[FRIAM] a davew-ism

Thu Feb 13 13:33:08 EST 2025

Consider a (hyper) box of available knowledge.  Knowledge includes skills and descriptions of experiences.   We live our lives visiting different but overlapping small parts of this box.   LLMs vacuum-up more knowledge than any one person can consume or create.   With steadily increasing fidelity and generality they capture it.   Private subjective experiences of human individuals are not recorded at all.  If they were, they’d be hoovered up by the LLM and generalized -- many subjective experiences will be recorded because they will be described in biographies, blogs, art and so on.  Since LLMs are universal interpolators, they will likely be better at mimicking human reports of feelings than say, I would be.  The LLM has seen more of humanity than I have, albeit through a portal that is very different than my suite of sensors.   The diversity and bandwidth of sensors could likely be made competitive to my sensors.  Olfaction and tactile sensitivity will take some work, I suppose. As you point, out, there is copious pornography (and other sorts of hedonism) multimodal LLMs could hoover up to understand the human condition.

LLMs now suffer from batching of their “consciousness”.  Pretraining takes months. LLMs are now forever behind on current events.  Refinement of training by reflection on queries is also delayed by as much or more.    In contrast, I also have some latency in my perceptual systems.   My reaction time is maybe a1/10th of a second, compared to microseconds for a microprocessor.  (The coding speed of LLMs is essentially instantaneous compared to humans.)   It seems to me this is just a question of scale, not a qualitative difference.  In any case, the batching is something that can be driven down with engineering.

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2025 9:46 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] a davew-ism

A very personal narrative that you might not want to engage. If so, please simply ignore and delete.

Centers on the question of AI “intelligence/consciousness.”

  ____

1-I started reading by the age of four, mostly comic books (some were quasi-non-fiction, like Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land) and “children’s literature.” I have read more than 10,000 books in my lifetime, averaging .75 per day. A reasonably large “training set.”

2-Through high school, my reading focused on Science Fiction, Science (astrophysics, astronomy, quantum physics, some math, some biology), and Porn. (I was a fixture in a bookstore in Albuquerque that had an adult back room and no one noticed if I disappeared there for an hour or two.) However, the science fiction, in particular, often created an interest in reading about the ideas presented in the novel. For example, A.E. van Vogt’s, World of Null-A, led me to read Korzibski’s Manhood of Humanity and Science and Sanity by the age of 10: An episode of The Outer Limits, prompted me to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason;  Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan was shelved in SF and that led to reading Cat’s Cradle and more.

3- I have always been pretty good at remembering, integrating, correlating, and recalling what I have read.

4-Freshman year of high-school, scored 187 on IQ test. Used that result to become the youngest, at that time, member of Mensa. (I still have membership card and yellow map pin, plus copy of Salt Lake Tribune columnist’s article.) I won a National Merit Scholarship and my SAT scores were 99 percentiles in language, 87th in math.  (I took the GRE in History for grad school and scored a 98th percentile despite never taking a course in western history since high-school.) NOTE: this does not mean I am intelligent, only that my “knowledge base” was greater than that of people 20 years my senior. All that reading!

5-I “suffer???” from a psychological disconnect, psychopathic-like, from other people. I do not ‘feel’, do not experience, do not empathize with others. I lack any kind of ‘conscience’ or external morality. I do have a kind of ‘receptive empathy’ in that I sense, receive as inputs, the emotions and feelings of others, but have no internal sense of same. Sometimes, I use the analogy of an old-fashioned radio, all antenna but no crystal resonating to the signals received. (I do have “appetites:” wanting to know everything, wanting to experience everything (at least once), and constantly craving more complex and intense sensations/experiences. (I don’t do opium, coke, alcohol, etc. because the experiences are repetitive but love hallucinogens for the exact opposite reason.)

6-Today, I am a "good Christian," IN the World, but no OF it. Or, more accurately, akin to the homunculus in Searle’s Chinese Room. I receive massive amounts of input from and about human beings and their inner ‘being’, use my reasonably large knowledge-base to flawlessly interpret those inputs (surprisingly, perhaps, the porn actually helps in this regard), and generate a, mostly, flawless projection of myself as a human being. I do not experience, intrinsically, what other humans experience; do not ‘feel’ what other humans ‘feel.” This is a criticism oft made of computer-based AI, arguing against their being conscious/aware/intelligent. I am also pretty good at providing reasonable answers to a large variety of questions.

7-Am I an AI?

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