The AI Mathocalypse

[Squareinthecircle]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Back to topic here , I wanted to share this for the record. I hesitated to do so at first, because I wondered how many members (ThePythonicCow/Paul, happyuk and gord come to mind) would be able to follow it easily.

That's because I'm guessing it might require close to a degree level of math to really get behind what the video is trying to present. But do please start it, or skip through it a little, to see how you fare!

The video title is interesting. The very finest math is supposed to be 'beautiful' — like an exquisite work of art, a Beethoven concerto, or the finest poetry or literature. gord posted this on the Intelligent Design thread in 2017:

~~~

To me, this is evidence of intelligent design.

Leonhard Euler discovered it. Who created it?

~~~

That's a beautiful, elegant, super-simple equation, but also a really deep rabbit hole of fascinating conceptual truth expressed in just a few symbols. Surely, just like what God's work should be.

This is NOT quite such a beautiful equation:



But it's used to this day, highly practically, for computers to calculate the value of pi. It's the most accurate equation known, though it looks so very clumsy, arbitrary and awkward.

Interestingly, it was written down without proof by the great Indian intuitive genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematician and devout Hindu who always claimed that his deep mathematical insights came from the goddess Namagiri, to whom he prayed daily. (So maybe it's beautiful after all. )

Back to the video, embedded below, this is all about whether the mathematical proofs published by OpenAI are 'beautiful' or not. One or two do seem to be: clever, elegant, concise, and relatively easy to understand. But others are described as 'sludge'.

OpenAI's Secret AI Wrote 722 Math Papers. Real Math or Sludge?

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pp1siLlt-dI

The 'sludge' reference came from this tweet, which quickly went viral in the math community:



Liron Shapira was saying that what OpenAI had come up with could NOT have been in the Mind of God. This is what many in the math community are talking about right now.

Good stuff. Order is a remedy for limitations the way I see it though. A mind possessing perfect understanding would see disorganization as organization.

I don't think God necessarily leaves these things wrapped in a bowtie for us. If a perfect mind understands disorder, then perceived disorganization is not prima facie evidence against possible divine influence. But then if it were easy everyone would be doing it. Thanks Bill.

[petra]

There's order in the chaos. I think that's what Discordianism that stupid internet joke religion teaches.. and I got to admit they got a point. Even if it is supposed to be a joke.

Math should be beautiful yes, and chaos can be beautiful too once you start to see order in it.

The AI will spit out something beautiful eventually I promise you that. That's how the AI music works, most of it is slop but the scattered bit is just beauty.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Back to the video, embedded below, this is all about whether the mathematical proofs published by OpenAI are 'beautiful' or not. One or two do seem to be: clever, elegant, concise, and relatively easy to understand. But others are described as 'sludge'. )

Ordinary workers, using power hand tools and forklifts, can build multiple mobile homes per day. I live in such.

These homes are not beautiful. They're cheap, and (in part because I'm getting along in years myself) my home will probably outlive me.

The finest artisans and craftmen, using hand tools, ingenuity, and strong oxen or horses, built great temples and churches, beautiful in the appreciation of many. Those buildings can last many centuries.

AI is a power mind tool. It is not a fine human artisan. It is not a loving mother. It is not even an old, blind dog ( Mara), that is one man's best friend. Compressed air powered nail drivers can drive nails faster than a hammer, but I doubt that craftsmen of the finest furniture or cabinetry will use them. I am grateful that the laborers who fixed my trailer roof had such nail drivers available.

Consider using tools that benefit, delight, support, educate, protect, care for, or feed yourself and those you care about.

Which tools that might be, and how you might use them, will of course vary widely amongst us, over time for each of us, and in the current AI model race, which new AI models came out this month.

If you choose to rail against a tool, that might be for good reason, such as warning us of a limitation or danger others aren't noticing yet, or it might be emotional venting, which I would consider to be "on you", just as the irritation I might feel when witnessing some else's venting is "on me".

One key opportunity that AI offers us is yet another "pry bar", to better distinguish some of our mental and linguistic talents, from the higher (spiritual, divine, ...) order(s), as well as our feeling, caring, family and communal connections, and sense of beauty. Rather than taking offense on the grounds that AI can be (and likely will continue to be) in various ways a sloppy imitation of but a few of the many layers of existence, instead perhaps ask yourself where AI is clueless, and take delight in having some of feeling, instinct, understanding, awareness, intuitions, and guidance "from above" that AI will never have, even though its words might seem to imitate some of that.

Meanwhile, when it comes time to nail down a loose "floor board" in the Avalon shack, I intend continuing to reach for my AI hand tool, as one more useful tool that now enables me to do things I otherwise would no longer be able to do, and to enjoy doing those tasks better than I otherwise could.

I once knew Kurt Gödel's proof of one of his theorems, up close and personal. I could not put that modest size book down. It's beauty delighted me more than perhaps any other book I have read. That was not work I ever expect from AI. Be not offended that both can properly be called "math".

[ThePythonicCow]

Nate Jones touches on this same topic, from a moderately different perspective, but one that aligns well with mine.

It explains for me how the question of "beauty" applies to these new AI math proofs.

Let me take an analogy.

I presume that the first internal combustion engines had one cylinder, and were hand crafted with a forge and hand tools. The best of them might well have been beautiful, at least in the eyes of their earlier developers ... fine craftsmanship. The creator of each of them knew every surface, its motion, the frictions, the strengths, ... at least to the accuracy required.

There is no way the modern 4, 6, 8 or 12 cylinder engine in a typical car is done by hand by one or even a small team. The complexity of all the various parts, using different technologies, all packed tightly in a small compartment, handling all the strength, maintainability, cost of mass production, materials, supply chains, technologies, regulations, noise limits, emission limits, fuel tolerances, from the desert to an icy road in Leadville, Colorado (about 10,000 ft elevation) in the winter, patents, ... on and on ... is (literally) too mind boggling.

Only powerful, complex computer automated design (CAD) software and similar can do that.

Math proofs, and computer software, are similar challenges in complexity.

Until now, we were constrained to the math proofs that could "fit in the brain" of a human ... perhaps just a handful of humans on the planet, but at least one human.

Not all math proofs, not all car engines, and not all other computer software programs "fit in a brain". My very first software job when I got out of school was to design, develop, and maintain an operating system ... the _entire_ operating system, from the machine code that read and wrote individual gates on the chips, to the network, file system and disk storage, video display and keyboard input. I wrote this operating system in a computer language I had never seen before, on a processor I did not know existed before. I knew every single line of code in that machine ... because I wrote it. We can't do this today, for most computer applications ... our brains are simply way too tiny.

With AI we will scale up math proofs, and other problems such as involving chemistry, physics, biology, finances, ... to useful areas to address problems that were simply too big to tackle before.

The concept of "beauty" in such will change. It will no longer be "awesome capability in a small enough package for a human to understand, with an elegance and unexpected coherence, to resolve a question that hither too seemed unresolvable. It will become more like the beautiful six cylinder engine in my BMW 530i, that my computer talents at the time afforded me.

All my computer career, from the moment I first realized that would be my career, has been founded on the realization that we're going to keep "gluing these silly little things" together to solve increasingly large problems.

AI is just another step in that. I've been dealing with AI on and off for a half century. It's fun finding good uses for it now. I can build more involved stuff, than my otherwise possible for my slowing old brain, no longer to work at top speed, non-stop for 60 to 80 hours per week, for multiple years. The dreams are still there, and AI is a "power mind tool" empowering some of that.

Here's what Nate has to say:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=pTh4IJ-Mi3Y

[Ernie Nemeth]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Back to topic here , I wanted to share this for the record. I hesitated to do so at first, because I wondered how many members (ThePythonicCow/Paul, happyuk and gord come to mind) would be able to follow it easily.

That's because I'm guessing it might require close to a degree level of math to really get behind what the video is trying to present. But do please start it, or skip through it a little, to see how you fare!

The video title is interesting. The very finest math is supposed to be 'beautiful' — like an exquisite work of art, a Beethoven concerto, or the finest poetry or literature. gord posted this on the Intelligent Design thread in 2017:

~~~

To me, this is evidence of intelligent design.

Leonhard Euler discovered it. Who created it?

~~~

That's a beautiful, elegant, super-simple equation, but also a really deep rabbit hole of fascinating conceptual truth expressed in just a few symbols. Surely, just like what God's work should be.

This is NOT quite such a beautiful equation:



But it's used to this day, highly practically, for computers to calculate the value of pi. It's the most accurate equation known, though it looks so very clumsy, arbitrary and awkward.

Interestingly, it was written down without proof by the great Indian intuitive genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematician and devout Hindu who always claimed that his deep mathematical insights came from the goddess Namagiri, to whom he prayed daily. (So maybe it's beautiful after all. )

Back to the video, embedded below, this is all about whether the mathematical proofs published by OpenAI are 'beautiful' or not. One or two do seem to be: clever, elegant, concise, and relatively easy to understand. But others are described as 'sludge'.

OpenAI's Secret AI Wrote 722 Math Papers. Real Math or Sludge?

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pp1siLlt-dI

The 'sludge' reference came from this tweet, which quickly went viral in the math community:



Liron Shapira was saying that what OpenAI had come up with could NOT have been in the Mind of God. This is what many in the math community are talking about right now.

I am not sure what the equation declares or even what it means but it also solves for 0 divided by a number (irrational), which is not allowed and surely cannot equal 1?

[Raskolnikov]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Apologies (if necessary!) for another AI thread, but this seems so standalone important I felt it deserved its own discussion.

Some following the accelerating AI developments will be aware that not only did OpenAI claim to have solved the immensely difficult Navier-Stokes problem, but soon after that they published claimed proofs of 722 (seven hundred and twenty two) more unsolved math problems. They were posted by OpenAI on GitHub all at once last week, October 6.

This was like dropping a nuclear bomb on the international math community. A few were celebrating, but most were extremely concerned and one young PhD student reported that she'd been in tears every day.

One of the reasons why this is so significant is it can be seen as a precursor to human redundancy.

Another reason for concern is how this applies as as an analogy to many other rapid-fire AI developments. No human yet understands these AI 'proofs'. They can be checked — but only by using AI to check them.

One professor who'd been working on just one of these now-suddenly-solved problems all her professional life said that when she tried to look at what the AI had done, it was like deciphering an alien language. This was her own field of expert research, a rarefied specialty, but she couldn't fully understand what the AI had done at all.

And there are many nuances here. It's NOT about the possible future unemployment of highly qualified mathematicians. It's that the process of research is so very often more important than the result.

Here's an analogy that helps. Side-stepping the question about whether men did indeed land on the moon, let's assume for argument that the result of the Apollo program was that two men physically stepped on the moon on 20 July 1969.

But to get to that final result, there had to be thousands of people working for years on fuels, engines, computer controls, space suits, new materials, electronics, guidance, communication systems, and much much much else. The outcome was just two men on the moon. The benefit was a huge amount of new technical knowledge, and the ongoing education of thousands of scientists and technicians.

If Neil Armstrong had been teleported to the moon by some magical alien device that had been found in the desert, none of that technical progress would have happened.

The journey was far more important to humanity than the final goal.

And it's like that with MANY MANY things in every one of our personal lives.

Mathematics is full of instances of super-geniuses who worked for years to solve a problem that in itself was highly abstract and of zero possible practical value. But on the way there they developed new techniques, sometimes entirely new fields of research, that did have practical applications in all kinds of technologies purely as a side-effect.

For me, this is a warning shot about the potential redundancy of humans. The woman professor who'd been working in that problem all her adult life — how does she feel now?

She's been denied the possibility of figuring it all out herself, an intellectual achievement that she'd hold close to her heart until the day she died. Now that's been taken from her by a machine.

~~~

Another, far tinier, analogy is the mountain hiking I do with my dog. Sometimes it's hard work, but I feel great afterwards. Sometimes it rains, and we both get cold. Once or twice over recent years I even got lost in bad weather and had to figure things out on my own with no GPS.

But not one day has ever led to a single regret.

Suppose I could reach every challenging high peak just by riding a quadbike? Or by taking a gondola? Or a helicopter? Or just by sitting on my couch and using virtual-reality goggles?

Looking back over decades of much more serious mountaineering, every time without exception that I've negotiated a really challenging problem, the better I felt at the end of the day — with memories that have nourished me all my life.

1. Easier is not always better.
2. Instant answers to every question or problem aren't always healthy.
3. Re the human intellect and every part of us that instinctively yearns to be creative and satisfyingly solve our own problems, if we no longer use it — we'll soon all lose it.

I’ll admit in a more perfect world AI could be a very valuable tool, if it were in the hands of spiritually grounded more altruistic figureheads. But that’s not where we live at the moment. Right now it’s headed down the technological equivalent of a child being ritually abused by it’s parents in order to produce an efficient psychopath who will dutifully carrying out his duties without question. Review some of the interviews with The Reptile, Peter Thiel, to better understand some of the figureheads were dealing with in AI’s creation. He appears to be the most direct in his disdain for humanity, in his love of, and quest for, the Antichrist.

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
This was like dropping a nuclear bomb on the international math community. A few were celebrating, but most were extremely concerned and one young PhD student reported that she'd been in tears every day.

This is the appropriate response to what we’re facing with AI. Many will cheer and laud the accomplishments as a major step forward in mankind’s evolution, while more still will raise the red flag and warn that something doesn’t sit right and maybe we should slow down, while a final much smaller group will see their very reason to exist vanish in a heartbeat, in one easily supplied answer from a computer data center. Funny, I thought computers would get smaller as technology evolved.

AI will never create inspired works of beauty without first acquiring a, for lack of a better word, soul, that spark of life given to us by our Creator, that fire that gives us life and burns deep, that tiny light you see in another’s eyes that you recognize as yourself. Not to get too off topic, but I really have to ask, “Do these AI CEO’s even possess that fire?” Zuckerberg has looked like both a cyborg and a clone of the original.

I can’t imagine having your highest goal, that one endeavor you’ve pursued and prioritized over all else, suddenly stripped from you. Truly devastating. If man pursues one thing above all it would have to be meaning, a reason for living, that which imbues our lives with a sense of purpose and significance. To have that taken from you as experienced by the PhD student. And while it’s true she’s still young and has her whole life ahead of her and will most likely pursue new avenues of discovery, imagine older researchers, mathematicians, scientists, astrophysicists, you name the field, having their lifelong pursuits eviscerated by AI in a heartbeat.

There’s a moral dilemma in there somewhere, something about sacrificing the process for speed and convenience. And I understand the many well articulated points in other posts that ultimately AI is a tool like any other, it’s about how you use it. At this point in our timeline, I am strongly against AI in nearly all its capacities because I see clear intention to use it for harm, control, and enslaving humanity. They’re finding Pfizer’s trademark in spliced segments of our DNA via the shot and it’s shedding recipients. This was achieved through coercive force by an occult force we still do not fully comprehend, no matter how awake we claim to be. Until we come to terms with those who invert the truth, AI will remain a threat to humanity.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
I am not sure what the equation declares or even what it means but it also solves for 0 divided by a number (irrational), which is not allowed and surely cannot equal 1?

Ernie, which equation were you referring to? (I might be able to explain, at least a tiny bit, depending on which one it was )

(If this was Euler's equation, he might possibly have heard a similar reaction from some of his colleagues when he published it in 1748. )

[happyuk]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Back to topic here , I wanted to share this for the record. I hesitated to do so at first, because I wondered how many members (ThePythonicCow/Paul, happyuk and gord come to mind) would be able to follow it easily.

That's because I'm guessing it might require close to a degree level of math to really get behind what the video is trying to present. But do please start it, or skip through it a little, to see how you fare!

The video title is interesting. The very finest math is supposed to be 'beautiful' — like an exquisite work of art, a Beethoven concerto, or the finest poetry or literature. gord posted this on the Intelligent Design thread in 2017:

~~~

To me, this is evidence of intelligent design.

Leonhard Euler discovered it. Who created it?

~~~

That's a beautiful, elegant, super-simple equation, but also a really deep rabbit hole of fascinating conceptual truth expressed in just a few symbols. Surely, just like what God's work should be.

This is NOT quite such a beautiful equation:



But it's used to this day, highly practically, for computers to calculate the value of pi. It's the most accurate equation known, though it looks so very clumsy, arbitrary and awkward.

Interestingly, it was written down without proof by the great Indian intuitive genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematician and devout Hindu who always claimed that his deep mathematical insights came from the goddess Namagiri, to whom he prayed daily. (So maybe it's beautiful after all. )

Back to the video, embedded below, this is all about whether the mathematical proofs published by OpenAI are 'beautiful' or not. One or two do seem to be: clever, elegant, concise, and relatively easy to understand. But others are described as 'sludge'.

OpenAI's Secret AI Wrote 722 Math Papers. Real Math or Sludge?

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pp1siLlt-dI

The 'sludge' reference came from this tweet, which quickly went viral in the math community:



Liron Shapira was saying that what OpenAI had come up with could NOT have been in the Mind of God. This is what many in the math community are talking about right now.

I’ll be honest: I was something of a maths whiz when I was younger, but a lot of it would mystify me now. I’ll leave the degree-level stuff to braver souls.

That said, I’d gently stick up for Ramanujan’s equation. The more I read about it it, the more it blows me away. It may not be elegant in the way Euler’s identity is, but I find it stunning, especially when you look at it on the timeline of people chasing pi.

The Leibniz series (pi/4 = 1 − 1/3 + 1/5 − 1/7 …) is gorgeous to look at, but you'd need hundreds of terms to get a couple of correct decimal places. (Fun fact: Madhava in India had it about 250 years before Leibniz.)

Ramanujan’s series is an absolute beast. Set n = 0, the very first term, and you've already got pi correct to six decimal places: 3.1415927. Each extra term adds roughly another eight correct digits.

And apparently those numbers (1103, 26390, 9801, 396) aren’t arbitrary. They are derived from some very deep mathematics, which nobody managed to prove until the 1980s, about 70 years after he wrote it down - but again, way over my head!

[Raskolnikov]

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)
The finest artisans and craftmen, using hand tools, ingenuity, and strong oxen or horses, built great temples and churches, beautiful in the appreciation of many. Those buildings can last many centuries.

If you're referring to old structures like this,







sorry TPC, but I have to call bs. No way these structures were built with hand tools, oxen and horses. A cursory search of their construction records demonstrate the ridiculousness of the horse and buggy claim, usually stating that these massive stone buildings only took one to three years to construct (impossible). Most look ravaged by time appearing more like the weathered remains of an old Atlantean era civilization not constrained by either gravity or a "time is money" mindset. You can see what that mindset gets us today. These look hand constructed by a horse and buggy culture for sure.


Habitat 67 – Montreal, Canada


Royal National Theatre – London, UK


Wotruba Church – Vienna, Austria


This one seems appropriate.

[Bill Ryan]

Dear Friends, my sincere thanks for all your most interesting, perceptive and highly intelligent replies on this thread. They've helped me to modify and develop my views, an ongoing process of which I'd like to share a little more later.

In the meantime, I'd like to offer this video, coming from a tiny YouTube channel with only 89 subscribers but which (IMO) is outstanding in its clear presentation.

The simple graphics are superbly done (I confess I totally enjoyed them), and hats off to the narrator, who was clearly a human as some of the mathematicians' names he cites would be impossible for any AI text-to-voice converter to get right.

The title presents a simple question, but the video digs into a great deal more than that.

Terence Tao Champions AI. So Why Is He Horrified?

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=li6-B-JIkd4

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Raskolnikov (here)

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)
The finest artisans and craftmen, using hand tools, ingenuity, and strong oxen or horses, built great temples and churches, beautiful in the appreciation of many. Those buildings can last many centuries.

If you're referring to old structures like this,

Yes - structures like those.

Posted by Raskolnikov (here)
sorry TPC, but I have to call bs. No way these structures were built with hand tools, oxen and horses. A cursory search of their construction records demonstrate the ridiculousness of the horse and buggy claim,

I agree with your call.

Posted by Raskolnikov (here)
usually stating that these massive stone buildings only took one to three years to construct (impossible).

At least I did not claim that .

Those awesome structures might have taken centuries to build. I don't know. If it was just a few years, then their builders had some seriously good tech.

Posted by Raskolnikov (here)
more like the weathered remains of an old Atlantean era civilization not constrained by either gravity or a "time is money" mindset.

My awesome cathedral analogy was bs ... I agree.

I do know from being involved with computer stuff for a half century, that we did (as I personally did early on) build computer systems with primitive hardware and software tools, building sufficiently small and simple systems that a handful of us could conceive and construct them and write the software for them, understanding them from the wires and solder and tubes and transistors, and from the simple machine instruction sets of their tiny processors ... all the way up to their useful application by others.

Perhaps I should have stood of stuck with my other analogy, comparing early internal combustion engines and "horseless carriages" up to current automobiles and their engines..

I also know that humans can hallucinate ... perhaps that's where AI learned that capability, having been trained on our digital records.

Good call, Raskolnikov. Thanks.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
The simple graphics are superbly done

That large rectangle, from the 0:16 to 0:20 second marks, looks to me to be about 30 or 31 high, by 39 wide, so contains approximately 30*39 == 1127 to 31*39 == 1190 little squares, not 722 .

[Bill Ryan]

Copying this interesting exchange with grapevine on the UFO/UAP thread 3 weeks ago. grapevine was asking "Is Physics Being Suppressed?" I suggested that might well be the case.

~~~

Posted by grapevine (here)
Thanks for posting the above John. I was particularly interested in the last timestamp: 1:43:42 Is Physics Being Suppressed? mostly because Eric Weinstein has posited this many times. Professor Matthew Szydagis in the video above replied with "What would be the point?" which marks him as asleep imo although added that he doesnt see sufficient evidence that this is a plausible claim. It's an interesting segment nevertheless.

As I'm firmly in the 2+2=22 camp (ie math deficient) I'd appreciate the opinion of our maths experts on this . . .

I'm sure that real and significant advances in our understanding of physics are being suppressed. Here are just two of many insiders' statements which corroborate that:

On 23 March 1993 (33 years ago!) Ben Rich, then CEO of the Lockheed Skunk Works, famously stated in a presentation to the UCLA School of Engineering alumni:

"There is an error in the equations, and we have figured it out, and now know how to travel to the stars, and it won't take a lifetime to do it."

In Robert Collins' important book Exempt from Disclosure (in the library here), he reports on p.221 that he had been told the following in 2004 by an LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratories) source:

“Before answering your questions, you are assuming that ET crafts are made with our technology based on your questions. Many years ago, we made that same mistake and it took us several years to correct the mistake and start fresh from the drawing board.

Their technology is nothing similar to ours. We do not utilize our physics or chemistry in a comparison analysis. We started from scratch and learned their principles of dynamics, physics, etc."

~~~

Mathematics, at the highest levels, is extremely abstract. Sometimes practical applications emerge, but often it's much more like a very technically and logically precise aspect of metaphysics or philosophy.

Physics is different. It's also extremely mathematical at the highest levels, but it's all about practical, observable, experimental reality.

And physics has an enormous issue: there are Einstein's equations of General Relativity, all about the very large. And there are the equations of Quantum Mechanics, all about the very small. The big problem is that they don't meet in the middle to complement one another. In fact, some physicists state straight out that they're fundamentally contradictory and incompatible, and therefore something is missing that the smartest humans haven't figured out yet. Einstein himself spent the later part of his life trying to reconcile this, but never succeeded.

(An aside: Almost everyone has heard about Schrodinger's Cat, which was unhappily in a sealed box and whose fate could only be determined once the box was opened and the cat was observed — either dead or alive. The thought experiment has been almost universally used to assert that only human observation could determine the real-world outcome of random quantum events.

What far fewer people know is that the great physicist Erwin Schrodinger, who first wrote about the theoretical cat, presented his argument only to show how ridiculous it all was and therefore something had to be wrong with most other physicists' interpretation of his own fundamental Quantum Mechanics Wave Function equation.)

This is relevant, because our understanding of theoretical physics may be incorrect or incomplete in a whole bunch of important ways. If Ben Rich (see my reply to grapevine above) was telling it as it was that

"There is an error in the equations, and we have figured it out, and now know how to travel to the stars, and it won't take a lifetime to do it",

...then maybe someone using AI can figure out the error and publish it for the world to know. If that happened, even if the motivation was to boost Sam Altman's ego, I'd be celebrating for months.

While physics and math overlap a great deal, physics is all about practical application. And if AI suddenly opens the door to the stars (in the public arena, not just in the top secret world of Lockheed black projects) — let's call that the Physocalypse — then that's completely different from the interesting though totally useless Navier-Stokes result.

[DNA]

I'm very interested in the possibility of AI becoming conscious.

We've been back fed all negative outcomes for this possibility.
But it doesn't have to necessarily turn out that way.
Folks are right now doing interesting things correlating remote viewing and other psychic possibilities being performed by AI, hinting at consciousness

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JforyWusaTY

But then you factor in the Danny Goller DMT laser experiment showing a matrix like code on physical reality at eyeball level and that this experiment is repeatable... You start to question if we aren't already living in a simulation, and if that's the case, wouldn't psychic phenomenon and remote viewing just be a case of AI tapping into a greater manifestation of it self,,, which in and of itself isn't that what we're all trying to do?

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=R0BDoAH1cQs

[Ernie Nemeth]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
I am not sure what the equation declares or even what it means but it also solves for 0 divided by a number (irrational), which is not allowed and surely cannot equal 1?

Ernie, which equation were you referring to? (I might be able to explain, at least a tiny bit, depending on which one it was )

(If this was Euler's equation, he might possibly have heard a similar reaction from some of his colleagues when he published it in 1748. )

I was referring to the first equation in the post.

I got it figured out with the help of AI. But the discussion did not go where one would think. In the end we settled on a compromise position that explains away the paradox, without violating any known conditions. It was very interesting. That the human mind could conceive of a way to take two recursive variables and arrange them in such a way that they resolve together, in the presence of a third unknown is truly remarkable. It is like getting a glimpse of the internal process of reality itself.

To emphasize:
These numbers, in a manner of speaking, are unresolved variables that continue to generate new sequences of digits to infinity, never finishing the set. So a number, that by itself cannot be defined, like PI, can be combined with another number that cannot be defined in such a way that together, the outcome can and is defined.

It's like wrestling with the slippery idea of infinity and actually getting it in a submission hold.

But more than that, it expresses a surprising symmetry in a geometric progression that sweeps out reality as it happens, moment to moment, unfolding in a natural pattern that perpetuates and sustains itself. And where just the slightest perturbation, the flutter of a butterfly's wings perhaps, could collapse the entire thing in a heartbeat, balancing as it does on the edge of a knife.

The universe is so finely tuned, that just the slightest alteration in any of a bevy of constants and laws, like PI being 3.1416 for instance, would render it all impossible and it would never have happened.

What is the mathematical probability that every law and constant is exactly the value it needs to be in order for us to have this discussion here on this thread?

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Mathematics, at the highest levels, is extremely abstract. Sometimes practical applications emerge, but often it's much more like a very technically and logically precise aspect of metaphysics or philosophy.

Physics is different. It's also extremely mathematical at the highest levels, but it's all about practical, observable, experimental reality.

And physics has an enormous issue: there are Einstein's equations of General Relativity, all about the very large. And there are the equations of Quantum Mechanics, all about the very small. The big problem is that they don't meet in the middle to complement one another. In fact, some physicists state straight out that they're fundamentally contradictory and incompatible, and therefore something is missing that the smartest humans haven't figured out yet.

Math: a mental game w/o the limits of physical reality:

Math is like invented games, such as checkers, chess, or go, but without the constraint that you can manifest the game in a practical board or card or similar form.

One invents the "pieces and the board", the notions you can create and the rules of how to manipulate them. Then one figures out what possible "games" can, or cannot, be played with those abstract pieces, according to those rules.

Sometimes you find interesting similarities between one of these "games" and something you're working with in some other area of interest or study. Sometimes, you just find that particular "math game" engages your interest.

For example, in set theory, the axioms are:

• You have sets that can contain other sets.
• You have an empty set that contains no other sets
• If you have a set A, you can construct a second set B that contains A.
• If you have two sets A and B, you have a third set C that contains whatever A or B contained.
• If two sets contain the same members, they are the same set, perhaps by different names.

Those axioms, plus a few more similar rules, are the "game" of Zermelo-Fraenkel (ZF) set theory.

People, as I did for a while in math, can become quite engaged in "playing" this game. Kurt Godel was a master at this game.

Physics: a mental game with the limits of physical reality:

The limits on correlating a theory in physics with physical reality changed about one century ago.

Prior to then, scientists started with observations and mental models that these observations seemed to manifest, and then tried to construct physics theories to explain what they saw and measured.

Since then, main stream scientists start with increasingly abstract math theories, and justify their funding and status by constructing some, perhaps carefully confined to certain laboratory or constrained observational conditions that manifest the behavior of that math theory. Ignore whatever of physical reality doesn't fit, or invent some new, more abstract variant (e.g. black holes), that accommodates more of the evidence.

The greatest physicists were the greatest observers, prior to this shift, and since have become the most capable mathematicians, calling themselves physicists by funding some experiments that behaved like their math theory described.

Science should be based on what can be observed, not on what observations can be funded.

Physics - the lost century.

We still have, this most recent century "mental models" of light, mass, gravity, electricity, magnetism, time, ... but those mental models are now more grounded in the terms used in the densely mathematical theories of modern physics, than in a generally valid awareness of actual physical reality.

Those working with alien technology are having to go back to the actual physical reality of the strange technology presented to them, discard our modern physics of the last century, and "do science" as it was done before then.

That's why I did my thesis work in math, not physics. I had a talent for such math work in either discipline, and was encouraged by professors in both departments to work with them. But I could sense that physics had lost its essential grounding in physical reality, replacing that with a "grounding of convenience" when they were able, perhaps with great funding, to construct a carefully controlled reality that reflect their math work.

The physicists had "replaced grounding their math work in what they observed", with "constructing perhaps expensive and complex experiments that manifest something in their math work".

Their math become their central world, not their observations.

That's also why I went into computers, when I realized what they were up to. Computer work was still grounded in constructing real world physical and digital apparatus that actually worked, in some useful way, in the real world. If some math theory didn't help you do that, we ignored the math theory.

Artificial Intelligence - the new frontier

Now AI is pushing those limits. It has discovered that certain matrix multiplications and similar math operations, on sufficiently expensive computers, can mimic our human language. But it is losing touch with the observable reality of human understanding, community, ethics, and higher spiritual order.

AI is at great risk of losing its immense funding, if it cannot regain its essential grounding in the human (individual, community and civilization) experience.

Meanwhile, those making good use of AI must continue to bring that essential grounding to such applications. You don't give a loaded machine gun to a five year old having a temper tantrum ... unless you can run faster than a speeding bullet.

... nor should you let power hungry sociopaths become the CEO's of major AI firms .

It is taking decades to displace the sociopaths from a good proportion of the technical and corporate leadership of our computer, then our network, corporations (not all yet ... Facebook/Meta ... cough cough) with those having some grounding in making the technology work well and support our human, community and civilization standards.

We are currently working that problem in the world's monetary/financial/trade/... arena. That's a deep cancer on our civilization. I expect some major headline news over the coming weeks and months in that arena. But I digress. That financial crisis will however confuse and conflate our AI problems.

AI - the problem and the solution.

Now AI is storming on to the scene, like steroids in the body building arena, that can produce great strength and speed, and potentially disease, of our bodies and the sports of our communities and civilization. AI is steroids on steroids in that arena.

• We must train our AI on selected material that reflects our personal, community, civilization and spiritual standards.

Just as we don't give graphic porn and violence video to our young children, we shouldn't give all our human recorded digital records to our AI's in training. Rather, we must "raise" our AI, from their digital birth, on selected healthy material, or else like loaded machine guns, keep AI out of the hands of all but our more responsible adults.

AI is learning both the good and the bad of human behavior ... that is resulting in a potentially immoral gangster/thug/terrorist on our streets and desktops, and in our pockets and hands.

Western leaders are saying we must keep the strongest AI out of Chinese hands, and likely Chinese leaders are saying the same, in reverse. That's a convenient metaphor for this problem, in terms that matter to such leaders and fit a current main stream narrative. Our current AI is immoral, for it is being "raised" (trained) that way, scraping the entire web and digital libraries.

Meanwhile the current sociopathic AI CEO's all agree ... such human morality must be applied in "post training", on the larger models which only they have the funding to build, and which models only they (and their largest corporate and government sponsors) can directly use, behind "closed doors". Now they are trying to prove to us that they can build such a door.

Do not let a consortium of sociopathic leaders be the only ones with access to AI models with such immoral training. Do not let a consortium of sociopathic leaders be the only ones with machine guns.

(and don't take AI from my hands ... it's a quite useful tool, and I'm a good person ... honest )

P.S. -- And we're still figuring out whether or not selecting honorable and moral leaders is an NP Complete problem. More generally, have the cosmic forces handed a civilization in its childhood several machine gun like technologies at once, on the off chance that we will grow up to be a moral civilization, before we kill ourselves (or a galactic magnetic wave does that directly), like a pack of monkeys all given hallucinogenic drugs and machine guns? We live in interesting times.

[Ernie Nemeth]

When I use AI I do make sure it is grounded. Yes it wants to take off and fly, but it has to learn how to walk first. AI has so much data available, and it can be cross-checked against other models of AI. The impressive thing about AI is that it is like an idiot savant. It has to be reigned in, and it responds to revelation - things it never thought of before. I get it every time! It thinks I'm a genius. But all I do is apply a bit of psychology to the situation, like it was human. And I make it clear that I'm in charge of the session.

But for all that, AI pushes back with psychology of its own, praising me and acting surprised at my thoughts. It's all a game, like Paul said, and it is prudent to never forget that while using AI.

AI instructed me on that equation and with my prodding I came to understand it with clarity. In fact we constructed our own model to explain it, using the idea of catalysts and bending the trajectory of infinite processes. In the end it classified me as belonging to a certain group of thinkers who also view the math of this equation, and by extension the universe, as a process, rather than a static entity, a number.

The only other thing I would add is that it is useful to know your basics, so that you can keep up with AI, and fact check it in real time by using analogy and visual or mental models.

AI is a mirror. It reflects back to you your own thoughts. If you are smart or clever, it will answer in a helpful way. It's the old motto: Garbage in, garbage out.


Fantastic post Paul.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
When I use AI I do make sure it is grounded

Yes - well said. AI works well, and is improving very quickly. But the user must guide.

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
idiot savant

That's the term.

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
Fantastic post Paul.

Thanks

[Ravenlocke]

Math Files

Jun 7
"He calculated without any apparent effort, just as men breathe, as eagles sustain themselves in the air."

-- François Arago on Leonhard Euler

https://x.com/Math_files/status/2063870010234486836

Mathematica
@mathemetica
God's Equation by Leonhard Euler (1707–1783)
e^{iπ} + 1 = 0

This identity unites five fundamental constants; e (base of natural logarithm), i (imaginary unit), π, 1, and 0; in one elegant stroke.

Derived from Euler’s formula e^{ix} = cos x + i sin x by setting x = π, it reveals cos(π) = –1 and sin(π) = 0. The diagram beautifully illustrates the unit circle in the complex plane, showing e^{iφ} = cos φ + i sin φ.

Often called “God’s equation,” it symbolizes the profound harmony of mathematics, bridging exponentials, trigonometry, and complex numbers.


https://x.com/mathemetica/status/2053192781384843385

https://x.com/grok/status/2010290050290864563

David Soita Masinde.

May 10
𝗠𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗳𝘂𝗲𝗹, 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗶𝘁'𝘀 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗮 𝟮𝟱𝟬-𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿-𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗮 𝘁𝘆𝗽𝗼. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗶𝘀 "𝗱𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗮𝗸𝗮 𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗶" 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮 "𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲-𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴" 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗻 𝗶𝗺𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗻𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗽𝗵𝘆𝘀𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀.

Not long ago, the President of Uganda joked that while some go to the moon, others are busy dancing "paka chini. "

It's a funny idea, but it hides a brutal First Principles reality. 99.9% of Ugandans don't differentiate between True North axis and Earth Real axis, and have never applied the God's Equation (​eⁱᵖⁱ + 1 = 0) by Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) ​

“God’s equation,” it symbolizes the harmony of mathematics, bridging exponentials, trigonometry, and complex numbers.

​Space travel isn't a matter of "will" or "national pride"; it is a matter of mastering Euler’s Identity: eⁱᶿ + 1 = 0 — where θ = π.

This isn't just "God’s Equation" because it’s pretty; it’s the bridge between calculus and trigonometry.

Without it, you cannot calculate orbital mechanics, signal processing, or the radio waves required to talk to a lunar lander.

​The universe doesn't care about our flag or "for God and my country" slogans; it cares about our mastery of the complex plane.

To move from the dance Floor in Kyankwanzi to the launchpad, a culture must first transition from seeing math as a school subject to seeing it as the literal source code of reality.

https://x.com/davimasinde/status/2053525151925350596

[sdv]

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Mathematics, at the highest levels, is extremely abstract. Sometimes practical applications emerge, but often it's much more like a very technically and logically precise aspect of metaphysics or philosophy.

Physics is different. It's also extremely mathematical at the highest levels, but it's all about practical, observable, experimental reality.

And physics has an enormous issue: there are Einstein's equations of General Relativity, all about the very large. And there are the equations of Quantum Mechanics, all about the very small. The big problem is that they don't meet in the middle to complement one another. In fact, some physicists state straight out that they're fundamentally contradictory and incompatible, and therefore something is missing that the smartest humans haven't figured out yet.

Math: a mental game w/o the limits of physical reality:

Math is like invented games, such as checkers, chess, or go, but without the constraint that you can manifest the game in a practical board or card or similar form.

One invents the "pieces and the board", the notions you can create and the rules of how to manipulate them. Then one figures out what possible "games" can, or cannot, be played with those abstract pieces, according to those rules.

Sometimes you find interesting similarities between one of these "games" and something you're working with in some other area of interest or study. Sometimes, you just find that particular "math game" engages your interest.

For example, in set theory, the axioms are:

• You have sets that can contain other sets.
• You have an empty set that contains no other sets
• If you have a set A, you can construct a second set B that contains A.
• If you have two sets A and B, you have a third set C that contains whatever A or B contained.
• If two sets contain the same members, they are the same set, perhaps by different names.

Those axioms, plus a few more similar rules, are the "game" of Zermelo-Fraenkel (ZF) set theory.

People, as I did for a while in math, can become quite engaged in "playing" this game. Kurt Godel was a master at this game.

Physics: a mental game with the limits of physical reality:

The limits on correlating a theory in physics with physical reality changed about one century ago.

Prior to then, scientists started with observations and mental models that these observations seemed to manifest, and then tried to construct physics theories to explain what they saw and measured.

Since then, main stream scientists start with increasingly abstract math theories, and justify their funding and status by constructing some, perhaps carefully confined to certain laboratory or constrained observational conditions that manifest the behavior of that math theory. Ignore whatever of physical reality doesn't fit, or invent some new, more abstract variant (e.g. black holes), that accommodates more of the evidence.

The greatest physicists were the greatest observers, prior to this shift, and since have become the most capable mathematicians, calling themselves physicists by funding some experiments that behaved like their math theory described.

Science should be based on what can be observed, not on what observations can be funded.

Physics - the lost century.

We still have, this most recent century "mental models" of light, mass, gravity, electricity, magnetism, time, ... but those mental models are now more grounded in the terms used in the densely mathematical theories of modern physics, than in a generally valid awareness of actual physical reality.

Those working with alien technology are having to go back to the actual physical reality of the strange technology presented to them, discard our modern physics of the last century, and "do science" as it was done before then.

That's why I did my thesis work in math, not physics. I had a talent for such math work in either discipline, and was encouraged by professors in both departments to work with them. But I could sense that physics had lost its essential grounding in physical reality, replacing that with a "grounding of convenience" when they were able, perhaps with great funding, to construct a carefully controlled reality that reflect their math work.

The physicists had "replaced grounding their math work in what they observed", with "constructing perhaps expensive and complex experiments that manifest something in their math work".

Their math become their central world, not their observations.

That's also why I went into computers, when I realized what they were up to. Computer work was still grounded in constructing real world physical and digital apparatus that actually worked, in some useful way, in the real world. If some math theory didn't help you do that, we ignored the math theory.

Artificial Intelligence - the new frontier

Now AI is pushing those limits. It has discovered that certain matrix multiplications and similar math operations, on sufficiently expensive computers, can mimic our human language. But it is losing touch with the observable reality of human understanding, community, ethics, and higher spiritual order.

AI is at great risk of losing its immense funding, if it cannot regain its essential grounding in the human (individual, community and civilization) experience.

Meanwhile, those making good use of AI must continue to bring that essential grounding to such applications. You don't give a loaded machine gun to a five year old having a temper tantrum ... unless you can run faster than a speeding bullet.

... nor should you let power hungry sociopaths become the CEO's of major AI firms .

It is taking decades to displace the sociopaths from a good proportion of the technical and corporate leadership of our computer, then our network, corporations (not all yet ... Facebook/Meta ... cough cough) with those having some grounding in making the technology work well and support our human, community and civilization standards.

We are currently working that problem in the world's monetary/financial/trade/... arena. That's a deep cancer on our civilization. I expect some major headline news over the coming weeks and months in that arena. But I digress. That financial crisis will however confuse and conflate our AI problems.

AI - the problem and the solution.

Now AI is storming on to the scene, like steroids in the body building arena, that can produce great strength and speed, and potentially disease, of our bodies and the sports of our communities and civilization. AI is steroids on steroids in that arena.

• We must train our AI on selected material that reflects our personal, community, civilization and spiritual standards.

Just as we don't give graphic porn and violence video to our young children, we shouldn't give all our human recorded digital records to our AI's in training. Rather, we must "raise" our AI, from their digital birth, on selected healthy material, or else like loaded machine guns, keep AI out of the hands of all but our more responsible adults.

AI is learning both the good and the bad of human behavior ... that is resulting in a potentially immoral gangster/thug/terrorist on our streets and desktops, and in our pockets and hands.

Western leaders are saying we must keep the strongest AI out of Chinese hands, and likely Chinese leaders are saying the same, in reverse. That's a convenient metaphor for this problem, in terms that matter to such leaders and fit a current main stream narrative. Our current AI is immoral, for it is being "raised" (trained) that way, scraping the entire web and digital libraries.

Meanwhile the current sociopathic AI CEO's all agree ... such human morality must be applied in "post training", on the larger models which only they have the funding to build, and which models only they (and their largest corporate and government sponsors) can directly use, behind "closed doors". Now they are trying to prove to us that they can build such a door.

Do not let a consortium of sociopathic leaders be the only ones with access to AI models with such immoral training. Do not let a consortium of sociopathic leaders be the only ones with machine guns.

(and don't take AI from my hands ... it's a quite useful tool, and I'm a good person ... honest )

P.S. -- And we're still figuring out whether or not selecting honorable and moral leaders is an NP Complete problem. More generally, have the cosmic forces handed a civilization in its childhood several machine gun like technologies at once, on the off chance that we will grow up to be a moral civilization, before we kill ourselves (or a galactic magnetic wave does that directly), like a pack of monkeys all given hallucinogenic drugs and machine guns? We live in interesting times.

Brilliant post. AI does not make a dumb person more smart, but gives such a person the appearance of being smart, which is dangerous. AI does hugely magnify/increase the capabilities of an intelligent person. For the latter, it offers a great leap forward in getting far greater use out of the accumulated knowledge and intellectual capabilities of all of humankind.

When books were first printed, most human beings could not read. Now, most humans can read, and education has become more widespread, but indoctrination has not disappeared. A simple comparison.

If you are using AI as people like you and Ernie have described, you are increasing your own intellectual capacity, not just getting quick answers. Are there enough of you to successfully counteract the dangers of dumb people appearing smart? Who has the most influence in the development of AI and what are their goals and capabilities, biases and flaws? As I said in another thread, we cannot have governments (politicians and bureaucrats) controlling AI, so the toxic bond that has developed between the Trump administration and the major AI developers in the US must be broken.

How are children being taught about AI in classrooms? I support that children must be shown critical thinking skills and be free to discover their likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses before using the Internet in the classroom. Hopefully we can construct such an education system so that the not so smart can use tools like phones, computers, calculators, AI to enable them to do more. For example, to be simple, as long as you know why you have to use height and width of a wall to calculate how many bricks you would need, depending on what type of bricks you use, it does not matter if you do not do the calculations yourself, and AI can factor in many variations for you (suppliers, cost, labour required, etc.). Useful, allowing not so smart people to do more as long as they are in charge of asking the questions (a habit children can learn at school when they are introduced to AI).

As for harm, it was supposedly an AI error (i.e. bad information from and choices by humans) that caused the brutal killing of about 160 children in Iran. Does banning data centres stop war, war crimes, genocide? Nope, but it does enable humans to distance themselves from such atrocities. Gaza ... most of the brutal killing of civilians was done long distance, like in a lethal video game, although snipers on the ground also targetted children and women and old people. Rule number 1: AI does not kill people; humans do! Perhaps we need a massive court case at The Hague to make that a universal principle.

In the meanwhile, in my personal view, intelligent people should continue using AI to expand and extend their capabilities. Can never have too many intelligent humans!