Dialog with Machines by Peter Krieg

Machine’s and Ideas

Modern computers can’t integrate arguments from different sources into new conclusions. They are unable to create comparatives, metaphors, or analogies, because they are essentially Turing machines (a hypothetical device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a set of rules, i.e. linear logic). The storage requirement for associative memory in a hierarchical structure increases exponentially as details add up. Data contained in capsulated in hierarchical structures, like the internet, has no comparative capabilities.

Biological Systems are Knowledge Based Polylogical Learning Systems

Hierarchical deductive inference system, like a computer, has only one way to look at things, but learning systems integrate patterns from external and internal events, and compare experiences to create new knowledge. It then uses the knowledge generated to transcend logical domain and apply the map to a new system. Biological systems create an abstract conceptual map of a solution and apply it no a new context. For example, a toddler taking the experiences objects falling combined with experience with the application of force to an object to come to the conclusion that when he or she pushes their plate off the table; it will fall onto the floor creating a mess.

Humans simulate “autopoipsis” (self organization a learning system develops through survival) in conversation. We abstract structural similarities between language and the adaptive behavior of survival. Data storage in cognitive systems can be thought of as generative, in the way we create conceptual symbols, rather than transcribe every event. For example, I might be read a long article, but I will probably only remember general idea as a sequence symbolic representations of the data I find relevant… (i.g. If I wasn’t taking notes, I would probably only remember this as a long article about how people are complex, and machines are dumb.)

Deep Blue Cheated, Virtual Reality Adapts, after that Everything gets Fuzzy

When you ask a person to factor 21, we don’t have to try every number until we get it right. A computer’s approach to problem solving is to test every possible solution, and though they can do this with increasing speed, it is an inefficient approach. While current computer technology does not think like we do, there are some similarities to our symbolic memory and the way some virtual reality systems are generating dynamic maps and dialogue. New “Pile Systems,” store data as input/output patterns.

On the last two pages Kreig describes Fuzzy Logic (which I cannot differentiate from a Pile System) and predicts the rise of the machines…

What’s Bugging Me About All That

He says “high end computers can handle 14 dimensions” (p.24), which seems to conflict with his premise of the mono-logical nature of computers?

At the top of page 24 Kreig says “knowledge system must be able to analyze data and create new data from it,” but isn’t that what a computer does, compare data with a function that generates an output? It does not create a new idea, just applies an existing formula to a pre-categorized set of variables, but doesn’t it generate new data?

How does quantum computing factor in? As I understand it, the “Q-Bits” these machines are based on use quantum “paradoxes” to be 1 and a 0 at once, rather than testing every solution as in a linear logic system. Isn’t this is essentially a Polylogical system?

He lost me on “Pile Systems” and “Fuzzy Logic.”

Doug Mann’s introduction to Jean Baudrillard

Doug Mann’s introduction to Jean Baudrillard relays a man with a philosophy on contemporary American society’s construction of a cultural reality with subjective tangibles and a history made malleable with philosophical semantics and media representation.

Baudrillard expanded on a Marxist categorization of objects as use vs. exchange, citing objects that have practical and prestigious value, and envisions a utopian future were gifts cease to be consumer objects and are exchanged for love (I wonder what he would have thought of Facebook, a consumer culture of virtual gifts).

The philosophy of simulacra, phases of imagery, and science fiction, was strangely analogous to neoromantic historian view of history and myth. Mircea Eliade’s (a historian concerned with myth and culture) philosophy of modern vs. “primitive” man’s connection to time and events is an odd parallel and inversion of Baudrillard’s writings on cultural shifts in the perception of reality. Both make extraordinary statements, and use a philosophical semantics to argue the validity through perceptually dependent “truths.” Eliade makes statements about archaic man’s freedom from the progression of time in a way that implies magical abilities to travel through time, and Baudrillard predicted that America would never enter the Gulf War, but they explain their claims, they describe a culturally constructed paradigm in which “actual” historical events are irrelevant. Conversely, Eliade believed modern man’s attachment to a “non-reversible” chronological history shackles us to an unchangeable reality that archaic man transcended through myth, contrasted with cultural progression to Baudrillard’s third order of simulacra, where we have created a disconnected virtual reality.

His views on seduction blatantly enforce an ignorant archaic stereotypical gender roles, and are not worthy of mention.