updated the post with one! best I got off the top of my head 😅
it's hard to give a "general purpose" A. It'd be easier after talking to someone (essentially doing a "binary search" with them via idea exchange + rating). This one I expect to split people as mostly "B" and "U"
> The hard problem of consciousness is already solved - at least partially.
U — As I understand it, Chalmers' hard problem is independent of the brain's role (contra the body or any other material substrate) but arises in relation to the very existence of any subjective / phenomenal experience at all.. even embracing the most extreme frames of distributed consciousness does not bridge the gap between it & its relation to particular physical states
> We know that consciousness isn’t localized to the brain, first of all, it exists throughout the whole body. It’s more accurate to say “consciousness uses the brain to compute things” than “consciousness is generated by the brain”.
The usage of A and B immediately struck me as Bayesian. If we change `true` to P(B),and we agree that P(B) = 1, then P(B|A) is also 1. We're using P(X) as "probability X is true", where true mostly just means agreement.
The remaining theorem is just P(A|B) = P(A) and we're stuck. We're both throwing A statements out there, and we both think P(A_me) = 1 and P(A_you) = U, where U < 1. If A_me and A_you are mutually exclusive then: P(A_you | A_me) = 0. We can never agree.
To agree on a P(A_x) we need to find another set of B, where P(Bi) = 1 and P(A_x | Bi...Bj) = 1 for both of us — which really might be hard!
There's also a second thing I thought about which is the process to move something from U → A → B. F(U, Bi...Bj) → A can be hard, you may need lots of B to make a U into an A. The function F here is super interesting and is basically the epistemological process from other posts.
Thinking about this, I came up with a problem in the analysis.
Some of the most useful and cherished writings I have ever read fall squarely in the B column. They tend to be compendia of Really Useful Information that I knew already so they are not novel, but are organized in such a way that they are easier for me to recollect and apply. A prime example is the book that, as far as I am concerned, is the greatest religious text ever written: The Tao te Ching.
This book is one of the most often translated books in the world and most translations bring new insights. The first translation ("interpretation") I read was by a former minister of the Unitarian Universalist church I attended, Jake Trapp.
Reading that copy of the Tao te Ching that night was life-altering. I felt like I had come across an old childhood friend - everything it said felt so familiar - but I was in a foreign country - China, not the Maritime Provinces of Canada - and my old friend was garbed in the costumes of that country.
Taoism looks askance on relying on sacred texts over direct experience: "the dregs [or dried bones] of the men of old". So it is only natural that someone who is aware of the Tao should know most of what is written in the Tao te Ching already. It's only common sense.
Note that the purported author of the Tao te Ching is "Lao Tsu": the Old Master. It is obvious to me that there is no such person. There are so many different styles of knowledge and its presentation in the book that it could have been titled "The Reader's Digest Book of 81 Best Taoist Sayings".
But the book is invaluable. I refer to it multiple times during any given year. Not becausse it has ever fit into Column A, but because it is a masterfully written compendium of Column B.
yes I think "A" and "B" places a value judgement, on one being worth more than the other. In another rendition of this on twitter I described the value of B as, people who can articulate things I already know, but in a way that is clear/that propagated further than I can, and I can learn from *that*
Now, on the other hand, I might argue that, curating existing information but in a way that makes it click *would* be novel information. I think the key for me is what it triggers in the observer.
So, to make this more precise, I'd say maybe I consider it "A", if there exists a question that, prior to being exposed to the thing, id answer it one way, and after exposure I'd answer it in a new way. That is the "proof" that something changed in my world model, and that I can trace it back to this specific piece.
As a side note, this is why a side project I have is to design essays that come with questions upfront. I want to know what people think before they read, because (1) if they already know the answer, they can perhaps skip the essay (2) if they don't know, I want to know if my essay changed their answer (3) or the final option being, they think my answer is wrong, and would like to correct it.
When I was writing the previous answer, I had in mind a semantic net - a collection of points Fi, where each Fi is a fact, and labeled edges Rj, where Rj is the relationship between two facts Fi and Fk. This is oversimplified of course, since a relationship can be a complex construction of many facts.
I guess I am posing a question about the nature of "information". Information (or knowledge) is normally thought of as "justified true belief", which could apply to the facts, their relationship, or the whole structure (or gestalt).
But my point about the Tao te Ching is about information as "justified useful belief". That is, I believe some information in the sense that I am justified in thinking that the information (actually my use of the information) is "useful". Whatever the hell that means.
That leads to:
A, B, U - the novelty of the information
X, Y, Z? - the usefulness of the information.
For example, here is a factlet:
The house centipede (Scutigera coleoptrata), which is commonly encountered, has 15 pairs of legs (30 total) when fully mature.
I expect that factlet is in column A for you, but it is a fun fact that is not very useful. Your life would have still have gone along the way it has been even if you had not ever been in possession of that knowledge.
On the other hand, reading the Tao te Ching changed my life.
Wouldn't the Tao be novel in some way? You may have been nominally aware of the information, but something about the presentation must have been novel in order to change the way you think. (I do like the usefulness criteria though - it could also be relevance)
I agree heartily. Yes, of course, the Tao te Ching is novel. My first problem was related to the meaning of the term novelty. My second problem was that both A and B presumed usefulness.
When I say I notice a problem I am not implying that the author's analysis is wrong. I am saying: be careful - the analysis could be simplistic or incomplete. Novelty is determined not just in a unitary sense of "is this fact new to you?" For example, EDIT 1 refers to issues around the notion of consciousness.
So my first problem about novelty is to question this response:
"this is technically multiple ideas, you can extract one and rate it."
This is a unitary sense of information in that you can break things into pieces and judge the novelty of each piece and the whole is the sum of the parts. We fall into that trap all the time in science and logic and forget the reality of emergence. Information involves each individual fact, the relationship between the facts, and the gestalt of the whole structure.
The second problem is that usefulness was taken as given in both A and B. I think you have to add C and D "true and useless". Part of that reason is that the question of usefulness is contextual and temporal. Faraday, quoting Ben Franklin, has been reported to have responded to people who questioned the usefulness of the electromagnetism that he and Doctor Franklin had explored with this response: "What good is a newborn baby?"
As you can see, I am finding problems with this rubric to rate information. There is a whole field of philosophy - epistemology - built around the meaning and evaluation of knowledge. Unfortunately, reducing this evaluation to a simple rubric will result in a form of Goodwin's Law. Information just cannot be easily classified.
I wouldn't say the problem is solved, though we know that a large part of it resides in the gut, which is why there are phrases in our languages about trusting your gut.
Something a lot of people don't realize is that literary mentions of the heart, particularly in the Bible, are referring to the kishkas, the belly or intestines, where a lot of neurons can be found.
I feel that this process of parsing out truth is built into our language of relating. From my perspective, this is already a natural formalism in the human experience of relating. But I do see the utility in formalizing what is already established through natural order, as long as what was natural is not made mechanical, lest we practice our prostrations of piety in vain, trading authenticity for empty habit.
I don't believe we can ever be talking about one thing, because as conscious beings we filter any statement through our mountain of meaning, our lifetime of context, and each person's totality of experiences is a complex web through which each person filters information to extract meaning.
Why do we seek to agree in the first place? Because two consciousnesses gradually coming to mirror each other informationally is the merging of spirits, even if just for a moment, to feel our eternal nature of unity while held in our individual prison of fleshy illusion. This is the force of love in action.
We are being actively divided so that we can be conquered, but left to our nature, we would awaken and merge through the force of love. It is our ultimate desire. It is why we (eternal souls) enter physical vessels in the first place: to experience the limited and the individuated unique perspective of the universe, to grow and learn. We each come for a reason, and through the challenges we move ever toward our nature of unity and oneness.
If I speak to someone about lyme disease (which I've lived with for 25 years), how can they rate my statement as anything but "U" unless they too have lyme, and yet everyone has certainly experienced lyme-like symptoms such as low energy, brain fog, achey joints. No two lyme-sufferers could totally agree on what lyme is, on what the experience is.
Plato and many others throughout history have posited the idea of a pure realm, containing the archetypal, uncreated, perfected elements upon which the world is founded, and from which it continually draws form- from the unmanifest sea of pure potential that is God/Mind. Our rationality is sourced from this realm, as is all the order of the universe. We formulate sentences in the realm of Forms. Our math and geometry, music and art- all of it- is from beyond this physical realm and is the cause of all that is.
This ORI model, from my perspective would get very complicated if we had to factor in context to this theory. One of the big problems with translating text from one language to another is that there are often imperceivable nuances to another culture's language, because it is a complex web of interrelated concepts which we refer to as "culture".
Again, there is the difficulty of complexity. The example of the statement about the hard problem of consciousness is difficult. Because of my focused research on this subject, I feel that this concept of universal consciousness is not novel to me, and so it's an "A", but I still don't know what their theoretical grounding is. I am assuming their model of non-local consciousness matches my vision, but it may be totally different.
This "A/B/U" query system, of finding common ground, seems to have in it the difficulty of approaching, entering, and navigating a person's paradigm in order to deliver a concept in a way that they can understand it from within their web of understanding.
If I point to an object, and say to a friend "look at that!", I hope that they will see what I see, that we will agree on what that thing is. But if I am on the shady side of the object, and they on the sunny side, we are not seeing the same reality, and how will we agree? One of us would have to change our context in order for our visions to converge on the same thing.
Seeing something from different angles is one thing, but seeing something from two vastly different lifetimes of built up context is quite another. What is it to agree? No two people can ever see from the same exact paradigm- impossible! What we can agree on is in the essence of things, and this essence is nowhere to be found, because it is the invisible undimensional unity undergirding the phenomenal world.
The buddhist concept of dependent arising states that all phenomena are interdependent, and as such, all physical things are imperfect (subject to cause and effect) and fleeting, always in motion, always changing, always influencing each other. But the source of all things who are dependently arising is the realm of Forms- the plane of the perfect archetypal symbols and formalisms. This is our common workspace of Mind, and is where agreement takes place in the first place.
When I say "triangle", I am evoking the archetypal symbol of a triangle, which lives exclusively in the realm of Forms. When you hear "triangle" from my mouth, you access that exact same archetypal form in the same realm of Forms as me and my mental invocation because the mental space is common to us both, and to us all, to all creatures and vibrations.
I believe this is the essence of agreement- the meeting of Minds upon the common archetypal element in the realm of Forms. It may be necessary to produce a list of "formalisms", or essential nature of all things from which more complex ideas and concepts can be built. This, of course would be reinventing the wheel, since this is exactly what language is!
I'm sorry for the long answer and tornado of concepts, but thank you for including me in this discussion. Maybe some of my posits and claims can be examined through the ORI model... Have a great day everyone!
I agree with your previous comment: if someone re-organizes something which you thought you knew in a way that makes it click, then it’s ‘novel’, making it A.
In the same way, this article is an A; I sorta understood novel vs known vs unintelligible, but you’ve presented it in a streamlined way that could scale quite well.
this was an A
Do you have a test piece of info for us? 👀
updated the post with one! best I got off the top of my head 😅
it's hard to give a "general purpose" A. It'd be easier after talking to someone (essentially doing a "binary search" with them via idea exchange + rating). This one I expect to split people as mostly "B" and "U"
Ooh, thanks! Nice one.
> The hard problem of consciousness is already solved - at least partially.
U — As I understand it, Chalmers' hard problem is independent of the brain's role (contra the body or any other material substrate) but arises in relation to the very existence of any subjective / phenomenal experience at all.. even embracing the most extreme frames of distributed consciousness does not bridge the gap between it & its relation to particular physical states
> We know that consciousness isn’t localized to the brain, first of all, it exists throughout the whole body. It’s more accurate to say “consciousness uses the brain to compute things” than “consciousness is generated by the brain”.
B!! Big fan of Varela / 4E cognition
Vibe coding is feasible on scale. It requires you to think hard about the architecture, but if you got the skills, it will sustain the pressure
ABU?
B
your turn then!
Most famous Hollywood actors just play characters that more-or-less have the same personality as the actor.
ABU?
The usage of A and B immediately struck me as Bayesian. If we change `true` to P(B),and we agree that P(B) = 1, then P(B|A) is also 1. We're using P(X) as "probability X is true", where true mostly just means agreement.
The remaining theorem is just P(A|B) = P(A) and we're stuck. We're both throwing A statements out there, and we both think P(A_me) = 1 and P(A_you) = U, where U < 1. If A_me and A_you are mutually exclusive then: P(A_you | A_me) = 0. We can never agree.
To agree on a P(A_x) we need to find another set of B, where P(Bi) = 1 and P(A_x | Bi...Bj) = 1 for both of us — which really might be hard!
There's also a second thing I thought about which is the process to move something from U → A → B. F(U, Bi...Bj) → A can be hard, you may need lots of B to make a U into an A. The function F here is super interesting and is basically the epistemological process from other posts.
Thinking about this, I came up with a problem in the analysis.
Some of the most useful and cherished writings I have ever read fall squarely in the B column. They tend to be compendia of Really Useful Information that I knew already so they are not novel, but are organized in such a way that they are easier for me to recollect and apply. A prime example is the book that, as far as I am concerned, is the greatest religious text ever written: The Tao te Ching.
This book is one of the most often translated books in the world and most translations bring new insights. The first translation ("interpretation") I read was by a former minister of the Unitarian Universalist church I attended, Jake Trapp.
Reading that copy of the Tao te Ching that night was life-altering. I felt like I had come across an old childhood friend - everything it said felt so familiar - but I was in a foreign country - China, not the Maritime Provinces of Canada - and my old friend was garbed in the costumes of that country.
Taoism looks askance on relying on sacred texts over direct experience: "the dregs [or dried bones] of the men of old". So it is only natural that someone who is aware of the Tao should know most of what is written in the Tao te Ching already. It's only common sense.
Note that the purported author of the Tao te Ching is "Lao Tsu": the Old Master. It is obvious to me that there is no such person. There are so many different styles of knowledge and its presentation in the book that it could have been titled "The Reader's Digest Book of 81 Best Taoist Sayings".
But the book is invaluable. I refer to it multiple times during any given year. Not becausse it has ever fit into Column A, but because it is a masterfully written compendium of Column B.
yes I think "A" and "B" places a value judgement, on one being worth more than the other. In another rendition of this on twitter I described the value of B as, people who can articulate things I already know, but in a way that is clear/that propagated further than I can, and I can learn from *that*
Now, on the other hand, I might argue that, curating existing information but in a way that makes it click *would* be novel information. I think the key for me is what it triggers in the observer.
So, to make this more precise, I'd say maybe I consider it "A", if there exists a question that, prior to being exposed to the thing, id answer it one way, and after exposure I'd answer it in a new way. That is the "proof" that something changed in my world model, and that I can trace it back to this specific piece.
As a side note, this is why a side project I have is to design essays that come with questions upfront. I want to know what people think before they read, because (1) if they already know the answer, they can perhaps skip the essay (2) if they don't know, I want to know if my essay changed their answer (3) or the final option being, they think my answer is wrong, and would like to correct it.
When I was writing the previous answer, I had in mind a semantic net - a collection of points Fi, where each Fi is a fact, and labeled edges Rj, where Rj is the relationship between two facts Fi and Fk. This is oversimplified of course, since a relationship can be a complex construction of many facts.
I guess I am posing a question about the nature of "information". Information (or knowledge) is normally thought of as "justified true belief", which could apply to the facts, their relationship, or the whole structure (or gestalt).
But my point about the Tao te Ching is about information as "justified useful belief". That is, I believe some information in the sense that I am justified in thinking that the information (actually my use of the information) is "useful". Whatever the hell that means.
That leads to:
A, B, U - the novelty of the information
X, Y, Z? - the usefulness of the information.
For example, here is a factlet:
The house centipede (Scutigera coleoptrata), which is commonly encountered, has 15 pairs of legs (30 total) when fully mature.
I expect that factlet is in column A for you, but it is a fun fact that is not very useful. Your life would have still have gone along the way it has been even if you had not ever been in possession of that knowledge.
On the other hand, reading the Tao te Ching changed my life.
Wouldn't the Tao be novel in some way? You may have been nominally aware of the information, but something about the presentation must have been novel in order to change the way you think. (I do like the usefulness criteria though - it could also be relevance)
I agree heartily. Yes, of course, the Tao te Ching is novel. My first problem was related to the meaning of the term novelty. My second problem was that both A and B presumed usefulness.
When I say I notice a problem I am not implying that the author's analysis is wrong. I am saying: be careful - the analysis could be simplistic or incomplete. Novelty is determined not just in a unitary sense of "is this fact new to you?" For example, EDIT 1 refers to issues around the notion of consciousness.
So my first problem about novelty is to question this response:
"this is technically multiple ideas, you can extract one and rate it."
This is a unitary sense of information in that you can break things into pieces and judge the novelty of each piece and the whole is the sum of the parts. We fall into that trap all the time in science and logic and forget the reality of emergence. Information involves each individual fact, the relationship between the facts, and the gestalt of the whole structure.
The second problem is that usefulness was taken as given in both A and B. I think you have to add C and D "true and useless". Part of that reason is that the question of usefulness is contextual and temporal. Faraday, quoting Ben Franklin, has been reported to have responded to people who questioned the usefulness of the electromagnetism that he and Doctor Franklin had explored with this response: "What good is a newborn baby?"
As you can see, I am finding problems with this rubric to rate information. There is a whole field of philosophy - epistemology - built around the meaning and evaluation of knowledge. Unfortunately, reducing this evaluation to a simple rubric will result in a form of Goodwin's Law. Information just cannot be easily classified.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Test info: U/B
I wouldn't say the problem is solved, though we know that a large part of it resides in the gut, which is why there are phrases in our languages about trusting your gut.
Something a lot of people don't realize is that literary mentions of the heart, particularly in the Bible, are referring to the kishkas, the belly or intestines, where a lot of neurons can be found.
Hi Omar and friends!
Cool discussion.
I feel that this process of parsing out truth is built into our language of relating. From my perspective, this is already a natural formalism in the human experience of relating. But I do see the utility in formalizing what is already established through natural order, as long as what was natural is not made mechanical, lest we practice our prostrations of piety in vain, trading authenticity for empty habit.
I don't believe we can ever be talking about one thing, because as conscious beings we filter any statement through our mountain of meaning, our lifetime of context, and each person's totality of experiences is a complex web through which each person filters information to extract meaning.
Why do we seek to agree in the first place? Because two consciousnesses gradually coming to mirror each other informationally is the merging of spirits, even if just for a moment, to feel our eternal nature of unity while held in our individual prison of fleshy illusion. This is the force of love in action.
We are being actively divided so that we can be conquered, but left to our nature, we would awaken and merge through the force of love. It is our ultimate desire. It is why we (eternal souls) enter physical vessels in the first place: to experience the limited and the individuated unique perspective of the universe, to grow and learn. We each come for a reason, and through the challenges we move ever toward our nature of unity and oneness.
If I speak to someone about lyme disease (which I've lived with for 25 years), how can they rate my statement as anything but "U" unless they too have lyme, and yet everyone has certainly experienced lyme-like symptoms such as low energy, brain fog, achey joints. No two lyme-sufferers could totally agree on what lyme is, on what the experience is.
Plato and many others throughout history have posited the idea of a pure realm, containing the archetypal, uncreated, perfected elements upon which the world is founded, and from which it continually draws form- from the unmanifest sea of pure potential that is God/Mind. Our rationality is sourced from this realm, as is all the order of the universe. We formulate sentences in the realm of Forms. Our math and geometry, music and art- all of it- is from beyond this physical realm and is the cause of all that is.
This ORI model, from my perspective would get very complicated if we had to factor in context to this theory. One of the big problems with translating text from one language to another is that there are often imperceivable nuances to another culture's language, because it is a complex web of interrelated concepts which we refer to as "culture".
Again, there is the difficulty of complexity. The example of the statement about the hard problem of consciousness is difficult. Because of my focused research on this subject, I feel that this concept of universal consciousness is not novel to me, and so it's an "A", but I still don't know what their theoretical grounding is. I am assuming their model of non-local consciousness matches my vision, but it may be totally different.
This "A/B/U" query system, of finding common ground, seems to have in it the difficulty of approaching, entering, and navigating a person's paradigm in order to deliver a concept in a way that they can understand it from within their web of understanding.
If I point to an object, and say to a friend "look at that!", I hope that they will see what I see, that we will agree on what that thing is. But if I am on the shady side of the object, and they on the sunny side, we are not seeing the same reality, and how will we agree? One of us would have to change our context in order for our visions to converge on the same thing.
Seeing something from different angles is one thing, but seeing something from two vastly different lifetimes of built up context is quite another. What is it to agree? No two people can ever see from the same exact paradigm- impossible! What we can agree on is in the essence of things, and this essence is nowhere to be found, because it is the invisible undimensional unity undergirding the phenomenal world.
The buddhist concept of dependent arising states that all phenomena are interdependent, and as such, all physical things are imperfect (subject to cause and effect) and fleeting, always in motion, always changing, always influencing each other. But the source of all things who are dependently arising is the realm of Forms- the plane of the perfect archetypal symbols and formalisms. This is our common workspace of Mind, and is where agreement takes place in the first place.
When I say "triangle", I am evoking the archetypal symbol of a triangle, which lives exclusively in the realm of Forms. When you hear "triangle" from my mouth, you access that exact same archetypal form in the same realm of Forms as me and my mental invocation because the mental space is common to us both, and to us all, to all creatures and vibrations.
I believe this is the essence of agreement- the meeting of Minds upon the common archetypal element in the realm of Forms. It may be necessary to produce a list of "formalisms", or essential nature of all things from which more complex ideas and concepts can be built. This, of course would be reinventing the wheel, since this is exactly what language is!
I'm sorry for the long answer and tornado of concepts, but thank you for including me in this discussion. Maybe some of my posits and claims can be examined through the ORI model... Have a great day everyone!
I agree with your previous comment: if someone re-organizes something which you thought you knew in a way that makes it click, then it’s ‘novel’, making it A.
In the same way, this article is an A; I sorta understood novel vs known vs unintelligible, but you’ve presented it in a streamlined way that could scale quite well.