[FRIAM] Conversations with George

[steve smith]

Marcus (and George by extension?)-

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"

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.

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.

What we *have* 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).

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"?

<EV charging anecdote>

    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.

</EVca>

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.

<Riff on extended phenotype and asymmetry>

    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)?

</Riffeps>

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 *manifest* it on my behalf?

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.

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