. I like his punchy style and his willingness to treat myth and history more or less on an equal footing. He's noting the skeptics along the way, tracing the history of the idea itself.
I learned a ton about Hercules, and of course Jesus figures in, how could he not.
One of those skeptics, I'd say, is Alexander Sokurov. His famous trilogy features Lenin, Hitler (Adi), and Hirohito. I just took in the last two this weekend.
He feels the "greats" get projected onto the big (shared) screen by a collective semi-unconscious with a drive to externalize some representation of "the commander in chief" or "the emperor".
The greats themselves are more ordinary people tasked with stepping into semi-publicly constructed roles. A lot of randomness enters in as they ad lib the part, says director Sokurov.
The hunters (as in treasure hunters) think the clues were pretty good this year, with their Oregon Trail theme. Barlow's route, over the shoulder of Mt. Hood, for which Barlow charged toll, featured a 60 degree grade in one section. Wagons had to be winched down the slope.
Nowadays, a section of Hwy 26, more like six degrees steep (note the runaway truck ramp), shadows that infamous place of passage, and is where the treasure was hidden.
The clues, one a day, aim to prompt human intelligence (HI), however I'm sure many hunters tried to enlist help from AI (do lowly search engines count?). The humans certainly put their heads together online, thinking out loud about the clues. My friend Dr. D. is an MVP contributor to this group process.
OK LLM people, here's my question: I really liked learning the literal meaning of "cliche", a typesetter's jargon for phrases used so often it saved time to just keep them in type. Templates. Swap in a few names to localize the more global. "Boilerplate" is another related word.
But how long might a cliche be? Don't we want to extract some of those longer strands we always re-encounter, such as how envisioning "four dimensional objects" is muy dificil. That's a cliche in our culture, that the "dimension ladder" likewise defines a state-approved meritocracy and even spirituality.
Only one or two people have ever attained the ability to visualize hyper-solids as simply and naturally as we ordinary mortals visualize solids; but a certain facility in that direction may be acquired by contemplating the analogy between one and two dimensions, then two and three, and so (by a kind of extrapolation) three to four. [H.S.M Coxeter, Regular Polytopes, Dover edition, pg. 119].
If you spend a lot of time in the library, you realize this phenomenon of "echo chambers" such as we encounter in social media, is likewise that of "lineages". Within a lineage, or school of thought, the same cliches (or call them dogmas in some cases) get recited over and over, with predictable segues to subsequent topics.
The whole of Abbott's Flatland deserves (and gets) a lot of weight in any corpus deemed to be about the LLM idea itself, because of Linear Algebra and its core apparatus: the hypercross (n mutual orthogonals).
With word2vec and doc2vec, we're mapping out what follows what, in terms of cliches of varying scope, many of them containers for more cliches inside, in a fractal pattern created by The Corpus itself.
The mystical superpowers that go with opening one's inner eye and "seeing in 4D" (or higher) are legendary in hypercross circles, and a basis for some mathematicians' professional pride (some call it narcissism).
Those inclined to join a priesthood first need to find a ladder, as upward progress towards Illumination that can't be objectively measured, much less recognized and respected, is unsatisfactory. The whole point is to be looked up to based on one's merits. Think of badges.
"The ability to think in higher dimensions" is a sought-after, time-tested scouting badge as it means you'll have that think tanker's sense of a shared "phase space" -- which might as well be a "phaser space" the way some play in it. The terrain is clearly more nuanced than XYZ or lat/long + altitude.
Lower dimensional = too coarse for comfort.
I see hope for diplomacy yet. If you want fewer boors in the room, keep to the invisible frequencies (which may be "dimensions" in some model). We're at peace with one another in our own cliquey inner circles (partially overlapping). Don't lay these endless wars at our doors, unless, that is, you wish them extinguished.
Shifting focus:
What more "meta" -- in the sense of "abstract" -- word meaning have we, than that of experience?
Think about it: what is such a word meant not to cover?
"Experience" is not a word you learn right away and despite almost everyone agreeing on the reality of prenatal experience, beyond such broad agreement, there's not much unpacking of that reality.
Except, that is, in some rarified branch of speculative psychology or wisdom tradition.
Or perhaps in meditation exercises for those seeking an experience of extreme regression -- or "rebirthing" as some call it.
Event is just as bad, in the sense of being so abstract and general as to have almost unlimited scope.
The idea that experience consists of energy events, happenings inside scenarios, has some appeal in the cinematic sense. Frames of film, discrete deltas, register any action the camera sees.
Frames of action. Action per time. Is this Hollywood style movie-making (lights, camera...) or simply physics (... action!)? E = mvv = mvd/t (Newtonian dimensional analysis).
You'll get a lot of people righteously claiming their cognitive frameworks are "experience-based" as if anything could sound less grounded, more full of fuzz and buzz. What irony.
For sure that's a tension, in terms of marketing, as the reality of an "experienced-based curriculum" (e.g.
First Person Physics) may well be positively palpable vs-a-vs some subject-denying observer-erasing "god's eye view" or other form of unawareness.
Have your diplomats (truckers?) speak from personal experience, about events they participated in, versus always reciting "talking points" handed to them by handlers. A sensitive and nuanced intuition is not in need of ham-handed directives from the know-it-alls presumably in charge.
