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Technology (AI) is particularly suited for individual *early learning* because, unlike in classrooms with 20+ students to one teacher, students can more efficiently and at their own pace acquire and master all the necessary skills and tools they'll need for further learning of more complex topics.

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Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · last mo.

The answer is obvious👇 According to the "Betteridge's law of headlines"-"any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word *NO*," because "if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion."😉 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteri...

Betteridge's law of headlines - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

How about a jet-lagged live posting while I read? Trying to read this because I keep getting tagged in posts about it, but the first paragraph already contains synthetic text (a quote from Claude). I will skip that bit and persevere... www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Howard Pattee defining *internal* #description and #construction as the fundamental requirements for #life and other life related qualities such as (autonomous) #agency, #consciousness ... It is interesting that not even von Neumann's UC would qualify. Excerpts from: www.academia.edu/6576779/Rose...

PATTEE Let me say it another way. Let me begin with a biological
definition, and then try to translate that into the physical terminology.
Living systems consist of a gene which is translated and read out into the
phenotype or the organism. The whole idea of evolution depends on the
distinction between the genotype and phenotype, and I'm willing to
accept this as the basic requirement for life. The question then is: what are
the minimum conditions for a genotype-phenotype system?
Now, in order not to use those same words, I translate them into a
*description-construction system,' and then ask what that means in physi-
cal terms. First of all (I suppose this is a philosophical presupposition), I
look on the world the physicists think about as being primarily involved
with space, time, matter,and energy, and the observables that human
beings choose as connected with dynamical equations that relate these
observables to space and time. In none of these non-living systems do we
find internal descriptions. At least that's not the way we look at physics;
we look at it as autonomous and inexorable motions or processes that go
on according to the laws of nature. We can describe this system and make
measurements on it, but the system can only behave according to the laws
of nature. In living systems, however, we have the process of internal
self-description. They also appear autonomous, but when we describe a
living system, we must include the genetic input, which is, in effect, a
constraint on the laws of motion. Through the genetic code, there are
certain molecules - the DNAS - which exert a very peculiar effect on the

91 Robert Rosen, Howard Hunt Pattee, and Raymond L. Somorjai

dynamics of the system, peculiar in the sense of physics. And I believe
that the minimum requirement for this peculiar type of interaction is a
self-describing, self-interpreting system; this is the basis of self-replica-
tion and hence evolution. Now, the particular living systems that we ob-
serve today are regarded by most molecular biologists as the only systems,
or at least the only interesting systems. I think that this is not the most
useful way to look at the nature of life. I think one should ask the ques-
tion: What are the essential properties of such a system? One reason I
suspect that the particular system that now exists is not the most funda-
mental is that all description-construction systems that I know have an
essential arbitrariness about them. Jacques Monod calls this the principle
of gratuity, which is a good way to say it, but I prefer just to call it arbitrari-
ness, in the mathematical sense. We label things in mathematics arbitrar-
ily, which means nothing more than we have a definite symbol; some-
thing is chosen absolutely, but that which is chosen is not really relevant.
Now, the real mystery is how, from an inexorable physical dynamics, one
could ever achieve an arbitrary self-coding, self-describing system. I
would repeat that the essential requirement of life is that it is a self-
describing, self-constructing system.

Quite interesting review of the problem of student and teacher #agency in contemporary learning environments with lots of references for further study. Published 2 days ago. 2k views 1k downloads. www.academia.edu/3071-0286/2/...

Agency in the age of generative AI: a critical review of educational implications

Conversations regarding the societal implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and its integration into educational processes are ongoing. An area of great significance in this regard is agency, in...

academia.edu

Santa Fe Institute @sfiscience.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I just had a thought that #Communism should probably be reinvented to become a "good" and "holly" word like its "sister" #Communion. They are both about the #art, #science and #politics of living in a #Community.

Join us tomorrow for SFI’s Community Lecture with Thalia Wheatley. Wheatley will explore conversation as a powerful mechanism for coupling minds — and what this means in the age of AI. 7:30 pm MT | Free tickets: lensic.org/events/the-b... or watch the live stream on SFI’s YouTube

Tech Policy Press@techpolicypress.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Of course. Design entails *intent* and some familiarity with *user experience* of which AI has none. Also, designers who don't "like to do good by the people they design products for" are not worthy of being called that, and all the "good old designers" were always aware of what Toyama popularizes.

As a designer who values doing good by the people that I design products for, those experiences
made clear to me that the incentives of the tech industry often were at odds with how tech
companies branded themselves as doing good in the world. Kentaro Toyama popularized the idea
that technology by itself does not solve social problems, but that it only amplifies human intent
and capacity. That is, technology amplifies existing power structures and incentives, instead of
acting as a solution to them. In line with this theory, I believe that AI has simply amplified the
incentives that currently exist in the tech industry, and the benefits that AI companies tout as
evidence of their ability to change the world only reveal the values that underpin how decisions are
made within the tech industry.

AI didn't kill design—it exposed what design was always doing, argues Zach Deocadiz. He says AI makes more visible that the design process has long served company goals over users. Part of a student essay series with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

#Emergence Is Not #Engineering Stuart Kauffman interview @noemamag.com www.noemamag.com/emergence-is...

Kauffman: What it means existentially is the end of metaphysical
insurance.

The West has lived with a kind of metaphysical insurance policy: All
that is possible already exists. The world is a machine whose
workings can be deduced. We can come to know, hence master,
hence have dominion. This is Francis Bacon in 1620. Knowledge of
the mechanical world for mastery, for dominion, for the ever
betterment of humanity. If not me, then Reason. If not Reason, then
God. If not God, then Physics.

The Third Transition, the "indefinite," says: There is no ultimate
insurer of the total future. That doesn't mean chaos. It means
something more unsettling: Order exists, but it is partly made.
Therefore, we are participants rather than spectators, co-creators
rather than controllers. We can guide and constrain but not
command and entail. This is the emotional "shock": It removes the
hidden promise that "the future is already written somewhere, and
we can come to know it."

Ivo@velitchkov.eu · 2mo ago

Symbolic logic is the only / standard / correct way for thinking properly. Or, is it?

Re [[boundary logic]], see also www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy... [[LoF]]

Rose Judson@rosejudson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The use of AI in creative work is quite easy to spot and a sure path to mediocrity for the people and organizations that use it. All *tools* are like that, built to do the job without *thinking*.😊

I am also a person in marketing, and the reliance on AI drives me nuts. It is literally designed to generate a statistically average output. The whole point of messaging is to have a specific voice that speaks to a specific audience!

#Phenomenology and #Constructivism (Autopoiesis) are "two sides of the same coin." Edmund Husserl’s concept of the #life-world (Lebenswelt) is the same as Humberto Maturana's concept of #praxis-of-living. We can only #know and talk about what we #experience. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The life-world as the empirical basis of science - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences

The empirical foundation of science has often been characterised in terms of the observable-unobservable distinction, developed either syntactically, as a set of statements, or semantically, as aspect...

link.springer.com

I always found interesting that #Substance, #Understanding and #System, all have the same Proto-Indo-European root "-sta" meaning "to stand, set down, make or be firm..." Also things like: the system being in a particular #state, an individual or group having and maintaining a particular #stance...🙂

system (n.)

1610s, "the whole creation, the universe," from Late Latin systema "an arrangement, system," from Greek systema "organized whole, a whole compounded of parts," from stem of synistanai "to place together, organize, form in order," from syn- "together" (see syn-) + root of histanai "cause to stand" (from PIE root *sta- "to stand, make or be firm"). The notion is "a combination or assemblage of parts or things forming or adjusted as a regular and connected whole."

#Platonism is a shortcut with which one can explain anything by referring to forms that reside in some "platonic space." An evolving #Physicalism is much more plausible (and interesting) Two views Michael Levin thoughtforms.life/platonic-spa... Carlo Rovelli www.smithsonianmag.com/science-natu...

An empirical claim that I want to make strongly is this: we already know physicalism is incomplete, because engineers and evolution exploit many "free lunches" - patterns that are useful and guide events in the physical world but are not themselves explained, set, or modifiable by the laws of physics. This includes things like facts about prime numbers, Feigenbaum's constants, and many aspects of computation. Nothing you do in the physical world, even if you can modify all the constants at the start of the big bang, will change those truths.

Mathematicians are already very comfortable with this - the old idea (Plato, Pythagoras, etc.) that there is a non-physical space of truths which we discover, not invent, and that this space has a structure that enables exploration. I make the conjecture that this space contains not only low-agency forms like facts about triangles and the truths of number theory, but also a very wide variety of high-agency patterns that we call kinds of minds. On this view, physical bodies don't create, or even connect to (and thus have) minds - instead, minds are the patterns, with their ingressions into the physical world enabled by the pointers of natural or synthetic bodies. In other words, whenever anything is built - machines, Al's, biobots, hybrots, embryos, etc. - it acts as an interface to numerous patterns from this space of forms to which guide its form and behavior beyond what any algorithm or material architecture explicitly provides.

Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at Aix-Marseille University in France, points to the example of Euclidean geometry -the geometry of flat space that many of us learned in high school. (Students who learn that an equilateral triangle has three angles of 60 degrees each, or that the sum of the squares of the two shorter sides of a right-triangle equals the square of the hypotenuse-i.e. the Pythagorean theorem-are doing Euclidean geometry.) A Platonist might argue that the findings of Euclidean geometry "feel" universal-but they are no such thing, Rovelli says. "It's only because we happen to live in a place that happens to be strangely flat that we came up with this idea of Euclidean geometry as a 'natural thing' that everyone should do," he says. "If the earth had been a little bit smaller, so that we saw the curvature of the earth, we would have never developed Euclidean geometry. Remember 'geometry' means 'measurement of the earth, and the earth is round. We would have developed spherical geometry instead."

Rovelli goes further, calling into question the universality of the natural numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4 ... To most of us, and certainly to a Platonist, the natural numbers seem, well, natural. Were we to meet those intelligent aliens, they would know exactly what we meant when we said that 2 + 2 = 4 (once the statement was translated into their language). Not so fast, says Rovelli. Counting "only exists where you have stones, trees, people-individual, countable things," he says. "Why should that be any more fundamental than, say, the mathematics of fluids?" If intelligent creatures were found living within, say, the clouds of Jupiter's atmosphere, they might have no intuition at all for counting, or for the natural numbers, Rovelli says. Presumably we could teach them about natural numbers-just like we could teach them the rules of chess-but if Rovelli is right, it suggests this branch of mathematics is not as universal as the Platonists imagine.

Noema Magazine@noemamag.com · 3mo ago

Nice summary. I thought this should have been obvious to anyone with a conscious mind having the capacity for reasoning or mental computation :-) Like it or not #life *IS* a special (self-producing) arrangement of matter and energy and nothing like other stuff produced by someone or something else.

In an award-winning piece for the @berggruen.org Essay Prize Competition, renowned neuroscientist @anilseth.bsky.social explains why consciousness is more likely a property of life than computation.

The "minds everywhere" proponents should read this👇 From: Donaldson R. E. (ed.) Texts in cybernetic theory: An in-depth exploration of the thought of Humberto Maturana, William T. Powers, and Ernst von Glasersfeld. American Society for Cybernetics (ASC), Felton CA asc-cybernetics.org/publications...

ONTOLOGY OF OBSERVING:

THE BIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF SELF CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE PHYSICAL DOMAIN OF EXISTENCE

Humberto R. Maturana

1. PURPOSE

My purpose in this essay is to explain cognition as a biological phenomenon, and to show, in the process, how language arises and gives origin to self consciousness, revealing the ontological foundations of the physical domain of existence as a limiting cognitive domain. In order to do this, I shall start from two unavoidable experiential conditions that are at the same time my problem and my explanatory instruments, namely: a) that cognition, as is apparent in the fact that any alteration of the biology of our nervous system alters our cognitive capacities, is a biological phenomenon that must be explained as such; and b) that we, as is apparent in this very same essay, exist as human beings in language using language for our explanations. These two experiential conditions are my starting point because I must be in them in any explanatory attempt; they are my problem because I choose to explain them; and they are my unavoidable instruments because I must use cognition and language in order to explain cognition and language.

The art of the deal🙂 Dr. Strangelove diplomacy: "It's the same people making the same kinds of decisions, assuming that they can impose their reality on everybody else, but they forget everybody else has an agency, everybody else has domestic audiences." www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

Transhumanists may not understand what #cybernetics is all about. It was never about "improving the human" or saying that nature, mind and machine are equal. It is about finding analogies and making machines that imitate nature and behave as animals or brains ... www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Nevertheless, the literal equalization between nature, mind, and machine,
although being cybernetic par excellence, does find impetus in a profound motivation for improving "the human"-to the point that the price to pay (i.e., its identification with a device that one can tinker with, fix, and enhance) turned out to be a bargain. That impulse is what drives transhumanism. Hence, my position is that both transhumanism and cybernetics represent two sides of the same coin-perhaps transhumanism being the thickest part of the coin. In fact, I advanced that the best way to understand cybernetics-its drive, eccentricity, and its luring aura-is best couched within the broader framework of transhumanism. The latter, understood as an immemorial longing (Malapi-Nelson 2017, chapters 9, and 10) for improving the human condition, indeed found in cybernetics its most radical expression.

Howard Pattee has one of the most consequential, comprehensive and well thought approaches in modern evolutionary biology. Unfortunately, many just try to fit bits and pieces of his theories into boxes instead of trying to understand the philosophy behind the science www.academia.edu/127552909/Re...

Umerez is correct that until recently I was unaware of the new field of
biosemiotics. In fact, until I read Kull's (2007a) and Favareau's (2007) histories I had no idea of how the current discipline of biosemiotics originated or how it had been promoted by Sebeok, Hoffmeyer, Barbieri, and others. As judged by its current literature, Umerez is also justified in concluding, "that Pattee is not properly a biosemiotician." I have no problem being an improper biosemiotician as long as I pass as a proper physicist and evolutionary biologist. Jon continues, "His [Pattee's]
perspective has not been and it is not semiotic. His use of linguistic vocabulary: language, code, symbol, etc, is just in plain terms and not as part of a specialized terminology." That is true. The symbol-matter problem that I consider fundamental is primarily a physics problem. I use conventional terminology from the culture of physics, and I do not coin words. In my papers I try to credit the experts who influenced my thinking, and none of them are semioticians.

MIT Press@mitpress.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Again, a typical case of conflating #consciousness with #cognition which is for the most part in most animals and other living things unconscious. Consciousness entails deliberate (computed) actions that go against genetic "urges." Saying that "brute matter itself" may be conscious speak for itself

Experience is in unexpected places, including in all animals, large and small, and perhaps even in brute matter itself, writes Christof Koch:

I don't know how anyone can write such an extensive tractate on #life and #consciousness without ever making a distinction between holonomic and non-holonomic constraints and including #HH_Pattee 's #Hierachy_theory and 'the physical basis of the origins of life'. www.frontiersin.org/journals/phy...