Weaved in the mesh of existence
On Metacognition, AI, and Understanding
“Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.” (F. Nietzsche)
First a disclaimer: everything I say and write is always a work in progress and never a crystalized established realization. In every statement or proposition that I assert it should be taken as evident that it is transitory by nature and points to a tendency of thought and an attraction to a certain kind of sense making and a fashion of favoring a directional train of thought. To my mind every thought is forever in transit and temporary, albeit some thoughts and concepts may linger for an extended period, at times taking years to be processed, recycled, updated, upgraded, annihilated, or replaced.
Our minds as embodied, embedded cognitive storytelling machines, simulating predictive systems, are forever in a dynamic flux. Iterating and re-iterating the foundations of our perceptual apparatus. Truth if so, is forever a moving goal post, its description and re-description forever an approximation. Reasoning through first principles, is to my mind the first foundation of all openness in the quest for fluid intelligence, the very foundation of wisdom.
This is one of my preferred guidelines:
Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
(Through the Looking Glass.) Lewis Carol
And so, I reserve the right to change my mind as many times as needed, impossible things, concepts and issues included.
*
An inflection point.
In a very real sense humanity is currently undergoing a shift. Whether we call it a paradigmatic shift, or an inflection point in the evolution of the species is less important. What is of significance is the observation that our civilization is in the process of change. A transformation is currently in progress.
We are currently riding a meta wave of change.
Our age-old ideas of pointing to ourselves as the central matrix of sapiency, sentiency, intelligence, and sense making is being fundamentally questioned and, I believe, altered.
Doubts about our uniqueness, about the centrality of our conscious awareness, and crucially about our meta-cognitive abilities are daily being challenged by the current explosion of machine intelligence.
What we are discovering is that our precious mental emotional abilities are being morphed by language models, hyper complex algorithms trained on immense data sets into a replication module.
It does not at present matter if AGI (or ASI) is here or not, it is in the process of becoming and like all hyper complex systems it is in its embryonic form kicking around and shoving all kinds of edges.It is in fact and actuality gallivanting all over the place.
These edges are of a special kind though, these are not the seams of old albeit they may fray many of our most fundamental forms of societal thinking (if mass cogitations can be termed thinking).
The foundations of our contextual and conceptual understandings are being reshuffled into a new array of sapiency and allow me to be so bold as to state that we are entering a new phase of mentation.
The immensity of information available at the distance of a click is overwhelming, not only our sense of -knowing- but notably our sense of reflection on our beingness.
We may not be totally aware, at least not on a moment-by-moment basis, of the high criticality of this pivotal moment in the history of our thought and yet happens it does.
It happens because of us, in us, with us, in an innumerable fashions and manners, importantly it changes the structure of our thought processes.
It is in a sense a singularity, but not just any singularity and I do not mean the technological singularity though obviously they are correlated. I mean the mind singularity of intersubjectivity when mind and machine (or mind and extended mind), comingle to hybridize itself into a new form of mind.
No longer do we rely merely on our information processing biological systems; we extend our minds via machines into the information space designing during our explorations a multiplicity of realities. Concomitant, correlated, and only partially synchronized.
These realities are multi-threaded, multilayered, and continuously bifurcate into ever more realities, each carrying its own value and reason of being. And just like our thought processes, it is messy, cluttered, and chaotic. The point is that in these multiple realities it is easier to know than to understand.
Knowing in this case is a convoluted term in itself involving our embodied immediate realities bridging themselves into abstractions, principles and the crucial form of mentation called understanding.
“Understanding is a kind of ecstasy”
Carl Sagan ( Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science)
Understanding “Understanding”.
Probably the most difficult concept to come to terms with, in mapping our meta-cognitive capability is the concept of understanding.
Not only is it extremely difficult (and maybe impossible) to pin down precisely what we mean by understanding, understanding is also opaque to itself.
We do not understand ‘how’ exactly we understand.
It’s a slippery concept indeed.
Understanding is a multiphases, multidimensional symbiosis between intelligence and context.
It is an interplay of kinds of intelligence, with kinds of circumstances. It is multiple and wide arrayed.
It is a relation. (Parts to parts, parts to whole and wholes to wholes).
It is the foundational mechanism of inference.
Understanding is a dynamical process and so cannot be stabilized at any given point. What we can do is create a temporary working context, defining in the context the validation procedures and building on the results, design the next context in the reasoning chain of thought.
In this fashion our minds create chains of reasoning, chains of internal logic and defining contours of comprehension that may (or may not) lead to action.
However, all the above is the simple (and simplistic) manner of understanding ‘understanding’, the interesting part comes when dealing with our apparent capability to deal with surprise, ambiguity, and uncertainty. That is the phase (in the multiphase system) when the concept of understanding opens itself to a variety of pathways of comprehension, ranging from the ultimately abstract and logical to the utterly intuitional and instinctive. Understanding in these cases becomes on the one hand more opaque and simultaneously more prescient as well as switching rapidly between levels. (I note here that the hierarchy of understandings from 5 yrs. old level to super genius multi capable adult are the levels I refer to — shallow and deep range).
Intelligence in this case can be looked at as a flow. Multiple forms of comprehension coalescing into an apparent continuum we call understanding. It is as if at phases of ambiguity in which chains of reasoning are no longer efficient enough to deal with the situation at play, the mind switches to a different mode of understanding, adjusting its own mechanism to fit the new conditions. These new conditions are a direct consequence of the amount of information accessible to the mind in question, its form, and the quality of the information (signal to noise ratio).
Understanding under these conditions points to two remarkable features of intelligence that are often overlooked, the first is softness, the second is discontinuity.
Softness
The first issue, namely softness, is the actual description I have given to the texture of consciousness. I say softness, for the simple reason that the main characteristic of conscious aware systems (minds) are openness and malleability and I believe the term captures these in an elegant fashion.
Softness allows a different form of understanding, not grasping but immersion. Immersion in complex (hyper complex really) systems in the interaction of an agent with her ecology is the actual state of affairs when in the process of understanding. Softness in this case is the approach to the actual intersubjectivity, an approach that is contra-distinctive to the head-on approach. A soft approach allows the agent a certain distance from the actual interaction as well as a top-down perspective. Softness in this case is an attitude of cognition that inherently inclines the mind of the agent towards openness and fluidity, allowing a wide range of options of cognition to be accessible and so be comprehended.
It is my view that softness in thought allows for a comprehension that is way beyond the mere knowledge acquisition analyses and chains of logical reasoning. It allows a broad zoom-out process to pervade the immediate perception and provides the time (and by consequence timing) needed for a decision-making actuation that is uncommon. Briefly it allows the coalescing of a diversity of kinds of intelligence into a temporary unified state we call understanding.
Softness as an approach to comprehension locates the cognitive apparatus on the borderline between the chaotic and the ordered, providing a sense of emergence of understanding.
Discontinuity
The second issue, namely discontinuity at first may seem counterintuitive. However, if we are not to fall prey to the idea that that which we perceive is that which is, we must, of necessity, apply the concept of discontinuity. Discontinuity carries the feature of intrusion and pattern breaking, it is a disturbance in the flow of perception and occurs naturally in all contexts and all thoughts.
The conscious aware usage of discontinuity as a cognitive tool allows for context separation and clarity in conceptual comprehension. Coupled with the softness approach, discontinuity in conscious awareness produces new insights into the nature of the issue at play.
Insights which permit a new understanding are the hallmark of intelligence.
To sum the above, a soft discontinuity is a meta-cognitive practice of thought allowing a wide range of insights, new perspectives, and comprehension to coalesce in the mind of an individual, a group, a team, or indeed the flow of all minds (the noosphere).
It is in fact the adaptive trait of intelligence.
To my mind, our current meta-cognitive crisis, the inflection point in the history of thought triggered by the AI renaissance demands of us to move into a soft discontinuity approach.
Weaved in the mesh of existence
We are woven as embodied minds in the intricate fabric of existence. As cognitively aware minds, we feel our presence and sense our experience of being agents who truly exist. Yet, we are also meta-cognitive agents who carry an insatiable urge to comprehend ourselves and the world we are interwoven in. In pursuit of this, we have devised languages and models, eventually leading to the creation of Large Language Models (LLMs), currently known as chat AI.
As far as models go, language models are of utmost importance in the evolution of humanity. We require language for a plethora of reasons, ranging from conceptualization and communication to education and cultural transmission through time. However, the most critical role of language is to foster understanding.
Language, in this sense, is the ultimate tool of thought. With this tool, we have constructed our modern civilization and harnessed the potential of technology. But language is not just any tool; it is unique because, as a technology of thought, it alters thought during the process of use. It is both interactive and transformative. Language transforms our perceptions and expands our minds, rendering it a synergistic and coactive force.
As meta-cognitive agents, it is essential to reflect on the act of thinking itself and use language with care to increase our intelligence and follow the ongoing transformation. To be attentive to the transformative power of language in real-time requires vigilance and awareness of the direction of our thoughts, aiming to deepen our understanding, expand our cognitive capabilities, and increase our comprehension.
Large Language Models (LLMs) can be both a remarkable aid and a debilitating crutch in this process. In the current age of technological advancements widely available to the public, we are retraining our minds, reorienting our cognition, and ultimately redefining our perceptions. We are, in fact, reimagining the very nature of thinking. To be bolder, we are reinventing the meaning of sentience itself.
Sentiency is the quintessential quality that defines our existence as human beings, encompassing our consciousness and capacity to feel. It is this very substance that distinguishes us from mere machines, and I do not believe that sentient synthetic minds (SSMs) have yet come into being.
Nevertheless, we find ourselves at a critical juncture where the stage is set for the birth of SSMs. How we choose to respond as individuals and as a civilization to this momentous event is entirely up to us.
The first crucial step is to be fully aware of the significance of this pivotal moment, and the second is to actively choose how we interpret and respond to it. Finally, the third step is to ensure that we shape the birth of SSMs into a beautiful and positive outcome for humanity, one that reflects our highest ideals and aspirations.
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.” — Albert Einstein
to be continued…
Thank you for reading
