What would you do?

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barehmel

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Suppose you had a topic that was the result of years of research. Suppose that the topic was of great importance in terms of technology and the economy. However, people who have deep religious beliefs are going to hate it as will people who have beliefs in the supernatural. There are prominent people from universities as well as others who are internationally known who have signed an open letter against this general topic although they are not aware of your specific work.

This area devoured entire generations of very smart people and billions in research so trying to explain why it didn't devour you is pointless; anything you say sounds arrogant. To present your information, you will have to refute not only the open letter but pretty much every existing theory on this topic.

If you suggest that you've made progress where no one else has, you are immediately accused of being crazy, suffering from a Dunning-Kruger delusion, or trolling for attention. You can nail down all of the technical details. But, when you try to talk about the topic itself, words don't seem to work as well because anything you say sounds exaggerated.

Yet, it could realistically be the greatest leap in technology in human history and at any rate it is likely to be the most rapid technological change. It could boost the economy in the US alone by perhaps $6 trillion per year. History doesn't seem to have any answers; apparently no one has ever been in quite this situation before.
 

cornflake

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Peer.

Reviewed.

Journal.
 

barehmel

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Peer Reviewed Journal.
Thank you for trying, but that was already a known aspect since it has an obvious historical precedent:

July 1, 1858: On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection

November 24, 1959: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
 

Emily Winslow

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Without details, I do not understand what is being asked or how the Darwin references (I assume they're Darwin references) are a refutation of the suggestion of peer reviewed journals.

I understand that you don't want to get into the topic itself, but rather the challenges of finding a publisher/audience for a controversial topic. I get that. But I don't know what you're after. Have you written a book or an article? Are you aiming for a technical audience or a popular one?
 

cornflake

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Ditto Emily.
 

barehmel

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Without details, I do not understand what is being asked or how the Darwin references (I assume they're Darwin references) are a refutation of the suggestion of peer reviewed journals.
I didn't suggest that I was refuting the peer reviewed journal response, snarky though it was. Rather, I was pointing out that it was a trivial and obvious suggestion and that there was historical precedent which was 150 years old. The topic doesn't fit into a journal article. At best an outline could be submitted but like Darwin this would probably not be noticed since it would be lacking the details. Assuming that a journal article was accepted without the details it might serve to alert professionals in the field to look for the book.

I understand that you don't want to get into the topic itself, but rather the challenges of finding a publisher/audience for a controversial topic. I get that. But I don't know what you're after. Have you written a book or an article? Are you aiming for a technical audience or a popular one?
I don't have any problem getting into the topic itself; I've worked on it for years. However, it seems to freak other people out. The book is highly technical in nature but the implications are provocative so if it were correct it would get international attention and be a best seller.
 

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I don't have any problem getting into the topic itself; I've worked on it for years. However, it seems to freak other people out. The book is highly technical in nature but the implications are provocative so if it were correct it would get international attention and be a best seller.
Since you don't mind talking about the topic, saying what it is might help us direct our advice.
 

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I didn't suggest that I was refuting the peer reviewed journal response, snarky though it was. Rather, I was pointing out that it was a trivial and obvious suggestion and that there was historical precedent which was 150 years old. The topic doesn't fit into a journal article. At best an outline could be submitted but like Darwin this would probably not be noticed since it would be lacking the details. Assuming that a journal article was accepted without the details it might serve to alert professionals in the field to look for the book.


I don't have any problem getting into the topic itself; I've worked on it for years. However, it seems to freak other people out. The book is highly technical in nature but the implications are provocative so if it were correct it would get international attention and be a best seller.

It's difficult for me to respond to you because you're not being very clear.

First of all, what is the work? Is it a book, article, play, song, collection of poetry?

You say you've worked on the topic for years: are you qualified to do the work? Have you performed your research at a recognised institute or university? Or have you worked alone, without that support?

Have you had your work checked and validated by your peers? You say the work "seems to freak other people out": why is this? Is it because it's somewhat unconventional in subject or approach? Is it because it challenges a lot of established ideas? Why does it cause this reaction?

What do you want to do with this work? Do you want to have the work acknowledged by the scientific community? Allow the work to be accessed for free to ensure its widest possible readership? Make a pile of money through book sales?

The more information you can give us the more likely we are to be able to answer your questions accurately. I have to say that a peer reviewed journal was my first idea on reading your first post, and I don't find the response snarky at all; perhaps if you'd given us more information to start with we could have been more helpful right from the beginning.
 

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I've published in peer reviewed journals and edited one. One possibility is to take a piece of your work and turn it into an article. My experience is that peer reviewed journals like provocative work.
 

barehmel

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Since you don't mind talking about the topic, saying what it is might help us direct our advice.
As you wish...

The topic of the book is cognition or consciousness. This includes an addition to evolutionary theory but for brains, intelligence, and consciousness. It describes in detail how and why intelligence evolved from flatworms to fish to mammals to humans. Although there has been a great deal of research on evolutionary mechanisms from genetics beginning around 1910 there hasn't been an addition to the theory in 150 years.

It includes an addition to computational theory. It explains the relationship between cognitive information processing and computational processing. It extends the Church Turing thesis. This would be the first major addition to computational theory since 1937.

It includes a detailed description of how human intelligence works and its relationship to classical, artificial intelligence. This would be the first major update to machine intelligence theory since the Dartmouth conference in 1956.

It includes a full deconstruction and refutation of Harris' notions about free will. It deconstructs the Chinese Room and Mary's Room. It answers the Mind/Body problem and both aspects of the Binding problem. It fully deconstructs and answers the Frame problem.

It includes a new information theory which describes the relationship between an intelligent agent and information. This gives a robust foundation to both the evolutionary and computational aspects. However, in application it also refutes ideas such as dualism. In other words, one of the cornerstones of religion, life after death, is eliminated. It disproves philosophical ideas such as Idealism. And, if this weren't bad enough it removes a number of popular and science fiction ideas such as disproving Asimov's three laws of robotics, current ideas about self-driving cars, the idea of distributed intelligence or consciousness, emergent theory, and even has application to CEOs of large corporations.

On the beneficial side, it provides a foundation for new computer architectures so that computational power can continue increasing without the need for process shrinkage which is grinding to a halt. It provides a means of dealing with extremely large volumes of data. This could have application to everyone personally. It could improve efficiency and open up new job opportunities.

It gives detailed descriptions of the requirements for human-type understanding and reasoning. From this, you could build a non-biological intelligent agent of human caliber. The notion of general advanced AI has caused enough concern to evoke an open letter. You can read that here: https://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter/

I can't get into the theoretical arguments here even if I wanted to since it would require at least half a semester to get someone already familiar with advanced AI up to speed. The best I can say is that the arguments in the paper (like Harris' arguments on free will) are simplistic, about four levels lower than the discussion needs to be. In other words, if Harris' book were a Freshman, 100 level course then the actual topic is 500 level.
 

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Ok, so you won't, or, I suspect, can't say, and will simply go on about how it's too amazing and mind-blowing and advanced for us to understand, thus you can never explain it to anyone?

That open letter is just encouraging robust research.

Dude, much of this, which you insist people will "hate," no one cares, as it's well, well trod ground. There's no afterlife? This is not a revolutionary notion, in any sense. You can't 'disprove' Asimov's laws of robotics; he made them up. He was a novelist who would shrug at you. Same as you can't disprove a philosophical notion.

Either explain or don't, but if you can't explain what it IS, you couldn't explain it to an agent or publisher either. so no matter.
 

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Don't talk about it, write it.

This is just bloviating.

Write it
Find a publisher
Or self publish it

Asking "What would you do" isn't really what you're asking, by the way.

You're not really asking anything, so what you need to do is discover the miracle of BIC.

"What would you do" is just this side of a meaningless question.

Moreover the "I can't possibly explain it in words a non-specialist would understand" is a thin excuse; that's what experts and scholars do.

If you can't express complicated concepts in simple terms, you don't understand the concept well enough.
 
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barehmel

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First of all, what is the work? Is it a book, article, play, song, collection of poetry?
I guess that is mostly answered in my previous post. I'm currently estimating 500 pages without fractional theory. So, it could also be two volumes.

You say you've worked on the topic for years: are you qualified to do the work? Have you performed your research at a recognised institute or university? Or have you worked alone, without that support?
Am I qualified? I guess if I'm right then I am. If I'm wrong then I guess not. How else could you tell? This is completely independent; I'm not part of any larger research effort.

Have you had your work checked and validated by your peers?
That would require publication of the book. I don't see how it could be validated prior to that. However, once it is published you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

You say the work "seems to freak other people out": why is this? Is it because it's somewhat unconventional in subject or approach? Is it because it challenges a lot of established ideas? Why does it cause this reaction?
I think I've answered this. People are freaked out about losing the comfort of having an immortal soul or spirit, of being able to communicate with dead people, or having some type of universal consciousness or telepathy. The evolutionary development of consciousness doesn't leave any room for a creator or anything supernatural. This removes all of these things. People get freaked out about the idea of a machine that can think and reason like a human. There are other aspects like jealousy. How am I worthy of solving it when other people have spent their entire lives working on it without success? I think the size of it also freaks people out. If correct, it would spark an international competition several times the size of the Soviet/US space race.

What do you want to do with this work? Do you want to have the work acknowledged by the scientific community? Allow the work to be accessed for free to ensure its widest possible readership? Make a pile of money through book sales?
If it's correct it will be acknowledged after publication. I would probably make a fair amount of money from book sales but could possibly make considerably more from consulting.

The more information you can give us the more likely we are to be able to answer your questions accurately. I have to say that a peer reviewed journal was my first idea on reading your first post, and I don't find the response snarky at all; perhaps if you'd given us more information to start with we could have been more helpful right from the beginning.
The response was snarky; I haven't yet lost my ability to understand written English. Please stop trying to rationalize why someone would post one word per line. That's not important and my response was polite (I said thank you).

Let's start with the title. My working title has been: Sapiens-Class Cognition: Its Evolutionary Development, Description, and Replication. That's probably not a good title.
 
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How am I worthy of solving it when other people have spent their entire lives working on it without success?

Could you define "it"? I'm not clear on the problem to which you've got a solution. Clarity will go a long way toward you writing something that gets your points across.

Sapiens-Class Cognition: It's Evolutionary Development, Description, and Replication. That's probably not a good title.

That probably depends on your market. It's not going to shift a lot of copies at your local B&N, but for a scientific journal it'd probably be all right. (Also, it should be "Its" and not "It's" here.) Should you find a publisher, they can help you with a more commercial title, if that's what you're looking for.
 

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I think I have to echo cornflake. It doesn't sound as controversial as you seem to believe. If you're asking if you should publish? Hell yes. If you're asking if it will be well received? Who knows? Will some people disagree? Of course they will. Some people disagree that the Earth is round.

Just friggin' do it.
 

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Let's start with the title. My working title has been: Sapiens-Class Cognition: It's Evolutionary Development, Description, and Replication. That's probably not a good title.

Start with an editor. Sorry, I know that sounds snarky, but a scholarly treatise with punctuation errors isn't going to be taken seriously.
 

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Ok, so you won't, or, I suspect, can't say, and will simply go on about how it's too amazing and mind-blowing and advanced for us to understand, thus you can never explain it to anyone?
Do you have question?

That open letter is just encouraging robust research.
You apparently didn't read it. https://futureoflife.org/data/documents/research_priorities.pdf?x33688
These concepts are also related to Kurzweil's claims about singularity. In the section on control:

Stanford’s One-Hundred Year Study of Artificial Intelligence includes loss of control of AI systems as an area of study, specifically highlighting concerns over the possibility that
… we could one day lose control of AI systems via the rise of superintelligences that do not act in accordance with human wishes — and that such powerful systems would threaten humanity. Are such dystopic outcomes possible? If so, how might these situations arise? . . . What kind of investments in research should be made to better understand and to address the possibility of the rise of a dangerous superintelligence or the occurrence of an “intelligence explosion”? (Horvitz 2014)

Dude, much of this, which you insist people will "hate," no one cares, as it's well, well trod ground. There's no afterlife? This is not a revolutionary notion, in any sense.
I wish you knew more about what you were talking about. I have no desire to make you look foolish.

http://consciousness.arizona.edu/
'The Science of Consciousness' (‘TSC’) is the world’s largest and longest-running interdisciplinary conference on all aspects of the nature of conscious awareness, feelings and existence. These include how the brain produces consciousness, how consciousness can causally affect brain processes, the best empirical theories, do we have free will, evolution of life and consciousness, the origins of moral and aesthetic values, how to improve mental, physical and cognitive function, and whether consciousness can persist after bodily death, e.g. through ‘uploading’ to machines, or via mental processes tied to the structure of reality. These and other relevant questions are approached through many disciplines in science, philosophy, business, the arts and contemplative practices.

Fully one third of the conference concerns spirituality as espoused by people like Depak Chopra. Secondly, you apparently aren't familiar with Christian evangelicals in the US. Evolution is routinely stated as a tool of the devil and it was common for them to make the claim that Obama was possessed by demons. Today it is stated that Trump was chosen by God. My mother believes that the US would have been destroyed by God if Trump had not been elected.

You can't 'disprove' Asimov's laws of robotics; he made them up.
I don't think you understand. There is a common belief in computational theory that actions (even for complex systems) can be hardwired as a set of rules. That is true as long as you are within the Church-Turing boundaries.

Either explain or don't, but if you can't explain what it IS, you couldn't explain it to an agent or publisher either.
Explain what?
 

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Moreover the "I can't possibly explain it in words a non-specialist would understand" is a thin excuse; that's what experts and scholars do. If you can't express complicated concepts in simple terms, you don't understand the concept well enough.
I never made that statement and I don't know where you got it from. I think any intelligent person could follow the arguments.
 

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I guess that is mostly answered in my previous post. I'm currently estimating 500 pages without fractional theory. So, it could also be two volumes.

Okay, so the answer is a book. That it took this much roundaboutness to get to the answer "a book" (and you didn't even say that in the end; you said "volumes") makes me worry for the wordiness and roundaboutness of the manuscript.

Am I qualified? I guess if I'm right then I am. If I'm wrong then I guess not. How else could you tell? This is completely independent; I'm not part of any larger research effort.

"Qualifications" usually refer to whether you have experience or education with the subject. This is apart from rightness or wrongness; it's about background, not the current content. Do you have degrees in related subjects? Have you held positions in institutions that work with these subjects?

That would require publication of the book. I don't see how it could be validated prior to that. However, once it is published you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

No, you can get feedback before you publish by sharing the work in its current state with experts in relevant subjects, and asking if they will consider writing a supportive blurb.

If it's correct it will be acknowledged after publication. I would probably make a fair amount of money from book sales but could possibly make considerably more from consulting.

The questions was what do you *want*, not what do you think will happen. What is your goal? What are you hoping to accomplish? It is very frustrating how you sidestep even the simplest non-critical questions.
 
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barehmel

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Could you define "it"? I'm not clear on the problem to which you've got a solution. Clarity will go a long way toward you writing something that gets your points across.
Computer scientists have been trying to create a basis for human-level AI since the Dartmouth conference in 1956. This has been described as the holy grail of AI research.

An extension to Church Turing is something most computer scientists would give their right arm for. It's not something anyone has ever considered possible just as no one considered physics beyond Newton to be possible before Einstein.

No one has created an extension to Evolutionary theory in the past 150 years.
 

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With respect, bahremel, cornflake is correct. Pseudoscientific conferences and your evangelical relatives aside, it's not a revolutionary idea that there's no afterlife and no deities. Plenty of people don't believe it, sure; but it's not unusual. While you may be upsetting your mother and your local community, you're not going to cause a critical mass of distress to the rest of the world. You're better off focusing your energy on getting your ideas down as clearly and concisely as you can.

As we're all writers on this site, here's an exercise for you: Write the back-cover blurb for your book. Explain to us what it's about. This is something you'll need to do anyway if you're looking to publish it commercially.
 

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Computer scientists have been trying to create a basis for human-level AI since the Dartmouth conference in 1956. This has been described as the holy grail of AI research.

What do you define as "human-level AI"?

An extension to Church Turing is something most computer scientists would give their right arm for. It's not something anyone has ever considered possible just as no one considered physics beyond Newton to be possible before Einstein.

What kind of extension do you mean?

No one has created an extension to Evolutionary theory in the past 150 years.

Again, what kind of extension do you mean?

I understand you feel we're lacking the education to understand what you're trying to tell us; but if you're going to publish a book, you need to be able to state your terms clearly, and in a way that's consumable to your potential readers.

I assume you've read Einstein's "Relativity." That's a remarkably accessible work. That's the kind of clarity you need to be working toward.
 

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I never made that statement and I don't know where you got it from. I think any intelligent person could follow the arguments.

I can't get into the theoretical arguments here even if I wanted to since it would require at least half a semester to get someone already familiar with advanced AI up to speed. The best I can say is that the arguments in the paper (like Harris' arguments on free will) are simplistic, about four levels lower than the discussion needs to be. In other words, if Harris' book were a Freshman, 100 level course then the actual topic is 500 level.

It is the job of an expert, presenting as an expert by virtue of writing a book about a topic, to be able to formulate a thesis, to develop complex topics and theories from a basic understanding, and to explain those concepts to others who are less expert in ways that are memorable and comprehensive.

This is what academics and scholars do. It's our job.

You don't have to get into the theoretical arguments at all, but you do need to be able to frame complex ideas in clear and cogent language; this thread suggests you have difficulty doing that.

Your posts in this thread are at best incoherent. You are ostensibly writing a scholarly book about a topic that requires some comfort with academic style and writing. (N.B. you've got a glaring problem with your title that you seem to be completely unaware of.)

You can't even formulate a simple question; your "question" still lacks context. What would we do with what about what for what?

Moreover, you posted a thread asking for help, and are rapidly getting snotty with people pointing out that you have a basic communication problem.

I suggest you contemplate what you want help with, and start over.
 

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I guess that is mostly answered in my previous post. I'm currently estimating 500 pages without fractional theory. So, it could also be two volumes.

I hope you've written it more clearly than you've written your posts here, because if not, it's going to be a very confusing read.

Am I qualified? I guess if I'm right then I am. If I'm wrong then I guess not. How else could you tell? This is completely independent; I'm not part of any larger research effort.

If you have no related qualifications (by which I mean a batchelor's degree, at minimum) and no academic standing in the subject then you're probably not qualified enough to interest a trade publisher, which would want at least some degree of reputation in your field in order to publish the book; and academic publishers would expect some sort of tenure, I would imagine, so again, you're out of luck there.

That would require publication of the book. I don't see how it could be validated prior to that. However, once it is published you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

Research projects are usually validated by being rigorously controlled and carefully designed; and by being published in journals which demand peer review. Yes, this means you can't get your whole book published in scientific journals: but the research which leads to a book is usually a collection of smaller, progressive investigations or experiments, and each one is tested in this way.

I think I've answered this. People are freaked out about losing the comfort of having an immortal soul or spirit, of being able to communicate with dead people, or having some type of universal consciousness or telepathy. The evolutionary development of consciousness doesn't leave any room for a creator or anything supernatural. This removes all of these things. People get freaked out about the idea of a machine that can think and reason like a human. There are other aspects like jealousy. How am I worthy of solving it when other people have spent their entire lives working on it without success? I think the size of it also freaks people out. If correct, it would spark an international competition several times the size of the Soviet/US space race.

No, they are really not. Many people don't believe in god, or in an afterlife, or in telepathy or "anything supernatural". As for whether you are worthy of "solving it", I'm not sure: because you've not explained what "it" is, or why it requires a solution.

If it's correct it will be acknowledged after publication. I would probably make a fair amount of money from book sales but could possibly make considerably more from consulting.

If you expect a publisher to invest in publishing this book, then you have to make sure every aspect of the book is "correct" before you submit it for consideration. If you can't prove this, then you're going to be out of luck. I'm not sure what sort of consulting you expect to do here, because I'm not sure quite what the book is about yet. You're not clear. And this doesn't bode well for the success of the book.

The response was snarky; I haven't yet lost my ability to understand written English. Please stop trying to rationalize why someone would post one word per line. That's not important and my response was polite (I said thank you).

If I were to say to you, "thank you, but you're an arse," having that "thank you" at the beginning would not make it any less rude.

Let's start with the title. My working title has been: Sapiens-Class Cognition: Its Evolutionary Development, Description, and Replication. That's probably not a good title.

You're right. It's not.

I wish you knew more about what you were talking about. I have no desire to make you look foolish.

Oh dear.
 
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