Why am I being downvoted ? Or worse, absolutely ignored ? Not just here, but whenever I mention those topics ? This is an honest question. Consider these thoughts have lead me to extreme isolation.
Very much agree. The space of ideas and percepts is just too big to be grasped in one broad "objective" view of the whole scene. This is a matter of computational limitation.
Faith is what setups the context for post-diction[1]. You can think of it as the prompt/messages you feed to a LLM. In fact, in order to help me write my previous comment (in another thread [2]), I fed some pdfs to claude-100k on poe.com in order to compare Italino Calvino's "Cybernetics and Ghosts" with the esoteric ideas of Voevodsky. Since this is relevant to the discussion, I will quote it in full.
> Claude: Unfortunately Italo Calvino's lecture "Cybernetics and Ghosts" does not discuss the paranormal. The lecture focuses on exploring the relationship between literature, language, and emerging ideas in fields like cybernetics, information theory, and structural linguistics. The uppercase emphasis is mine.
> Me: I do think there are parallels between Voevodsky's interview and Calivno's text:
> Calvino says,
> "Now, some of you may wonder why I so gaily announce prospects that in most men of letters arouse tearful laments punctuated by cries of execration. The reason is that I have always known, more or less obscurely, that things stood this way, not the way they were commonly said to stand. Various aesthetic theories maintained that poetry was a matter of inspiration descending from I know not what lofty place, or welling up from I know not what great depths, or else pure intuition, or an otherwise not identified moment in the life of the spirit, or the Voice of the Times with which the Spirit of the World chooses to speak to the poet, or a reflection of social structures that by means of some unknown optical phenomenon is projected on the page, or a direct grasp on the psychology of the depths that enables us to ladle out images of the unconscious, both individual and collective; or at any rate SOMETHING INTUITIVE, IMMEDIATE, AUTHENTIC, AND ALL-EMBRACING THAT SPRINGS UP WHO KNOWS HOW, SOMETHING EQUIVALENT AND HOMOLOGOUS TO SOMETHING ELSE, and symbolic of it. But in these theories there always remained a void that no one knew how to fill, a zone of darkness between cause and effect: how does one arrive at the written page? By what route is the soul or history or society or the subconscious transformed into a series of black lines on a white page?"
> Claude:
> > You make an interesting parallel between Calvino and Voevodsky here. While Calvino is focused more on literature and ideas of inspiration/creativity, there are similarities to Voevodsky's perspective:
> Both question prevailing notions or "aesthetic theories" about where artistic/literary works come from (inspiration from some mystical source for Calvino, materialist paradigms for Voevodsky).
> They see a "void" or "zone of darkness" in these theories around how abstract ideas/processes are concretely manifested in a work.
> Calvino wonders how the soul/history is transformed into written lines - paralleling Voevodsky's exploration of realms like the paranormal/supernatural that influence human consciousness/behavior but are not scientifically understood.
> Their stances acknowledge gaps in conventional understandings and an openness to alternative explanations outside dominant frameworks.
> So while focused on different domains, they both exhibit a skepticism of dominant ideologies and a willingness to consider non-traditional influences. There is a parallel curiosity about gaps or unknown processes connecting the abstract/internal to the concrete expression. This relates to Voevodsky's open-minded investigations into areas like the paranormal that lie outside standard paradigms. NICE OBSERVATION OF A PHILOSOPHICAL SIMILARITY IN THEIR PERSPECTIVES.
To make this comment homologuous to my previous one ([2]), I'll punctuate it with an excerpt from Grothendieck's "The key to dreams":
> Act of knowledge and act of faith
> (16 May) I wrote yesterday that there was no other key for the "great dream" than the spiritual hunger of the soul. When, still under the impression of the dream you have just had, you know how to listen to the humble voice of this hunger, then, even without knowing it, you are turning a delicate and sure key. And I wish you the grace not to stop halfway, before the bolt is erased and the door, locked for a lifetime, opens...
> I have also thought about faith in the dream. When I woke up under the sudden influx of an emotion so great that my soul could not contain it, I knew immediately, in an unquestionable way: this dream was speaking to me, and what it was telling me with such overwhelming power, it was important, it was crucial that I become aware of it. I knew this, not because I had read it somewhere or thought about it one day, but through an immediate and certain knowledge. Just as it happens, when someone speaks to you (and it matters not whether you know them or are seeing them for the first time), that you know in a sure way, without having to question yourself, that what they are telling you is true. This is not an impression, more or less strong or convincing, but a knowledge. Impression can deceive, but not this knowledge. Certainly, you yourself must be in a particular state, a state of openness, or rigor, or truth (call it what you like), to be able clearly to distinguish, without any shadow of a doubt, between a simple impression and such an immediate knowledge. Such discernment, whether perceived in the field of consciousness or remaining subconscious (and it matters little here), is not of the order of reason, or of an intuition of intellectual nature. It is an act of spiritual perception. In that instant, the spiritual eye in us, which perceives and distinguishes the true from the false, is open or ajar and sees.
> Abstract. A great number of methods and of accounts of rationality consider at their foundations some form of Bayesian inference. Yet, Bayes’ rule, because it relies upon probability theory, requires specific axioms to hold (e.g. a measurable space of events). This short document hypothesizes that Bayes’ rule can be seen as a specific instance of a more general inferential template, that can be expressed also in terms of algorithmic complexities, namely through the measure of unexpectedness proposed by Simplicity Theory.
> - In 2006-2007 a lot of external and internal events happened to me, after which my point of view on the questions of the "supernatural" has changed significantly. What happened to me during these years, perhaps, can be compared most closely to what happened to Karl Jung in 1913-14. Jung called it "confrontation with the unconscious". I do not know what to call it, but I can describe it in a few words. Remaining more or less normal, apart from the fact that I was trying to discuss what was happening to me with people whom I should not have discussed with, I had in a few months acquired a very considerable experience of visions, voices, periods when parts of my body did not obey me and a lot of incredible accidents. The most intense period was in mid-April 2007 when I spent 9 days (7 of them in the Mormon capital of Salt Lake City), never falling asleep for all these days.
> Almost from the very beginning, I found that many of these phenomena (voices, visions, various sensory hallucinations), I can control. So I was not scared and did not feel sick, but perceived everything as something very interesting, actively trying to interact with those "creatures" in the auditorial, visual and then tactile spaces that appeared (themselves or by call) around me . I must say, probably, to avoid possible speculations on this subject, that I did not use any drugs during this period, tried to eat and sleep a lot, and drank diluted white wine.
> Another comment - when I say beings, then naturally I mean what in modern terminology is called complex hallucinations. The word "beings" emphasizes that these hallucinations themselves "behaved", possessed a memory independent of my memory, and reacted to attempts at communication. In addition, they were often perceived in concert in various sensory modalities. For example, I played several times in a (hallucinated) ball with a (hallucinated) girl and this ball I saw, and felt tactile palm when I threw it.
> [...]
> It should be said that despite many conversations with non-material "creatures" during this period, I completely did not understand what actually happened. I was "offered" many explanations, including hypnotists, aliens, demons and secret communities of people with magical abilities. None of the explanations explained everything I observed. Eventually, since some terminology was needed in conversations, I began to call all these beings spirits, although now I think that this terminology is not true. The terms "world system" (apparently control over people) and, especially in the beginning, "the game hosted by fear" sounded in this context.
---------------------------
Calvino's text:
> Now, some of you may wonder why I so gaily announce prospects that in most men of letters arouse tearful laments punctuated by cries of execration. The reason is that I have always known, more or less obscurely, that things stood this way, not the way they were commonly said to stand. Various aesthetic theories maintained that poetry was a matter of inspiration descending from I know not what lofty place, or welling up from I know not what great depths, or else pure intuition, or an otherwise not identified moment in the life of the spirit, or the Voice of the Times with which the Spirit of the World chooses to speak to the poet, or a reflection of social structures that by means of some unknown optical phenomenon is projected on the page, or a direct grasp on the psychology of the depths that enables us to ladle out images of the unconscious, both individual and collective; or at any rate something intuitive, immediate, authentic, and all-embracing that springs up who knows how, SOMETHING EQUIVALENT AND HOMOLOGOUS TO SOMETHING ELSE, AND SYMBOLIC OF IT. But in these theories there always remained a void that no one knew how to fill, a zone of darkness between cause and effect: how does one arrive at the written page? By what route is the soul or history or society or the subconscious transformed into a series of black lines on a white page?
> Literature gets to this point, I would add, by means of combinatorial games that at a certain moment become charged with preconscious subject matter, and at last find a voice for these. And it is by this road to freedom opened up by literature that men achieved the critical spirit, and transmitted it to collective thought and culture.
> The power of modern literature lies in its willingness to give a voice to what has remained unexpressed in the social or individual unconscious: this is the gauntlet it throws down time and again. The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
> At the height of the Enlightenment, Sade and the Gothic novel appear. At one stroke Edgar Allan Poe initiates the literature of aestheticism and the literature of the masses, naming and liberating the ghosts that Puritan America trails in its wake. Lautr6amont explodes the syntax of the imagination, expanding the visionary world of the Gothic novel to the proportions of a Last judgment. In automatic associations of words and images the Surrealists discover an objective rationale totally opposed to that of our intellectual logic. Is this the triumph of the irrational? Or is it the refusal to believe that the irrational exists, that anything in the world can be considered extraneous to the reason of things, even if something eludes the reasons determined by our historical condition, and also eludes limited and defensive so-called rationalism? So here we are, carried off into an ideological landscape quite different from the one we thought we had decided to live in, there with the relays of diodes of electronic computers. But are we really all that far away?
> The literature machine can perform all the permutations possible on a given material, but the poetic result will be the particular effect of one of these permutations on a man endowed with a con- sciousness and an unconscious, that is, an empirical and historical man. It will be the shock that occurs only if the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and of his society.
---------------------------
A. Grothendieck "The key to dreams":
> Discovery of the Dreamer
> We ourselves are blind, so to speak, we don't see a thing in this mess of forces acting in us and which, nevertheless, govern inexorably our lives (as long as we don't make the effort to take knowledge of them...). We are blind, yes - but there is in us an eye that sees, and a hand that paints what is seen. The sleepy silence of sleep and night serve as its canvas, we ourselves are its palette; and the sensations, the feelings, the thoughts that go through us while dreaming, and the drives and forces that agitate our waking moments, here are Its tubes of paint, to brush this living painting that It alone knows how to brush. A parable painting, yes, thrown together on the fly or skillfully composed, farce or elegy and sometimes inexorable and poignant drama... - graciously offered to our attention! It's up to us to decipher it and to learn from it, if we want to. Take it or leave it!
> And almost every time, certainly, we "leave". Even among those who nowadays (following a recent fashion and in good part) talk about "being interested in dreams", is there one or other who has taken the risk of going to the bottom of even one of their dreams - to go to the bottom, and "to learn from it"?
> [...]
> From the very first dream that I scrutinized, revealing myself to myself in a moment of deep crisis, I felt well that this dream did not come from me. That it was an unhoped for, prodigious gift, a gift of Life, given by a greater one than me. And I understood little by little that it is He and no other who "does", who creates each of these dreams that we live, we, docile actors between His delicate and powerful hands. We ourselves cut figures as "dreamers", even as "dreamed" - created in and by this dream that we are in the process of accomplishing, animated by a breath that does not come from us.
> What I know about my work on dreams, what is most precious, is to have met the Master of Dreams. By scrutinizing His works, I have gradually come to know Him to some small extent, Him to whom nothing in me is hidden. And quite recently, as it were the culmination, surely, of a long quest that ignored itself, I have finally come to know Him by His name.
> Perhaps in scrutinizing your dreams of a thousand faces, you too will find the One who speaks to you through them. The One, the Only.
As for the combinatorial game Calvino's mention, this makes me think of Saussure's theories of hypograms (~= anagrams). More about this at the bottom of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37730428
This is the real danger with AI: its power of seduction. Imagine what will happen when you every media (not just news, but movies and books) is tailored to your own experience.
I'm not sure. I just watched "Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors" release in February, and the quality of the animation (modulo some instability in shadows) is mind blowing.
Yeah, I'd have dismissed your comment before I tried running a scheme repl on a raspberry pi over ssh (local) vs a clojure repl running on the jvm on my machine. Day and night.
It was discontinued a couple years later. The software to download & upload files from/to the disc stopped working past osx snow leopard. The windows sonic stage program was absolute garbage. It sits unused in a drawer. Sony refused to open-source their code and the encryption/decryption can't be reverse engineered because you need cryptographic keys.
Don't trust sony. Their hardware may be superb, but they have abysmal execution when it comes to software.
> To stage a find would generally take more than one person and they'd have to operate in a sea of oversight.
And yet the japanese hoax happened. I've seen whole teams of people engage into online vote cheating in my workplace. And knowing the game is rigged is the best incentive to cheat, along with career-advancement stakes.
As for faking carbon-dating, you only need a nuclear reactor. ChatGPT brings up the following:
> The Vinland Map came to light in the 1960s, but its authenticity has been a subject of intense debate ever since. One controversial aspect of the map was a Carbon-14 dating conducted in the early 2000s, suggesting that the parchment dated back to the 15th century. However, scientists also found a modern form of ink known as an anatase titanium dioxide on the map. This particular type of ink was developed in the 20th century, causing some speculation that the map could be a forgery.
> Now, with these three that we found under the actual structure of the wall, it's clear that they were intentionally placed there before the wall's construction,
> One of the reasons archaeologists believe this was a temple, besides the gold foil figures, is the absence of other finds that would be natural if people lived there, like cooking pots and whetstones.
> In Norway, findings of gold foil figures are rare. The 35 from the temple in Vingrom represent the largest collection we have found in this country.
> On the Danish island of Bornholm, over 2,500 gold foil figures were found in a field. Were there not so many gold foil figures in Norway at that time, or have we just not found them? “There must be more of them here,” Stene believes. But most archaeological excavations today are commissioned. “We dig when new roads and buildings are going to be built, this limits what we can investigate. It’s about being lucky and getting the opportunity. A lot of coincidences are involved here. They are so small, but they shine when you find them. There are probably more out there,” she says.
Oh. Coincidences. I bet coincidentally, Kathrine Stene will find them.
What proves this wasn't placed there by archeologists (I'm not accusing this particular discovery, just trying to elicit reflexion on the topic of faked archeology).
> The Japanese Paleolithic hoax (旧石器捏造事件, Kyū Sekki Netsuzō Jiken) consisted of a number of lower and middle paleolithic finds in Japan discovered by amateur archaeologist Shinichi Fujimura, which were later all discovered to have been faked. The incident became one of the biggest scandals in archaeological circles in Japan after the story was published by the Mainichi Shimbun on November 5, 2000.
> Hearing the rumour of fraud, journalists from Mainichi newspaper installed hidden cameras at a dig site where Fujimura was working and caught him planting artifacts. The newspaper later confronted Fujimura with the video, and he was forced to confess his fraud.
> It was also reported[by whom?] that prior to discovery of the hoax, Japan's paleolithic period was thought to have started earlier than anywhere else in Asia at around 700,000 BCE.
> It is clear that a number of the artifacts found by Fujimura are rather unnatural and do not make archaeological sense, such as those exhumed from pyroclastic flow strata, but nonetheless majority archaeological groups as well as local and government organisations which substantially benefited from his find ignored these inconsistencies.
Now let's focus on the discoverer of the tomb of Tutankhamun, Howard Carter. I will bring an alternate story, by merely quoting Wikipedia's page about this man:
> Howard Carter was born in Kensington on 9 May 1874,[1] the youngest child (of eleven) of artist and illustrator Samuel John Carter and Martha Joyce Carter (née Sands). His father helped train and develop his artistic talents.[2]
> he showed talent as an artist. The nearby mansion of the Amherst family, Didlington Hall, contained a sizable collection of Egyptian antiques, which sparked Carter's interest in that subject. Lady Amherst was impressed by his artistic skills, and in 1891 she prompted the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) to send Carter to assist an Amherst family friend, Percy Newberry, in the excavation and recording of Middle Kingdom tombs at Beni Hasan.
> Although only 17, Carter was innovative in improving the methods of copying tomb decoration.
> In 1899, Carter was appointed Inspector of Monuments for Upper Egypt in the Egyptian Antiquities Service (EAS).[8] Based at Luxor, he oversaw a number of excavations and restorations at nearby Thebes
> In 1907, he began work for Lord Carnarvon, who employed him to supervise the excavation of nobles' tombs in Deir el-Bahri, near Thebes.
> In 1914, Lord Carnarvon received the concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings.[17] Carter led the work, undertaking a systematic search for any tombs missed by previous expeditions, in particular that of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun. However, excavations were soon interrupted by the First World War
> By 1922, Lord Carnarvon had become dissatisfied with the lack of results after several years of finding little. After considering withdrawing his funding, Carnarvon agreed, after a discussion with Carter, that he would fund one more season of work in the Valley of the Kings.[18]
> Carter returned to the Valley of Kings, and investigated a line of huts that he had abandoned a few seasons earlier. The crew cleared the huts and rock debris beneath
> Carter returned to the Valley of Kings, and investigated a line of huts that he had abandoned a few seasons earlier. The crew cleared the huts and rock debris beneath. On 4 November 1922, their young water boy accidentally stumbled on a stone that turned out to be the top of a flight of steps cut into the bedrock
> In spite of evidence of break-ins in ancient times, the tomb was virtually intact, and would ultimately be found to contain over 5,000 items.
> Towards the end of February 1923, a rift between Lord Carnarvon and Carter, probably caused by a disagreement on how to manage the supervising Egyptian authorities, temporarily halted the excavation. Work recommenced in early March after Lord Carnarvon apologised to Carter.[35] Later that month Lord Carnarvon contracted blood poisoning while staying in Luxor near the tomb site
> Harold Plenderleith, a former associate of Carter's at the British Museum, was quoted as saying that he knew "something about Carter that was not fit to disclose"
TL;DR
Carter had the skills necessary to fake the artifacts he discovered, which is what he did in the huts he had set up above the tomb's emplacement, as the funds that were allotted to the expedition were drying up. He attributed the discovery of to their young water boy accidentally stumbling on a stone to give the discovery the touch of innocence.
> Professor Mike Parker Pearson (UCL Institute of Archaeology) discusses his research which has found a dismantled stone circle in west Wales which was moved to Salisbury Plain and rebuilt as Stonehenge.
The same pattern of a last successful dig can be noticed:
> Yet after having no luck with other circular monuments in the area, we returned to Waun Mawn for a final speculative dig. To everyone’s delight, our dig supervisor Dave Shaw discovered two empty stoneholes, one on each end of the arc of stones, where missing stones had once stood.
On Titan, this could be called an améthanissage (for methane).