language

https://elixir.free-electrons.com/linux/v4.15-rc6/source/ker...

Also, see Linus' response here: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/1/3/797

editx2: Oh, guess seccomp doesn't use eBPF yet? Suppose that raises a bunch of questions about permissions necessary for specifying programs that might dereference kernel pointers and such by emitting `bpf()` calls.

Also, both kinds of policy are resident in files. I don't understand your point there.

Dunno, taking @revelation's word for it? Mentioned they were missing it. It sounds funny to me though. I'm not a Debian user.

edit: The Debian page on security features confuses me (https://wiki.debian.org/Security/Features).

I don't think the analogy is adequate. A processor is an object - it "objects" to all of us. It appears to have an existence independent of the thing that recognizes it as such. When we embark on an empirical investigation of something, we make a distinction between the scientific observer and the scientific object. We come to an agreement about the boundaries of the object. This does not appear to be the case if you want to call consciousness "that special [condition, or process, or property, or pattern, etc.] of being a scientific observer" (which we would ideally want because it seems to encapsulate all those special things that distinguish human beings from other organisms with nervous systems).

In that domain, we cannot make a distinction between subject and object. In order to even speak intelligibly about things, we must all draw the boundary of the thing we're talking about - but we are in the peculiar position of being the very act of drawing the boundary.

I like to think about it that way, but it makes the problem feel intractable.

The problem is that we want to describe consciousness as "that thing that allows an organism to describe consciousness as 'that thing that allows an organism to describe consciousness as ´that thing that allows an organism to describe consciousness as [...]´'"

That [and this] whole space [of considerations, here] appears to be fraught with circularities like this:

Step 1. Draw a distinction between consciousness and meta-consciousness.

Step 2. "From what vantage point, and with what 'machinery' do we make a distinction?"

Step 3. Go back to Step 1.

> .. that our ability to think about the issue is constrained by our language.

I think I agree, otherwise I'm tempted to think that we would have already arrived, trivially, at some clearer kind of agreement about it.

https://github.com/dirtycow/dirtycow.github.io/wiki/Vulnerab...

It may be that distinctions like the one you're describing here are useful to make, but I don't think this claim refutes the possibility of ML "fitting a particular piece within a larger, yet unarticulated model."

I think the assertion is more that our current ways of representing elements of human experience are necessarily very lossy - or that there's some aspect of the situation that you can't describe/implement in terms of models of neural nets.

Always glad to see references to Hofstadter's work, but this sounds like hyperbole. I don't think that mere feedback loops are "strange" enough to invoke his name. I think the idea refers to loops in systems which are heterarchical. I don't think there are any interesting crossings over different layers of abstraction here.

Interestingly, these ideas have been around for quite some time. For example, the work of Warren McCulloch (and Walter Pitts) predates Hofstadter's thought in this space. Relevant passage from his 1945 article, "A Heterarchy of Values Determined by the Topology of Nervous Nets":

"[..] three heterodromic branch­es link the dromes so as to form a circle in the net which is distin­guished from an endrome in that it is not the circuit of any drome but transverse to all dromes, i.e., diadromic. The simplest surface on which this net maps topologically (without a diallel) is a tore. Cir­cularities in preference, instead of indicating inconsistencies, actually demonstrate consistency of a higher order than had been dreamed of in our philosophy."

True - I suppose I'm trying to hold onto the "kernel:hypervisor :: process:unikernel" analogy here for no good reason. Following it suggested that it might be the hypervisor's responsibility.

"Order and chaos are not a properties of things, but relations of an observer to something observed - the ability for an observer to distinguish or specify pattern."

Kind of how I take philosophers/scientists to be (and other dichotomies that are variations on that kind of pattern). There's a funny [and highly paraphrased] quote I use from Heinz von Foerster that I think is highly relevant:

"The reductionist eventually comes to know everything about nothing (by way of distinction) - the wholist eventually comes to know nothing about everything (by way of generalization)."

Another interesting way of articulating this might be: "The universe splits itself into two parts - an observer and an observed."

Consciousness appears (intuitively, on the surface) to be the thing which creates the possibility of describing consciousness. A description of consciousness must account for itself. A theory of consciousness must be written such that it writes itself.