Tagged "society-of-FAIR"

A Sign Helps You Use It as Though It Were an X

Suppose an alien architect has invented a radically new way to go from one room to another…We would never recognize it as a door…All its physical details are wrong.

Sending Signal-Signs

Sending signal-signs1 to steer engines of compute, the wheel does no work.

The Persistence of Identity

What is that strange possession that stays the same throughout its life?

Let Traits Accrete

How can it be that complex, dynamic objects can be described by short and simple strings and words?

Keying Into Fashion and Style for Knowledge Arrangement

We often have sound practical reasons for making choices that have no reasons by themselves but have effects on larger scales.

Identity and Concurrency

Regarding a resource – dataset, model, tool, standard, agent, etc. – as a single thing can be helpful: in allocating physical space, in dealing with privacy and responsibility, in de-confusing mental activity.

"We Need to Dockerize and Distribute Robert"

It does not help for you to think that inside yourself lies someone else who does your work.

Ensure That Provenance Bottoms Out

Some questions may be pursued circularly, where for example you cannot find a final cause – you must ask, What caused that cause?

"Straightening Out" Circular Causality

We often seek to “straighten out” a maze-like, loop-containing situation. We try to find a “path” through “causal” explanations that go in only one direction.

Data Ventriloquy

Punch and Judy, to their audience: Our puppet strings are hard to see, So we perceive ourselves as free, Convinced that no mere objects could Behave in terms of bad or good.

Crossing the Inter-Lab Chasm

Without enduring self-ideals, our [research] would lack coherence. As individuals, we’d never be able to trust ourselves to carry out our [protocols].

Slot Long Range Plans Into Ecosystems

A principled system has predictable relationships between its modules, whereas an adaptable system has sparse and flexible relationships between its modules.

Schemes for Indirect Control

There are two fundamental approaches to indirect control in code.1

Directness Is Dangerous

If self-control were easy, we might end up accomplishing nothing at all.

The Conservative Self

To understand what we call the Self, we first must see what Selves are for.

Core Versus Crust

The art of a great painting is not in any one idea, nor in a multitude of separate tricks for placing all those pigment spots, but in the great network of relationships among its parts.

One Self or Many

Is a self a centralized entity? Is it a society that includes both images of what is (“data”) and ideals about what ought to be (“schema”)?

What Functions Do Ideas About Selves Serve?

One must not mistake defining things for knowing what they are.

Appearing Opposed, Related Goals

Pain can simplify point of view. When you’re in pain, it’s hard to think of anything else.

Destructive Acts Serving Constructive Goals

Let’s say that the urges of the Play process compete with those of other processes, like Sleep:

Hierarchies, Heterarchies, and Agent Memory

In a hierarchy, each agent only acts on behalf of one other agent:

Agents and Hierarchies

Designing any society, be it human or computational, involves decisions like these:

The Principle of Noncompromise

The longer an internal conflict persists among an agent’s subordinates, the weaker becomes that agent’s status among its own competitors.

Migrating Conflicts Between Agents to Higher Levels

Many children not only like to build, they also like to knock things down – to hear the complicated noises and watch so many things move at once.

Are People Machines?

Are people machines? “Everyone knows that machines can behave only in lifeless, mechanical ways.

Easy Things Are Hard

In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.

Holes and Parts

What keeps a mouse contained in a box? It is the way a box prevents motion in all directions.

Parts and Wholes

We’re often told that certain wholes are “more than the sum of their parts.

Novelists and Reductionists

Some like to focus on the new. They like to invent theories.

Components and Connections

An agent like Builder is not merely a collection of parts like Find, Get, Put, and all the rest.

Wholes and Parts, in FAIR and Mind

It is the nature of the mind that makes individuals kin, and the differences in the shape, form, or manner of the material atoms out of whose intricate relationships that mind is built are altogether trivial.

Agents and Agencies

We want to explain complicated things as a combination of simpler things.

Common Sense

We found a way to make a tower builder out of parts.

The World of Blocks

Imagine a child playing with blocks. Imagine the child’s mind contains a host of smaller minds - “agents”.

The Society of Method

For a method, a protocol, thought about and done by you, what’s a “you”?

The Research Process and the Bits

How could solid-seeming computer hardware support such a ghostly thing as research progress?

The Agents of a FAIR Research Platform

To explain a FAIR research platform, we have to show how they are built from mindless stuff, smaller and simpler than anything we’d consider smart.

Riffs on the Society of Mind - Prologue

How do FAIR data resources work? How can you build a FAIR resource from many little parts, each non-FAIR by itself?