Apparently I am a lying liar who lies when it comes to bringing back my blog. I've been having some health issues, and that compounded with a whole lot of school and work has lead to this being left until it it long overdue. This was pretty accidental, and now that school is over I really want to get back to the bi-weekly schedule for good now. I haven't applied to masters programs due to this illness and so I hope to keep myself somewhat sharp with this blog. At the very least, thinking about computer science and philosophy seriously(ish). This also feels like a warm-up for me to be getting back into writing, so it might be slightly rough.
On that note, I'm not really sure about what topic I should write about today, I've started and deleted three potential ideas, so instead I'm going to run through a list of things that I'm thinking about writing a post on in detail and move from there. Baby steps back into this I suppose.
- I've been trying to little avail to write a proper introduction to philosophy and computer science, this is what partially ended up stultifying the blog in the first place, truth be told. I'd like to cover major philosophical theories as the relate not only to artificial intelligence but also things like computational complexity. I would attempt to make this series quite elementary and accessible, as it would both be something I could point at when people ask what I do, and would be really good for me to establish some baselines. It's a really big field though with a lot of depth and breath and that's really been holding me back from getting started. I have begun writing a fairly detailed history of where philosophy and computer science have met, but it didn't have the right momentum, so, back to the drawing board.
- A topic that's been a pet of mine for awhile now is the idea of mental illness and its relationship with artificial intelligence. I can't seem to write this post without getting a little more scifi than I think I should on this blog. Ever since I read about Texas' DISCERN system I have been obsessed with this idea. In particular, I've been looking from the psychology side at how mental illness connects into creativity. Some sources support the claim that this is the case and others deny it. I'm trying to find a good paper to stake some initial ideas in, but I haven't really found anything that seems like a good bedrock for some thinking. I do like the high level idea of this though, and it may be worth continuing to poke into.
- Finally, as I was going through my unwisely named "Current Projects" folder I found the old story generator bot that I was working on. I've come up with a few ideas about how to use and improve that. In particular I've been thinking a lot about 'narrator motivation', wherein part of the content comes from a weighted language system and the rest comes from the 'mood' of the narrator. This is to say that, a narrator who is happy might use more punchy words, wherein a boring narrator might use cumbersome language [1. Like I do! ] Again, I'm not sure I have enough really concrete to start writing on this.