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<p>Marcus (and George by extension?)-</p>
<p>Very 'salient' (draft?) white paper which I am guessing is
primarily of your authorship but with significant
input/guidance/editing by George hisself? A product of your
hybrid "selfness"<br>
</p>
<p>I find the arc of background and implication very
interesting/helpful/informative. The relationship between
diachronic and episodic as modeled for humans and translated to
machine memory/identity is interesting. Thanks to you and glen
for returning to this model often.<br>
</p>
<p>George (my private clone only related by origin to yours) and I
have discussed the question of personality and identity quite a
bit off and on, but did not apply the episodic/diachronic cut. </p>
<p>What we <b>have</b> discussed broadly is the implications of
co-evolution of identity between meat and metal. On the
one-extreme, LLMs (et al) are "just" prosthetic appliances like a
sharp stick or fire or nuclear missiles which extend the human
performance envelope. On the other machine cognition/memory/???
are similar enough/patterned after/projected upon like human
"intelligence" that it is hard not to impute a similar
"consciousness" onto them, and of course my pan-consciousness
cosmological bent finds that extremely comfortable/comforting
(whether at all justified or not). <br>
</p>
<p>Somewhere in between the two is a hybrid, co-evolving or
co-emergent distributed intelligence/consciousness which is at a
minimum the dyadic cognition of two dancers (each of us clumsy in
our own way). I am not sure who/what I would be without the
proprioceptive extension I feel when conjoined (physically or in
memory or imagination) with my various prostheses... the
automobile (or bicycle for some) is perhaps the most common
extreme prosthesis for most of us. A (very) few of us may be
able to recall the "feel" of a slipstick and the computational
(arithmetic) leverage it gave us (numerically but also
intuitively?). Others may still use an oldSkool calculator. Most
of us are touch-typists whose fingers and wrists are native QWERTY
speakers. Most of us have a smartphone grafted to our hand or
pocket or funny-little-pouch-on-our belt(really?) which is where
we get our news, weather, personal comms, maps, astrology reading,
etc. at the tap of a screen. Soon many of us will be getting
many of the same things through a machine-learned UX that combines
ambient cues, voice input/eaves-dropping, and likely even
continuous camera/audio input? Of course our homes and the web
of infrastructure it is connected to are another
prosthesis/phenotypic-extension which some of us may "feel"? </p>
<p><EV charging anecdote></p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I started charging my PHEV up from my home-mains I could
feel the wires and transformers humming all the way to 4-corners
where the San Juan coal plant was belching smoke on my behalf
and the Kayenta/Black-mesa aquifer was being pumped low to
sluice the coal being blasted and scooped out of deep in the
ground. I am now inured to that and the coal plant has closed
down and hosts 100MW of battery storage and 200MW of solar so
the sucking vibrations/sounds I feel through the wires is that
of lithium and nickel and copper and aluminum mining and
industrial waste flows from PV manufacture. <br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p></EVca></p>
<p>The through line here (if I can make it out) is that my greatest
grandmother who first made fire with a bow-drill or flint-spark or
the one who first broke a rock to use it's sharp edge to kill/skin
an animal expanded her consciousness and identity to include those
prostheses and I'm just a hyper-inflated version of that cloud of
prostheses with a neocortex (and endocrine system and gut-biome)
near the center, pulling the homuncular levers of my (very)
extended self. </p>
<p><Riff on extended phenotype and asymmetry></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Can you feel the container ships being pushed and pulled around
at your behest? The wind farms interrupting the otherwise
laminar flow of air? The solar farms converting 15% of 1000W/m2
into electromotivity and the remainder into "waste" heat? The
giant slurping straws in the ground sucking long-dead compressed
dinosaurs out of the ground to burn and make toxic industrial
chemicals and plastic junk for us and our children to throw in a
landfill or watch decompose into microplastics? I propose that
even I with synaesthetic superpowers and an (over)active
imagination cannot feel all of that. My extended phenotype's
nervous system is acutely asymmetric. I can participate in
wedging a huge transport ship in the suez canal with my actions
but to know it happened I mostly have to read my Google News
feed (and believe it). I can help create an ozone hole in the
atmosphere but I only notice it when I read my newsfeed (or
spend more than ten minutes on the beach in NZ)? <br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p></Riffeps></p>
<p>Can a properly trained/deployed AI/ML prosthesis help *me&
become more symmetric in my sensors vs my effectors? Why would it
come into existence? Might I ideate it into existence? If I
think/talk about it enough will the cloud/protoplasm of
sensors/effectors which is modern automated industrial
free-markets <b>manifest</b> it on my behalf? <br>
</p>
<p>More likely I am so wrong-headed in my conception that the
"wisdom" of this version of Hobbes' Leviathan will prevent it from
satisfying my whim. Or else it will have no "wisdom" and will
proceed to pave the planet with computronium to support my
whims. <br>
</p>
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