"If a lion could speak, we could not understand him" β Wittgenstein
Cat language consists of metaphor from outside our frame of reference.
I think humanity's greatest feature is the extent we will go to try & imagine what the world is like to be a cat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRzsgCp60YU
...And humanity's greatest failure: how little time we spend imagining how our world looks from each other's perspective; instead only assuming.
You are all cats to me. Weird cats.
"If a lion could speak, we could not understand him" β Wittgenstein
But what if a lion could sing? What then?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjO6jXlCeZc
(h/t @plsburydoughboy)
If a lion could speak, I wanna be the person who'd understand them.
Which is why I am always on the look-out for studies on urine signaling behavior in felinidae. I think that might be a way they speak.
Seriously though, If you wanna speak cat someday to spite wittgenstein, ya'll gotta be up on that cat piss.
"Spontaneous discrimination of urine odours in wild African lions, Panthera leo" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347217300404
Now... ask me why I have bee semen on google alert. π
=οΌΎβ β βοΌΎ=
"Isaac is not a genius. He can not write his own name, dress himself, read or write or use cutlery. He requires round-the-clock care. He can not speak one word. He is severely autistic, yet he has found a way to connect with others that is as unique and special as he is."
https://aplus.com/a/google-street-view-helps-non-verbal-autistic-boy
I literally don't have words to describe this better. So here's a screenshot of my locked twitter.
I have a βgoogle street viewβ of all my meaningful tweets and content Iβve written on birdsite.
Sometimes when I struggle to find words, I use my memory for spatial information to βretrace my stepsβ and find the right symbolism to communicate my intent. Sometimes its not the cleanest, and it can be noisy, but it works for me.
I realized recently that I also remember people this way. I can go to their profile and refamiliarize myself with them. It creates a sense of space.
Language maps?
Language maps.
https://www.ted.com/talks/ajit_narayanan_a_word_game_to_communicate_in_any_language
People maps?
https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/11/11/1812/2514636
I need better tools.
A shunting yard style transformation of a particular langauge representation into an abstract syntax tree... or rather a semantic mesh.
Did you know there is a 'programming language' who's linguistic representation can be dynamically changed at run-time and supports scratch? I know it exists, I don't know what it is called.
See James Owen Ryan's thesis (not yet published?) and intrinsic algorithm's (Dave Mark's) story blocks.
Story Maps. Causal Maps. Inference Maps.
Templates & Metanarrative
Language is a linear compression format that lazily describes implicit causal association maps via a system of gossiped meta-narrative templates.
These templates are biased by our attention and awareness of another's attention. Adaptive to the needs at hand. These can be artifacts such as words, but also phrases and idioms which have been previously imbued with meaning.
The communication via language has error checking features that are adaptive to the various channels by which information is conveyed. It is constantly being honed thru a series of internal compression systems that mirror how ant forage and compress their maps by operating on it.
This compression often happens during sleep and has been investigated partially thru Hebbian Learning theory, and is inherently Bayesian because it is fundamentally a signal processing system trying to process itself.
Dreams are your brains adversarial networks running while the main mode of movement is shutdown, used to simplify the networks of thought based on a sort of simulation of experiences. Its necessarily done in offline mode because thoughts are not always relevant at the moment.
While the brain dreams the narrative self is quiet and 'the elephant in the brain' dances.
@ultimape (note to self: you already have a thread on this that directly references ribbonfarm pieces. Refer "Sisyphus' masks" and the futility of maps as ~storied lossy compression networks. )
The anxiety driven need to maintain our maps. Maps made so we can point at where it hurts, where the dragons live, and where we might want travel to fulfill our needs.
"...information space is constantly changing. Our information world is changing much faster than that of our ancestors. In navigating this nauseating landscape, we need fixed points that do not exist."
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/10/01/meaning-and-pointing/
Even "mapping" the mess to better understand how to avoid it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AhSNsBs2Y0
"In the abstract language of information theory, the kind of disorder called entropy is the lack of structure or compressibility in data. Consider a rectangular field of pixels which can be either black or white. A field of pure black or pure white has maximum order in the sense of Shannon entropy: you hardly need any bits to explain how to recreate the image. This is not a mess."
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/01/05/tendrils-of-mess-in-our-brains/
We share entire life templates as maps. And we love reading about it as much as we love sharing.
Finding others who share the same map means finding potential allies for the journey.
"We are also illegible to each other. Unlike nomads from previous ages, who wandered in groups within which individuals at least enjoyed mutual legibility, we seem to wander through life as largely solitary creatures. Our scripts and situations are mostly incomprehensible to others."
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/07/31/on-being-an-illegible-person/
Meta-mapping: "The Stuff of Thought" to the thoughts on stuff. Language is embued with meaning. And stuff?
"Even if you do try hard to become an expert, your stuff will remain a somewhat illegible machine, because it was not designed top-down. It was designed as a series of hacks and modifications to an inherited lifestyle, which itself has been evolving for many generations. Understanding it completely would be like understanding the lifestyles of all your ancestors."
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/16/the-las-vegas-rules-ii-stuff-science/
Its 10 PM. Do you have a map of where your stuff is?
And other rituals we use to maintain order in the chaos we call our lives.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/30945/origin-its-10-pm-do-you-know-where-your-children-are
I often confuse overton windows with inferential distance.
At some point concept of "unthinkable thoughts" is less about being taboo, and more that they are illegible given the structures of meaning that currently exist.
Conjecture: "overton window" inflates notion of attention management/acceptable discourse with the ability to form thoughts within a framework of meaning.
Operating Theory: most are blind to frameworks of meaning. I am blind to acceptable discourse?
Same same, yet diff.
This notion of illegibility is important when you want to engage meaningfully across divides.
The first pass of being able to talk meaningfully is to bridge inferential distances. It's a chasm between where you stand and where they stand, full of unknown words and sometimes hidden perspectives. It takes effort to stretch yourself, and can be painful.
Like fictional archaeologists using their knowledge to reach beyond themselves, often requiring a scary leap of faith.
https://giphy.com/gifs/JgvuJ50VJGrvO/html5
Even if you bridge the chasm of inferential distance. (Maybe by finding a shared point of understanding you can build up meaning with?) This still leaves the trap of the overton window.
It's a trap you have to pass by knowing the right words. A community password. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkAkgxIIhL4
The range acts as an implicit boundary for a community: What is acceptable for us to pay attention to? What do we ignore?
A joke, a riddle, a toll. An ever shifting costly signal.
But its more than that...
The overton window is something you have to learn too so you can interact safely with a culture.
But there isn't just one window. It is a collective sense of the communities you belong. A social gestalt with many different setpoints and ranges.
Even inside of a culture you are familiar with, your own setpoint may be quite different.
And so (Rude) is relative. Personal. A Chesterton's fence loosely depending on your station and your caste. Dynamics that a foreigner is often not able to see.
It a way, my blindness and belligerence to this window is a blessing and a curse. I punch well above my station when it comes to epistemic peers. And so I can play with ideas that are outside of most people's inferences and mostly pull them back to legible territory.
But I also don't see when I'm stepping on the toes of the powers that be. I'm unquestionably rude, acting as a foreigner in my own country not knowing implicit rules of how one should be. Talking outside of the window.
The overton window lives in the realm of signals. Right beside your personal quirks with language and shifting local norms of speech. The land of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, and various Majority Illusions.
Familiar is comfortable, so it goes unnoticed.
But I'm weird. An ethereal ghost, I walk thru Chesterton's fences like they weren't even there. I crack the riddles of "speak friend and enter" http://www.tk421.net/lotr/film/fotr/20.html but then when I finally am noticed, they're wondering why I am even there.
Gross body stuff (urine), food, and head cannons. Show more
π΅ Pissing the night away π΅
π
I wonder what would have happened if I used my associative memory for memorizing jokes and quips to gain social status instead of using it to remember information.
I wonder what sort of social environment would have biased me in that direction.
I wonder if wondering itself - a form of Gedankenexperiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment is something inherient to the traits of being a good comedian.
Esoteric wordplay and puns as an IQ signaling game - fishing for epistemic peers.
That Aha-hahaa moment.
"Wouldn't it be funny if..."
Is how I get my friends in to do things.
"The kind of reputation play exemplified by dares allows children to practice risk, negotiation, and social signaling. They define themselves and their groups through their speech acts and actions. Social standing and belonging have been so important to survival that they are worth risking death and injury in order to maintain."
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/05/05/dares-costly-signals-and-psychopaths/
Piquing curiosity. Framing problems. Directing attention thru questions.
Oh wait, thats what I'm doing right now.
Hello followers. I'm borrowing your attention and knowledge to invent new ideas.
Signaling for cooperators. Calling upon ancient oaths. Calling up on our ancestors. Shining out a light on the ideas of the past. Shared meaning manifesting itself as the future's legacy. Pointing the way?
Collectively honing in on a hidden idea in abstract space of meaning.
Like robot fish
http://gracegao.ae.illinois.edu/publications//journal//2017%20Swarm%20Intelligence_Shinerbots_Ji.pdf
Or ants
http://www.swarmanoid.org/upload/pdf/Sperati-EtAl:10:ants.pdf
Pathfinding with maps.
Resonating ideas in the hivemind of the like minded?
https://mastodon.social/@ultimape/100202254571089436
Mapping a space of ideas by coordinating landmarks. Translating forms and shapes are we looking at the same territory?
Finding maps long forgotten. Trying to glean what they were seeing. Modeling the model makers by the light of the moon.
"And yet there lie in his hoards many records that few now can read, even of the lore-masters, for their scripts and tongues have become dark to later men."
https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/8dyv56/the_tongues_of_men/
> The lesson for Epley can seem βpainfully obvious.β To understand someone, we should not imagine their point of view but make the effort to βgetβ their perspective. βTrue insight into the minds of others is not likely to come from honing your powers of intuition,β Epley wrote, βbut rather by learning to stop guessing about whatβs on the mind of another person and learning to listen instead.β
http://nautil.us/blog/taking-another-persons-perspective-doesnt-help-you-understand-them
Exploring. Yelling out and listening to the echos. Mapping the negative space.
@ultimape This relates to what @vgr mentioned recently about having to temporarily posit that falsehoods are true as a step toward obtaining a previously illegible truth.
This might be the best way to increase inferential distance, and the falsehoods might exist beyond the overton window, making it difficult to share results effectively if the final conclusion is not obvious.
To a 3rd party this process can look exceedingly similar to conspiracy theory / nuttery.
@mchapiro @vgr There an interesting process for optimizing x86 assembly code that uses a similar notation - if you squint at it, they're basically an evolutionary search process combined with an attention biased search system.
The trick is defining "correctness".
"Our approach is similar in some sense to brute-force enumeration in that its content to experiment with incorrect implementations. However it sacrifices completeness in the interest of tractable runtimes."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD9mZDJzb58
@mchapiro @vgr I've used the 'nuttery/consiracy' angle to explore space of microbiomes a bit. I have a long thread on birdsite where I explore H. Pylori's effects and try to link it to everything I'm interested in. I know i'm wrong, but in process it routed out far more genuine misunderstandings in my knowledge than if I didn't try to believe it was true.
"You can learn more about truth faster not by 'correct' beliefs, but by having others explain why your trollish misappropriations are bad."
@mchapiro I'd love to read the bit where @vgr alluded to that idea.
My own thinkining is a mashup of https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/09/07/the-world-as-if/ and https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/02/15/make-your-own-rules/
And a sprinkling of "intuition pumps" derived from the same sources as Dennet's
@mchapiro @vgr TL;DR: Juergen Schmidhuber's novelty search algorithms. https://refactorcamp.org/@dorian/100170037821360945
I've been more drawn to this type of thinking lately.
Towards a pursuit of illegibility with an intent to clarify / improve legibility.
Hence #zanyidea, gnostic psychobabble, & general crackpottery.
Mostly sourced from pre-internet esoterica/occult i.e. Madam Blavatsky, Roerich, Jung's maladaptive daydreaming (Red Book)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jung/comments/7bwl2t/maladaptive_daydreaming/
...whose denial led to the creation of legible / rational / wonkful structures that we're faced with today.
@vr00n I like framing a lot of jung's stuff as "wrong but useful". Different (incomplete) perspectives trying to build narratives of stuff we don't quite understand.
The notion of trying to translate between the domains of thought has helped me not be so judgemental about that stuff as I was when junger.
Compressing maps to share them with friends at increasingly distant locations. Connection Maps.
"Language itself acts as a store of information, shared among minds, and language tends toward compression. As stories and concepts are shared, they become more compressed, until they reach the final stage: a metonym, a single word that represents a story or concept that conversation partners are expected to understand. A word is the ultimate tl:dr for human communication."
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/09/03/cartographic-compression/