Direct Link to File. 510 words, 2 minute read, 1 paperback pages

Came across this tonight: https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/what-is-literary-talent

So, I will try to enjoy writing. And clacking away on a mechanical keyboard is one way to do that! :-)

Had a great talk with lost-lost friend/associate Alan Lockett today. He helped review a talk I’m giving, and corrected me …or better-clarified for me some things about Attention & Transformers. AND we talked about categories!!

Alan was very adamant that he doesn’t believe categories are “real.” Not just real metaphysically, but also in the sense of psychologically, that people don’t reason on the basis of ‘hard-‘ (my word)-defined categories “as the mathematical logicians would have us believe” – at that point I pulled out Parrochia’s book!

We talked about objects. Where does one object end and another begin? In terms of atoms / wavefunctions, is it not arbitrary? I mentioned that I thought Nietzsche had something to say on this, but only because Mark Anderson had come into my office on a few occasions to ask about this. ….I wonder if C. knows where in Nietzsche this might be.

And then, if we can’t even get “objects” “right”, and objects are the basis of our ideas about categories,….? What then?

We talked about a friend of his (Avril? Ankit?) who studies function spaces & neural networks (Ohhhh yea I love that stuff) and how the “empty” spaces in state-state that are not covered by your basis functions(‘ span) could be regarded as a category.

I brought up that there needs to be some kind of threshold to convert a continuous NN output value into a classifier. ….he…..didn’t see that….or I didn’t see what he said about it… hmmm. ???TODO: ask Alan about this again.

Alan said that biological neurons “either fire or they don’t.” They don’t have variable outputs. Ok.

We talked…. and I do have notes somewhere… about how human-brain categories are dependent on context, and primable, in terms of their response to stimuli. For example, hearing the words “river,” “stream,” and then “bank”, the last word is placed in a category based on its previous words, whereas “gold,” “bullion”, “bank”, the finincial meaning of “bank” is the category that we associate with the auditory stimulus that sounds like “bank.”

(He said this has nothing to do with the fact that the same label – “bank” – can mean different things, rather that it’s the body’s response to the stimulus of the sound that he was talking about)

It seems that, now having completed my talk for the AES (and its video), I must again write the book. Now, do I love writing the book? Um. I can try to love writing the book, can’t I?

Two particularly duanting aspects of the book are..well..all of it. But especially the history of classification and the talk about language.

Perrhaps the bit about language could be covered in the history, once I get to Wittgenstein. …or perhaps a chronological organization is not the way to go. Hmm. Perhaps I should get started.

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