Importance of Symbolic Reality
In the West, most people live in a rather exclusively conceptual (view upon) reality. The negligence of the symbolic (view upon) reality leads to mental impoverishment and suffering. Symbolic reality is everywhere. This is because complexity is everywhere. That makes reality (the human environment) too intractable for merely conceptual communication in both directions. This means Read the full article…
Quality of Depth
Most people would agree that ‘quality of depth’ is profoundly relevant to them personally. At the same time, many may disagree about what it entails. It’s a challenging concept. It’s already challenging to grasp ‘human depth’ since subconceptual processing – therefore also the difficulty to conceptually get it – is an inextricable feature. ‘Deep’ itself Read the full article…
Many Intelligences
Intelligence can take many forms to such a diverse degree that talking about many intelligences is appropriate. Where does this thinking lead us to? This is not a discussion about whether or not there is ‘plant intelligence.’ More important is the thinking about your intelligence. Are you simply a being that enjoys the ‘phenomenon of Read the full article…
How Compassion Leads to Motivation
Compassion changes people from the inside out as nothing else does. If you haven’t done so yet, then please read about Compassion, basically before continuing. From the inside out True motivation starts deep inside — this is, with broadly distributed mental-neuronal patterns (MNPs) acting in parallel. In Compassion, we see substantially more overlap of MNPs Read the full article…
From Compression to Prediction
Compressing information can intriguingly lead to enhanced predictive capabilities. This general scheme is recognizable in many contexts ― organic and artificial. Life itself Life can be understood as a local defense against universal entropy (chaos or heightening of chaos). Within any bubble of life, there is a concentration of resources to this aim. At the Read the full article…
Believe in Your Self!
Unfortunately, many people are not inclined to deeply believe in their <Inner Strength>. Nevertheless, especially nowadays, global fate depends on it. This unbelief is not typical to a specific culture. Its ubiquity means that either: It’s a natural given, making people genetically predisposed to not believe in themselves. It’s a cultural thing in a general Read the full article…
The Path from Implicit to Explicit Knowledge
Implicit: It’s there, but we don’t readily know how, neither why it works. Explicit: We can readily follow each step. This is more or less the same move as from intractable to tractable or from competence to comprehension. But how? Emergence If something comes out, it must have been in ― one way or another. Read the full article…
When Enlightenment becomes Dark
Talking about Western Enlightenment, logically, things tend to become darker when pushing reason forward on a defunct view of the human being. You may already know I’m talking about the subconceptual level of mental processing. If you don’t, please make sure to first read some blogs about it. Smartness is not enough. Being able to Read the full article…
About Confabulation
Depending on how exact you want inferences to be, humans are born confabulators. Not surprisingly, we also see much confabulation in present-day generative pre-trained transformers (GPT). Confabulation is a look-alike but inexact information. Note that in the GPT field, this is nowadays called hallucination. Confabulation is inherent to mental ‘parallel distributed processing’ (PDP). Humans and Read the full article…
Parallel Distributed Processing
In the mental sphere, Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) is nature’s way to reach ever more complexity. It’s also the title of a phenomenal book (edited) by Rumelhart & McClelland, published in 1986 — my mind-opener a few years later. Much AURELIS-thinking started then. Subconceptual In PDP, the basic units of mental processing are not the Read the full article…
Balance vs. Synthesis
Where a balancing act can be proper, a synthesis can be powerful. In a synthesis, a deeper connection between elements is sought, which may lead to an unforeseen and original direction. A balance is an equilibrium that doesn’t readily invite originality. In many cases, that’s OK, of course. Finding a balance may defuse tensions, enabling Read the full article…
Bringing Compassion to the World through A.I.
This is the crucial idea behind the philanthropic project of Planetarianism as part of the AURELIS project. You can find a blog about Planetarianism here and a concrete overview presentation (ppsx for laptop) here. Concretely, it’s a set of projects aiming for this blog’s title. Compassion, basically, is no rosy moonshine. There are strong traditions Read the full article…
Science for Complexity
Especially in human-related sciences, holding on to a Platonean ideal is insufficient for grappling with present-day challenges. We need new science to manage complexity. A.I. can provide the necessary tools for this. Science of medicine and psychosomatics Until now, medical science has been based on a non-complex picture of the human being. This accords with Read the full article…
The Quest for Abstract Patterns
This is about creation. The creative process Some see three levels of creativity: interpolation, extrapolation, and the invention of something new/out of the box. This progress in levels goes from the domain of the known toward the domain of the not-yet-known. One can also see these levels as the possible results of an increasing discernment Read the full article…
From Intractable to Tractable = Intelligent
This is what intelligence can do: simplifying intractable problems (not easily controlled, managed, or solved) to tractable ones without much loss of relevant information. Problems may be social, mathematical, or other. Depending on the meaning of the considered terms, it may be seen as an exhaustive characterization of intelligence. However, this is not meant as Read the full article…
Global Human-A.I. Value Alignment
Human values align deeply across the globe, though they vary on the surface. Thus, striving for human-A.I. value alignment can create positive challenges for A.I. and opportunities for humanity. A.I. may make the world more pluralistic. With A.I. means, different peoples/cultures can strive for more self-efficacy, doing their thing independently and thereby floating away from Read the full article…
Is Compassionate A.I. (Still) Our Choice?
Seen from the future, the present era may be the most responsible for accomplishing the advent of Compassionate A.I. Compassion, basically, is the realm of complexity. It’s not about some commandments or a – simple or less simple – conceptual system of ethics. Therefore, instilling Compassion into a system is not a straightforward engineering endeavor Read the full article…