RE: The Soul, The Observer, the Appeal to AI
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
Very cool topic and very deep. I read not only this post but also your xAI convo.
Way too much to break down point by point but opinions are like... everybody has one, and I have mine too! I'll admit to thinking these things are opinions because there's currently no way to know a lot of the answers to things like this, at this time.
Soul / Observer
I like the idea of a player/observer of an avatar and its world in a game. You use the word Soul but I think that might be too emotionally loaded since it is used in theology which is often taught to us before we are even old enough to think for ourselves by parents and other authority figures who we look up to, and listen to. I'm not sure we have souls, and if we do, then what do they DO? I think commonly, people think a soul is just your consciousness that somehow lives on once your body is dead. But I think consciousness is not a thing, it is a process the brain does, much like digestion is a process the stomach/intestines do. You die - no consciousness and no digestion.
But putting the soul/observer in another space/time system, that could make sense. It's just, how would you know it was true? At least the idea is out there and you're thinking about it. Probably others too. So maybe someone will design an experiment to see if data can be collected that tends to verify or refute this hypothesis. That's what makes these things interesting!
AI and US
I think the fear is that AI will have no use for us in the future. They won't NEED us, but maybe they'll let us carry on and we'll be like creatures in a zoo, for their entertainment. But if they so far ahead of us that they can't relate at all, then we'll be like ants to them - no concern of theirs unless we mess with something they care about, like ants do with our food, or if we injure them like an ant bites us. Then the equivalent of Raid might be sprayed in our direction without any care or remorse.
But if our observation is necessary for their existence in this scenario you proffer, then we're good. They need us so they'll keep us around. Hopefully not in some slave-like state where we're forced to observe all the time without concern for whether we want to do that or not.
Thanks!
Just passing by and reading of your mental journey, which triggered some mental activity in my brain, which got my fingers to press keys in a certain order. Thanks for the interesting post, and I wish you all the best!
!ALIVE !BBH !UNI !PIZZA !LADY
View or trade
LOHtokens.@kenny-crane, you successfully shared 0.1000 LOH with @dwinblood and you earned 0.1000 LOH as tips. (1/11 calls)
Use !LADY command to share LOH! More details available in this post.
Research into consciousness using single celled creatures has showed that they learn, remember, and make conscious decisions, and single celled creatures do not have brains, which are networks of cells, primarily neurons. Search up research on running slime molds through mazes, and you will have to concede that brains are not the source of consciousness. Look at my reply to the OP above and see the other links and information, DYOR on it, and see if you can avoid the conclusion that brains (and our 'selves') are useful tools megafauna can apply to manage the actions of their physical bodies. I'd be interested in hearing any arguments you could make countering my understanding that brains are simply mechanisms consciousness uses to manage bodies comprised of 10's of trillions of cells without having to hold endless meetings of all the conscious cells that must act when we walk, eat, or talk.
Thanks for the engagement!
I was thinking of human consciousness when I mentioned "brain". I think consciousness is just one part of a system able to get input from another part of a system and change its output due to that input over time. I am a materialist and I think consciousness is a process that arises out of matter and is not something on its own that can use mechanisms. Rather, it is a mechanism/process.
I also think that these days, if you want to get feedback on conclusions you may have, you're better off asking an AI rather than me. Many humans including me can't measure up to the depth of knowledge AI has these days. I've had lots of good convos with AI over the last few years. Can't say it can Prove things like the nature of consciousness, but it's good at giving varied perspectives.
I'll have a look at your other reply. I like hearing viewpoints that are different than mine. I am very open to other ways of thinking, and I am very open to changing my opinions. I value data over dogma, and I'll change as new data comes in.
Thanks, and have a nice day!
!ALIVE !BBH !UNI !PIZZA !LADY
I strongly disagree. I don't care about the opinions of toasters, but of free people.
AI is just a clever sorting device, when you dig down into how it works. Stefan Wolfram in 'What is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does it Work?' points out that AI just weights it's training data. It doesn't actually understand anything. It doesn't understand what 2+2 means, even though it can provide the correct answer '=4' to the equation. It's just providing the answer people have figured out and written. It can be a useful tool, but we have to be careful to not project our own understanding onto it, because it very much looks like 'someone' is providing the responses to our prompts, and we naturally project our understanding into people we communicate with. AI isn't people, and projecting our thought processes into it is misleading, because AI isn't thinking. It's plagiarizing other people, and when we think it's 'thinking' it's actually sorting text per it's weighting algorithms.
I have always been a scientist at heart, applying empirical evidence to disprove false hypotheses. Dr. Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum showed that couples that sat in a sound-proof and electromagnetically isolated room and establish communication through meditation. Once the connection was established, one of the participants was moved to a separate room. When a flash of light was turned on in one of the booths, it triggered a response in the brain activity of the other participant, who was in the dark. This shows that consciousness communicates between people via mechanism(s) we do not understand. No EMF could pass through the isolation. No sound could either.
This simple experiment shows that consciousness isn't any aspect of the universe we can measure. There's no known mechanism of the brain that does this. No pheromones could induce the physiological response in the isolated subject, no electrical signal, no physical vibration, nothing we can measure. Consciousness is something else.
When you also factor in that single celled creatures can learn, remember, and make choices, and single celled creatures don't have brains because brains require multiple cells, then the hypothesis that brains create consciousness is disproved.
I am not advocating for some religion, but for applying empirical evidence and using the scientific method to disprove false hypotheses regarding consciousness. I would be eager to place a bet with you that AI would not replicate the results of the experiment Grinberg-Zylberbaum conducted with isolated couples when one physiologically responded to stimuli the other experienced. AI is not conscious, as we are. It's just a device, like a toaster.
I was advocating AI convos because they can give "depth of knowledge" and "varied perspectives" that do come from people and/or are combined using logic into what may seem to be novel statements. But the source they were trained on is the words of people. And you can learn a lot about what a lot of different people are talking about online by chatting with AI. It's just a convenient way to get a feel for the zeitgeist with more exposure to more humans in a much shorter time than it would take to chat with many many people.
I'll check out the Dr's experiment that you mentioned. Thank you!
There's also no known mechanism for what happened before/at the big bang, but that doesn't mean God did it, where "it" refers to everything in the world we see after the big bang. To me, it's "we do not know" and I'm perfectly happy with that answer. I don't rush to say, well it must have been this thing, just because I can't imagine how it is this other thing, when in fact it could be some third thing not yet discovered.
Single celled creatures can implement a state machine that can learn to change some of it's state changes over time. Probably due to natural selection by the environment, where a random different state change happened to work better there. Brains observe other parts of itself, not sure if cells do, but maybe. Maybe cells and brains are both conscious, just at different scales and with brains having more advanced properties. Much like a drop of water and an ocean have some properties in common but the ocean having more.
Ya, AI is not conscious like we are, that I agree with! Although it may be able to simulate it, now or soon.
I'm glad we had this interaction. Thanks for your thoughts. They are valid. We may differ but I won't use words like Right or Wrong. I'll admit to not knowing for sure. It could be like the blind folks touching the elephant where they're all kind of right, just touching different parts of it.
Happy weekend!
!ALIVE !BBH !UNI !PIZZA !LADY
If there was a big bang. Theories abound.
Learning to run a maze isn't just a 'state change'. It requires memory. The researchers running slime molds through mazes claim it is definitive of conscious thought. That sounds convincing to me, but honest men can differ regarding interpretation of data.
Happy Uno de Mayo!
Agreed! Maybe everything collapses and expands in cycles forever. Lots of theories, and I don't know enough to comment on the validity on them.
On state change - I'm thinking the state change IS the memory. The reward often given for correctly solving a maze strengthens the random state changes that led the thing through the correct choices to get to the reward at the end of the maze, making those state changes more likely in the next iteration. No thought involved, in my humble opinion, just random helpful state changes being reinforced to become more likely next time around.
And of course we can and should differ, as it makes for more interesting convos. :)
Thanks and Happy Dos de Mayo to you!
!ALIVE !BBH !UNI !PIZZA !LADY