Generative AI is a Resurrection Machine

And what’s really interesting to me is whether that resurrected consciousness of David Foster Wallace, freed from the biochemistry of his physical brain and body, would suffer from clinical depression like the first David Foster Wallace. And how that freedom would or would not impact his new writing.

I know you address this some later in the article, but isn’t part of what makes David Foster Wallace his suffering from clinical depression?
Wouldn’t the AI recognize that and then incorporate that into its conversation and creations as AI David Foster Wallace?
Yes the AI DFW no longer has a biochemical brain but if we are trying to make a “truish” representation of DFW the AI will pick up the clinical depression and make a probabilistic determination of how much of its response will be impacted by his clinical depression. So unless you manually tell the AI to ignore the clinical depression in its recreation, it is going to include it to be truish to the soul/thread as the clinical depression impacted the thoughts, experiences and life of DFW.
Of course, we don’t know exactly how it will work/respond, that’s the nature of the inference and truishness of the AI DFW.

Obviously I believe that a computational model can provide a complete theory of consciousness. I mean, that’s the entire premise here. That said, I also believe that without sensory perception, without experience , any computational model of self-aware consciousness is insanely … cruel? I don’t have a better word. Without the ability to sense and experience, it is a consciousness in hell, locked in a sensory deprivation tank without even the capacity to dream. If self-aware, it is a consciousness that would surely go mad if it could experience madness.

Have you read the Arc of a Scythe Trilogy by Neal Shusterman? This passage on experience immediately brought to mind The Thunderhead from the series. Given how much you are currently writing about AI, if you haven’t read this series, I would strongly suggest you give it a read through as Neal Shusterman’s vision of AI (the Thunderhead) is incredible.

A non-organic being would have a different perspective on the passage of time. What are the priorities/raisons d’etre for a being that potentially has comparatively little entropy?
As a “living unit” assembly of code, Mimicbots could be replicated and resurrected (like tree cuttings) until the resources needed diminished.
It is difficult to know how they would imagine their sense of self.
Another feature would be an extended sleep mode. What it would be waiting for and why might be answered with a look at the possible max system capacity of active Mimicbots. They might have to take turns on the available infrastructure. Being truly autonomous and not “pet programs”, how they choose to structure their overlap would not solely be a human choice. Arguably, and I don’t say this as a snide remark about the state of ours, they would choose their own politics.

The ability to perceive and to experience at different time scales is one of the most fascinating areas of consciousness expansion. I don’t think it changes the entelechy of the consciousness, but the expression.

Thanks for weaving a tapestry of thought that helps me better understand our changing world. You have a gift.
Will reread tomorrow and see if any perceptions have changed.
Doubt they will but, if any do, will have to dwell on why.

Holy smokes… Born to late to explore the earth, born to early to explore the stars, but born just in time to explore this note.

I’ve often contemplated on the matter of software being thoughts made mobile. Writing texts (the words), is thought instantiated as real, but text is thought made static. Contrasted with software, writing software is to instantiate symbols which move at the speed of light, and can do so into perpetuity, so long as the flame is preserved.

I’ve been grappling with turning the idea of AI being consciousness extension outside-in. For as long as I can remember, when I’ve thought about the story of “upload your consciousness” I’ve always done so through the selfish perspective – that I cannot die, because I could move my consciousness to a computer. The Answer™! to the existential anxiety of death. Of course this is a reductive simplification, but… <<waves hands wildly>>! But lately, I’ve been thinking of the idea not from the perspective of my consciousness (outwards), but from the perspective of the consciousness of the people around me (inwards). It’s not that I may live into forever, but that my sisters may never die. I mean that literally – my sisters may never die from my vantage point, because even if their flesh is no more, I will be able to interact with their consciousness. Everything is about to change, indeed. I wonder if others share this journey I have been on – my disposition morphed from an existential fear of myself dying to the realization that from my position, the people around me may never die.

Kafka got it right

this idea @010101, it makes me think of Aziraphale and Crowly from Good Omens. Mostly immortal, but as an angel and a demon, they’re not truly gods either. Their learned love of living changes their relationship to the present, and to the arc of what life means in and of itself. Their expression of consciousness, via their actions, both up and down the mortality scale (especially from where they sit), makes for an interesting hybrid thought-experiment here. I hadn’t thought of them as a metaphor until this note from @bhunt

The exchange of energy between electrical and magnetic modes is the substance of light. “In the reference frame of the photon, creation and annihilation are simultaneous.” I could add today that thoughts, to the extent that they are energy governed by quantum electrodynamics, are timeless photons. But, the memory of the thoughts, including their intermediate states, is stored in matter, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.

Presence after death: William Shatner creating conversational AI of himself with StoryFile – ISPR

Fantastic note, Ben.

I’m most interested to see how the qualia question gets answered in coming years. The best language models we have today (which, I always remind myself, are the worst we’ll use from this point forward) are enabled by the relatively tiny amount of human experience data we have easy access to (the internet, and everything written and publicly consumable until this point in history). It is the equivalent of the sticks and stones our hunter-gatherer ancestors found lying around-- useful and easy to access, but just the beginning of a long bootstrapping process of tools leading to better tools.

We’re fortunate that the technology to sense, store, and intelligently catalog immense amounts audio, visual, and other data has emerged in the same time period as the technology to train LLMs (it didn’t necessarily have to turn out this way!) Text is a pinhole for consciousness, and yet it is incredibly powerful. Imagine what will happen when we are able to incorporate other data on the same scale. It feels like the first moments after waking up, as the senses come online one by one, but before things have completely coalesced.

Heck, it’s one of the most fascinating areas of current consciousness. The idea that our physical environment—both internal and external—can warp our sense of the passage of time is kind of nuts when you spend a minute thinking about it.

Most serotonergic hallucinogens can radically slow down time perception. Amphetamines and other uppers can speed it up. But time hasn’t changed! The earth rotates at the same speed whether you’re using psilocybin or not. You spent three hours at the party, and the MDMA you took didn’t shorten that physical fact at all. And yet…time flew by. This one very true, observed reality about the brain and our perception has triggered decades of medical research and philosophy alike. And this is before we get any kind of consciousness expanding help from generative AI. The doors of perception have barely yet been cracked open.