The Interface

Warm Greetings to All,

Join Plato's Cave philosophers and Orlando Stoics on Zoom this Sunday morning, Sept 6 at 9:00. (Informal chat at 9:00, forum at 9:15)

NOTE: New Applications for Plato's Cave membership are currently closed. The Plato's Cave forum will soon be discontinued on this meetup platform for reasons stated in my message to members.
Links and program information may be accessed through our partner organization, the Orlando Stoics meetup, at https://www.meetup.com/orlando-stoics/

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Every Sunday, a new forum. Our meeting starts at 9:00 AM with friendly wakeup chat; then our select topic panel briefly introduces the subject at 9:15, followed by member discussion and Q&A.
Volunteer introduction panelists will meet following each forum to develop the next program;.

This Sunday - The Interface

Start with the senses, not the mind. The question is not whether a machine thinks, but what world it ends up in, given what it can sense and what it was built to care about. We begin this week with Donald Hoffman. Evolution, he argues, never tuned our senses for truth. It tuned them for survival. In his simulations, creatures that see the world accurately lose to creatures that see only what pays. So what we see works like icons on a screen. The icon is not the file. It hides the machinery so we can act fast. He made the case formally with Manish Singh and Chetan Prakash in 2015, gave a TED talk that year, and wrote The Case Against Reality in 2019. Perception, on this view, is not a window. It is a control panel, built for one animal.

We then turn to Jakob von Uexkull, who got there first, from the other direction. He was a biologist who watched animals and asked what their surroundings actually held for them. Take the tick. It waits on a branch, sometimes for years, and answers to three signals: the smell of butyric acid, warmth near body temperature, and bare skin to bite. That is its entire world. He called this the Umwelt, and said every creature has its own. The tick, the bat, and the person are not seeing one world in different detail. They live in different worlds that overlap. His book came out in 1934 and in English in 2010. Ask the same question of a machine: what is in there, and what is missing entirely?

Finally we will discuss Joscha Bach, who builds such systems and asks from the inside. A mind, he says, is something that makes a model. It finds the patterns that hold steady, predicts what comes next, and acts. We do not experience the world directly. We experience the model. And the model has to include the modeler: a system that acts needs a picture of the thing acting, so it builds a character and runs the story from inside it. That character is the self. It is part of the model, not the machine underneath. See Principles of Synthetic Intelligence (2009) and his long-running Chaos Communication Congress talks. If he is right, a self is not something a system has or lacks. It is something a system makes.

Links

Donald Hoffman

• “The Interface Theory of Perception” (Hoffman, Singh & Prakash, 2015): https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-015-0890-8
• The Psychonomic Society’s overview of the paper and the commentaries on it: https://featuredcontent.psychonomic.org/interfacetheory-our-species-specific-desktop/
• TED talk, “Do we see reality as it is?” (2015): https://youtu.be/oYp5XuGYqqY
• Michael Shermer’s sympathetic-but-skeptical response, Scientific American (2015): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-humans-evolve-to-see-things-as-they-really-are/
• Donald D. Hoffman, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman

Jakob von Uexküll

• Jakob Johann von Uexküll, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Johann_von_Uexk%C3%BCll
• Umwelt, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt
• A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (1934; Minnesota, 2010), audiobook and publisher summary: https://universitypressaudiobooks.com/detail.php/1339
• Bibliography, editions, and translations: https://www.monoskop.org/Uexkull
• New World Encyclopedia entry, a plain overview of the Umwelt idea: https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Jakob_von_Uexkull

Joscha Bach

• Bach’s own site: http://bach.ai/
• Joscha Bach, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joscha_Bach
• “Machine Dreams: Dreaming Machines,” 33C3 (2016), on the mind as a generative system: https://infocondb.org/con/ccc/33c3/machine-dreams-dreaming-machines
• “Self Models of Loving Grace,” 38C3 (2024), on the self, agency, and identity: https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/speaker/URY3ED
• Background on the “From Computation to Consciousness” series: https://aifoundation.com/news/p/part-2-from-computation-to-consciousness-how-computation-helps-to-explain-mind-universe-and-everything

Hosted by:
Plato's Cave and Orlando Stoics
https://www.meetup.com/platoscave/
https://www.meetup.com/orlando-stoics/

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