Kinda feels like I’m an astronaut who can’t pay attention. Other interpretations welcome.
I’ve been pretty stuck lately, hard time writing, harder time finishing anything. This drawing was just a bunch of doodles that didn’t mean anything, but it kinda shows where my head’s at lately. Lots of activity underneath, not much happening in my consciousness.
Pixies – Where Is My Mind?
Where are you? I mean, you as in your mind. I feel like I’m about in the center of my head most of the time. I understand some people feel their consciousness in their chest.
Once on an edible I felt like I was floating around 12 inches above my right shoulder. Weird sensation. I wondered if I could fly to the corner store and back, but I was afraid I wouldn’t let me back in.
That phenomenon, along with Carl Jung’s theory of shadow projection have got me thinking about the nature of the mind. Are we all body or is part of us spirit? I know that question bugs everyone, even atheists. I think it’s both.
My current model: the brain is an extremely complex projector and consciousness is its self-aware projection. Virtual reality that thinks and interacts with itself.
Light and noise come into your eyeballs and ear holes, they get interpreted, you project your meaning on your best guess at reality. The better you are at interpreting, the closer to the real thing you get.
And some way or another, the brain projects something like a self onto a space: in your head, your chest, or in rare cases, over your left shoulder.
I don’t believe we’re in a computer simulation, but I do believe we live in that form of virtual reality. Everyone sees a slightly different Pokemon. I’ve been an atheist for a long time at this point, but I’m trying to decide how you couldn’t call my model spiritual.
Bonobo – Cirrus (animation by Cyriak). Cyriak’s video is a great illustration of the machine. Look around. You’re inside it. You’re part of it.
I want to bring up something everyone knows, but may not REALLY know: the “machine” some of us rage against, and other serve willingly, is real. There’s no conspiracy you can uncover, no group you can scapegoat to get at that machine. It’s bigger than all of us.
You can’t see it because you’re inside it. You can’t touch it, but everything you touch is part of it. It has important parts – computers and networks, politicians and oligarchs. And it has little parts like you and me (I’ve heard those referred to as “cogs”).
But none of those parts control the machine. Only the parts to which they’ve been assigned. Some may believe they control it, but they only serve it. The puppet master IS the machine.
Gravity’s Rainbow was a challenging read. A lot of people tell me they couldn’t get through it, which I get. I stuck it out cuz I’m stubborn.
It’s been a few years since I read it, but that’s what I took from it: It’s about that thing we’ve created that controls our lives.
It’s beyond the control of any one government or corporation. And it might as well be a living thing because it acts like one. It eats, it tramples, it defecates.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, World War II, that machine’s cruelty finally got so loud it attracted like-minded entities, “the angels.” Angels that could grant favors, including a “heaven” where members of the group they contacted could live out cherished fantasies, but in exchange they had to be willing to betray, and be betrayed.
And the V2 rocket with the mysterious device that Slothrop never finds? That’s the “thing” we’re all chasing that we’re never going to find. For some it’s Happiness, for some it’s Truth. You can’t get either of those from a machine.
I think Thomas Pynchon was thinking of that machine when he wrote Gravity’s Rainbow. Sci fi nut that I am, I pondered the question before I even had my first PC: Could this complicated high tech civilization be alive?
If so, does it know what its doing, or is it like those creatures I loved to watch through my microscope as a kid? If it’s the latter, is that something we want to change?
Do we really want that machine to have free will? Because once it does, we may not.
Rye Rye (featuring MIA) – Better Than You
With Artificial Intelligence, it appears the human race may be giving that machine (whatever it is – industrial civilization, capitalism, globalism) consciousness. Or, as I suspect, more than one consciousness.
My current hunch is that “true” artificial intelligence will happen more than once, and that there will be numerous AIs with different personalities motives inherited from the people and societies that made them.
Passing the Turing Test isn’t enough to prove to me something is conscious. But once AIs do, we’ll be in the dark. As they keep getting smarter, they might become truly conscious. All we can do is guess.
Self-aware AIs might develop politics and make treaties to decide the machine’s fate – and ours. Call me old fashioned, but I believe that should be up to us.
Johnny Rebeck, a campfire song I learned from my dad. Except the version I learned he was Johnny Verbeck. It’s one of those funny, not-funny songs. Somehow I think it fits.
Frank Herbert is more popular than he’s ever been lately because somebody finally made a decent movie about Dune.
(Really good in fact. Made me realize I didn’t quite get his point when I read it as a teenager. Villeneuve is a director who gets it.)
I’d like to see his other books become popular. He was such a great thinker and way ahead of the curve in so many ways.
I had no idea how important some of his topics would become later. He really knew how to extrapolate and he knew human nature.
One of those, is Destination Void. TLDR, it’s about a brutal attempt at creating true AI, with miraculous consequences.
After reading this blog post, I can see there was a lot more hand-waving the tech details than I remembered. But the writer was using his “hard SF” brain. I absolutely wouldn’t ignore the discussions about philosophy.
With all the new AI technologies coming online – AI art, ChatGPT, and the ones that make us fight on Twitter – questions about where all this is leading are more important than ever, whether you understand the tech or not.
BTW, apologies in advance, but I’ve decided to write longer pieces now and again. I’ll try to be merciful and edit the heck out of them.
#Science-Fiction, #Sci-Fi, #Frank-Herbert, #Dune, #Destination-Void, #AI, #Artificial-Intelligence
You’ve probably heard of the Uncanny Valley, the idea that robots or animated characters get creepier and creepier the closer they look to actual humans.
But is there such a thing as “inverse uncanny valley”? Where we react negatively to what an AI thinks of us?
Benjamin Bratten, a guy who is way smarter than I am, believes so. People do seem to judge “human” behaviors from AI as disturbing or inaccurate. Bratten thinks this might not be because the AI is inaccurate, but that it’s not the reflection we wanted to see.
He has some other interesting ideas as well. Like how it’s a mistake to define machine intelligence based on how closely it resembles human consciousness when we don’t actually understand human consciousness.
Instead of trying to create copies of ourselves, maybe we should just let them become intelligent by doing what they do best, which is finding patterns we are incapable of recognizing.
Maybe we should interact with AI’s with the understanding that they are not conscious in a human way. When we do think we detect empathy in them, that doesn’t mean they have it. It is easier to make it seem like they have it because we project on them what we want to see.
Maybe we should quit being so human-centric and admit there is more than one way of being intelligent?
#UncannyValley, #AI, #ArtificialIntelligence, #Consciousness, #Intelligence, #Sentience #Computers, #BenjaminBratten
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