Unmaking Sense

Episode 11.57: Joy and misery, optimism and pessimism interpreted in relation to latent space.

We extend earlier discussion of latent space to encompass joy and misery, optimism and pessimism by considering how human minds can react sympathetically to their perception of the latent spaces intimated by their experiences.

Episode 11.56: Noise and chaos as seen by human minds may yet hold untold fertile riches for others.

The third in our internal mini series based around denoising latent space: that we cannot see anything in “what is directly in front of us” does not imply that there is nothing there to be seen. By having faith in our intuitions, doggedly putting one foot in front the another, and watching what emerges we may yet find ourselves rich beyond our wildest dreams.

Episode 11.55: Why a world that seems to lack all shape, purpose and meaning may imply the opposite.

The second in a three-episode linked sequence exploring meanings emerging from latent space.

Episode 11.54: The first of three linked episodes starting in chaos that denoise to new sense.

Episodes 11.54, 55 and 56 were all recorded in one thirty-minute walk. They start from nowhere and end up somewhere, just like the metaphorical denoising of latent space that creates a new image in and of the world.

Episode 11.53: The significance of diffusion models for human cognition; the concepts they enable.

How diffusion models afford us the ability to add technical, material support to intuitive cognitive claims such as tacit knowledge, in dwelling, and the ability to intuit fecundity even where there is no apparent pattern or meaning.

Episode 11.52: Diffusion models of different strengths and what they tell us about human cognition.

Details of the way diffusion models noise and denoise images and text to different levels and what that tells us about the sense we can make of the world. In particular, that human intelligence cannot discern a pattern does not imply that there is no pattern there to be discerned; noisy images can and do embody the legacy of the parent images and text whether we can detect it or not.

Episode 11.51: Four consequences of AI diffusion models for human understanding and cognition.

We follow up on the conversation with an AI that we transcribed in episode 50. There are four points: one is about how we lay hold on the latent space that is made possible by any given object and implicit in it; second is that the way we give expression to our collective non-conscious understanding of the world in such things as religion means that it is not so much the religions that matter as what those religions tell us about ourselves; the third is that we lay hold on the fleeting impressions that latent spaces make upon using rhetoric for fear of losing the insights; the last is that determinism is the kiss of death to human life, and turns us into a kind of walking dead because it removes all possibilities of choice from the way we instantiate latent spaces.

Episode 11.50: What Mixtral-8x7b-instruct-Q4_K_M thinks of these arguments. I read a transcription.

This episode unusually is composed entirely of me reading out the contents of a conversation that I had this morning with the Mixtral-8x7b-instruct model, I think the 4KM quantised model if you’re interested in that sort of thing. I think it’s really interesting even if it’s a bit repetitive, but I think nonetheless the model’s capacity to summarise the argument of episode 47 which I gave it as a text file is truly remarkable and the way it takes up the ideas and runs with them more remarkable still. In episode 51 I will share some of the ideas that I have had as a direct consequence of this stimulating conversation in a way that further illustrates exploration of a latent space.

Episode 11.49: That human minds can make no sense does not mean there is no sense to be made.

It is a legacy of the human arrogance that comes from believing ourselves to be the chosen species of the planet and the universe, put here by God to dominate everything. That prejudice is demonstrated in the way that we still harbour the belief that something that is unintelligible to the human mind is unintelligible to any mind. But image to image diffusion shows that chaos as it appears to us in the latent space is not the chaos we imagine it to be. There is a potential for the creation of new images out of the points in latent space that have themselves come from parent images that have been made unrecognisable by the noising process. By unmaking sense, we follow that same path, and we intend that by remaking sense we may emerge from it with a better understanding of the world and a better way of living in it.

Episode 11.48: Image to Image as a metaphor for changing our sense by unmaking and remaking sense.

By unmaking sense we create and add noise and uncertainty in much the way an image to image AI diffusion model transforms one image into another. But in remaking sense according to some new principle we reconstruct our worldview in a way we at least hope will be better and intend to be better.