Machines + Society #17: Rethinking labels; Pirahã people; Tigran I love you
machines + society
Mako Shen | Dec 31, 2020
Before the essay, here are the recall questions from last month:
In 1984, Orwell wrote “until they have become conscious, they will not rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious”. What are some plausible reasons behind the psychology of this analogy of the ‘sleeping masses’?
What is the ‘felt sense’ and why does it matter?
Question the Labels: Getting Ontologic
[Young Man Reading By Candle Light, Mattias Stomer]
I.
When you feel your 'blood boil', you 'see red', and you want to yell and punch something, we call that anger. When you feel a warmth in your chest and laugh under a full moon with friends until there are tears in your eyes, we call that joy. What about the feeling you get when you feel like you've seen this person standing before you holding a cocktail glass, but you can't quite remember where... Familiarity? Recognition?
II.
The Cartesian coordinate system specifies a location by providing a set of (x,y) coordinates. The x is the distance from the x axis, and the y is the distance from the y axis.
The polar coordinate system specifies distances using a distance and an angle, (r, θ). The r is the distance from the origin, and the θ is the angle away from the positive x-axis.
How else can we orient different points in space?
III.
When my friends and I talk about 'attention', we usually think of it as a continuum: I am either paying full attention, no attention, or somewhere in-between.
But sometimes I'm in a crowded room where I'm struggling to hear the voice of the person talking to me. I lean in when suddenly I hear my name faintly being called from across the room. They're saying my name at a volume no higher than the rest of the room, but somehow I can clearly hear the voice. How is it that I can go from no attention to full attention? What is happening there?
IV.
Human civilizations are powerful in large part because of the ontologies we've inherited from our ancestors. An ontology is a way of grouping things. Emotions are an ontology that allows us to describe our inner experiences. The Cartesian coordinate system is an ontology that allows us to describe a point on a 2D plane. The number system is an ontology that allows us to manipulate and distinguish between groups of objects in the world.
Note, however, that ontologies are different from perspectives. In the infamous feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, Devil Anse Hatfield thought the McCoys should be punished because they killed Asa Hatfield. Ol’ Ran’l McCoy thought the Hatfields should be punished because they killed Bud McCoy and his brothers. They had different perspectives (each thought that the other family should be punished), but the same ontology (that violence should be punished with violence).
We should be really grateful for our ontologies. They often feel intuitive but are very seldom innate. The Amazonian Pirahã people, for instance, never invented a number system. This meant that their adults could not precisely distinguish quantities above three. Without the number system, we would not have a large scale government (reliable tax is impossible), a developed economy (how can you trade on a large scale without being able to count?), or any of the innovations that require these things.
Yet just like how Bonaventura Cavelieri invented the polar coordinate system to study circular motion, we should think more deliberately about new ontologies to more effectively operate in the world around us.
Consider the example of attention again. Earlier, I was puzzling over what happens to my attention when I hear my voice quietly called in a loud room. The neuroscientist and Buddhist Culadusa (aka John Yates) presents a useful ontology in The Mind Illuminated*. According to him, rather than thinking of our attention/consciousness as an on/off switch, our conscious experience has two major components: attention and peripheral awareness. Think of it in terms of our vision— just as I can look at my hand but still see blurry details of the room, my attention allows me to think about the next words in this sentence while my peripheral awareness may ponder what I will cook for lunch today.
When I hear my name being called in a crowded room, my peripheral awareness, which is always broad and open, recognizes the sound. The other stimuli are filtered by a circuit in the thalamus, and my attention is redirected to the source of the voice.
Culadusa's ontology of attention and peripheral awareness is not entirely original, but the way he frames it reflects a unique understanding of the phenomenon— by deeply understanding it, he has in a way generated a new ontology.
New ontologies let us heal deeply torn families, start companies, and find meaningin life. They are the bedrock of how we perceive the world. Not only can examining ontologies make our lives richer, but it can also equip us to solve new problems.
Creating a useful new ontology is daunting, but it doesn't have to be. The first step is to think more explicitly in terms of ontologies— what categories do I use to comprehend the world?The next is to start collecting different ontologies. Choose a topic, and look explicitly at the different categories and labels that experts apply to the topic. Creating a new ontology, I contend, will naturally follow. But don't just take my word for it. Go forth, and ontologize!
*The Mind Illuminated is by far the best book on meditation I have come across. It has significantly changed the way that I practice.
Questions:
What is an ontology and why is it a useful concept?
What are the components of conscious experience?
📰 Assorted Links 📰
What Taiwan's military can learn from the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. “the Azerbaijanis used loitering munitions (kamikaze drones), medium-strike UAS with guided munitions, and recon UAS in concert with artillery, to devastating effect. Against an entrenched opponent, the strikes decimated the fixed command posts, logistics centers, and assembly areas, badly weakening Armenian defenses”
"it seems that the fiscal benefits of DeepMind’s work to reduce Google’s data centers’ energy use by as much as 40% may not be adequately represented in DeepMind’s financial statements". DeepMind's Value to Google. Brief but thought-provoking. I'm not actually sure if intangible value like energy use reduction needs to be in financial statements. Link.
How I Made A Self Quoting Tweet. In which the twitter API is briefly explained, and Twitter is made into a directed cyclic graph.
Why it's OK to Block Ads. "What I find remarkable is the way both sides of this debate seem to simply assume the large-scale capture and exploitation of human attention to be ethical and/or inevitable in the first place. This demonstrates how utterly we have all failed to understand the role of attention in the digital age—as well as the implications of spending most of our lives in an environment designed to compete for it" from the Oxford Practical Ethics blog.
Killing Mosquitoes with Cardi B. Her explicit language is bad for the mosquito babies.
The breathtaking Armenian jazz of Tigran Hamasyan, from Tiny Desk Concert.
In the reflective mood
Of the posts I've written this year. My favorite is Thinking In Questions, but the most popular by far was Tools for Thought, owing to a link from Marginal Revolution. This newsletter has driven me to scramble at the end of each month and consolidate my peripheral thinking into a piece of writing. I enjoy that, and think I'll continue in some capacity for the foreseeable future. The goal was never to create something purely for other people. I aspire in large part to Gwern's credo of writing to inform a future self, but I definitely have leaned into the explanatory mode more than I would if writing to myself.
Instead of New Year's resolutions, consider doing a Past Year Review. I've found it to be much more helpful and likely to stick.
Ben Kuhn's favorite essays of life advice. I would add Dormin's Thoughts on Meaning and Writing to the list. None of the essays are literary masterpieces, but that's not the point. They are, variously, inspiring, pensive, and honest.
Podcast of the year
This Sounds Serious | Season 1. A Florida weatherman is found dead with his head stuffed inside a waterbed. A journalist investigates. Bizarre hilarity ensues.
🎧 Music 🎧
Step it Out Mary — The High Kings. Irish rock.
Peg — Steely Dan.
La Fiesta — Chick Corea.
Happy New Year to all. May it be filled with ease and gratitude.