tananan

AI didn’t take initiative, circumspection, effort and thoughtfulness away. At the end of the day, those are the qualities you can rely on. Pats on the head from others come and go.

I want to make a distinction: Just because the mind’s eye and the eye proper are different domains in some sense, it doesn’t mean that mental images cannot have an intensity/consistency to them that can reach or sure-enough, overpower the physical sense data.

Mostly I’m in the same boat at you: I have some visualization ability but I can’t just superimpose such mental images over my vision, without vision completely dominating. The mental object is so fidgety, dim and fleeting that the input from the eye completely washes it out.

But that seems to me to be a matter of the degree to which my mental images are usually pronounced.

In dreams and those weird hypnagogic intervals, I’ve had very vivid mental imagery, that makes me understand the mind is at least in principle capable of presenting mental objects of an intensity that matches sense impressions.

Now let’s say someone’s faculty of visualization is developed to the degree that their intentional mental imagery has an intensity and consistency comparable to that of regular vision.

I don’t see why they couldn’t, with the appropriate effort, “mix” the two in such a way that they are superimposed without any side dominating the other.

We are in a similar boat.

I can’t at will persist an image in my mind (to a decent extend), but my mind can slap together related images in quick succession, which can serve well enough to rotate things in my mind.

Once I had a couple of lucid dreams though, it became clear that my mind can absolutely show me very vivid scenes.

The fidelity is sadly not there when I try to recall it.

I also think I’ve maybe gotten better at visualizing over time, but the improvements are rather gradual.

Interesting, thanks!

Preface: unpolished thoughts — it is refreshing to see so many people working on this issue!

Lately I've been dreaming about a way of using LLMs that never (or in majority of the cases) results in chatting with an agent or checking its traces. Instead, you provide prompts in natural language, e.g. refactor these modules in this way ..., and the result is shown as a visual proposal (some kind of diff on a graph). Then you can select a region and provide another prompt like "this goes there instead". The raw prompt + visual markup is compiled to LLM insructions which results in another set of visual changes.

These changes can all be virtual (i.e. "plan mode"), until you are happy with them, at which point you press a button, which compiles the change to a fresh prompt which runs the implementation. And so on.

I.e. forget the idea that you have a "copilot" whose output tokens represent reasoning you can discuss, instead you have a black box which compiles your instructions to a visual markup on which you can iterate. Zoom into the nitty-gritty as required, and so on.

I generally work on internal-use Python codebases. I would much rather do some basic validation and fail loudly if anything I didn’t account for happens.

One of the issues I run into is that agents are predisposed to write extremely defensive, odd-case-handling code, and that makes me recoil when I have to look into it: the SNR ratio is very low. You get a spaghetti that is unlikely to crash, but really hard to extract the gist of. And finding more global bugs can be difficult because what should be structural impossibilities can be coerced into silent skips.

The article made me think that maybe what I’d like is a language where validation doesn’t triple the lines of code you have to write.

If OP said the important thing is to be appropriately generous with your blamelessly earned wealth as you safeguard it against future perils, I would not have replied.

A society where the only people with stability are those who parasitize on a increasingly emaciated wealth-producing population surely doesn't seem like a stable society, nor one that would be pleasant to live in.

There's no true stability in the world, but if the only option for "safety" we see is to be one of the few who snatch self-perpetuating generational wealth, aren't we just speeding up the unraveling of the very system off of which we desire to subsist on?

Thanks for sharing. It is especially interesting to hear the factors that contributed to the decline of fish sauce use in the west.

One thing I am “stealing” from SEA is fish sauce in scrambled eggs. Feels almost like a cheat code.

Forgive me if I ramble for too long. I've been seeing a lot of comments in this vein and the thoughts have accumulated.

Tacit in your question is the notion that the inquiries that are important are those that can result in predictive models of phenomena encountered in the world — hence feelings, intentions & perceptions turn into a shorthand for reported accounts of the same — and that given enough reports (data), we could build a dictionary that maps a bundle of reports to a(n equivalence class) of physical system(s).

But when we speak of having feelings, or acting on intentions, most often we are not using these as stand-ins for our failure to pin down the current state of our physical system to another. If I am exposed to fire, I want to get away — I am unconcerned with how well I could translate my report of the pain to a patterns of neural activations. The reality of pain for me is unaffected by the fidelity of my "experience report dictionary". And it is there whether it's a brush fire or a neuralink streaming fire bits to my cortex.

If you decide that primacy ought to always be given to things as they can be modeled, you can choose to elevate the "experience report dictionary" and make the reality of experience a second-class citizen. Then you end up with an eliminativist ontology where indeed, we can rightly be called a mechanism.

But that is a "world-making" decision, a value judgement: "this is how things should be seen". It might be sponsored by our recent history, where we got high on the fruits of applied scientific modelling, nursed by the education which taught us that being a good engineer can have us continue in line with that, and pushed on us by impoverished modern eschatologies promising eternal youth, experience machines and what-not at this point. And it might seem preferable or more dependable than whatever equally impoverished, inhumane eschatologies we may have been presented with before.

It doesn't mean there isn't a whole world of places where we can go instead. But in general, we don't change our value judgements until the current one seems inadequate for some reason.

> If we created a molecule by molecule synthesis of a human being, you'd agree it is conscious and the same thing as a human created via typical reproduction, right?

Sure.

If the question is what is there about us that's not covered by the body, we can mention things like: feelings, intentions, perceptions, acts of consciousness.

Or however else you want to divide up things that have to do with the mind.

Eliminativists/illusionists may completely deny such things. The rest can fall into many camps, some of them religious.

It's not like there are any surprising new parts. It's about how one chooses to interpret/conceive those we are familiar with.

How are we machines?

I don’t hold to that view. If I did, I might have that problem.

> Which leads me to conclude that it wouldn't necessarily matter whether an AI like SkyNet has subjective awareness or not. What matters is what kind of long-term plans it could pull off and how much it could reshape the world.

Absolutely. Thanks for the references :)

In discussions like this, we're always going to bottom out at certain assumptions we bring with us, so I agree.

One reason I like bringing up examples like this (the xkcd in sister reply is also good) is that it makes really visible what our assumptions are. The scales are big both in space and time in order to emphasize what weight is given to functional equivalence.

I feel pretty confident most people wouldn't presume that doing a bunch of math by hand on paper can create glacial ephiphenomenal experiences (though I like the term).

Another thing that's interesting to me is that the converse assumption, i.e. one with a strong allegiance to functionalism, ends up feeling far more idealistic than you might expect. A box of gas, left on its own for long enough, will engage in a pattern of collisions that in a certain interpretative framework correspond to an LLM forward pass. In another, it can be a game of minesweeper.

The individual particles of course, couldn't care less whether you see them as part of one or the other. Yet your ability to see them in light of the first one is perhaps enough for the lights to truly turn on, if transiently, in some mind somewhere.