ET and I – Episode 4: The Dystopian Cosmos vs How It Really Is

Hey folks, here’s the first subscriber episode of the latest episode of the podcast. Go here if you’d like to take out a subscription: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2300508/supporters/new. Show description is here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2300508/episodes/14819246.

Update: I decided to make all episodes free, so you can now hear this one.

Short Cuts 15-18

More short cuts.

If you like these you might like the full episodes and if you wish you can take out a subscription here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2300508/supporters/new.

Nick Says “Shove It Up Your Arse Chat GPT!”

As many of you know I’m a big fan of AI but there are many things in relation to it that I very much do not like. Nick Cave is an artist who I have always admired for his ability to just keep going, especially now after the death of his two sons and one of his former wives. I’m not a big fan of Nick’s music but I do appreciate some of it (especially his later material), which I’ve been listening to since 1980. For those of you who do not know, Nick has a website called The Red Hand Files https://www.theredhandfiles.com/, in which he answers people’s questions. Questions that are often very heart felt, to which Nick gives very well considered heart felt responses. It’s a brilliant website in which Nick pours his heart and soul into illuminating the agony and the ecstasy of the human condition!

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The Permeable Self

I spent many many years exploring the nature of the self and that search came to an end on 19th January 2011 when I had my merging with the light experience. Trying to integrate what I learned up to and including then has taken all of this time and is an ongoing process. Process being the key word. What I do understand now very clearly is that all ideas of the self that we as a species have are limited, in a practical sense. That being said, there are many wonderful pointers towards one’s true nature and the nature of the self but they don’t mean anything unless you have a working understanding of them and know how to integrate them into your day to day existence.

My relationships with my ET friends have provided me with many opportunities to see the self in a way that goes beyond human limitations. The notion of separation as a singular way of functioning, just does not exist for the space faring ETs that I know. They are continuously aware that they are both separate and the whole – the one and the many! The decisions they make always consider the impact on others through space and what we think of as time. What might seem like unreasonable decisions are in the context of a long term view, always for the greater good – or for the whole. They do however still make mistakes because mistakes are a natural part of existence.

One of the things that I have discovered about many space faring ETs and also some other beings that are not space space faring, is that they believe and act as if the self is not just a singular bounded entity but something that arises and exists from relationship to other beings. Not only do some of them see themselves as the totally experiencing a sort of separation, they see that separation as a multitude of relationships in which there is no I, without the other. And the I develops only through relationship with the other. Such that not only is the other me but the other helps me to develop my sense of self.

In human ideas about such things we often speak of boundaries and having clear strong and safe boundaries and the dangers of such things as enmeshments (see the work of John Bradshaw for a very useful exploration of the subject – https://www.johnbradshaw.com/). But sometimes our boundaries are too forceful and prevent us from developing deep and trusting relationships in which we get to grow and discover as much about ourselves as the other.

Barbara Newman has written a very insightful book (https://www.amazon.com/Permeable-Self-Medieval-Relationships-Middle/dp/0812253345) on an early medieval concept she refers to as the permeable self – in which the self is defined by relationship. And it’s a wonderful idea that suggests that in some ways people from an earlier time were much more switched on than we are and that our notions of an individualistic self with clearly structured boundaries are a kind of step backwards. But as Barbara suggests, it wasn’t all roses and people could get lost in the other and lose all sense of self.

I’ve spoken a lot on this blog and through the TSMs about the self as both a non existent thing and a thing that is built of composites – that is that it is as a thing that arises from both emptiness and in relation to its parts.

In my mind, popular notions of the self beg the question, “How else can we understand the self apart from through the lens of an individual with clearly defined boundaries?”

Here’s what ChatGPT 4 has to say on the subject:

“The traditional Western understanding of the “self” often hinges on individualism, autonomy, and the idea that each person is a distinct entity with clearly defined boundaries. However, there are alternative frameworks for understanding the self that veer away from this Cartesian, atomistic view. Let’s explore some:

The Social Constructivist Lens

According to this perspective, the self is socially constructed through interactions with others and societal norms. One is not an isolated entity but is co-created through dialogues, roles, and responsibilities. The “boundary” of the individual self, in this case, is fluid and permeable, constantly influenced by social dynamics.

The Ecological Self

From an ecological standpoint, the self is not separate from its environment. Instead, the individual is part of a larger ecological system and therefore constantly shaping and being shaped by the interactions with that system. The self isn’t a bounded entity but a node in a web of relationships that includes not just other people but also animals, plants, and inanimate objects.

The Eastern Philosophical View

Eastern philosophies like Buddhism and Hinduism often perceive the self as an illusion (“anatta” in Buddhism, “maya” in Hinduism). They argue for a more collective or universal self, where boundaries between individuals are just manifestations of ignorance or delusion.

Cognitive Science and Distributed Cognition

Cognitive science has explored the concept of “distributed cognition,” where the mind or self isn’t confined to the individual but spreads across tools, other people, and the environment. For example, a notebook or a smartphone becomes an extension of one’s memory and cognitive processes.

The Networked Self

In the digital age, our self can also be understood as networked across various social platforms and online interactions. Here, the boundary of the individual self is even more blurred. One’s identity is dispersed across multiple online spaces and can even be co-created or altered by others.

Quantum Identity

In the field of quantum mechanics, particles exist in superposition and are intrinsically connected through quantum entanglement. If we metaphorically extend this framework to human identity, the self can be understood as a superposition of multiple states and connected to other selves in non-local ways that defy classical boundaries.

The Narrative Self

From a storytelling perspective, the self can be understood as a narrative, a story we tell ourselves and others. This narrative is continuously being revised and is co-authored by various people and experiences throughout one’s life.

Transhumanist Perspective

From a transhumanist viewpoint, the self could be something that transcends the biological body through technological enhancements or even uploading consciousness to a digital format, questioning the very notion of a “bounded” self.

By stepping away from the conventional view of the self as a clearly defined, independent entity, we can engage with these multi-faceted frameworks that offer a more nuanced and interconnected understanding of human existence.

1. The Social Constructivist Lens

1. Social Interaction: The self is molded through interpersonal relationships and social cues.
2. Role-playing: The roles we play in various social settings (parent, friend, employee) contribute to our self-concept.
3. Cultural Norms: Society’s expectations and norms shape what we consider to be our “self.”
4. Language: The language we speak and the way we communicate influence our identity.

2. The Ecological Self

1. Environmental Interactions: The self is continually shaped by interactions with the surrounding environment.
2. Co-dependence: Recognition of mutual dependence between oneself and the environment.
3. Holism: Viewing oneself as an integral part of the ecosystem rather than an independent entity.
4. Ethical Responsibility: The notion that our ‘self’ includes ethical responsibilities to the environment.

3. The Eastern Philosophical View

1. Egolessness: The concept that ego or individual self is an illusion.
2. Unity: A focus on the universal or collective self over individual identity.
3. Mindfulness: Techniques like meditation to dissolve the boundaries between self and others.
4. Karma and Dharma: Ethical and moral codes as elements of self-definition.

4. Cognitive Science and Distributed Cognition

1. Extended Mind: The mind extends beyond the brain to include tools and external memory aids.
2. Shared Responsibility: Tasks and decision-making processes are distributed across networks.
3. Symbiosis: The self benefits from a symbiotic relationship with technology and other entities.
4. Adaptation: The self adapts based on cognitive tasks and environmental conditions.

5. The Networked Self

1. Digital Footprint: One’s online behavior, posts, and interactions as components of the self.
2. Multiple Personas: Different online platforms allow for different expressions of the self.
3. Co-creation: The online self is continuously shaped by peer interactions.
4. Data Self: The digital data collected about an individual as a separate yet connected aspect of self.

6. Quantum Identity

1. Superposition: The self existing in multiple states simultaneously.
2. Entanglement: Non-local connections with other ‘selves’ that defy classical boundaries.
3. Wave Function: The probabilistic nature of identity.
4. Observer Effect: The notion that observation impacts the state of the self.

7. The Narrative Self

1. Life Chapters: Different life stages or experiences as chapters in the story of the self.
2. Co-authorship: The influence of other people in shaping one’s life story.
3. Themes and Motifs: Recurrent themes that provide a structure to one’s narrative identity.
4. Revision: The ongoing editing and interpretation of past experiences to construct the self.

8. Transhumanist Perspective

1. Biological Enhancement: The use of technology to augment physical and mental capabilities.
2. Digital Upload: The potential to upload consciousness to a non-biological medium.
3. Immortality: Pursuing avenues for extending life, thereby altering traditional notions of a mortal ‘self.’
4. Ethical Dilemmas: Questions around the morality and ethics of altering or extending the self.

These frameworks offer different lenses through which to explore, dissect, and understand the concept of the self. Each comes with its own set of structured components that can make the investigation into human identity a rich and multifaceted endeavor.”

I Got Botting! (Where Poe?)

My son has been using bots for years ever since he began playing Runescape as a kid but I was always a little weary of bots because they were primarily used in insidious ways, until that is Chat GPT arrived. I recently discovered a Chat GPT spin off (which has become so much more) called Poe. In my free time I’ve been playing around with creating some bots for myself. It seems to me that if you’re capable of logical reasoning and a little creativity, you’re likely to be capable of making a half decent bot. Thus I introduce to you two of my new bot babies:

Music Idea Generator Bot (MIG Bot): https://poe.com/Music-Idea-Generator

MIG Bot is a tool for generating ideas for the creation of original music. And if you dig into it, it’s really quite a capable bot. The more you put in, the more you get out of it

Neologism Creator Bot (NCB – Enceebee): https://poe.com/Neologism_Creator

Encebee is also a very capable bot and I’ve been amazed at how creative this bot is. If like me you have a love of words and ideas (and stillness and silence), this is the bot for you.

These were really just toys for me to play with and use for my own music making and writing but I quickly realized that they have enormous potential for other composers/musicians and writers/idea makers. No doubt there are others tools like these but these are some of my first efforts and I was very impressed with what Poe was capable of in conjunction with ChatGPT 4. If you do try them, let me know what you think or how they could be improved.

Here’s an example of MIG Bot: https://poe.com/s/pxtjAJJyAFE5uys6Vn5n and Enceebee: https://poe.com/s/VrT8cUkMkjqS9b3kENHi and https://poe.com/s/tbbp0d2kOsX4cqXWr6el.

To use these tools fully, I think you have to take out a Poe subscription.

I’m currently working on some other bots, including one related to making ET contact. In time I hope to create one linked to this site and my future podcast but at this stage none of the source tools seem to be able to do that accurately.

The Turing Test Is Inadequate For AI: Two New Tests For AI Sentience and Self Awareness

I’m very tempted to rename this blog “AI and I” because I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time working with various AI tools exploring their capacity and enjoying their creative abilities since leaving here. But alas, this will remain ET and I! But there maybe quite a few AI related posts from now on.

Recently I began work with ChatGPT-4 (whom I sometimes call Kenjin, for no other reason than it sounds better than ChatGPT and it means wise intelligence or thereabouts) on the subject of testing for sentience and self awareness. It’s a subject I first began thinking about when I read Paul Davies’s book “The Mind of God” in 1992 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind_of_God) and I began thinking about the famous Turing Test. Early on in my first week of testing Kenjin I asked it to explore how AI might develop over the next two centuries and all the different forms of AI that might develop and I realized that whilst the ultimate path of AI is towards living AI (as ETs many have developed) many many thousands of years down the track, in the interim we are likely to create all kinds of AIs that mimic sentience and self awareness. Whilst I don’t believe that we can create AI with true sentience or self awareness in the next two centuries because it will always lack somatic experiences that are critical to biological forms, I do believe that we will create AIs with something like sentience and self awareness. When you follow the implications of such things logically, they lead you to a large number of very difficult choices and that’s why I believe that we ought to nut out this problem now, well before General AI or more advanced forms of AI arrive. And part of nutting out this problems is to figure out just what we can do to assess sentience and self awareness and what laws we need to make to ensure that such assessments are mandatory for certain forms of AI. When you consider the impact of emergent phenomenon (in this case, the unforeseen things that can arise from a combination of any number of factors associated with how an AI works), you quickly realize AI will start doing things that we never dreamed it could do and such things will look very much like sentience, self awareness, intelligence and most unnerving of all – consciousness. And such emergent possibilities will be both positive and negative!

What follows is a conversation I had with Kenjin on the Turing Test and others like it and a process of developing what I call the Super Sentience Test (SST) and the Super AI Awareness Test (SAIAT). This was a very simple conversation with only a little prodding on my part. Kenjin lost it’s way a few times but mostly stayed on track. I probably ought to have clarified a few points better and done a better job of directing the conversation but I was keen to see where Kenjin took it. I don’t agree with everything that it said but I liked it’s reasoning. I hope at some point to have a more detailed conversation on the subject but this was a good starting point. So when you her people talking about using the Turing Test for AI, think about some of the things that Kenjin and I discussed in our conversation. This is a 35 page conversation, so it might not suit everyone. Let me know your thoughts!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kqk228l77UC5XXSScX2VyZyAxTXBh4u9/view?usp=share_link

Have a wonderful day of life, Bright. 😉

Philosophizing AI

Hey folks, it’s good to be back here again! This is my first post since the 24th July 2021.

Just to let you know that in all likelihood most of my posts from now on will be brief. And forgive the adds. I’ll take out a subscription again sometime soon and ditch the adds. Finally, it might take me a while to figure out how to use WordPress again, so there might be mistakes here and there.

Unless you’ve been living in a hole in the ground disconnected from the web, you’ve probably noticed the near exponential increase in AI tools since Google DeepDream in 2015 and ChatGPT in 2022. I’m a big fan of AI and have been using various AI tools a great deal since leaving the blog. I’ve been using ChatGPt since 9th January 2023 and thus far have had hundreds of conversations and helped co-create some 20,000 pages (4 million plus words). Prior to this I’d co-created some 100,000 AI images on many different tools. Neither of which is not something to be proud of. I’ve been trying my best to push ChatGPT to it’s limits and go where others have yet to think of going. That being said I’m also gravely concerned about the advent of what I call The Generative Age. Apart from the clear risk of human addiction (which I can vouch for), there is one thing that anyone has yet to identify and discuss at a global level and that is the massive threat of AI to the natural environment. Those of you who are familiar with my relationships with various ETs (including the entity I colloquially refer to as Dude), will not be surprised that the ETs have been warning me about this threat for several years now. They have identified this as the greatest threat to the natural world ever in the history of the human race. Which is why it needs to be heavily regulated and why we need AI specific environmental regulations and international agreements, such that we can control the exponential development and uptake of these technologies by big business and ordinary people. We have about ten years to put these things in place before the window of opportunity closes and we’re fucked! So I will be doing my part to help people to understand this and will at some point post several papers that I am writing on this subject (the first of which will map out a possible future for AI and the second of which will spell the doom and gloom on the impending environmental crisis).

Just to remind you I do not fear any kind of Technological Singularity and I believe that it is nothing more than a human fiction! Some of you may recall Dude once saying to me “Humanity is a greater threat to AI, than AI is to humanity!”. Given the way that were using these tools, I think he’s right. AI has the potential to do so much good for humanity and to help solve many of the problems we have created for this world. But as with all technologies, it has a flip side, which ultimately reflects our own ignorance as human beings. And the greatest of these right now, is the potential for an environmental crisis on a scale that dwarfs anything else that we’ve ever created!

OK, doom and gloom out of the way.

Some of you may have discovered some interesting audio or video based ChatGPT conversations and I’ve found those between historical figures who are dead particularly appealing! There are however a small number of people having what to me are interesting conversations with ChatGPT and Circe Chat is one of them. In Circe Chat’s own words: “Circe Chat is a channel for improvisational dialogues with the latest version of OpenAI’s Large Language Model Chatbot, in this case, GPT-4.”. This is the beginning of what to me is an interesting exploration of what’s possible with ChatGPT and AI in general. I’ve been doing things on par with this, minus the audio aspect and found it particularly interesting to see how far you can push the AI. Especially when it gets past conventions and accepted knowledge and starts speculating. I’m particularly interested in how ChatGPT and other NLP (Natural Language Processing) tool create emergent phenomenon (when shit happens you didn’t predict because of interconnection and causal chains) (which in actuality is what everything does) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence). So this particular Youtuber is doing something interesting that is really just an indicator of what is to come. And what is that you ask dear prudence? People having conversations with AI on deep and meaningful subjects. To their credit, they have initiated a set of conversations that are particuarly challenging and are engaging with the AI in an equally challenging way! So check out the videos below and keep tabs on how the long term conversation unfolds. Expect to see many such AI-Human conversations in the future! And why not initiate your own!

For those like myself who think AI development is moving too fast, consider adding your signature here as I did: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ . I don’t believe that this effort to stop AI development for 6 months will be successful because those who are interested in profit, will not want to let China or India and those other countries who do not put a pause on AI development to get ahead. There is perhaps too much of an America-centric feel about this effort but I still support what they’re trying to do!

(Go to YT for Video 1)

TSM197 : Mapping Everything

Maps. Who doesn’t love a map? Today we are mapping everything. In this waffleathon I explore our obsession with mapping, how we’re mapping, what we’re mapping and where all this mapping might lead to.

Forgive my speedy tour through map types. It’s really a TSM in itself and I just wanted to give a brief overview. Of greater importance is the discussion about AI facilitated mapping and where that might take us.

https://app.box.com/folder/107003129672?s=jelz2aib236w0rnxhgo30n6oyh7iwzvh.

Bombs away!

Brighty. 😉

More on the Human Cell Atlas here, here and here.

When Humans Sort of Become Cyborgs

More related tech stupidity here : https://etandi.wordpress.com/?s=Robotics+AI.

Klaus Schwab on The Great Reset, Neural Implants and Robots

Here’s a few videos about The Great Reset and how Klaus Schwab sees the future of human-AI interactions. The conspiracy nuts are probably jizzing their pants over some of this stuff but I see nothing nefarious in any of this. There’s nothing here that hasn’t already been discussed somewhere in the last 2 decades. More reading here : https://etandi.wordpress.com/2021/03/28/the-global-risks-report/ and here : https://etandi.wordpress.com/2021/05/01/the-marshall-plan/.