth.
There is no such thing as economic science. If you can find an empirical, demonstration of mental events, biology, correlating value through arbitrary means, I'm all ears. Until I see proof, this is witch doctor level thinking hoisted onto the West as a self-immolation project.
Of course, both scientific approaches of history and myth are the work of fabulists. eg Jung, Campbell. The point is to examine the myth and then history as the source of causal illusions.
“The myth is the prototypal, fundamental, integrative mind tool … to integrate a variety of events in a temporal and causal framework.” Merlin Donald
That's folk science, what Donald is describing (he admit this in Origins of the Modern Mind).
Remember that the causal framework must be evaded to reach scientific correlations, where multiple contradictions can lead to knowledge. Myth and history were addictive hiccups that trapped humans in way simplistic explanations.
We evade this "plain English" silliness, like economics, or go bust.
That's simply the function of narrative using words. How can anything built subjectively in symbols and cause and effect reach consensus, correlational objectivity?
They can't. Language is for confirmation bias first and foremost. It embeds the illusion of subjective perspective in every statement.
We quit language, replace it, or go down for the count.
"It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world, and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world, it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions – the unrepeatable and the unpredictable – are what technology abolishes. The feeling is one of loss of the world."
Knausgaard
Math has no relationship to behavior, nor do almost all terms used to describe behavior, engineers should have already grasped cog-sci is folk science.
If engineers remain uneducated in this way, you'll become sycophants led as lemmings by cult figures like Alexander.
We're talking about "you obviously can reason about politics in the same way one can reason about anything else that doesn't behave rationally, like fish"
Lol what? You just posted a cog-sci op ed whose first third rambles on being refused publication decades prior. (The second two thirds pretends behavioural neutoanatomy, where we stimulate brain structures to see what happens, doesn’t exist.)
You don't even grasp what that paper is. It's not an op-ed, it's a theory/review article with empirical evidence that's increased many percentages since it was refused publication, now it's a primary approach in neurobiology. Read carefully.
Math may be able to model those things momentarily, but ultimately "all models are wrong yet some are helpful" so YES math has no relationship to behavior, it cannot reference it. It can only symbolically (arbitrarily) model it.
> ultimately "all models are wrong yet some are helpful" so YES math has no relationship to behavior, it cannot reference it. It can only symbolically (arbitrarily) model it
Sure, nothing is knowable. Great if you’re trying to get social sciences funding. Not super useful for anything practical.
What's coming: Spatial intel (not Apple spatial computing) is a top-down/bottom-up direct perception that everyone participates in. It bypasses binary, renders it obsolete. Makes AI look puny and overbuilt, needs only analog and only partially. Wipes away the symbolic interruption we've been addicted and dumbed down inside.
This is wax fruit. It's like sportscasting what cognition appears to be doing from a post-hoc, using things already patterned.