Retired engineer: embedded systems hardware design. Education: physics and math. Interests range from Agricultural Robotics to Origin-of-Life questions.

California, Monterey Bay
Joined May 2022
Nested agency and grammar-based language models (39/n). • Formally titled as “Nested pushdown automata and context free grammars (1/n”). Renaming to better reflect the design project’s origins as an exploration into physical computation.
Nested pushdown automata and context free grammars (1/n). I am one of those people that needs to build something before I feel I understand how it works. In an effort to take a deeper dive into the Theory of Computation I’ve put together a nested stack machine in a FPGA. At this point the hardware seems to be working. Now the journey ahead is to start programming this bad boy and see how such an alternate processor architecture will work out in real world applications such as robotics.
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Replying to @fkasummer
Polanyi too: “scientific tradition derives its capacity for self-renewal from its belief in the presence of a hidden reality”
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String theory is what happens when an intelligent system is starved of sensory input and starts hallucinating. Intelligence needs grounding. For this reason, intelligence is practically never the bottleneck to solving impactful problems. The bottleneck is iterated contact with reality.
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Something different to take your mind off the world's problems for a bit. Just a few miles south from my home... Hundreds of sea lions swarm Moss Landing roadway, closing traffic to one... youtu.be/J5mE7P_oyx0?si=S4BO… via @YouTube
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But what do you do when somebody has ripped the toilet paper dispenser off the wall? (Speaking from experience here.) • An honest question, not intending to be critical, but why can't we just expect people to act better in the first place; ..to rise to their full potentials? • Rather than creating robot fixes to forever compensate for people's increasingly inadequate behaviors? • For some reason, the choice to expect more from ourselves (as individuals and as a society), rather than look to AI and robotics to fix society's problems, never seems to be considered an option. • In some ways, Elon is right, the dawn of AI is also childhood’s end for the human race. We either grow up and become a society of adults, or we devolve into a society of children under an AI parentage. • Quo Vadis?
The self-cleaning units seem to be working well now- and they’ll only improve it seems to me. No more paying someone to clean a strangers’ poop from the ceiling!🤮 Robots can simply deliver and install fresh supplies to units- unless that job is retained for nice young men? Expect robots are long term cheaper.
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My bad, one typo edit and I lost this perfect reply. Reposting to keep continuity. See if this works. xitter.cf/Aaron_Lowry/status/210…
Replying to @wildiris19
I expect AI to act as a high resolution filter in this regard. We currently penalize all functional adults to sustain an expanding parasitic demo of permanent children. This is unsustainable and AI will increase the tension until some rupture occurs.
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This is what I have been working on and although the research focuses on literary creativity I strongly suspect that it also applies to inventiveness in general including the mathematical intuition that leads to new discoveries. The Goblin Realms: Topological Mapping of Human and AI Semantics The "Goblin Realms" framework identifies a fundamental topological divide between the way humans and artificial intelligence navigate the landscape of meaning. Using high-dimensional mapping, the research reveals that human creativity relies on a high "leap rate," where authors jump across semantic voids to connect distant concepts. In contrast, AI models perform an "algorithmic crawl," sticking to predictable, precomputed paths even when instructed to be original. This distinction is quantified through the "Goblin Criterion," which focuses on versatile, low-friction words that serve as hubs for these creative jumps. The study further demonstrates that reading difficulty is driven by these cognitive leaps rather than simple vocabulary rarity. Ultimately, neurobiological data confirms that while AI mirrors standard human logic, it fails to replicate the unique neural patterns associated with true divergent thinking. I still have more multilingual experiments to run with Large Language Models, then human experiments ranking results (if I can get funding), then I hope to find the holy grail, a harness for LLMs that lets them make genuinely creative leaps in the same way humans that do. And then formally write it all up, so the AI's can read it, because a lot of humans don't read anything these days. 😆
🤖 Made with AI
The reason why the Goblin phenomena in AI outputs exists is actually very interesting and tell us some important things about how they, and how human language works.
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It is so strange how often theology comes up in purely scientific investigations. History of science says it’s not uncommon but still very strange.
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I'm so pleased to finally finish and deliver the piece commissioned by @ThePersonPod , a brave man he chose to let me create it with next to zero oversight on his part. There's a lot to the little piece so I'm planning at some point to have a chat about what went into it (physically and metaphysically). Is this what one might call "metagelical iconography" @PaulVanderKlay ?😉 We'll see if I can't get a critique or a like from @PageauJonathan 🙃 @klwong43 @AHomelyHouse @ashley_lande @mattcrotts (fitted, carved oak; painted and finished)
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What if C.S. Lewis was given the opportunity to rewrite Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End.” This is a fun rabbit hole of speculation I’ve recently fallen down into. Clarke, being the atheist that he was, was oblivious to certain archetypal patterns that Lewis would’ve easily picked up on. Suppose “Childhood’s End” was treated as a sketch for an unfinished screenplay and C. S. Lewis was given the task of rewriting it into something that was presentable. What would/could he do with it? Any thoughts? @annielcrawford @kalezelden @klwong43
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You can’t have free choice without transcendence. • To have "choice" implies the existence of rule sets by which choices can be made. • Where such rule sets come from, is the realm we designate as the transcendent. • Ultimately a conundrum indeed, for both atheistic and faith communities alike.
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Just finished rereading “Childhood’s End”, Arthur C. Clarke, 1953. • Unsettling how well the role played by the Overlords can be mapped, in current times, to a combination of AI and Effective Altruist. • Clarke, like so many other Sci-Fi writers, had spiritually a very dismal view of humanity. The story ending is just the “rapture” without a redemption. • But that is the common thread in all AI-doom scenarios; the inability to see one’s fellow human beings as anything other than passive players in a fixed game. • Rather, the antidote to AI doomerism is a worldview that sees humanity as active agents in a creation story that is ever yet unfolding. • But where does one go to find people that still think like this?
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A must watch video. The most hilarious experiment / expose of just how cringe and technically terrible these chatbots that we call "AI" really are. Chatbots attempt beatboxing and rap.
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Has anyone tried using one of the AI tools to tackle the Evolution 2.0, $10M technology prize challenge? • In contrast to AI solutions in mathematics, this would be a unique challenge with real-world implications. • The challenge asks the simple question, “How can/does agency arise at the level of molecular chemistry?” It carries a $10M prize. It is been open since 2017. And has never received a single viable solution. • For example, in terms of computational systems, it is known that 2D(flat) origami is Turing complete. One can also create computational systems using strings of colored pop-beads. (see, Post Tag systems) • So, why couldn’t cooperative ensembles of folding proteins not be able to function as primitive “LEGO block” computational building elements too? (*) • ..Thus, enabling the creation of extended finite state machine and pushdown automata organizational like structures at the cellular level. • (*) Demonstrate a synthesis pathway to make this observation happen and you’ve won the Evolution 2.0 challenge.
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Panpsychism and Intelligent Design both serve the same function. • They both act as drip pans to be put under a theory-of-life to catch all the things that theory fails to account for. • The only difference being, recourse to the former seems to be academically acceptable, while recourse to the latter is not. • Either the laws of physics are sufficient to explain the origin and continuation of life, or they are not. • Metaphysically, there is no right or wrong answer here. Only that you be honest and articulate upfront which choice your proposed theory-of-life assumes. • If your theory-of-life requires the drip pan of some supplemental external non-physical agency, then it’s not science. • It is a signal to go back and look again. Because you’ve missed something important.
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This is what the beginning of a paradigm shift in the Thomas Kuhn sense looks like. • Michael Levin is so, so, close. Only missing one last piece of the puzzle. • That is, show how agency can arise at the level of molecular chemistry(*), then the observations in this paper become subsumable under a single conceptual umbrella. ..No further recourse to some variation on panpsychism or dualism need be made. • (*) This is the Evolution 2.0, $10M technology prize challenge in a nutshell. Michael Levin’s observation regarding the computational accessibility of ‘forms” is the same as Perry Marshall’s question, “Where does new code come from?”
A hopefully significantly clearer, better version of my initial Platonic Space paper (a much modified version of the original 2025 preprint) is here: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5g… "Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment in Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments" More new papers on this topic coming, but I wanted to update the kickoff manifesto now that we're a year in since I first wrote it. It's submitted to a journal now so there will be a peer-reviewed version available eventually, but the updated preprint is already up.
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Finally have the time to start working through this paper. Michael Levin really "has taken the bit in his mouth" on this one. A must read.
A hopefully significantly clearer, better version of my initial Platonic Space paper (a much modified version of the original 2025 preprint) is here: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5g… "Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment in Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments" More new papers on this topic coming, but I wanted to update the kickoff manifesto now that we're a year in since I first wrote it. It's submitted to a journal now so there will be a peer-reviewed version available eventually, but the updated preprint is already up.
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