[FRIAM] a davew-ism

Thu Feb 13 16:02:11 EST 2025

On 2/13/25 11:33 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>
> 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.
>
I've been ideating on LLMs as high dimensional information manifolds 
with sub-manifolds representing something more like *knowledge*... and 
of course the implicit "knowledge manifolds" of the skills, and 
descriptions of experiences (and all sorts of unions, intersections, and 
convolutions of same) also being "manifolds of interest or use".
>
>   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.
>
Excepting of course the low-fidelity/distorted massive missives some of 
us offer up into cyberspace?
>
> 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.
>
I do wonder at the implications of training LLMs "only" (or dominantly) 
on memoiresque materials.   More better (referencing DaveWs post) at 
emulating human
>
>   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.
>
This is why I went on my tangential riff about donning some AR/XR specs 
and my lower-body exoskeleton and going awander in the world, making 
myself (in)?valuable to the emerging AI overlord as an semi-autonomous 
meat-puppet, experiencing the world *for* it?
>
>
> 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 a1/10^th 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.
>
Maybe AI/ML are more impedance matched to exploring/exploiting the solar 
system where reaction-times to rock strikes in the belt or rings of 
Saturn are best machine-speed but the patience required for travel 
across stellar distances and the lag in comms are not that suited to 
human sensory-motor/neural/limbic systems.

This is where I think humanity (and much of the biosphere) can survive 
an AI singularity.   The various biological singularities of the past 
(e.g. emergence of multicellular creatures) didn't discard or overwhelm 
the previous dominant life-forms (though there may have been mass 
extinctions?) but rather created and then filled entirely new 
as-yet-non-existent niches?

I used to dream in orbital mechanics (a few years ago) but my 
intellectual self knew that the tuning of my body/perception/limbic 
system was quite out of scale for the kinds of things likely to occur in 
any solar-system scale orbital mechanical experience... things would be 
happening way too slow (and sometimes fast) for me to make sense of, be 
entertained by, etc.    Maybe with a computronium brain-case and 
neuralink-inspired tendrils into my brain, the resulting cyborg-me would 
be just fine dodging space-dust while waiting weeks or months to 
traverse long distances.   Not sure what I'd be doing out there in the 
deep vastiness, in my dreams it was enough just to be imaging 
(viscerally) that I could "swing gravitationally" through an N-body 
problem (emphasis on imagine).

> *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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