THE DEATH OF POSSIBILITY

July 18th, 2020

Many possibilities must die in order for reality to arise.  In fact, all possibilities for a given moment vanish once that moment has emerged in time.  That tiny sliver of possibilities that actually do occur are no longer possibilities, they are in fact, facts of reality.

This lends to an unsettling question: do possibilities even exist?

From a purely deterministic viewpoint, the answer is. . . no.  Possibilities do not exist.  The universe is a vast machine which is simply running its program.  But since we are inside of that program, and that we are in fact made of the fabric of the universe’s program, that limited perspective keeps us from seeing just how all the clockwork meshes together in order to bring about the next moment in the exact and often surprising way it emerges.  

The concept of a possibility is in fact an illusion.  But aside from deluding ourselves, it generally seems to be a very helpful illusion.  Just as free will is generally a productive notion to believe in despite its total incongruence with a deterministic view of reality.  One convenient aspect of this universe is just how adept humans are at hosting contradictions side-by-side in their minds.

Though, it’s perhaps equally beneficial from a psychological perspective to shun all use of the concept of free will and possibility.  From that point of view, there really does seem to be something like destiny, and having a particular destiny in mind can be a powerful force for moving forward if a person is of the belief that their destiny is certain to come about.  There is of course the small caveat that we don’t, and can’t ever know what our ‘destiny’ is in this sense.  

Our blindness to the larger movement of the universe necessitates these fantasy-concepts of possibility, free will, goals, and even destiny - if one believes they can know it ahead of time.

In fact: what exactly is the difference between someone who believe a particular outcome is “their destiny” and someone else who is simply working really hard to make a certain possibility come about?  The difference seems to be incidental of language more than it is a practical difference.  Perhaps a person with a goal has an orientation that’s a bit more flexible and fluid than the person with a self-proclaimed destiny, which harks of a potentially dangerous stubbornness, but then again, achievement almost always requires a certain hard-headed determination.

Regardless of which way we lean on to view the future, we are deluding ourselves to some degree.  To believe that there’s any possibility that things will turn out in any way other than the way they actually will is just as deluded as believing in a specific destiny that is somehow known ahead of time.

The death of possibility doesn’t occur the moment the present finally casts all factors into an eternity of frozen past, in fact, the possibilities we imagine don’t ever die, because they never actually existed in the first place.

MACHINE MEDITATION

July 17th, 2020

The portions of this episode that are in italics have been generated by GPT-3 from OpenAI.

This episode is another collaborative effort undertaken with GPT-3, the newest technology from OpenAI.  This episode seeks to explore the topic of meditation with this machine.  As with the previous episode, number 823 entitled AI Collaboration, Tinkered Thinking and GPT-3 will take turns adding a paragraph to the episode at hand in order to build a cohesive piece that reads as though it was written by a single mind.  GPT-3’s contributions will be conveyed in italics.  Tinkered Thinking will initiate this episode on meditation by writing only the next two words of the succeeding paragraph and allowing GPT-3 to fill in the rest of the sentence and succeeding paragraph.

Meditation is a state of consciousness and it is not a complete departure from thinking to arrive at this state, but an improved immersion in the processes of thinking and an awareness of thinking as such, which is enhanced by being freed from the immediate desire to have things the way one would like them to be and the need to make them fit into the way one would like things to be.

In one sense, meditation is the practice of accepting the moment as it is, unedited, and unvarnished by our perspective when it is laden with memory and desire.  To make progress to this end is to place distance between our raw experience and our default response to that experience.

It is human nature to be in a constant state of conversation with ourselves, and what this has become, what we call, “thinking,” is very often negative and distracting.  When our default setting is triggered we are constantly engaged in justifying or defending our beliefs.  When in the presence of stimuli, we are evaluating and critiquing.  When our past comes back to us we reactively have a desire to repeat or undo our mistakes.  At the root of all of this is fear, fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of death, fear of being alone, fear of being with others.  The self is a collection of learned fears; fearful reactions to thoughts, feelings and events. Meditation, or the practice of accepting what is, helps us to appreciate the fullness of what is by freeing us from clinging to our personal desires, which often determine what we believe is true and relevant, to instead see the moment for what it is without the delusions of the past or anticipation of the future.

Meditation is a gift of the mind that serves to cleanse us of our broken thinking and to put us in touch with the living moment, not as an interruption of our thoughts, but as a medium for resolving the riddles of thinking and interacting with our surroundings, with ourselves and with others in the purest and most effortless manner.  Meditation can be the key to seeing beyond the barriers of isolation and fear and experiencing a kind of clarity that is inexpressible in words.  

When we achieve the ability to separate our sense of identity from our experience, we inhabit a context that permits for more options, a wider perspective and more points of view.  The simplest form of this can be summed up by the question: Do I want to act upon the anger that I am currently feeling?  The unmeditated mind is likely to act reactively while intoxicated by the inspiration of such anger.  But the practiced meditator has developed the ability to pause, and then consider options.

This all sounds very simple, but it's not.  The mind resists this kind of mediation because the mind has been nurtured and validated by this world.  In a way, the mind is like a drug addict that has a physical dependence upon emotions and events in order to feel validated and purposeful.  Meditation, on the other hand, suggests that life without thought is preferable to life with too much thought.  This will come as a challenge to many because the mind has become dependent upon its thoughts and it fears that without these thoughts, it will die. 

In this sense, it's curious to think of any given thought as an organism.   We use the word 'meme' to describe concepts that compete in ways similar to genes.  Might we also say the same thing about entire perspectives?  Perhaps the reason we can be so stubborn is simply because the ideas we currently hold are simply trying to resist irrelevance and extinction?  The key benefit of meditation in this discussion is that we gain the ability to separate from the identity generated by these perspectives and by doing so we are free to consider options that can potentially lead to a better, more fulfilling life.

Part of the problem with the mind is that it will tend to indulge itself and strive towards habits that make us comfortable in the moment, while rejecting anything that doesn't serve that goal.  With this mindset it's easy to see that much of life is the creation of a mirage.  A mirage can be seductive.  Many live within this illusion in a dream-like state.  In many ways, we can view reality from this perspective as a dream from which we awaken as our perspective moves closer to align with the actual.  For example, there is no longer the person I once thought of as myself.  There are no longer desires or fears of the person I used to be. The person I was is like the face in the mirror that was once familiar, but the face looking back at me today is clearly something else, though still entirely recognizable.  It is through the practice of meditation that we are able to step back and observe this change, but in a way that isn't forced or dramatic.  It is a gradual shift that happens to us slowly over time.  It is the ability to witness this shift as if it were happening to someone else.  This level of detachment takes practice.  It takes attention and openness.

AI COLLABORATION

July 16th, 2020

The poritions of this episode in Italics have been generated by GPT-3 from OpenAI.

This episode has been written in collaboration with an artificial intelligence.  The technology is from OpenAI, a research laboratory exploring artificial intelligence, and the name of this technology is GPT-3.  This collaboration has been done with the beta version, which builds off of it’s predecessor GPT-2.  In the most basic way, it is a set of neural nets that has been trained using vast amounts of text from the internet.  A simple way to think about the way it operates is that GPT-3 tries to generate a likely and believable continuation of text that you give it.  So it looks like a basic text box.  The way Tinkered Thinking has interacted with GPT-3 for the purposes of this episode, has been by taking the exact paragraph you just read and feeding it to GPT-3 and hitting submit, at which point GPT-3 generates a continuation of this text given certain parameters like word count.  For the purposes of this collaboration, that word count has been set to approximate an average paragraph.  After GPT-3 generates the paragraph that will follow this one, Tinkered Thinking will then pick up afterwords and add an additional paragraph.  As the text for this episode grows in this way, it will be fed back into GPT-3 after Tinkered Thinking has added to the text in order to generate another paragraph given the larger  context of the episode.

Something that has been really fun about this collaboration has been watching how GPT-3 writes in response to things Tinkered Thinking has written.  When Tinkered Thinking adds a line of humor for example, GPT-3 is very likely to follow up with something funny as well.  This kind of feedback in the text has actually produced some pretty organic-feeling conversation in the episode.

What's perhaps even more fascinating is that GPT-3 has already referred to this episode in the past-tense, though it doesn't yet fully exist.  From a human perspective, it seems that GPT-3 can remember this episode and recall that it had some funny parts to it.  As the main creator for Tinkered Thinking, I'm somewhat relieved to know this, because Tinkered Thinking is almost always painfully lacking in humor.

So far, after many thousands of iterations, we have figured out that the best way to get GPT-3 to understand what we want it to do is by giving it examples of our work. In the first phase of the collaboration, Tinkered Thinking gave GPT-3 2 examples of its writing. The first of these was an example of a possible extension of a paragraph we had given to GPT-3. The second example was one that described GPT-3's own function as a tool. This second example was largely important to establish a context for why we were giving GPT-3 this particular paragraph in the first place.

From the point of view of a writer, the potential applications for a tool like GPT-3 are immediately apparent.  Some writers might get nervous and even depressed about the accuracy and shocking coherence of a tool like GPT-3, but as a collaborative tool, it's ability to help a writer get unstuck is incredible.  Think of a traditional writing prompt.  It's often hit or miss as to whether or not it actually works and gets a writer to put words to a page.  What works far better than static writing prompts is a conversation with another person.  Not only do we view our own thoughts differently when we hear ourselves say them aloud, but a companion in dialogue, equipped with a unique perspective often generates questions and counter-points that give our own thoughts a little friction, giving us some grist to hold onto.

We think that we could eventually expand the value of a tool like GPT-3 far beyond the realm of just writers, but rather as a tool for businesspeople, scientists and engineers as well.  A tool that generates not just coherent paragraphs, but also coherent slide decks, product ideas or designs would dramatically help a lot of people.  In the world of science for example, we often generate hypotheses that then require us to run large-scale experiments to disprove them.  We can't run experiments on the origin of the universe for example, but with GPT-3 we could generate a possible hypothesis for why it works the way it does and then simply test that hypothesis.

It's imaginable that one day we could all have companion AI's that help us make progress more efficiently.  Think, for instance, about the nature of learning today.  It's clear that school is terribly inefficient with teaching - we simply haven't figured out the optimal way to help large groups of students learn.  And then of course there is learning on one's own, which can involve endless wasted hours when we are stuck.  How incredible would it be to have a companion like GPT-3 to get a snapshot of the context you're dealing with, and generate a question that perhaps you haven't yet considered?

On the other hand, one can also imagine a future that might not be so fun to live in. Imagine if every time you gave a company a statement about your values, they could generate a reasonable counter-argument and in doing so basically unravel all of the reasons you thought you were right in the first place.  Or if every time you needed to convince someone of something, you had to write a persuasive essay and a really smart machine immediately fired off a convincing counter-argument to every single paragraph in your essay.  In a world like this, it might not only be really difficult to have an idea, but also incredibly difficult to hold on to that idea in a meaningful way. We think we'll need to develop a way to have this technology support rather than undermine our values.

As with any collaboration, it's important that the aim of all parties involved are inline with one another.  The risk with AI collaboration is one of incentives.  Systems with far faster processing speeds could quickly spiral off into dangerous directions if the incentives of that program are not inline with human incentives.  Aligning incentives is perhaps the first act of collaboration for any collaboration.  We define what our aims are so that everyone is on the same page.  But what happens when this question is placed before all humanity.  Say for example an AI becomes truly sentient, and then simply asks of all humanity: What are your goals?

Or what if the AI decides to focus on one specific area, like solving climate change for example?  As long as this AI's incentives are inline with human incentives, it might be able to come up with solutions far beyond what humanity is currently able to conceive of.  And as a result, humanity could become a lot less fragmented and divided, simply because an AI could now take the values of all humanity and apply them in a global context.  In a strange way, an AI could help us all come together, but at what point does this relationship of human and machine start to undermine who we are as a species?  Where do we draw the line between human and machine?

COHERENCE OF IMMERSION

July 15th, 2020

Does human language really make as much sense as we think it does? Or is this coherence an illusion bolstered by our total immersion in the medium?

We certainly like to think we're making sense. But so do the characters in any fantasy novel, or science fiction movie. And we as readers and watchers go along with the odd logic, the magic, the unknown science. This is referred to as suspension of disbelief. We suspend some sort of common sense notion that what we are seeing or reading is not something we could possibly believe. And this trick of the mind allows us to 'temporarily' believe in the unbelievable. Seems legit, but what if the division here is not so clean as theatre critics like to pretend.

What if, we are in fact quite prone to believing in nonsense? Well, this certainly seems true of other people. Conspiracy theorists of every variety seem perfectly capable of believing the unbelievable - at least as it's described by anyone who isn't apart of that group.

The problem is of course that these terms are relative when smeared across the topics of conspiracy theories and theatre productions lacking a 4th wall. We do a lovely job of compartmentalizing these different aspects of experience with unsettlingly ease, all the while failing to see the spinal cord of human psychology that runs smoothly through each one.

It's likely we compartmentalize like this, and we invent quaint terms like 'suspension of disbelief' because it casts us in an ideal light of control. It's as though we consciously choose to suspend certain mental faculties in order to enjoy a drama at the theatre, but those conspiracy theorists holding their signs and shouting on the street corner? Oh they have nothing to do with this mental phenomenon of choice when it comes to belief.

The reality seems as though it might be backwards. Instead of being in control of what and how and why we believe something, it's that our attention can become magnetized by beliefs and concepts without our explicit and conscious choice.

The larger point is that all of language, or at least a huge majority of the language we use and the communication we engage in, might only make sense on it's own terms. Think for a moment really, how often does language of any verbose nature really touch the brick and mortar aspects of reality? Certainly the shorter uses of language ping off of solid reality all the time.

Did you take out the garbage?

Are the kids in bed?

Where is the remote?

These all concern the physical orientation of reality, and luckily, their coherence is really dependant on our experience of physical reality. Things fall apart when we just imagine the garbage where it's supposed to be, respond that it's been taken out, and then deal with the consequences later when our failure to report on the actual nature of reality is discovered. In that case it looks as though we've lied.

But the more verbose uses of language, for example, this very post and episode can and should be questioned about the way it makes sense. You might understand each sentence in turn, and find the larger point brightening in your mind, but to what degree do these words touch base with solid, verifiable reality in the same way that the earlier questions do? Certainly far less.

These words could, in reality, be spinning a cognitive fiction. Of course, isn't this what we're always trying to do when we build an arguement or a case to try and convince anyone of anything? How persuasive do the words really need to be if the argument regards some facet of brick and mortar reality that we can touch and see? Given the amount of dissension and disagreement that perpetually abounds and resounds throughout culture, the answer seems to be that we do need to speak very persuasively about obvious things. Now that doesn't sound quite right, but at the same time it paints an accurate picture of our discourse. So what's going on?

Perhaps it's the discourse itself that contains the problem. Not the way we use it, but the medium itself: language. Each word, afterall, is a concept, and not the thing it refers to, like boat. The word boat as you hear it or see it on the page is a piece of reality that isn't actually connected in any direct way to a thing that floats in the water that you might use to travel. That connection exists indirectly through our minds as they exist in the form of a network that hosts all these words.

What if that network of words has attributes that allows it to become untethered from physical reality? It certainly seems to be the case. And we don't have to point at hot opinions about the current state of public discourse. We need only think of Harry Potter or Star Wars, or Game of Thrones. These are primarily vast constellations of words that purposefully separate from the reality that we experience on a day to day basis. The proof is in the pudding in that you can drown in these fictional puddings. Whole swathes of time pass while you immerse yourself in a fantasy world and quite literally forget about the real world, all because of language.

So how do we assess the language that's being used around important topics? How do we ensure that we don't talk each other into a mutually crazed la-la land that leaves the bunch of us walking off the edge of a cliff without noticing as we describe an endless ground that we can trick ourselves into seeing?

Language and communication is always at risk of this sort of mistake.

The only safeguard consists of a counter-intuitive practice: we must regularly seek to separate emotion from language in order to inspect the meaning that is being conveyed across the plains of communication. It's the emotionally laden language that can turn our minds into hot balloons that rise unanchored off into an unreality that blinds us more and more from what's going on. When we shuck the emotional resonance from the words we use, we begin to see them in an honest light, one untainted by momentary swings of feeling. And this practice, this discipline is something that Tinkered Thinking continually attempts to achieve, by dissecting the words and the concepts we use, not with a heavy or hot heart, but with a placid wonder, and a curiosity that is not afraid to question even itself.

FALSE MOMENT

July 14th, 2020

As the technology behind photos and film continues to advance in such a way that it becomes more and more seamless with the moment, one wonders whether the need to 'compose' false moments will disappear. When photography as a technology first came into being, people were required to stand very still for a length of time in order for the exposure to work. The limits of the technology required a particular behavior, and that behavior has persisted. For the most part, we are still saying 'cheese' in order to flag the exact moment when everyone needs to smile without blinking.

But imagine for a moment if everything around you, in a kind of 360 degree aura was being visually recorded and an algorithm was monitoring all the angles and compositions and automatically selected moments that spontaneously looks good as photos, compiling those at the end of the day and creating the quintessential photo album of your life? Would we still feel the impulse to compose photos if this were the case?

Probably, either because the behavior is fairly entrenched at this point, or rather because we compose photos not because we are trying to have a likeness of our moment, but because we seek to represent an ideal moment that isn't actually occuring.

We live in our head more than we do in the moment. We chase ideas, dreams and peak states that are perpetually poised in the future, like the proverbial carrot dangling before the donkey. As a result we miss the moment, and ironically, when we do find ourselves wholly present, the experience is often so nice that to interrupt it with the taking of a picture would only lessen our sense of what it's like to be alive in that moment.

We exist in false moments framed by ideals at the expense of the actual moment. Oddly, the thing we are trying to get at is always here with us. The problem is not that we lack something that might exist in the future, it's that our attention lacks a certain flexibility, construction and focus to connect tangential desire with the satisfaction that is always available in the present.