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Polanyi’s Paradox

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Re: Polanyi’s Paradox

#11

Post by sidlls »

Simon_says wrote: post #8
H8crilA wrote: post #5

Next time someone asks me how does a modern artificial neural network really work - I'll just ask them "how do you know that my face does indeed look like mine?". Or "how do you recognize people by their voices?". Or this creepy one: "can you consciously stop decoding the English I'm speaking now?". This Wikipedia page can serve as an extension of the argument.

Those are all great to think about but seem rather lacking as an answer to the question.

Especially since there isn't any good evidence that modern neural networks behave anything like our biological ones.

Re: Polanyi’s Paradox

#12

Post by psychoslave »

H8crilA wrote: post #5

Next time someone asks me how does a modern artificial neural network really work - I'll just ask them "how do you know that my face does indeed look like mine?". Or "how do you recognize people by their voices?". Or this creepy one: "can you consciously stop decoding the English I'm speaking now?". This Wikipedia page can serve as an extension of the argument.

Well, I would say that to my mind we are not there. That is, despite the label of neural network, we do have a bottom up explanation of how it works (although it doesn't guaranties that this model is "what really happens out there").

On the other hand, despite the advances in neurosciences, as far as I know we don't have such a consensual bottom up model for human behaviors.

Re: Polanyi’s Paradox

#13

Post by wastedhours »

zeckalpha wrote: post #9
pedro1976 wrote: post #4

I prefer Slavoj Zizek classification into knowns and unknowns. - Known-Knowns: things we know that we know - Known-Unknowns: things that we know we don’t know - Unkown-Unknowns: things we don’t know we don’t know - Unknown-Knowns: “The things we don’t know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say. “. This is better known as culture.

Is that Slavoj Zizek? I thought it was Johari.

Yeah, I've always known it as "the Johari Window".

Re: Polanyi’s Paradox

#14

Post by zoren »

zeckalpha wrote: post #9
pedro1976 wrote: post #4

I prefer Slavoj Zizek classification into knowns and unknowns. - Known-Knowns: things we know that we know - Known-Unknowns: things that we know we don’t know - Unkown-Unknowns: things we don’t know we don’t know - Unknown-Knowns: “The things we don’t know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say. “. This is better known as culture.

Is that Slavoj Zizek? I thought it was Johari.

Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham apparently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johari_window

Re: Polanyi’s Paradox

#15

Post by mr_crankypants »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #6

> activities based on tacit knowledge include recognizing a face, driving a car, riding a bike As far as I know, there are different classes of tacit knowledge here: Driving a car, riding a bike etc are learned behaviour, recent in evolutionary time, and might also in a few generations not commonly learned any more, as e.g. riding a horse is uncommon now. But recognising a face (or not being good at it) is innate in…

One that might bridge that gap is learning a language.

It's almost certainly much more recent than recognizing a face, but still something humans have been doing for a long time, and is a near-universal human behavior. Like the others, though, it needs to be learned, has a strong cultural component, and tends to happen with the help of others.

It's also interesting because there's an entire academic field devoted to its study, and, at least from my peripheral perspective, they seem to be constantly bumping up against Polanyi's Paradox. I've seen more than one academic argue that the set of grammatical rules that we can accurately describe is a subset of the grammatical rules that we use when communicating. Which, if true, is pretty interesting, since language is a social construct - the implication is that we can fabricate and reliably transmit information that we can't actually express.

Re: Polanyi’s Paradox

#16

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

mr_crankypants wrote: post #15
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #6

> activities based on tacit knowledge include recognizing a face, driving a car, riding a bike As far as I know, there are different classes of tacit knowledge here: Driving a car, riding a bike etc are learned behaviour, recent in evolutionary time, and might also in a few generations not commonly learned any more, as e.g. riding a horse is uncommon now. But recognising a face (or not being good at it) is innate in…

One that might bridge that gap is learning a language. It's almost certainly much more recent than recognizing a face, but still something humans have been doing for a long time, and is a near-universal human behavior. Like the others, though, it needs to be learned, has a strong cultural component, and tends to happen with the help of others. It's also interesting because there's an entire academic field devoted to…

> the set of grammatical rules that we can accurately describe is a subset of the grammatical rules that we use when communicating

Although rules do move from one camp to the other. For instance, people (myself included) find this article fascinating because it makes conscious a rule that English-speakers use unconsciously

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...

Re: Polanyi’s Paradox

#17

Post by Retric »

psychoslave wrote: post #12
H8crilA wrote: post #5

Next time someone asks me how does a modern artificial neural network really work - I'll just ask them "how do you know that my face does indeed look like mine?". Or "how do you recognize people by their voices?". Or this creepy one: "can you consciously stop decoding the English I'm speaking now?". This Wikipedia page can serve as an extension of the argument.

Well, I would say that to my mind we are not there. That is, despite the label of neural network, we do have a bottom up explanation of how it works (although it doesn't guaranties that this model is "what really happens out there"). On the other hand, despite the advances in neurosciences, as far as I know we don't have such a consensual bottom up model for human behaviors.

We have a bottom up model for very simple animals. But, even a fruit fly has 250,000 neurons that’s a lot of complexity.

So, saying we understand some reflexive human behaviors from the ground up is actually a lot of progress. We are even applying that knowledge in many useful ways.

Re: Polanyi’s Paradox

#18

Post by heavenlyblue »

pdpi wrote: post #7
pedro1976 wrote: post #4

I prefer Slavoj Zizek classification into knowns and unknowns. - Known-Knowns: things we know that we know - Known-Unknowns: things that we know we don’t know - Unkown-Unknowns: things we don’t know we don’t know - Unknown-Knowns: “The things we don’t know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say. “. This is better known as culture.

Polanyi's paradox isn't an alternative to that classification — rather, it explicitly states that a surprisingly large amount of knowledge falls into the "unknown knowns" classification, in areas that defy your "this is better known as culture" description.

Yeah, “unknown knowns” is better known as “the weirdo over there who just sat at the piano and started playing it perfectly having never played it before”. The parent is taking it too meta.

Re: Polanyi’s Paradox

#19

Post by beaconstudios »

I've been reading Alan Watts' "the way of Zen" recently and this point forms a strong central pillar of his explanation. What we think of as our mind or our self, the conscious mind, seems to be basically a paper thin director on top of all the real functionality which is much more powerful and evolutionarily much older.

Relatedly, our use of language to describe and identify things and phenomena falls prey to the map-territory relation in a way that can warp our thinking. But I can't do his explanations justice, I can only recommend picking up the book if you're interested in these kinds of cognitive paradoxes.

Re: Polanyi’s Paradox

#20

Post by tw1010 »

zeckalpha wrote: post #9
pedro1976 wrote: post #4

I prefer Slavoj Zizek classification into knowns and unknowns. - Known-Knowns: things we know that we know - Known-Unknowns: things that we know we don’t know - Unkown-Unknowns: things we don’t know we don’t know - Unknown-Knowns: “The things we don’t know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say. “. This is better known as culture.

Is that Slavoj Zizek? I thought it was Johari.

I thought it was Rumsfeld. (Not joking.)
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