[ExI] Survival

Bryan Bishop kanzure at gmail.com
Thu Jan 3 19:37:36 UTC 2008


On Thursday 03 January 2008, Jef Allbright wrote:
> Probably familiar to denizens of this list is the ability to assess
> with a quick glance a person's probable orientation on the "Science
> vs Humanities" axis.  The clothes and grooming are usually the
> strongest signal, supplemented by physical stance, facial (especially
> ocular) dynamics, choice and following of visual targets, and on and
> on.  Up close, and especially with interaction, choice of words and
> emphasis **within context**  tell a broad story of a person's
> upbringing and experience, their values and their preferences on many
> levels.

Yes, those skills and abilities _must_ be familiar to extropians. Aren't 
most of us programmers, medical scientists, and at least philosophers? 
In common, these jobs demand that one knows how to 'debug' a situation, 
to act as the detective or pathologist or diagnostician and to be able 
to trace thoughts and patterns back to their multiple sources, an 
impossible feat according to Boltzmann and statistical physics and yet, 
somehow, we are in fact able to operate, walk and talk.

> You may read the above and react with something like "yes, of course"
> or perhaps "yes, but it's possible to be completely wrong", but the
> key point I offer is that

In this area, the real trick is creating or generating your resulting 
behavior so that even if you *are* wrong, you can still operate 
effectively.

> ***************
>
> all of these "signals" necessarily emanate from a coherent whole --
> they are **far** from independent.  (This is related to the point I
> occasionally try to convey about the difference between probability
> and likelihood.)
>
> ***************

One context cannot truly, completely know another. But maybe know 
enough?

> Related examples include "gaydar."  Or my dog's extreme sensitivity
> to mood and context, allowing her to infer meaning (in her limited
> terms) with amazing accuracy despite no real language abilities.

I think humans are another excellent example, although many of the cases 
are kind of foggy in thoughtspace due to previous (abusive) frameworks. 
Actually, literary analysis *might* be an example, where thoroughly 
well-read people attempt to extrapolate the sources of the language and 
beliefs of an author. See the recent Hofstadter reference in the other 
thread on universal languages.

> Other notable examples are available from the popular book _Blink_,
> and Paul Ekman's research on face-reading and deception.

David Zindell too:
>    Her eye twitched then, and I saw what I should have seen long ago:
>    My mother was addicted to toalache - the facial tics were the 
>    result of her hiding this shame from her friends, and from herself. 
>    I saw other things, too, other programs: The layers of fat girdling 
>    her hips, which betrayed her compulsive eating programs and love of 
>    chocolate drinks and candies; her arrogant speech patterns, the 
>    clipped sentence fragments hinting at her belief that others were 
>    too stupid to understand any but the briefest bursts of information 
>    (and hinting, too, at her basic shyness); the way she had 
>    programmed herself to squint in place of smiling. The cetics call 
>    these program revealing body signs "tells." I searched her face for 
>    the frowns, eye-rolls and blinks that would tell the tale of 
>    herself.            

> Hallning, an art invented to integrate the crosstalk of the mind's
> senses, was like a laser light that could cut in many directions. A 
> master cetic could also use hallning to confuse these senses so that 
> one could 'hear' the colour red as a ripping of wool cloth, or 'smell' 
> a fireflower's essence as lovely traceries cut into the stonework of a 
> cathedral. With hallning, a cetic might even use one's brain in 
> unusual ways, for instance, shifting the making of words from the 
> language centres in the brain's left hemisphere to unconditioned 
> synapses in the right. Although Danlo was no cetic, he had learned the 
> fundamentals of hallning, as well as the arts of simultaneity, 
> fractality and fugue. And others. To thwart the mind-reading efforts 
> of Isas Lel and his compatriots, Danlo called upon almost every art 
> that he knew.            

>   Once, years before, Hanuman li Tosh had taught Danlo the cetic's art 
>   of face reading; he had taught Danlo that the body's conditioned 
>   responses of muscle and the deeper nerves always betrayed the secret 
>   workings of the mind. An arching of an eyebrow, a pursing of the 
>   lips, a twitch of a finger – any of these motions could tell the 
>   tale of what one was thinking. Thus, if a cetic knew how to 
>   interpret the tells, as these subtle body signs were called, he 
>   could read one's true fear. But Danlo was no cetic, and even for a 
>   master cetic such as the dreaded Audric Pall, these Transcendentals 
>   would have been hard to read.         

Good stuff.

> Less reputable (but entertaining) resources include Neural Linguistic
> Programming (stripping out the idiocy of the Speed Seduction fanboys
> and the blatantly immoral self-promotion of many practitioners), the

I have tried reading some NLP books, but it's just hype. And I am also a 
fanboy of speed reading, though not the peculiar 25 kwpm cold reading. 
My rate is up to 1.2 kwpm with computer assisted word-flashing, 
although my comprehension starts taking significant dives.

> art of "cold-reading" (intentionally or unintentionally practiced by
> so-called "psychics"), and the impressive acts of Derren Brown
> (taking into account manipulation, trickery, and selection of
> positive results.)

I think I sat down to do some calculations at one time, and because of 
the 14 kHz operation of the brain or whatever, it is impossible to be 
reading at the rates that the cold-readers are suggesting. But still 
inspiring ... maybe neuroengineering will lead the way in the future.

> A related question, of deep practical interest to me, is the
> relationship of such probabilistic pattern-matching to issues of
> "empathy", which as popularly recognized is an evolved heuristic for
> modeling the internal state of intentional others, but quite limited
> relative to its potential more developed and technologically
> amplified form.

The clash of wet empathy and cold, hard tech may look like there's much 
to be found, but that's probably only due to the impracticalities of 
current interfaces. I am sure that extropian values of context-empathy 
will make their way into the future.

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/



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