It was really good through the pandemic and then he got a bit caught up in discussing politics, when I was just there for the quantum physics. (Was around the time after he picked up his new physics/philosophy position and moved towns)
He was very influential in pushing me to favour Many Worlds over Copenhagen, and his interviews with people like David Deutsch were gold. Might have to check out what he's doing these days.
Given the number of neurons, hash collisions are inevitable? /s
Our model of the world, and this includes "memories" is very highly compressed, and extremely lossy. We reconstruct everything from what neurons activate when we recall something, so it can also be like a corrupted zip, where we don't access everything required in the moment. This can be affected by sleep, stress, hormones, etc.
What is quite interesting is when we try and recall something and can't, but the subconscious processing continues and you recall it later.
Bought four Hemnes last year for my sitting room library and various pieces of molded hardwood for a kick board and fascia. Finished up as a single fairly solid built-in bookcase the full length of one wall. The legs allowed for passing wires under (accessible via the removable bottom shelf) and up behind so it can have lighting.
The one to watch is Iluka who received a AUD 1.65b loan from the Australian Government to build the Eneabba rare earth plant, currently to come online in 2027. Their stockpile is xenotime and monazite and Yytrium and Erbium are a priority for processing.
Not sure about Lynas and whether they have access to those rare earths from an alternate source to feed into their plant. The Mt Weld mine is carbonatite and mostly LRE rather than the Yytrium and Erbium heavy xenotime/monazite Iluka have stockpiled.
Be careful not to equate conscious with subjective experience.
- Conscious is the substrate or architecture of the system.
- Awareness is the active resolution of inputs (external and internal) against that system's model.
- Subjective Experience is the feeling "what it is like to be" from within the system.
I also disagree with the "observer" position. Seems he's imported some Carlo Rovelli into this essay as they do collaborate together. You don't need an observer - it's the same reason I find Copenhagen / Wave function collapse to just seem wrong.
The reason I think quala is hard to pin down comes down to how the conscious internal model compresses what it has previously resolved about the world (internal and external).
The feeling of blueness is that highly compressed concept (not raw data about ranges of wavelengths) which is then compared against the blueness of something our awareness is focused on.
The drone footage out of Ukraine was like this. Some of it is cartoonish or like watching an action movie or video game.
It's when you recognise the humanity of the individual - for example IR footage of a soldier trying to sleep in a foxhole before a drone drops a grenade. The aftermath starkly reminders you that this was a living person a few moments earlier.
Consciousness is a bucket of things. Putting subjective experience to the side, the main components could be:
- An internal model that is actively revised (the Markov blanket/s)
- A continuing active resolution of inputs (either sensory or the ability to simulate "dream" - basically aliveness)
- A persistent state of completed resolutions that are recursively reentered and affect the future resolutions.
Everything we might say have these abilities are organic, but a digital system could possibly be defined as being conscious if it met all those.
LLMs have an internal state, they respond to external input, they have a form of memory.
What is missing is agency; a directionality of resolution, and the subjective experience (what the conscious process "feels' like from inside.
I would suggest that those developed purely via evolution as the drive to procreate and stay alive against entropic decay.
When you stop typing, the LLM is not there wondering when or what you will type next. It responds if you ask it something, it doesn't wait around wanting to continue the conversation. There's also no loss if you stop or delete it completely.
The next phase could be adding something equivalent to dreaming (except a LLM doesn't sleep), where the LLM continues "thinking" about the conversation, and generates something additional to say without explicit prompting.
And maybe a digital system needs to know/sense/feel its potential mortality, and cares about that?
You just attempted to define consciousness here with a series of arbitrary features.
Don’t not see how you’re making it up? The sounding and spelling of the word itself is made up. Then your attribution of these arbitrary features like an actively revised internal model to the definition is also made up.
You are debating about a language problem. Vocabulary. Vocabulary is not a profound or interesting problem. That is what the whole “what is consciousness” issue revolves around.
The visual alien form is superficial, the underlying cognitive process is very much the same, but different.
McGichrist write about the Master and the Emissary to explain the conscious and subconscious human brain. The octopus takes this to a whole new level with eight separate sub-brains, each a Markov blanket to itself as demonstrated when one gets severed. Unlike the tail of a drop-tail skink, the severed arm shows continuing evaluation and adjustment to its environment.
Is there a "what it is to be an octopuses arm", does it exhibit agency like a human? Most likely not but it blurs the boundary between organic and non-organic consciousness.
I don't have a problem with hallucinations, rather the confabulations.
We want AI to make predictions under uncertainty that could be wrong. What we don't need is getting know facts wrong.
One of the best responses I got from ChatGPT was when it said "I don't know", and on questioning it - it responded that it was an unsolved problem and it couldn't objectively take a side iun the argument.
He was very influential in pushing me to favour Many Worlds over Copenhagen, and his interviews with people like David Deutsch were gold. Might have to check out what he's doing these days.
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