Formalization of numbers.

I always felt that there was something strange about the way the concept of numbers are formalized by set theory or category theory. Although the concept of numbers do have some problems, unless we deal with infinities there does not seem to be an urgent need for formalization, as far as calculations are concerned, including complex numbers.

Humans seem to have an intuitive understanding of numbers, on par with qualia. By trying to formalize numbers by set or category or other theories, something extra is added, and there are consequently some "evil questions" that shouldn't be asked, as numbers represented by these formalisms have something external to our intuitive understanding of numbers. 

I am not saying that attempts at formalization are meaningless. I just feel that numbers should be treated on the same footing as qualia. Just as attempts at formalizing qualia do not go well, formalization of numbers is bound to be unsatisfactory, because such an approach is not addressing the essential nature of numbers directly. 

An entertainment of one's own. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl by Nick Park, released from Aardman @aardman

It is so wonderful when grownups do their best to entertain children and the inner children in our hearts.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) is such a labour of love, that when you imagine all the efforts and ingenuity that went into it you almost wanted to cry.

I saw it on Netflix in Tokyo on the release day.

The opening sequence of Heath Robinson gadgets achieving feats of waking up, body washing, changing clothes, and breakfast preparation would put a smile on everyone's face. The new invention by Wallace, a robot gnome for whom "no job is too small", invokes an alarm in the viewers' mind when the AI assisted agent goes about tidying up the garden. The contrast between a more contemporary, naturalistic gardening principles and the old school geometrical garden making enforced by the gnome is cleverly slipped into the plot.

The liberal arts hight standards of the animation is evident, for example, when the disgruntled Gromit, chased away from the usual habitat by the Wallace's-favour-winning gnome, reads none other than Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own in bed.

The beauty is that the cleverness is never imposed upon the viewer. The AI alignment problem is clearly one of the themes, where an artificial agent designed with good intentions can cause unintentional havoc. The Waluigi effect, where an AI made as Luigi (a good guy) can turn into a bad guy (Waluigi) through a slight loss of balance, is one of the hidden themes of the film. Indeed, the whole film could be considered as a statement on AI safety, but the sheer entertainment value completely wraps it up, so that you don't have to notice to enjoy the story.

Children are very sensitive and they take messages with astonishing efficiency and sincerity. The fact that a number of grownups (I presume) of the Aardman clan led by the great Nick Park has produced such a sparkle joy for kids is a glimmer of hope at this otherwise gloomy turn of quarter century.

A final spoiler alert: You should take the art of old school tea making very seriously.

Queen of Hearts. Diane Morgan in Cunk on Life.

Cunk on Life, starring Diane Morgan as the cleverly irrelevant interviewer and interrogator Philomena Cunk, is a delightful repeat of this hugely popular franchise as well as a courageous trial at things sometimes shockingly and delightfully new. 

The hallmark deadpan dialogues with experts are still there (I wonder how the interviewees can keep straight faces confronted by Diane Morgan in the set), and the scripts are masterfully written, although I suspect there must be many ad-libs. There is something profoundly interesting in the way the Cunk character succeeds in producing laughter, by exposing something vulnerable in the experts or expert knowledge. It is quite all right, because that would be the job description for the experts involved. Well done.

Cunk is almost always beside the point, but in an up-to-date, politically aware (not necessarily correct, which is unfortunately important in today's cultural climate) way. Personally, Cunk somehow reminds me of Socrates, in that the ultimate wisdom can be only expressed in terms of self-acknowledged ignorance. But then Socrates was perhaps one of the first recorded comedians, and arguably one of the best ever.

When dealing with venerable issues such as religion, classic art, and theory of evolution, Cunk nonchalantly throws modern and contemporary items such as mobile phone, AI, and her mate Paul, which may appear inappropriate for the casual observer, but ultimately prove very relevant. After all, in Cunk on Life we are in a timeless zone, where things grand and trivial, meaningful and meaningless, noble and vulgar meet. 

That's the kind of place where genuine creativity happens, and Philomena Cunk reigns as the Queen of Comedy, as well of Hearts. The warm heart was felt, for example,  when the fourth wall was broken, and the sound guys were given the credit that were due. Wonderful stuff created by wonderful staff.  

We are all in the Big Bang gang, by the way.

Cunk on Life. BBC2 and Netflix.

Ken Mogi bio, contact, and profile photos.

 

Ken Mogi is a neuroscientist, writer, and broadcaster based in Tokyo. Ken Mogi is a senior researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories, and a visiting and project professor at the University of Tokyo. He leads the Collective Intelligence Research Laboratory (CIRL) at the Komaba campus of the University of Tokyo, together with Takashi Ikegami. He has a B.A. in Physics and Law, and Ph.D in Physics, from the University of Tokyo. He has done postdoctoral research in University of Cambridge, U.K. He has published more than 300 books in Japan covering popular science, essay, criticism, self-help, and novels. Ken Mogi published several bestsellers in Japan (with close to million copies sold). He was the first Japanese to give a talk at the TED main stage, in 2012 (Long Beach). 

As a broadcaster, Ken Mogi has hosted and is hosting many tv and radio programs, in stations including the national broadcaster NHK, and Discovery Channel Japan. He has also appeared in several international programs, such as Closer to Truth and a Bloomberg documentary hosted by Hannah Fry.

Ken Mogi has a life-long interest in understanding the origin of consciousness, with the focus on qualia (sensory qualities of phenomenal experience) and free will. Ken Mogi’s book on IKIGAI, published in 35 countries and in ~30 languages, has become a global bestseller. The German version of IKIGAI was the No.1 bestselling book in nonfiction in Germany for 38 cumulative weeks in 2024. Ken Mogi’s book with Thomas Leoncini, Ikigai in Love, was published in 2020. Ken Mogi's third book in English, The Way of Nagomi, came out in the U.K. in 2022 and in the U.S. in January 2023. Ken Mogi's fourth book, Think Like a Stoic, will come out in July 2024.

 

Contact:

e-mail:kenmogi2005qualia@gmail.com

X: @kenmogi

Instagram: @qualiaken

Ken Mogi profile photos.

You can download large files by clicking on the URL below.

Ken Mogi photos by Itaru Hirama (2021)

 

 

The self and the diversity of qualia.

The individualities of qualia are defined in the framework of the self, so in that sense, the uniqueness of qualia and the uniqueness of the self must be dual. The self is large enough to contain the diversity of qualia that we experience.

Within that diversity, self-consciousness occupies a special role. Self-consciousness itself is neutral, prior to any specific instances of qualia. However, the neutrality of self-consciousness is large enough to embrace the great diversity of qualia.

I LIKE MOVIES, written and directed by Chandler Levack.

I LIKE MOVIES (2022), written and directed by Chandler Levack, is a wonderfully realistic depiction of the growing pains of a young person. 

I saw it in a Tokyo theater.

The protagonist of the film, Lawrence Kweller, a movie geek in a rural town in Canada, is convincingly played by Isaiah Lehtinen. The uniquely moving aspect of this piece is that there is nothing particularly unique about the Lawrence character, except that he loves movies too much. As a result of his passion, Lawrence ruins relationships, and his greatest dream of going to NYU (spoiler alert!) does not materialize, as should be in a true-to-heart depiction of the tumultuous period of the typical adolescence.  

Lawrences's efforts to make it in life as a film director reflects the experience of Levack herself. The gender swap was well-thought and clever, resulting in an answer song to Lady Bird (2017). New York, or the United States in general, symbolically seen from the locality of Canada in which this masterpiece is situated would find resonance in many people's heart. The closing of the film is in a sense a self-assertion of the "True North" (a self-referential phrase in the Canadian national anthem), well fitting for a nation that produced similarly humanistic delights such as the sitcom Schitt's Creek in recent years. The paying of respect to the first nation people at the end of the credit roll was fitting and truly like Canada. 

AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor

AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor was a very interesting read. The authors make a salient point that compared to generative AIs, predictive AIs perform very badly. From gun shootings to the prospect of a person's academic performance, or from the next hit song to the breakout of civil wars, AI technologies categorically cannot predict the future. For sure, humans are equally bad at predicting, but the point is that AIs cannot be expected to do any better. Any illusion on this would lead to snail oil.

In addition to the disaster of predictive AI, another related, and significant deficiency of AI is content moderation. The authors argue how and why filtering out potentially harmful posts on the social media are hard. Some of the difficulties come from the incredible ingenuity of humans to bypass any perceived restrictions or algorithmic structuring. A side effect of this is that a lot of people need to be employed to label bad contents manually, a task with negative effects on mental health. 

Topics such as top-N accuracy, the Gartner hype cycle, and the reproducibility crisis in AI research are very effectively analyzed and streamlined. I recommend anyone interested in AI's status quo and beyond to read this wonderfully written book.