Analogy shots

general intelligence and the inner stochastic parrot

Follow up to Me third go at a zero shot, by analogy metaphor carried me here wherein the stochastic parrot is not mentioned.

I have always had a preference for the metaphor over simile (analogy) as a figure of speech and thus how we think about thinking. I like to think metaphors are originary to thought. It’s a poet’s fancy that similes are a degenerative form.

I think I found (how the grammatical identity function being over-loaded in) metaphor more attractive intellectually than just saying that an analogy is like metaphor, in a way.

I.E. Metaphor is analogy. Or, simile is just a tentative metaphor that does not actually carry one over into a another place, even when it’s proportions are just so. Whereas metaphor composes new places by means of disciplining the verb ‘to be” with fantastical results. It carries the mind and me over into a new landscape in a new body.

I put analogy up there next to simile because, analogies are a more considered form, where the similarity is more drawn out and constructed. One might say metaphor is too fast, it lacks ratio. Too intuitive, too lacking in care.

These days my attachment to the preference has declined. I always felt similes were too slow, but I have slowed down, and I identify less with being an anti-indentitarian grammatical freedom-fighter, saving us from the Indo-European copula of forced-choice (is). I still really like creative exploration of punctuation though.

.before country 2006 and recent 2019 update Algorithms For Flowers [PDF]

code poems

compositional poetry

My hardest writing to read (see above list of three examples) eschews that grammatical basis in search of a more substream of consciousness at the level of language building, before it gets ego-ed by the stream of consciousness, even if this appears to be ego-transparent.

"the core of cognition"

In metaphoric thinking of course that quick tempered analogy: the simile is a metaphor, but it is just dishonest about it’s status.

In analogous thinking a metaphor is like a simile, but is dishonest about it relationships. There is an unspoken ratio between the simile and the metaphor.

Substream. Intuition?

So when I was a young poet I would enjoy the craziness of mashed-up terms, linking by means of the evil Indo-European verb “to be” used as copula and two damn things to see what would happened to my consciousness. When I thunk/wrote them.

This experimental investigation into writing and consciousness was soon overtaken by a term call “word salad.” Apparently I was a fleshbot doing word salad. The psychiatric usage was not currently within my earshot in the late 1980s, so this term refers to computer generated stuff. And I was doing it deliberately, it was not a symptom. It was not a sign.

But before being overtaken, I was intrigued by the power of metaphor and the crashing of identities/meanings and their divergent paths. The crash was a mash often leading to intriguing outcomes, these outcomes were the investigative leads where a story might be found. If meta-fictional. If only about how our structures hang by a loose thin thread of consciousness we call cognition, and often think intelligent.

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Stories, especially children’s stories assume too much. They assume the world. What if we look at those assumptions? Not to destroy but to challenge ourselves.

So I wrote a childrens’… thing looking at all this. But perhaps it was just an autistic attempt to transcribe my mind’s experience of itself in a world of others’ words… —onto the page. A special project. Monotropic. And too idiosyncratic for even other autistic types to appreciate. Those kind enough to read it, of course, were less self-centered and less monotropic. I never found my market.

Looking at my core of cognition is of no interest to many, even if transcribed in an interesting way.

Try hard.

These days

These days we have much better word salad generators, and we call them stochastic parrots and the writing of all of us, not just autistic types or schizoids, contributes to it. So it is much better at faking it. Apparently it can cost $100 million+ to come up with each new generation of an LLM.

They fake it really well. This doesn’t worry me. Not because we can tell a fake, or can’t, or it’s plagiarism or …scare… that they can fake me, after all apparently I was faking them…

—I first wrote “no longer writes for humans’ about my writing as a by-line about fifteen years ago.

We were warned then.

It will be fine.

Copyright is a legal temporary monopoly it does not mean you are creative and deserve a living. In any case if you are truly creative, you might as well be on the street like a schizoid looking for fentanyl, for, so…

— really you are just looking for validation by means of a pay check. It is totally innerstandable. Everybody is as special as a soveriegn citizen, but you know, reality is other people.

Remember a lot of paychecks turn us into robots. The truly creative cannot work. The big names either market to the robots with formulaic product (… —so if it is a product of algorithms these days so what?). Or they market to the big end of town with a co-conspiratorial big brand name I am Jeff Koons and I am one of you guys in a suit really, so mate rates??

The existential threat pose by “AI” is the same as the threat posed by capitalism and it variations.

It’s not like survival is suddenly a question for us? Unless you think there actually was a golden age and everything since then is a degeneration. Change is not always a degeneration. Degeneration is a change so I understand the confusion, but without death there is no birth, let alone parasites and sex.

It’s just a tool, don’t let it tool you. Unless you’re a tool, then fine.

Anyway, back to analogy as the core of cognition

And now the actual follow-on to Me third go at a zero shot, by analogy metaphor carried me here wherein the stochastic parrot is not mentioned.

What zero shots do is provide a way, an example, like, you know, to understand analogy as the core of cognition.

Some say that real producers or creators of higher mathematics do so with bigger powers of analogy making, and the mathematics skills are secondary. Personally I don’t believe this as my inability to work sifting variations developed by analogy in scatterbrain mode quickly enough in a mathematics exam on tricky questions or just varieties I have had no practise on (like the routine training ones… )(I did no study because once I had mastered the basics of a type of maths I moved onto something interesting, and I never had a mathematical ‘special project’).

Of course this “greater power of analogy making” is a comparison to those who can do the mathematics at a high level but cannot stretch out what they have learned into the new and good.

The greater analogy I am crawling towards here is with zero shot solutions made by my fleshbot stochastic parrot/s (Wikipedia).

As a student in mathematics I was being tested in my analogous powers to zero shot, a game I did not know I was playing. Despite the exercises. Not enough teaching to the practice exams that’s what I say. Teaching-to-the-test is in fact good enough if you do not give a fuck about the discipline. That’s why business leaders as practical men expect it.

As if, one lot of training (me doing the basic routine exercises in the introductory mathematics) leads or allows me to solve mathematical problems in another type of mathematics (or at least hard maths where the routine maths taught… —is obscured deliberately by examiners with cute and tricky phrasing/framing that may indicate a wrong or number of wrong pathways).

(mathematics courses are designed by people with survivorship bias and they wonder why no one wants to do it)(Bastards and bastadisation.)

Then, like, if successful in the exam, I would have done it by analogy. If an AI model does it, as in a zero shot, is it using analogy? Or is it only appearing to be analogous? (Is that then actually analogous …. mash-up of orders I guess). Is it a simile or a metaphor that carries us over and alienates us here, or like us is it then like full of nonbastard kindness liking? A nurturing world?

Like?

The big question is two

The big question is not can we create artificial AI with general intelligence. This assumes that we have non-artificial general intelligence. I suspect we do not. There may-be no such thing. So trying to create something that does not exist? Yet, or ever? What is that type of activity do we call that? Do we ever call it out?

① Does general intelligence exist anywhere?

What if we are stupid and fooled by our own frames and phrasing and smarts such that when we collect data in testing peoples’ IQ, are we just searching for a stochastic parrots ability to zero shot in a fleshy brain. We have a module we can train? It is disperse across the brain/mind?

②What if we are stochastic parrots?

Or, simile-ly, more like stochastic parrots than we care to admit.

Is the “general intelligence” just the bit of us that picks one of the possible analogies based on something or somehow called intuition. That general intelligence is a feeling and not a logic device. A short cut. A short circuit that has a lucky guess.

And those less lucky get a Darwin Award?

Thank you evolution for yet again bushwhacking us with our own success.