Video footage of the Singularity Hypothesis event in London yesterday.

Distracted from distraction by distraction T S Eliot, Burnt Norton

Toward a Formal Characterization of Real-World General Intelligence

[A slightly edited extract from my paper "Nature's Dark Domain: an Argument for a Naturalised Phenomenology". Royal Institute Of Philosophy Supplement [serial online]. July 2013;72:169-188 with audio!]

Most listeners will readily distinguish an eight second sequence from Xenakis’ pioneering ‘granular’ composition Concret Ph.

ConcSequence

and a loop that repeats the first one-second slice of it for eight seconds.

ConLoop

This is discernible because of the obvious repetition in pitch and dynamics.

Telling the looped sequence from the non-looped sequence is not the same as acquiring subjective identity conditions that would allow us to recognise the extra structure distinguishing the non-looped from the looped sequence in a different context (e.g. within the entirety of Concret Ph). What is discerned here is arguably a fact about the shortfall between type-identifiable phenomenology and non type-identifiable phenomenology (“unintuitable” or “dark” phenomenology).

As an illustration of this, the mere awareness that there is missing structure in the loop does not help settle the issue between virtualist and occurentist construals of that structure. It is plausible to suppose that the perceptual awareness of the missing structure in the Xenakis loop consists of virtual contents – a representation of tendencies in the developing sound rather than something like a constantly updated encoding of discrete sonic facts [1]. Indeed the virtual model would be consistent with the widely held assumption that our representation of temporal structure is accomplished via recurrent neural architecture that modulates each current input by feeding back earlier input.[2] But whether the contents of representations of temporal structure are virtual or occurrent in nature has no direct bearing on their conceptual or intuitive accessibility.