Unmaking Sense

Episode 11.38: Noising and Denoising in diffusion models as metaphors for Unmaking and making Sense.

An unexpected light illuminates the whole Unmaking Sense series. A key-stone falls into place; understanding occurs, emerging from the fog of 450 episodes.

Episode 11.37: Diffusion models; how they work and what they tell us about the human brain.

How diffusion models work in general outline, what that tells us about neural nets and the AI process, and what it suggests we might usefully learn from the whole process about the operations of the human brain. Some passing remarks about copyright law.

Episode 11.36: The inside story; what it is like to be you or me; consciousness and understanding.

We explore one aspect of understanding that perhaps beguiles us into imagining that t is some special quality: our inside story. And we consider how AI may come to experience something similar in an occasional, emergent way.

Episode 11.35: does “understanding” refer to more than is entailed in the organisation of memories?

Memorisation and understanding again.

Episode 11.34: Is there a difference between memorisation and understanding?

Does “understanding” entail some further quality or power beyond a rich memory and the ability to organise it to solve a problem, answer a question, or complete a prompt when required? The first episode of several investigating the question.

Episode 11.33: Paying attention to what is going on directly inside us right now.

It’s great to pay attention to the present and to what is going on in front of us, but what is going on inside us right now?

Episode 11.32: Radical self-trust as the key to knowing how to live the present; only I can be me.

Radical self trust is the key to making decisions about how to live the present because in the uncertain relationship between the present and the future radical self trust is the only basis upon which we can live the present in the way we uniquely ourselves can live the present, rather than as others might hypothetically suggest that we should or could or would be better advised to do. Finding needles in haystacks as an AI problem.

Episode 11.31: Living the Present as the only preparation for the future that amounts to anything.

Dewey’s great maxim and why trusting in our enjoyment of things, in what energises us, is the only way to decide how to spend the present time.

Episode 11.30: What interests us is what energises us, and so something we do willingly and with joy

Some clarification of the nature of enjoyment as a reflection of human interest, and some reflections on the criteria that we might use as a measure of the extent to which we enjoy things, and have an interest in them as measured by the energy that those activities or those relationships generate.

Episode 11.29: Interest-driven education is a self-justifying end in itself not a means to an end.

Because the means-ends relationship between learning, qualifying in something, working and earning a living has been ruptured by the advent of AI, we will need to refactor education to be an end in itself, and only interest-driven education can possibly satisfy that requirement.