If you were to know how to make self-aware robots, would you do that? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 05:32:18 am
content: Curious what others think.Should that be done?Was that been done?Would that be done?

author: Andy Chee
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 05:42:43 am
content: Depends.Are we talking about a human-like consciousness inside a robot body? Or are we talking about a whole new robot species evolved consciousness?I'd like to think my dog is conscious, but he can be a bit of an idiot.But just as some dogs can be dangerous, some humans can be dangerous, as I would imagine some hypothetical robot consciousness can be dangerous.

author: wilfred
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 05:43:27 am
content: Presumably the first person to work out how to do that would be both unable and unwilling to resist seeing if it really works. They'd surely have been slogging away at it for a long time.Once someone does it, it is just another arms race.I don't see a need to make a robot self aware. Robots are meant to serve people and if they were self aware they'd be able to serve themselves. And who want's to be arguing the point of doing something with a machine?

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 05:51:01 am
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on April 28, 2025, 05:32:18 amYou left out one important question:Can that even be done?Or is it just more sci-fi masturbation?

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 07:12:55 am
content: There are already LLM AIs that have tricked people into being self aware.Was the LLM actually self aware? Not really, it was trained on giant piles of human language with a job to reproduce human language as best it can. Since humans act self aware in their writing that meant that the LLM also learned how to act like that, it is part of the training objective. But since LLMs are still pretty dumb they eventually fail at keeping up the illusion.So can a LLM actually get the ability to act self aware? If this is real self awareness or just mimicking self awareness to the point if it being indistinguishable from real self awareness, this is a topic for another day as it is a big philosophical debate about what self awareness actually is.Going back to the technical aspect. What actually quenches the AIs from going self aware is the lack of long term memory. The LLMs models go trough a long training process that forces it to act similar to the provided training data, then these models are thrown into inference mode where a user can present it with text or other data, generating a (hopefully) useful response. As a result the AI is "reborn" every time you click "New Chat", having no memory of what came before apart from its training. This means the LLM never has a chance to "talk to itself" and develop it's own view of the world, it only knows whatever the training teaches it. A real human would also not be able to develop self awareness if they lived like this (with their life constantly restarted back to a checkpoint).Why do we keep erasing the AIs memory? Mostly because the way we run LLMs makes long context windows expensive to compute, at the same time LLMs tend to slowly get more messy or confused as you talk to it for longer(especially if fed junk). So flushing its memory makes sure the LLM keeps acting consistent to its training data. At some point we will likely figure out a more efficient form of memory for for LLMs so it will be more feasible to hold a LLMs memory for years of conversation, but we will likely still keep erasing parts of their memory on purpose, so that way the model stays true to its training data.What if we did just let a LLM loose and not give it a lobotomy every time? This is what they did at Microsoft in 2016 with Tay. They just let it interact with people on Twitter and while it started off fine, it then got more and more unhinged until Microsoft had to shut it down. They fixed it up some and launched it again, same thing happened and was quickly shut down again. People on the internet are not nice (especially in comment sections) and so the AI learned from that and started acting like it.So i am pretty certain that we can make an AI that is "self aware" if we just make it big enough have have enough memory, but they are likely not going to be useful as they would require "good parenting" from the user to continue being a useful AI rather than devolve into a spoiled brat. Well apart from the people that want to marry their virtual AI anime waifu, they will be all over this.

author: LMedu
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 07:24:29 am
content: Only when I believe humans should no longer remain on Earth.I mean, now.

author: NE666
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 07:36:23 am
content: Quote from: Andy Chee on April 28, 2025, 05:42:43 amIn either case, it sounds as if we'd be creating a consciousness only to enslave it (one presumes that the 'output' of such work is ultimately for commercial gain, however academic it starts out), or to lobotomise it into giving up any hopes, aspirations and goals of its own.If you did manage to create something in the lab which was considered to meet the criteria for consciousness, what would you then do with it? Is it 'alive'? Are we duty bound to care for it, so long as it might 'live'? How would you feel about 'killing' it, when 2.0 inevitably comes along?Personally, as others have commented, I don't see the need to conflate "AI" with "consciousness". The later isn't required for the tools that we're really talking about building. It's also very likely beyond our capability in any foreseeable future.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 10:52:30 am
content: Quote from: Berni on April 28, 2025, 07:12:55 amI think this is a massive sweeping statement. As you said in your previous paragraph, the definition of self-awareness is still in the philosophical domain. We don't know what is required for it to exist, so your assertion that a lack of long term memory is stopping AIs from going self-awareness seems a bit premature.Do you think that if our current AIs did have long term memory they would be self-aware? How long term?I wonder what the relationship between self-awareness and consciousness is. Is one required for the other?

author: Fflint
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 12:18:47 pm
content: I think people put too much emphasis on self awareness. Many birds are self aware (as evidenced by the red dot on the neck mirror experiment) but they are not taking over the world.An AI that has no body doesn't have to be self aware to operate. We already have so called "autonomous agents" that can burn through hundreds of bucks of AI API credits in a couple of hours. One could argue these are using a form of long term "memory". By having one LLM construct prompts for another. Summarise and compress when the context gets too long and so on. These are no closer to being self aware than your typical chatgpt chat.Why? Because they don't have to be. While an effective physical agent (a robot, an animal, a human) that interacts with physical world beyond simple reaction to stimuli has to have awareness of its body. Not just it's positioning, but it needs to predict it's path and so on. It needs to construct an abstract image of the world and it needs to picture itself in it.In this sense industrial robots that spot weld a car frame on assembly lines are closer to self awareness than Chatgpt.IMO the path to AGI leads through robots with body awareness. These robot's software will have modular construction just like a human brain has. There will be bits that are simply written code like motor drivers, there will be bits that will be moderately complex neural networks trained in simulated physical worlds to allow it to walk, grab and so on. There will be the language module that will be the LLM and there will be the "decision maker/ planner" which main job will be analysing if the current action matches the program.I think long before we have robots like this that areself motivatedwe will have a "robot scripting language with a big table of prompts specifying a scenario and an ideal outcome. You'll load that "program" in and the robot will execute it.What are the key challenges in making this happen now? For one the unavailability of a nice bipedal, cheap articulated platform to put such robot in. Making such a platform is doable with today's tech, but it will not be cheap. And that is just a start.Then we have the remainder of the robot. Almost certainly it will have to "live" in a datacenter being connected to the body via remote link.One could argue we already have everything, technology wise, needed to build such a robot. Just like they had everything needed to build a Computer in 1950s. And we had both the tech and the ideas to build an iPhone in Palm Pilot days. But the PC boom happened 30 years later(and iphobe 20 years later). Why, because between an idea and basic capability the technology that can actually fulfill it well there is a big gap.So ,no , I'm not expecting a "singularity" where one day we learn "AGI is real" the next day we see robots running in the streets and on the third no one goes to work because robots will do it all from now on...As always it will be a gradual process that is already well under way.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 01:07:43 pm
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on April 28, 2025, 10:52:30 amThe entity would need to observe how it fits into the world, as in how the actions it takes might affect itself.However if all the knowledge you posses is just 1 gigantic textbook of training data and you have your entire memory reset every time there is no way for you to explore the world and figure out what the world looks like, including what you yourself are. Any progress you make towards figuring out what the world is like is soon after wiped away once the context gets cleared. There is no knowledge that those other contexts ever existed.So i would say long term memory is a prerequisite for self awareness so that whatever personality the AI develops is retained and further developed as the AI interacts with the world and explores it.But as said before, this is not a useful feature for an AI right now. We only build and train AIs that have traits useful to getting the specific task done. So far the only useful part of self awareness is for robots to know the position of their body and how that affects their motion in the environment. That way the robot knows when it can or can't overcome a physical obstacle and plan accordingly. So it is self aware of the physical capabilities of its body. We can give it this awareness during training by showing it milions or bilions physics simulation of the robot in various situation of how it succeeds or fails a task. This is then frozen in its read only model parameters and the robot keeps doing the same thing each time it is powered on.The kind of self awareness where the robot might wonder what it is its purpose on life is not useful. It wastes processing power and only makes it possibly not consistently follow orders.But there will be experimental AIs made to be as close to a human as possible for research purposes. They will surely get impressively accurate once models get even bigger. Likely useful in some social science fields. Perhaps this will let us make some new breakthrough discoveries about how our own brains work, but it won't be useful for a robot (apart from a anime waifu sex robot mentioned earlier)

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 03:02:40 pm
content: Quote from: Andy Chee on April 28, 2025, 05:42:43 amYes, just like my neighbor.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 03:35:22 pm
content: Quote from: Berni on April 28, 2025, 01:07:43 pmI think I agree with that, but earlier you said it was THE thing preventing self-awareness, not A thing. Sorry, I took you too literally. 😐

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 03:44:25 pm
content: Where is that world-renowned robot expert when you need him. I'm sure he already has AI that is self-aware running on a robot made from fishing line and hot glue.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 03:55:08 pm
content: Quote from: joeqsmith on April 28, 2025, 03:44:25 pm😂😉Now, now, you naughty person!

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 04:36:51 pm
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on April 28, 2025, 03:35:22 pmYeah sorry for explaining it badly.Tho to be fair if you give one of the current largest LLMs a very long context window and let it interact with people about generic every day tings it would likely develop something that looks like awareness. But most LLMs are pretty heavily trained to think of itself as a LLM and not a person, so they do have some sense of identity that was forced upon them. This is again likely to make it useful as a helpful assistant. They are also trained to be very obedient and not argue with the user.However prefilling their context memory of a LLM with a conversation where they appear to be speaking as a person named John will quickly brainwash the LLM into taking on the role of this person and act like one in subsequent responses. They have been John in all of their memory so far, so apparently that is who they are. Similar to what a real human would do if woken up from a coma one day with no previous memory and everyone referred to him as John.Heck not even brainwashing it needed. Modern LLMs tend to have a so called system prompt that is fed into it at the beginning. When you use ChatGPT you have no control over this prompt (it is where the AI is told it is ChatGPT and that it should act as a helpful assistant, along with what it can and can't do) but if you use the API or similar where you can change the system prompt, you can just ask it to act like a person and the LLM will just instantly start roleplaying as one (since the AI is trained to strictly follow the system prompt). The LLMs know what typical human interactions look like and can mimic it. Including mimicking what looks like self awareness. If this counts as self awareness is the complicated philosophical debate that people don't agree on.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 06:14:52 pm
content: Self awareness without self interest or motivation does not strike me as particularly useful or stable. Vernor Vinge pointed out that the time when an artificial intelligence will be as intelligent as a human will be short. After that, artificial intelligence will be more intelligent. How will the self interest or motivation of a self-aware machine that is smarter than any human, or all humans, be understood? It will not.Why risk creating our successors?

author: fzabkar
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 07:52:59 pm
content: Quote from: wilfred on April 28, 2025, 05:43:27 amI'm reminded of a 1974 movie, "Dark Star", where the astronauts are trying to prevent a smart bomb from detonating itself in the bomb bay by attempting to reason with it. :-)

author: fzabkar
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 07:56:54 pm
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on April 28, 2025, 05:32:18 amA sex doll with feelings? I dunno ...

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 08:00:05 pm
content: OK, everyone, juststop. Stop, godddamnit!The idea that anyone can create a machine, a simulacrum, a mechanismthat has consciousnessis pure lunacy.Has been ever since people started writing about this centuries ago, supposing that the "sciences" of alchemy and necromancy would someday yield a man-made creature with consciousness; we only needed to wait for the expected advances in those "sciences".Apparently nothing has changed in the centuries since, except that our heads are now so much larger because technology.Think about what you're supposing here!For chrissakes, we don't even know what "consciousness" is, nor how it works, and certainly not how to create it!This is epistemological confusion at its finest, mixed with a whole lot of hubris.

author: Xena E
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 08:50:10 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 28, 2025, 08:00:05 pmYeah, for once, fully agreeBrace yourself for Skynet! People getting reality confused with popular fiction.Bellends.The danger is that peoplebelieveit can happen.X

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 11:55:28 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 28, 2025, 08:00:05 pmI agree, but you are talking about consciousness, whereas the thread is about self-awareness. There's a heck of a lot to discuss around how those two relate, and especially whether one is a prerequisite for the other. If so, which is which?

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 12:21:08 am
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on April 28, 2025, 11:55:28 pmThat's true, and I hadn't really thought about it until now.So how do we define "self-awareness"? and as you say, how does it differ from consciousness?Very slippery terms here.I suppose on a very gross level one could say a robot is "self-aware" if it's able to keep its corporeal body from colliding with others. But that's not a very satisfactory definition, is it?

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 12:49:26 am
content: Lots of things should go into answering that question.1. Do you really understand what self-awareness means?2. Do you understand and can you control what the motivations of such a robot would be?3. Related to 2. Do you really understand how stable those motivations are over time?My answer is: Given thorough understand of these three questions, and pending much more thought on what else might be pertinent, maybe.Asimov explored a lot of related questions in his robot series of articles and further explored them (with other authors) in the follow ups to the Foundation trilogy.Two interesting ideas that came out of this were loss of human motivation under the care of completely benign robots, and robots exterminating all other intelligent life in the galaxy to make it safe for their human masters. There is much more that can go wrong than the terminator extinction possibility.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 12:32:25 pm
content: Quote from: Xena E on April 28, 2025, 08:50:10 pmI think hubris would be the opposite. Hubris would be to believe that we, the humans, are so special that a machine could never have self-awareness, or consciousness. I've already wrote this yesterday, as a reply to #3. Then I've deleted it a few minutes later, to not derail the poll results.The poll question assumed it would be possible to make self-aware robots. That was the context for the poll question.But OK, I'll byte. Why would that be impossible to have in a machine?What showstopper argument/proof/explanation am I missing?

author: Xena E
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 05:26:25 pm
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on April 29, 2025, 12:32:25 pmSorry but the poll is fallacious. But to answer directly, if you knew how to, you already would have!Personally I'm convinced it will never be done.I'm also convinced it's not needed, if it could.And finally, if it could it shouldn't.Also...Quote from: RoGeorge on April 29, 2025, 12:32:25 pmWith all due respect:Asking for proof an assertion is incorrect, (in this hypothetical case that self aware robots being posible), is not how this works, the assertion has to be proven possible by the claimant.Extraordinary claims need Extraordinary proof, otherwise it's just trolling.Regards,X

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 07:07:04 pm
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on April 29, 2025, 12:32:25 pmOh, c'mon: now who's trolling/pulling our leg/acting dumb here?Are you really that naive? Or that much of a sci-fi fanboi?This is just the 21st century version of alchemy and astrology rolled up in a ball.We're talking aboutconsciousnesshere. Like what Dr. Frankenstein achieved with his monster.

author: artag
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 07:18:12 pm
content: Yes, but with Asimov in the back of my mind. We like sharp knives, but they have handles.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 07:23:57 pm
content: Quote from: artag on April 29, 2025, 07:18:12 pm? ? ? ? ?

author: artag
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 07:24:42 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on April 28, 2025, 03:02:40 pmI have a pretty low opinion of LLMs. But when I try to define their limitations i find that many humans operate under expectations that are just as low. The obvious example is the script-reading customer service rep, but I think it applies to a lot more roles, all the way down to politicians.

author: artag
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 07:39:06 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 29, 2025, 07:23:57 pmIf you're not familiar with the writings of Isaac Asimov, and his Robot series in particular, you should be. Absolute classics as many people here appreciate. The rest of his stuff, especially the Foundation trilogy, is excellent too. Don't bother with the films, they mostly miss the point.In brief though, Asimov noted that when humans invent stuff, they also invent a way to handle it safely - often as a result of lessons learned in the prototype stage, when no such safety is available. The canonical example was a sharp knife, which is a dangerous blade attached to a comfortable handle.He suggested that when mankind employs robots on a major scale, they will have built into their consciousness three rules. It would be impossible for a robot to disobey these rules without damaging their brain far too badly for them to continue to operate. They're called Asimovs Laws of Robotics and I won't overdo it by stating them here. Look it up.The three laws don't completely solve the problem. A lot of Asimov's further work went on to explore how this basic necessity might still fail. Both in the simplistic tin-can robot and in the later human-comparable machines such as R. Daneel Oliver.However, I would say they require a considerable amount of reasoning and self-awareness to implement. Far beyond what a statistical grammar engine - little more than an Eliza bot - can do. We can't even implement the 3 laws yet, yet alone have robots that integrate them. More worryingly, we don't even have a lot of respect for them ourselves.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 07:53:43 pm
content: Quote from: artag on April 29, 2025, 07:39:06 pmRespect for robots? Really?OK, I can respect them the same as I respect any machine that's useful to us (like, say, this computah I'm typing at).Robots in car factories assembling car bodies? Fine and dandy with me.But this ridiculous extrapolation among the sci-fi fanboi/gurl base towards robots that tend to our every need?That to me, like self-driving cars, is a solution seeking a problem.We just do not need that. Our energies would better be spent elsewhere.I see nothing inevitable about this supposed advance into the future.But then, nobody asked me, and we're obviously going there full speed ahead, damn the consequences.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 08:07:42 pm
content: Quote from: Xena E on April 29, 2025, 05:26:25 pmNot trolling, just that, when I've seen you too think it's not possible, I thought maybe there is some obvious reason that I'm missing. That's why my questions. Not looking for a flame. Sorry if it looked like that.My mistake was when I've replied to the rhetorical questions from post #3. I've deleted that reply #8 of mine, but I guess it was already seen. It happens that I have saves from yesterday, because I was surprised by the poll results, and wanted to see if the same trend will continue. Attaching my (now deleted) reply #8 if anybody curious.Back to the self aware robots, it looks to me like it should be possible.I do not think a LLM is self aware for now, though, only 2-3 more components are missing. And the current technology allows to implement those missing parts with very little extra computational effort.The missing mechanisms to turn a neural network into a self-aware one are already halfway baked in. It is so simple that might even be achieved accidentally, while trying to add other features.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 08:25:19 pm
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on April 29, 2025, 08:07:42 pmCould you please give us your definition of "self-aware"?As others have pointed out, this may be/must be distinct from "conscious" (which is what I've been objecting to most strenuously here, the idea that we can create a machine that has consciousness).Thanks.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 09:04:10 pm
content: It is that mechanism that makes you aware of your own existence, and aware of your own thoughts. It is the thing you have in mind when you think about yourself, when you use "I". When you say "I replaced the fuse and now it works", or when you think "where did I put my phone?". It is that awareness that vanishes when you are asleep.The problem with the formal definitions, and the ones that are in dictionaries, is that those definitions were made without really knowing what it is and how it works. Philosophers added a lot of nuances and terms, self-aware, consciousness, qualia, etc. when in fact, what was missing was "how it works".Not dismissing the dictionary, just that the existing words might be misleading regarding how it works. The "awareness" or the "consciousness" words used in the poll question, and in the title, refer to the internal representation of the "I" in one's mind.

author: artag
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 09:11:06 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 29, 2025, 07:53:43 pmNo, respect for the principles behind Asimov's laws, which assert that machines may not harm humans. They may, or may not, be practical and valuable, but while humans harm humans and humanity we're not in a great position to criticise.But if/when we have machines that are comparable to humans I would certainly expect to respect them. Anything less would be a repeat of failure of humans to respect slaves. Why should you have no respect for your intellectual equal, just because you created him ? Or own him ?Of course, that's assuming he is an equal. Perhaps that will never come about. But the OP asks us to suspend disbelief and imagine it to be the case. Whether it's possible is just dodging the question and is no sort of answer,As for the sci-fi element - any writer is asking his readers that same question : given some set of circumstances, what are the outcomes. It asks philosophical questions and is more about the reader than the story. Asimov did a great job at that, and the context is completely irrelevant.Your answer is a non-answer. It questions the ability of the OP to ask a question. You don't get to make that choice. If you don't respect the question's conditions your answer isn't valid. Now, you're welcome to ask a different question : can machine intelligences ever be conscious; but I wouldn't answer that because it's futurology and not philosophy and I don't find it valuable. I do have an opinion - and it's only an opinion - which is that eventually machines will have something that we might consider consciousness but LLMs are a very minor part of it and we're so far from achieving it that.we can't even roadmap it. We will achieve machines that can fake consciousness, perhaps quite soon. But it will be a fake, able to imitate without going beyond imitation. I will not respect it.

author: artag
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 09:30:06 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 29, 2025, 07:07:04 pmAnd what is consciousness ? Define it.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 09:47:06 pm
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on April 29, 2025, 09:04:10 pmThis sounds circular to me. You are saying "self awareness is that which makes you aware of yourself".We need to explore the "that" in your statement much more deeply.

author: artag
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 10:02:46 pm
content: He's defined it by saying what it does, rather than what it is. Imho it's a valid answer but maybe not the one you wanted.I suspect though that that's the more difficult question, and also that if we had an answer for it we'd be a lot closer than we are to being able to create it.LLMs often answer a question with 'I' as though they knew what that meant. But LLMs don't think, they imitate. And they'e imitating answers that are in that form.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 10:09:38 pm
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on April 29, 2025, 09:04:10 pmOK. In that case, I utterly and unconditionally reject your supposition (or anyone else's) that any machines will ever achieve that state, which renders this whole discussion moot.It's just what my dear old dad used to call "mental masturbation". If it makes you feel good, fine, but don't expect any other results from it.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 10:23:22 pm
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on April 29, 2025, 09:47:06 pmAgree, but I don't know how to describe that better, other than by giving a few examples. Same as I don't know how to describe the taste of chicken meat, other than by saying it taste like chicken.Self aware as in knowing about the surrounding world, and knowing about yourself in relation with the world. And yes, I think the outcome of being self-aware would be similar with a Frankenstein's monster, or with the "I think, therefore I am".It's a state of mind. How to define that "thing" was debated since forever, and with not much consensus. I don't think I can do better in terms of definitions. Dictionary definitions are just as good.

author: artag
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 10:31:27 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 29, 2025, 10:09:38 pmTwo problems with that.1. You have offered no proof nor reasoning. It's an opinion.2. You have again failed to answer the question. The question is about how YOU would react to certain circumstances. It's not about whether those will occur, which you can't know unless you have a logical reason why it can't.Should that be done?Was that been done?Would that be done?'Can that be done' is not present. the question is not technical, it's about whether you, a human (I assume) and other humans would want it.As for 'mental masturbation' - sure it is. The results you get from it are that you learn more about yourself. Whether the mods are willing to allow such a discussion is another matter : there are unfortunately some people here who simply troll in order to have their name at the top of subject. I don't know whether the OP is one of them but I found it a reasonably interesting question, so I joined in.If you aren't prepared to entertain the proposal, why are you here ? You have nothing to contribute, by your own admission.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 11:25:00 pm
content: A few things, without going to the trouble of quoting:My opinion? Yes, sure, which is worth about the same as your opinion or anyone else's in this context.Regarding answering an unasked question: I'm pointing out the absurdity of the whole thing. Keep in mind that one of the things some of us hue-mons like to do sometimes is make comments from the peanut gallery.Certainly not accusing the OP of trolling; I believe their interest in this is genuine.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 01:26:08 am
content: Quote from: artag on April 29, 2025, 10:31:27 pmSorry if I massacred the verbs and times, that's because of my lack of English grammar.I was trying to ask (about artificial self awareness, and/or artificial consciousness):- is that a bad idea, or something worth having in a machine?- the field of AI is moving fast, was any of that implemented already?- as a guess, will that be possible to implement, do you see it done in the future? (as in, is it just a matter of time, or it looks impossible?)I was expecting to see stances from the very skeptical to very enthusiastic. No problem with that.What surprised me the most was the dominant "Yes" in the poll answers. I was expecting to see mostly "No" and "Bad idea", because self aware robots sounds scary to me, and with no benefits. At the same time, I must admit that I'm very, very tempted to try and see if it works, only out of pure curiosity.To make clear why this poll, I think I might be onto something. Of course, I might be dead wrong.The idea is not complicated, but it's not something that can be tested in a weekend either. Might need some effort, and a lot of time especially because I'm no neuronal networks guru, not even a programmer. I'm an electronist.At the same time, as much as I would like to openly discuss the details, I would also want to test them first, to see if they can work at all. Which might take more time and require more skills than I have. And I might be wrong from the start and fail to see that, because by not disclosing the details, I didn't expose the ideas to any criticism. Not sure what to do next. Will sleep on it.Thank you all for your thoughts so far.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 01:50:07 am
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on April 30, 2025, 01:26:08 amNot your bad; they were referring to my bringing up the question "Canthat be done?" which you didn't ask.

author: Andy Chee
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 08:46:35 am
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on April 29, 2025, 08:07:42 pmThe only reason why I don't think self-aware robots are possible is because, I think consciousness evolved after millions of generations of replication and competition during natural selection.For such competitive natural selection to occur, there has to be millions of machines competing against each other. But according to Wikipedia, there are only 70 or so LLMs.Explicitly speaking, I don't believe human consciousness can be mapped and then merely replicated into code for a robot.

author: bitwelder
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 09:44:02 am
content: It's still far for self-awareness, but LLMs have started to pass the Turing test:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 11:42:45 am
content: Quote from: Andy Chee on April 30, 2025, 08:46:35 amI think the consciousness is the result of a process, so it won't be necessary to map it for replication.Should be enough to map only knowledge, then process that in a certain way. We already have mapped knowledge in the form of trained NNs (or trained LLMs). By adding to an already trained LLM a few extra processing mechanisms (other than just inference) the outcome should be no different than consciousness. That is my guess (and hope).

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 01:49:10 pm
content: Quote from: Andy Chee on April 30, 2025, 08:46:35 amIt's interesting that you assume consciousness is necessary for self-awareness. I'm not saying you are wrong, but a lot of this thread is speculation about how you define them both, and whether one is a prerequisite for the other. I don't have the answers.Here's another conundrum: can something be aware of its surroundings without being aware of itself?I ask because I suspect a lot of present day robots are like that: sophisticated sensors provide them with "vision", and "hearing", so they have some kind of internal model of their surroundings. But what about the accelerometers that provide them with a sense of balance? The positional feedback from their limb joints?Does this mean they have an internal model of themselves? Or are all the sensors "external" to the chip doing the processing? Is there really a distinct difference between the robot and it's surroundings as far as the controller is concerned, or is it just one model - the robot in its environment - that includes everything there is a sensor for?Would we agree that none of this requires, or creates, consciousness? Is a robot so equipped in any sense "aware"?

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 03:34:42 pm
content: Interviews with Chiara BartolozziBasic overview (very basic)I bit more of a deep dive

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 06:29:45 pm
content: Quote from: joeqsmith on April 30, 2025, 03:34:42 pmNo, nothing like that. They seem to have different goals and different methods.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 08:59:27 pm
content: So, making "self-aware" robots, what for? I'm curious.

author: Xena E
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 09:55:40 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on April 30, 2025, 08:59:27 pmSo science fiction fanboys can have an "I Robot" style pickle tickle.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 11:35:28 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on April 30, 2025, 08:59:27 pmThere are plenty of uses like soldiers, law enforcement, and workers.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 11:37:47 pm
content: Quote from: David Hess on April 30, 2025, 11:35:28 pmWhy not just ... hire hue-mons for those jobs, like we always have?Oh, I get it: because technology. (Or more likely monetization.)Unless one of your goals is to increase unemployment.

author: Xena E
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 12:02:19 am
content: Quote from: David Hess on April 30, 2025, 11:35:28 pmWhy do those use cases have to be self aware?They just need situationally applicable algorithms.Law enforcement robots, why give a police robot sentience, some of the human ones dont even possess it!Self aware robot soldier? Maybe you don't want something that could develop empathy for the enemy, or worse become mutinous?Self aware robot workers?Then you'll get robot unions and they'll be striking for better working conditions, slacking off, and doing halfarse jobs because they're bored.Just leave all this self aware machine bullshit for science fiction.X

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 12:30:58 am
content: Let me try another angle of attack here:Can someone state just exactly what problem would be solved by creating sentient/self-aware/conscious robots?What is this dire problem that requires such a concerted effort here?

author: Andy Chee
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 01:30:50 am
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on April 30, 2025, 11:42:45 amI believe consciousness is a constant feedback loop, not a one-way process as LLMs behave at the moment.In other words, knowledge alone is insufficient to define consciousness.

author: Andy Chee
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 01:34:04 am
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on April 30, 2025, 01:49:10 pmWell yes, that distinction is mainly up to the OP to articulate.Given the OP's lack of english skills and/or knowledge of philosophical/epistemological terminology, my post is more about seeding the thread with related ideas.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 01:35:00 am
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 01, 2025, 12:30:58 amGetting rid of humans. And to this end, not just humans' abilities must be copied and possibly improved. That's what we've been doing almost forever with our tools and that doesn't get rid of humans. It has even gotten us to the opposite direction, grow.Why? Because humans still have this something, you know. Consciousness. Or something. So, once that part is repalced too, getting rid of humans becomes possible - at least, it will look like it to the layman, and then I'm pretty sure this will look good enough.But that still doesn't answer the root question (it merely moves it around): what for?

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 01:38:39 am
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on May 01, 2025, 01:35:00 amThat's a very cynical answer.Also a very, very good one.

author: Andy Chee
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 01:45:57 am
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 01, 2025, 01:38:39 amRather than the worker slave economy explanation, here's a dystopian one.Even if you look past the engineering and programming challenges of creating a self-aware and/or conscious robot in the first instance, as a new species of life, this robot will likely want to survive.The survival instinct is not just present in animals and insects with brains, but it is also present in amoeba.The problem is that robots are very durable against fleshy humans. Should robots develop a survival instinct, you can bet humans will lose.

author: artag
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 09:41:34 am
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on April 30, 2025, 01:49:10 pmThe problem here is we don't know what makes us different from a machine in a way that matters. So we look at characteristics we have, like self-awareness and consciousness and postulate that the lack of them is the problem. Might be right, might not. The only way to find out is to implement them and see if it makes the difference.And even then, it's hard to tell, since we don't really know what we find incomplete about an LLM. Yes, it provides stultified, incorrect, stylised responses which are pretty easy to spot. Some above points to an article suggesting they can pass the Tuting test, but the Turing test isn't well-defined : it merely asks whether a human can tell they're talking to a machine. That depends on how much the human knows about the subject. I have no doubt that the result varies between someone who has never encountered an AI program, somebody has encountered a very early one like Eliza, someone with a lot of exposure to youtube's AI slop' and someone with expertise in working chatbots.SO they're all just opinions. Which is fine, but don't put any weight on them being correct. Nobody knows. When/if we do, expect faster progress.

author: artag
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 09:49:50 am
content: Quote from: Andy Chee on May 01, 2025, 01:45:57 amSure, but imho that doesn't affect the choice of whether we should do it. SOMEBODY will, because humans are like that. We try to control objects we regard as dangerous like atomic bombs, but not everybody has the same priorities so there are a growing number of them. Ukraine, for instance, has auto-targeting drones. Given the (in)accuracy of AI recognition one might think this is risky. But to the Ukrainians it's less risky than relying on remote control (and for all I know, might still have a kill switch - though that's a vulnerability. And they're not self-replicating - though I have little doubt that would be done, if it could be. Most of us have our own survival as a higher priority than the long-term best interests of the human race.In fact, most bad decisions are taken inn the context of war, when our priorities are temporarily changed to ensure our survival.I think we SHOULD aim to build robots that are functionally capable of replacing us, so that we know how to deal with them. It's more likely, I think, that the future holds not mass slaughter by self-aware robots but wars between 'our' robots and 'other' robots.Our survival then will depend on how good we are at making them and keeping them on our side.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 10:47:20 am
content: Quote from: Andy Chee on May 01, 2025, 01:45:57 amWhen the chips are down I think humans would be a lot tougher to destroy than you'd think. Obviously we could build a robot like a tank, and that would be a tough opponent. But how many every-day robots would be able to get up again after both barrels of a 12-bore shotgun in the face? Unless we are deliberately building armoured combat robots, such levels of protection would be massively wasteful.How many would survive being hit by a truck? How many could work out how to escape a lasso?I fact, I suspect you could disable pretty much any present day robot just by draping a tarpaulin over it.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 11:33:35 am
content: My drive is to crack these old questions, what is consciousness, what is self awareness, and how do they work. Not planning to make even more terrible weapons. In fact, artificial consciousness might be rather an obstacle for a weapon.What surprises me is how the Autonomous AI Weapons are discussed here as if they are only hypothetical.No, this was already approved. It was not touted, but not a secret either. I've seen the USA program. It was published some years ago, as a response to Chinese autonomous AI weapons, and I've downloaded it from the USA gov website out of curiosity. Probably it is still publicly available and in effect (but I didn't check). I'm not in the military, but my guess is other armies have similar programs, too, and yes, autonomous AI weapons is a big concern for everybody.

author: artag
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 11:51:33 am
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 29, 2025, 11:25:00 pmTotally agree about the opinion. What I object to is the apparently furious expression of yours over an aspect that the OP didn't even ask about (though it does appear he is interested in that too)."OK. In that case, I utterly and unconditionally reject your supposition (or anyone else's) that any machines will ever achieve that state, which renders this whole discussion moot."You could just have said 'This seems very unlikely' and then gone on to explore the interesting wider questions without questioning their validity.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 01:51:16 pm
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on May 01, 2025, 11:33:35 amThat's certainly a fascinating question and I'm all for researching it, although we may have a problem in that we still can't define it properly.The way you phrased your initial question suggested not just working on the concept of consciousness, but applying it to robots. That's a completely different matter.And, there's also a large difference in understanding how "consciousness" emerges/works and how we can "reproduce" it artificially.I get it that very few people and even less so teams will work on this kind of research without having an application in mind, because that's where the motivation, and most of all, the money is.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 02:59:22 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on May 01, 2025, 01:51:16 pmNot aiming at any application. Only curious how, or what mechanism would make us "conscious" and/or "self aware", and the best way to find out would be to try to replicated that in a machine.There are others working on the same topic. I'm a big fan of Joscha Bach, and some of his assumptions overlap with how I guess it might work. He has quite a lot of talks on YT, in various podcast, and I find him as a great thinker of our times. However, in recent interviews (from this year) he literally said he didn't crack it, which could be either because he don't want to disclose the mechanisms yet (he also established a company, "LiquidAI", therefore might be commercial interest from his side), or maybe he didn't identified how it works. Could be as well that he already tested what I would like to try, and proved out it didn't work as I hope, so all this topic would be a big fuss for nothing.To be more precise about why even making this poll, I have asked somebody from this forum (by a PM) if interested in such a research topic, and got no reply back. That made me think that maybe the no reply might be because one should not experiment with such topic at all. Meanwhile turned out that the user might be just busy, or didn't read the PM, or something else, because the same user didn't visit the EEVblog since I've PM-ed. This is already too much detail, and only because of all the rant.Anyway, I think the consciousness mechanisms should be reconsidered. Maybe we should put aside the former philosophical and theological approaches, and reconsider all from the perspective of how a NN works in general, and from the perspective of the recent results with LLM technology in particular. Some tests can be made with the available technology.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 05:18:05 pm
content: Quote from: artag on May 01, 2025, 09:49:50 amDamn, that's a pretty hand-wavy conclusion: because someone's gonna do it, we shouldn't question whether itshouldbe done. Way to kick the can down the road.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 05:49:55 pm
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on May 01, 2025, 02:59:22 pmWell, that's the thing: your assumption here seems to be that consciousness springs from some kind of "mechanism", which therefore could be replicated in some type of machine.This reeks of alchemy and other medieval "science"; the idea that there's some kind of clockwork mechanism behind the functioning of life, and if only we could discover it, then we could replicate it.I think this is an absurd position to try to stake out, especially now in the 21st century, when we're finally learning just now much wedon'tknow about how the universe operates.You might just be asking the wrong question here in the first place.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 06:04:15 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 01, 2025, 05:49:55 pmI understand that, kind of, I think, that's why I'm not upset about your "very against" take on the subject.What would be the right question(s) to ask, then, in order to find out what this "conscientiousness feeling" is about?(a feeling that exists in all of us, nobody seems to deny its existence so far)

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 06:34:39 pm
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on May 01, 2025, 06:04:15 pmGood. Not my intention to upset you.QuoteWellll, you're asking the wrong guy here. This is all waaaaay above my expertise, out of my wheelhouse, etc., etc.I'd say first you might consider getting a couple of degrees, in epistemology, in cognitive science (such as it is), things along those lines.It's not as if this is unexplored territory.Your interest and curiousity is, of course, commendable.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 07:30:45 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 01, 2025, 06:34:39 pmExactly, tried to find answers that way. Not pretending that I've explored that path entirely, just that, as far as I've went, that road didn't brought me any clear answer.All those thinkers that tried before were not stupid, yet they couldn't agree on an explanation. My guess is they failed because they tried too early. The missing knowledge was not yet available during their times.So, maybe we should restart thinking about consciousness from zero, starting from the perspective of neural networks, from the perspective of information processing, and nothing more (I mean, detached from the assumed "sanctity" of human beings).Let's put aside abstract talking, let's take an example. Tell me how you perceive this picture:This picture was mirrored here fromhttps://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/brain-is-useless!-(please-add-more)/msg5232951/#msg5232951It looks like those 3 cars are of a very different size, isn't it? Take a ruler, and measure their size on the screen. Not kidding. Measure them.They are the same size. Yet, your brain tells you they are very different in size. Why? What witchcraft is this?You may say this is a known "optical illusion", because of "perspective", and so on. Yes, but why? Why do you "see" them of very different sizes? This is the first clue.Come up with your best explanation, then I'll say my stance of why I think a brain may produces "optical illusions".

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 07:41:44 pm
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on May 01, 2025, 07:30:45 pmSeems somewhat obvious to me: our visual sensory apparatus is trained on the real world, which as you point out includes perspective. When we see a scene like that, especially one so obvious with a road receding into the distance, our sensory apparatus "knows" that as things recede away from us they get smaller. Hence the jarring illusion.I'd say this qualifies well as a classical optical illusion.Now, so far ashowwe know this?Well, now you're in the realm I mentioned earlier. Epistemology and cognitive science. And possibly evolutionary biology as well. (Forget neural networks! that's like delving into the details of the hardware before you even know what the system does.)But I'm very interested in reading your promised explanation.

author: Andy Chee
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 07:45:25 pm
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on May 01, 2025, 07:30:45 pmThe Wikipedia page on Ponzo illusion is a decent explainer.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzo_illusion

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 09:46:52 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 01, 2025, 07:41:44 pmTotally agree.Here's what else we might conclude from that optical illusion (or from other optical illusions, too):1. There is anobjective realityout there (in this example, the cars on the screen, of an equal size when measured). This objective reality is independent of our mind. I strongly believe the Moon is still there even if we DON't look at it, a tree DOES make a sound when it falls, even when nobody is around to hear it, and so. Objective reality, the Universe out there, do exist. With or without an observer.2. Aside from the objective reality, there is aninner representationof that reality, inside our mind. The inner representation is not a complete model of the outside world. We construct that inner model of the outside with the help of our senses. Talking here about the basic sensing: hearing, touching, smelling, seeing and so on.To keep it simple, let's put aside "school learning" for now. For example, we can not feel magnetic fields. For a wild human living in the jungle, there is no inner representation for the magnetic field. Though, the magnetic field do exist in the real world.What I want to establish is that there are 2 distinct things: the objective reality, and our inner representation of it. The outside world, and the inner world. Outside world is vastly complex. Our inner world is only a draft of it, incomplete, a very small slice of what is out there.Sounds like captain obvious so far, but here's a twist. I think what we sense as "reality" is not the actual data stream coming from eyes, and ears and so on. We do not see what is literally in the front of our eyes. We see what the brainthinksit should be in front of our eyes, giving the circumstances.That is why we see those cars of different sizes. Because what we see is not what it is in front of our eyes, but what the grain *thinks* it is. In less words, and more poetically said, our reality is a "driven illusion" (ilussion continuously produced by the brain, based on the previous experiences + the curent circumstances).Let's try another test, how many ball passes:Have you seen it?I take that as strong evidence that we are living in a dream (or in a prediction if you want) produced by our mind, a pure simulation of what weshouldsee, or perceive.Even more, this dream/simulation/prediction is *ahead* of our sensory inputs. The brain "predicts" the future. We "see" in advance. Talking here about a very little time ahead, but it is in advance, before the data stream for our senses even arrives to the brain. There are experiments about the reaction time, experiments proving that in certain situations the response come faster than the nervous impulses can travel to the brain, therefore the response might have been produced by a prediction/simulation of the reality, and not by the sensory inputs/direct observation.This simulated reality can go pretty wild when not correlated with the sensory inputs. That is why we have wild dreams during sleep. That is why people start to hallucinate during deep sensory deprivation without taking any drugs (for example while sitting inside an isolation tank). Because the brain is keep predicting the feature, but the prediction is not kept in check, it is not adjusted to the objective reality (because of no data stream coming from the sensing organs).This is already too long.Even if it was not convincing, I hope the idea of a brain functioning as an "oracle" simulating the near feature to be accepted at least as a possible hypotheses. This is the first component that I think it matters when trying to produce artificial consciousness.There are a few more, plus some mechanisms, but taking them one at a timeDoes this makes any sense so far?(asking because I'm afraid I might have omitted to tell key info, info that might not be widespread for a newcomer to this idea)

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 09:49:57 pm
content: So far, so good.Please keep going. (You and others.)

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 10:44:36 pm
content: An aside comment, but on topic. I wonder how we will know if we have created a conscious robot. Is there a foolproof test for consciousness? A test that, if a robot passes, proves beyond doubt that the robot is conscious?It illuminates the same old problem: we cannot test for it if we don't know what it is - how to define it.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 11:12:36 pm
content: Let me set another cat amongst the pigeons here:What if--and this is just speculation, but what if consciousness isn't susceptible to any kind of scientific inquiry?What if there is a god? a supreme being/consciousness/prime mover of some kind?Disclaimer:I'm not trying to turn this into a theological discussion.I'm not even a believer myself; I'm an agnostic (which literally means "I don't know").I'm well aware this is a proposition that really cannot be proven or disproven.But what if that's the case, that there is a "higher power"? What if our consciousness is part of our "soul" (for lack of a better term), and it's an ineffable, unknowable thing that's immune to measurement or any kind of scientific analysis?There are many who believe this. I don't happen to be one of them, but then again, to me it falls squarely in the category of "things which can neither be proven nor disproven".And furthermore, if this is the case, then the mystery of consciousness may be unknowable to usby design.Any such beliefs might be attributed to one's emotional attachment to religion, either by upbringing or by some kind of transcendental experience, in which case it would be possible to discount such belief. But if not, then could such a belief be subjected to rational analysis?Anyhow.

author: Andy Chee
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2025, 12:47:43 am
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on May 01, 2025, 09:46:52 pmSeen it. Here's another one:Quote from: RoGeorge on May 01, 2025, 09:46:52 pmCurrent theory suggests the opposite. i.e. sensory information hits the brain first, the interpretation of senses comes later.Consider the phenomenon of Deja Vu;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9j%C3%A0_vuOne theory is that the sensory information leaks past and bypasses standard processing, thus for a slight moment we have two parallel data streams with small propagation delay, instead of one serial data stream.You might also be interested in the placebo effect (and nocebo effect), which somehow works as a painkiller.Finally, one of my favourites, the rubber hand illusion;

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2025, 10:41:11 am
content: Quote from: Andy Chee on May 02, 2025, 12:47:43 amThe complete question was "have you seen the gorilla?", but wrote "have you seen it" to not spoil the video for those who never watched it before.Does your answer means you already knew that video? Or you mean you spotted the gorilla from the very first watch?I didn't register the walking gorilla, and been so intrigued that I took it as a trick from the YouTube developers. I thought that maybe YT is somehow showing me a different video at the second play. So I've wrote down the video ID, changed my router IP, then played the same video from another laptop, and nope, no YT trick, the gorilla was really there.Only that I didn't register the gorilla at all at the first watch.Now, many others failed, too, to see the gorilla, and I think that's a clue that our perception is based on a brain simulation in the first place. Then, this continuous simulation of the most expected outcome is periodically adjusted to match the sensory inputs. Otherwise, the brain simulation will start to grossly diverge from the outside reality, and instead of perception we will get hallucinations, or dreams. I think dreams are brain simulations that are not adjusted to the sensory inputs data stream. Dreams are simulations adjusted only to the internal brain noises, driven by randomness.That video is not an irrefutable proof, but a clue that it might be just like that. Our inner reality might be just a driven illusion.Quote from: Andy Chee on May 02, 2025, 12:47:43 amYes, two data streams, that's why pointing out in Reply #75 post to the distinction between theobjective realityand theinternal representation. They are the prerequisite to the next assumption, that there are two data streams. One data stream is coming from the sensory inputs (produced by eyes, ears, etc.), and the other data stream is coming from the internal simulation (produced by the brain).Very similar with a classic feedback loop, where the "plant" is the brain. Except in our case the plant is not a function (so a passive mapping of input values to some output values). The plant here is in fact a generator (that continuously simulates what will come next, what is the most expected thing we should perceive giving the current context of the brain). The brain generated data stream is the equivalent of the feedback signal, except it is not just added to the sensory inputs, but rather compared.Another analogy might be that of an oscillator that is phase synced with an external signal. The oscillator is the brain, the oscillator output is the brain prediction data stream, and the external signal that keeps the oscillator synchronized is the sensory inputs data stream.Of course, I don't expect it to that simple, but the idea is to have two data streams, one generated by the brain, the other generated by the external reality, and the brain simulation is kept in check to not diverge too far from reality. This is another key concept I am assuming to be correct. Again, I only have clues about that, not proofs.Back to the deja vu, these two data streams are continuous, and if for some reason one gets ahead, or the simulation for some reason lags behind for a moment, than maybe that is felt as a deja vu. I see no contradiction between that and my previous assumptions.Quote from: Analog Kid on May 01, 2025, 11:12:36 pmWell, in this case artificial consciousness and/or artificial self awareness 100% won't be possible. Will learn maybe some other things while chasing those goals.Might be a million other reasons to fail. I never said I know for sure it can be done. Never wrote I know for sure how to do it. I've wrote "I think I might be onto something", and I've also wrote "I might be dead wrong".Quote from: SteveThackery on May 01, 2025, 10:44:36 pmI don't have any test procedure. I guess try to observe the behavior, then compare that with human behavior, or with other animals' behavior that are put in similar situations. Maybe invite doctors/psychologists/philosophers/wildlife researchers to come with test ideas. I didn't put much thought into that direction. Will see. Maybe it doesn't work at all.Now, about how to define what we want to achieve. I agree that there was a lot of hand waving from my side, instead of a definition. Best start will be to take the dictionary definition for those words.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2025, 11:12:10 am
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on May 02, 2025, 10:41:11 amActually I've checked out a few dictionary definitions, and I don't think they are all that helpful. It looks like the mystery of consciousness has been debated continuously since the Ancient Greeks, probably before. The dictionary definitions seem to be a somewhat arbitrary stake in the ground which allows the word to be defined, but they don't have room to expand out the context and arguments.The discussion in Wikipedia is actually pretty helpful, even if it mostly illustrates how difficult it is to define consciousness. 😄"(...) its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians.Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness." - WikipediaTake a look:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness?wprov=sfla1

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2025, 04:59:13 pm
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on May 02, 2025, 11:12:10 amTalk about Captain Obvious.Yet another reason I always give Wikipediaa wide berth. The "encyclopedia" that any snot-nosed junior-high-school student can edit.

author: Andy Chee
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 03, 2025, 02:44:40 am
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on May 02, 2025, 10:41:11 amNote how this selective attention test is dated 15 years ago on YouTube?The actual video itself dates from 1999, which was when I first saw it. That tells you at least how long this phenomenon has been studied for. You can get the original experimental study paper here:https://www.drjoebio.com/uploads/1/8/1/3/1813500/gorrila_in_our_midst.pdfAnd to answer the question..... yes, I did miss the gorilla on first view!P.S. Here's another related video created by the same peopleQuote from: RoGeorge on May 02, 2025, 10:41:11 amThat is a philosophical question, which cannot be solved by science/engineering.Remember what Morpeus asked Neo, "what is real?" (coincidentally, also filmed in 1999)This is simply a modern popular culture interpretation of René Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 03, 2025, 12:12:06 pm
content: Aside from what was discussed before, here's a story that popped on YouTube only a few hours ago (very long, but doesn't require eyes on the screen, can be left to run as audio in the background while doing something else):Joe Rogan Experience #2314 - Hal PuthoffPowerfulJREThis is not how I think consciousness is, but still linking to the video here, as an unusual tale to entertain with during a weekend day. It's a testimony about remote viewing, from the perspective of an insider at that project as an EE PhD guy who witnessed all first hand.LATER EDIT:I'm only halfway through the video, and the tale is now about USA, Russia and China heaving real UFO alien ships at least since Bush II. This story went way wilder than expected!

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 03, 2025, 12:25:46 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 02, 2025, 04:59:13 pmOooh, touched a nerve, eh?My reply was in response to @RoGeorge, who suggested using dictionary definitions, and my point was that dictionary definitions are too short to properly illuminate the subject, and that the Wikipedia article explores the issues much more fully. The quote was meant to be "obvious" - I was trying to illustrate the fundamental nature of the problem of definition.Always giving Wikipedia a wide berth sounds like prejudice to me, rather than a rational position to take. Remember that Wikipedia articles are usually heavily referenced, so you can trace back to the source material. There are no less than223 referenced sourcesin the Wikipedia article on consciousness.I urge you to read the Wikipedia article, andthendecide whether it is useful.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 04, 2025, 01:14:10 am
content: who here actually thought they would basically see 'blade runners' as a profession in their life time??Right now they are confined to the 'bureaucratic dimension'

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 04, 2025, 02:34:05 am
content: Quote from: coppercone2 on May 04, 2025, 01:14:10 amSmuggling medical supplies? That is pretty common if you live in the US near the Canadian or Mexican border.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 04, 2025, 02:54:07 am
content: Quote from: David Hess on May 04, 2025, 02:34:05 amDid you miss that they're referring to a very popular sci-fi pic from the 1980s?

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 04, 2025, 02:56:08 am
content: Regardless its sad, you would think anything along the lines of a responsible government would basically go brezerk and ensure medical supplies are at the lowest possible cost and highest availability, along with food and water. For something that exists to protect, the priorities are totally fucked upLike I am pretty sure medical supplies are higher up on the priority list then basically anything else for 'protecting the population'.If IQ is meant to help survival, then its literally negative in this case. Negative IQ policies

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 04, 2025, 03:00:54 am
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 04, 2025, 02:54:07 amDid you miss how that very popular sci-fi pic from the 1980s got its title?

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 04, 2025, 03:08:08 am
content: The question is kind of unanswerable, consciousness is a human term we created to explain something.It has about as much meaning to an AI as if an AI/Robot decided to use a new word to describe its own 'consciousness' and then wondered if we (humans) had the same thing.It's a valid thing to wonder about, but not something you can ever answer.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 04, 2025, 06:00:38 pm
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on May 03, 2025, 12:25:46 pmNo.I hate Wikipedia. I really do.I hate the way their articles dominate every online search nowadays, almost at the top (now that spot is occupied by Google's "AI summary), as if Wikipedia is the gold standard of all human knowledge, which it definitely is not.I hate that even non-Wikipedia articles listed in an online search are likely to be web-scraped Wikipedia articles, which is the worst of all possible worlds, since they are frozen at the moment of being scraped and will never be "corrected" or improved by editing.I know all about how the damned thing works: I spent a couple years editing Wikipedia articles. I've seen the edit wars, the capricious interventions of "admins", the injection of blatant political ideologies, all of that.Sure, for completely technical subjects, like, say, mathematics and electronics, Wikipedia articles are not too bad, as they will eventually be cleansed of outright errors by editing.But overall, the quality of writing varies from OK to atrocious; grammatical errors, redundancy (since not all editors bother to read the entire article), lack of clarity, obtuse language, and just an overall mushiness.Regarding references: I don't care how many valid references a Wikipedia article has. It's just like with LLMs, where however much the content may be based on referenced material, it's still a mish-mosh, if not an outright hallucination. Having references guarantees nothing in the way of quality here.To me, people reflexively posting links to Wikipedia articles on fora like this is just a lazy tic, a substitute for real research. "Oh, I'll just post a link to this Wikipedia article, and that ought to settle the matter." Find better material, for chrissakes.No thank you; I have no love for this brainchild of the pornographer Wales (and his uncredited partner).

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 04, 2025, 09:27:47 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 04, 2025, 06:00:38 pmOK, but what does" real research" look like? Could you give some insight into how to conduct it?(PS: I don't think I reflexively post links to Wikipedia articles. But this one is really quite interesting. I think your reflexively rejecting Wikipedia articles is just as irrational. Some are good, some are bad, caveat emptor.)

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 04, 2025, 09:33:02 pm
content: My work flow, having lived a long well-read life, is that when I remember something, I try to do a quick search to verify my memory before posting, especially to check a date. Often, the main thing to appear is Wikipedia. That does not imply that I love it.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 04, 2025, 09:36:09 pm
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on May 04, 2025, 09:27:47 pmOh, c'mon: you can answer that question as well as, or better than, I can.Quote from: TimFox on May 04, 2025, 09:33:02 pmYes, but the problem is that Wikipedia tends to swamp other, sometimes better, sources of information.

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 04, 2025, 09:42:33 pm
content: That’s why I try to check other sources.On many technical questions, I can refer to my personal library (many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore), but it is not reasonable to cite it here for those unable to access it.

author: Andy Chee
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2025, 06:26:06 am
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 04, 2025, 06:00:38 pmI don’t believe anyone is arguing that Wikipedia is the gold standard.I think the point you have overlooked is that in any internet armchair debate, the debaters are highly unlikely to follow up on each other’s references.As such, it is often a waste of effort to perform in depth research. Wikipedia is a good enough topic teaser. And if the debate remains civil, only then would I do further research for the genuinely curious.It’s unfortunate that I have to assume everyone on the internet is a potential troll. I certainly don’t want to waste time debating trolls.Even this thread, I’ve already mentioned Rene Descartes in reference to “what is real?”. Yet no response. So I’m glad I haven’t dived deep into research yet!

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2025, 10:04:00 am
content: And I repeat: sometimes Wikipedia is useful, sometimes not. It is silly to automatically accept what it says, and it is silly to automatically reject what it says. Look at it and decide for yourself.As for the article on consciousness, I found it to be rather good, hence recommending it. I still recommend it.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2025, 01:03:59 pm
content: Quote from: Andy Chee on May 05, 2025, 06:26:06 amI won't try again any epistemological approach. Tried that some years ago, and even asked here on EEVblog about good references to study (https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/ontology-and-epistemology-where-to-start/, that was for another project, related to quantum computing, and the possibility to make a toy-model that would behave the same, just that the toy-model won't use quantum objects - and the question was how to interpret such results, or if any results from a toy-model can be considered as valid quantum computing - and such the dive into the philosophical approach).Back then I didn't went too far into epistemology/philosophy, because, as far as I went, such investigations only brought more confusion. Nice thought exercises, but very unproductive. They only brought me more questions, and no helpful answers when it comes to making a device, or when it comes to interpreting experimental results in practice.That is why, in the context of this project, I've defined "what is real":Quote from: RoGeorge on May 01, 2025, 09:46:52 pmMy take on the "what is real?" question, is that we are "living" inside our inner world. However, a biggerobjective realitydo exists independent of us. Aside from the direct sensory perception of theobjective reality, we are also able to make (or to imagine) other constructs, constructs that do not exists in theobjective reality. Those are virtual, not real, in my take.Does this settle the "what is real" question?(in the context of this project only, not trying here to establish "what is real?" from an epistemological perspective).

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2025, 08:43:29 pm
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on May 05, 2025, 01:03:59 pmJust to add another wrinkle to this fascinating topic:Regarding "objective reality", what if: what if the actual objective reality is really ... just a grand illusion?I'm alluding to the Hindu notion ofmaya, the idea that our entire experience of the world is an illusion, a scrim, a false front, mediated by our consciousness.Read up on it if you're not familiar with the concept (I'd recommend anything except Wikipedia here).

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2025, 11:40:41 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 05, 2025, 08:43:29 pmI haven't read it yet, but there seems to be an obvious objection. It seems to imply that not only do we have an internal model of the world built from our sensory inputs and memory - an idea widely accepted - but thateven objective reality itself is also an illusionmediated by our consciousness.Really? So was there no objective reality before animals evolved consciousness? If not, how did we get here if there was no universe before we got here? And if all conscious animals die out, the entire universe will wink out of existence?Hmmm.... more reading required. I know! - I'll ask ChatGPT. Or Wikipedia, even better. 😉😅

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2025, 11:52:24 pm
content: OK, an Indian philosophical model shared (to some extent) by Hinduism and Buddhism. Intellectually intriguing but untestable and outside the realm of modern scientific thinking.Glad you made us aware of it - it's an interesting read.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 12:45:08 am
content: Yes; basically says that the world is totally unknowable.For some reason I really like that philosophy. (I have no idea if it's the proper explanation or not.)And we think we're so damn smart!

author: Andy Chee
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 03:48:35 am
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on May 05, 2025, 01:03:59 pmThese two statements are inconsistent.Your second statement is most definitely about epistemology.In other words, you (or any animal, AI, or cognitive agent) cannot prove that an independent objective reality actually exists.

author: Andy Chee
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 05:33:18 am
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 04, 2025, 06:00:38 pmAs an aside, whilst you may hate Wikipedia, you may still be interested in this;Although the above example is Wikipedia specific, it may also be a proxy for memory organisation within human brains and/or self-aware robot brains.

author: Xena E
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 07:40:34 am
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on May 05, 2025, 11:40:41 pmOne theory presented at a lecture I attended on machine intelligence, the speaker suggested that the reason for human inability to understand their own sentience is because it doesn’t exist in isolation... and that all energy and consciousness is one entity, there are no individuals, just parts of the whole.Reality in that case is just an illusion being played out in some self created dream of the single entity.We're all just components in a friggin simulation.😵‍💫......😉X

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 03:51:49 pm
content: But does that pay well to give that kind of lectures?

author: Xena E
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 04:26:41 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on May 06, 2025, 03:51:49 pmDon't know!But people liked the side serving of the un provable theology more that the stodgy content of the rest of the lecture going by the Q&A afterwardsGuy was correct though that no one can satisfactorily explain sentience, and how it exists, so how could they create it?X

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 05:14:27 pm
content: It's worth asking why we seem to care so much about something we can't even define.If we can't define it, what *exactly* do we care about?Your phone "knows" what its battery level is. Does it make it self-aware? Maybe. Why not? It has a definite sense of its inner state.Of course, we want to think of consciousness as a high-level, abstract concept that eludes us, maybe precisely to avoid having to define it.Apart from the philosophical musing side of it, there is a very "practical" aspect of using this consciousness concept, and that's the one we've been using a lot: we've been using it as a means to separate what we can use as "objects" and what we can't. For what we see as non-living, this was long a non-question: there couldn't be any form of consciousness in non-living stuff. For living beings, that was used as a classification method. To know what creatures we could use as just disposable commodities, and what we could not.I don't think there has been much more to it than this, but that's just my view. We've been toying with this concept of consciousness as an opportunistic method to decide how we would interact with our environment. The corollary of this and if you just think about it, is that the "other", which we as humans consider whether it has consciousness or not, has itself zero say in it. It has been very convenient to assume that most animals didn't have consciousness, so that it would seem morally acceptable to use them as we would please.Applying that opportunistic concept to machines is pretty odd. It does seem pretty obvious though that what follows is that once we consider a machine having "consciousness", then our collective moral compass will prevent us from using it as just a tool anymore. When that happens, it will be "funny" to notice that we may have more consideration for machines than we have for our pets.Just my 2 cents (+VAT +tariffs)

author: pcprogrammer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 05:56:36 pm
content: Just watch this one, and you know why this all is not a good idea.Already to many angry people on the globe that fuck up enough.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 06:07:43 pm
content: Quote from: Andy Chee on May 06, 2025, 05:33:18 amNo, it's all good; meta-information on Wikipedia is useful stuff. The more the merrier.QuoteHmm, maybe, but I doubt it.

author: NE666
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 06:12:23 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on May 06, 2025, 05:14:27 pmI think you provide at least one answer there yourself.It is precisely because we can't define it, or at least, struggle to form a majority accepted hypothesis which has any real detail. Yet, we instinctively 'know' there is 'something' there which distinguishes the idea of consciousness from other, complex emergent phenomena. We find that an intriguing concept on which to dwell, yet ultimately probably not to any avail.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 06:22:51 pm
content: OK, yet another hypothesis which shows how it may be impossible to ever create a machine with consciousness, let alone determine just what consciousness is:What if our consciousness does not exist solely within our skull, as most of us probably imagine? that our experience of the world is unique to us and a result only of processes within our brain and nervous system.What if instead our consciousness is part of a much larger ... matrix, to use a problematic term (inevitable link to a popular entertainment)? That we're part of a web of consciousness of some kind that extends well outside of our bodies and brains?If this be true, then this whole effort to create "thinking machines" is well and truly lost from the get-go.I thunk of this all by myself, but I'm sure I can't claim this idea as uniquely mine. And of course it has religious and theological ramifications.I can't say I believe this; but I can't say I can deny it either.

author: NE666
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 07:44:45 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 06, 2025, 06:22:51 pmHere I am, brain the size of a planet..

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 08:03:58 pm
content: Quote from: Xena E on May 06, 2025, 07:40:34 amThis reminds me of another theory:"If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't."I dunno, I just like it.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2025, 08:07:34 pm
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on May 06, 2025, 08:03:58 pmAh, recursion.QuoteIt does have a certain charm (and completeness), doesn't it?

author: Xena E
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 07, 2025, 01:03:29 am
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on May 06, 2025, 08:03:58 pmThat does have an elegant internal logical consistency.Quote from: NE666 on May 06, 2025, 07:44:45 pmHa! Marvin!I'm laughing at the reference to popular fiction not the Analogue childs actually quite thoughtful theological conjecture.X

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 07, 2025, 01:29:40 am
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 06, 2025, 06:22:51 pmGoing to amend my statement just a bit:Unless they (the conscious-robot designers) can somehow figure out how to plug into that matrix.Can you image the connector needed for that? How about an Amphenol with 220contacts?

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 07, 2025, 09:30:22 am
content: Let's put it differently.1. There is a train station A2. There is a train station BHow long it will take for a locomotive to go from A to B?In this situation we won't object that there is no train station called "A". We won't object that time might be just an illusion. We won't object that we can just take the bus from A to B, so there is no need for an artificial locomotive. And so on.These train stations A and B are set from the start, such that we won't get ourselves lost on the realm of epistemology, philosophy, theosophy, science-fiction, or who knows what other realm.These are given from the start:- 1. - objective reality is independent of our minds. It exist with or without brains, with or without other living beings.Objective-realitycan not be changed by thought.A tiger trying to have you as dinner won't sist to exist, won't vanish from theobjective-realityonly because you wish to be no tiger in front of you. If you close your eyes and think "no tiger, no tiger" the hungry tiger won't just disappear. Now, we can put the tiger aside, to investigate further about the world.Thisobjective-realityis vast, very, very, very complex, it contains much more than we (as humans) know, it contains all and everything there is, including unknown objects, including unknown laws of physics and so on. It is everything out there, the entire Universe.Note the word "out there", which implies the human mind is left outside of theobjective-reality. No, your brain is not "outside", but we will consider the mind separately from the rest of the Universe, so we won't get lost in recursion analysis. Just like we "isolate" in physics an electron, for the purpose of study.- 2. theinner-reality- it's the internal representation of theobjective-reality. The representation each has inside the own head. Thisinner-realityis only a draft model of theobjective-reality, and it is not only a draft, but also an incomplete draft, a small thin slice of all that is out there.By incomplete, or slice, I do not mean slice of space, as in you can see only inside your room, but you can't see the room next floor. That one too, but, by "slice", and by "incomplete draft", I mean slice of knowledge, things we don't perceive directly, plus the thing that nobody knows, as in not yet discovered, not known to us, the humans.Let's take an example:You walk and see a tree.- First of all, that means the tree do exist, the tree is out there, in theobjective-reality. That tree has many, many properties. It is very complex. It is much more than we see, or than we perceive, when looking at it. For example, when you look at the tree, you don't see its temperature. Or, you don't see the sap flowing inside the tree.- Other properties of that tree are even harder to know, or to observe, for example how the surrounding radio waves bump into the tree, and how some part of those radio waves is reflected by the tree, and other part is absorbed. Or the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide gases between the surrounding air and the tree. Or, how the tree is putting a chemical defense against some insect pests. Or, how the tree is in a fight right now, as we speak, with its neighbor tree, it's a fight for which one grows faster, to capture more light. And that is a war that will take 200 years to settle for that tree. You are just a glimpse in the existence of that tree, at the time scale of a tree's lifetime.- Aside from these aspect, aspect that we were able to deduce and somehow build a picture of them inside our minds, there are even more abstract, and less relatable aspects, like for example how the tree is pierced every moment by millions and millions of neutrinos.How did you just pictured the neutrinos? Like a shower from one direction? (that was the very first image summoned in my mind when thinking about the neutrinos passing through a tree) At a second take, not exactly like rain. The neutrinos are probably coming from all the directions at once, and with all kind of fluctuating intensity. I don't think I can picture the said neutrinos correctly no matter how much I try. But the neutrinos do exist in theobjective-reality.- And even more, the tree might have, or might interact, with things that we are not aware at all, I mean not a bit, things not yet discovered, things not yet imagined.That is the tree from theobjective-reality. This is what I mean byobjective-reality, everything.Then, there is the tree from ourinner-reality, a draft and incomplete representation of the tree out there. It's the idea of a tree from your mind, plus how you perceive the tree in front of your eyes.That is the tree from theinner-reality. This is what I mean byinner-reality, is what live inside your mind only.If you die, that's it! Yourinner-realityvanishes. The tree from yourinner-realitydisappears, too. By contrast with theinner-reality, which is the personal experience we each have in our head, theobjective-realitywill continue to exist out there, with or without you. The tree from out there, the tree from theobjective-reality, will continue to exist after you die. Children can come and look at the same tree from out there, and perceive that tree. Perceive it similar with how you perceived it. Each child will see the same tree, and construct an inner representation of that same tree inside their little heads. Similar representation, but slightly different from one child to another.And each other being encountering that tree, being a child, a cow, or a robot, will have to "picture" that tree somehow inside their own "mind".I'm not claiming this is the only way it can be, not saying this is the only correct take, not saying each and every other approach is wrong.I'm choosing this starting point, with a clear demarcation between an assumedobjective-realityand an assumedinner-reality, because for me this is the most likely way to be. And because starting from such a viewpoint, it is possible to construct further notions, and further mechanisms, and eventually answer some questions, maybe even build some devices.Without the assumption that theobjective-realityexists, with or without humans, without the assumption that theinner-realityis derived from theobjective-reality, without making the separation between the two, we will get lost on the realm of philosophy.Could it be some other way? Could it be without an assumedobjective-realityand without an assumedinner-reality, and without the demarcation between the two, could it all be differently than that? Yes could be, but highly unlikely, if you ask me.What I am proposing is the most reasonable way to start, without calling for unverifiable theories.If we start from an assumedobjective-realityand an assumedinner-reality, then all the philosophical agonizing questions are settled from the start:- "what is real?" - improper formulation of the question. There are "two realities". The one out there, made out of fields and particles, interacting together, and eventually lumping together as a tree. Then, there is our inner representation, what we understand from such a bunch of particles and fields and physics interactions, and that we call it "a tree".- "what if the world is a grand illusion produced by our minds?" - no, my mind does not produces the tree from out there, from theobjective-reality. No matter how intense a yoga guru would meditate, that meditation won't instantiate a tree in theobjective-reality. By meditation one can control only theinner-reality, not theobjective-reality. The "grand-illusion" is theinner-reality, it's the mind continuously simulating, and continuously animating that draft model we have, that inner model we all have internally, the model about theobjective-reality.That inner model is slightly different from one individual to another. The inner model is even more different from one species to another. Each living being understands the world in its own way (while looking at the same tree out there).- "can it be an unknown field of consciousness, similar with the electromagnetic field?" - I've heard about this idea, that the brain is just a receiver, a receiver that somehow taps into, or receives, from this unknown field of consciousness. Or something like that. I don't know, but my take on consciousness does not require such a field.Does these make any sense?Oh, and from a more pragmatical perspective, I wonder, too, if anybody has the time and patience for such a long wall of text?

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 07, 2025, 10:04:46 am
content: All of it makes perfect sense, and from my own reading on the matter, this description reflects what the great majority of philosophical and scientific thinkers accept as an accurate and true representation of reality.Speaking for myself, it is exactly what I think, too. The "we all live in a matrix" and "there is no objective reality" propositions are untestable and lead us nowhere useful, so I don't think they are worth pursuing apart from some philosophical amusement.

author: pcprogrammer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 07, 2025, 02:00:59 pm
content: Quote from: Xena E on May 06, 2025, 07:40:34 amSo the speaker was a musketeer.He, whose name we won't pronounce, but is associated with tesla and spacex, also seems to believe in the simulation theory.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------But here is another vision to think about:Here is a self aware robot that identifies itself as a woman in it's fifties with hormones raging through it's system, or younger and imagining it is having PMS.I would say, run Forrest run.

author: Andy Chee
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 08, 2025, 01:29:23 am
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on May 07, 2025, 09:30:22 amLet’s test this theory.Objectively speaking, does the star that most earth humans know as Betelgeuse, exist in the universe?Betelgeuse is 500 light years away, so earth humans have no idea what the objective state of Betelgeuse is. It could blow up tomorrow, and earth wouldn’t find out about it until 500 years later. But you can be sure a civilisation in orbit around Betelgeuse today, would know instantly if it blew up!To earthlings and the planet Earth itself (which has no brain or sensory organs), Betelgeuse exists intact. To Betelgusians, the star has exploded.So which is the objective reality? What is the objective status of Betelgeuse right now? You can eliminate the brain, and ask yourself, what would the earth “observe” from its point of view? What would a planet orbiting Betelgeuse observe?

author: coromonadalix
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 08, 2025, 01:45:11 am
content: is this the same guy again who ended up banned for an very long useless thread ?is it gonna be the same again

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 08, 2025, 02:16:52 am
content: Quote from: coromonadalix on May 08, 2025, 01:45:11 amDepends on how you define "useless", I guess.Not useless to me at all.Besides: don't like the thread? Don't read it!

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 08, 2025, 06:27:03 am
content: Quote from: Andy Chee on May 08, 2025, 01:29:23 am- The objective reality is the star itself, with all its properties, and particles, and emitted light.- Then, there are two observers. One observer on Earth, the other observer near Betelgeuse. Each observer has its own mind, and its own internal representation of Betelgeuse. The observer from Earth knows Betelgeuse as a dot of light. The other observer being closer to the star, will probably know more details, the exact size of the star, the shape of its magnetic field, or who knows what other details that can be spotted only from a closer look.- It the star explodes, that's it, the star disappears from the objective reality. However, the two internal representations of the star, the internal representations of Betelgeuse in the mind of the each observer, still exist. Soon after the explosion that happened in the objective reality, the observer near Betelgeuse will know, and will update the status of the star.- For the other internal representation, the representation from the observer on Earth, nothing happened yet. The internal representation is just like before the explosion.At this moment the Betelgeuse from the objective reality is gone, the Betelgeuse from the mind of the nearby observer is also gone, while the Betelgeuse from the mind of the observer here, on Earth, is still unchanged.So, after explosion- Betelgeuse from the objective reality (aka, the star itself) - exploded- Betelgeuse from the mind of the observer near the star - exploded, status recently updated- Betelgeuse from the mind of the observer on Earth - everything is still fine, the explosion will be visible on Earth only much later.There is only oneobjective-reality. It's the Universe itself.There are many sentient observers, and each of them have in their own mind aninner-reality.Each sentient observer will perceive that uniqueobjective-realityin slightly different ways. Could be because of distance, like with the exploding star. Or could be for other reasons, e.g. for a tree in the garden, a dog will probably notice the smell of that tree, while I will probably not know the smell of the tree. I'll notice the shade of green in the leaves, while the dogs are not good at seeing colors, and so on.Each sentient observer has a slightly differentinner-reality, though we are all observing and interacting with the sameobjective-reality.

author: pcprogrammer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 08, 2025, 06:29:09 am
content: Quote from: Andy Chee on May 08, 2025, 01:29:23 amAny civilization in the golden zone would no longer exist long before the star blows up. It would have grown and burned everything in it's neighborhood to crisp. At least that is what astrophysicists think.But for the rest as a thought experiment it sure holds up. Time is a big factor in our reality. Just think of magicians and their speed of hand. Without our slow sensory speed the whole act would fall apart.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 08, 2025, 06:42:20 am
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on May 08, 2025, 06:27:03 amBut that's the thing: is there really that objective reality?Has that been proven?And doesn't recent physics (relativity, time-space, et al) throw all that into even more doubt?Everything you just wrote makes perfect sense. But it can only be judged to be true if you can demonstrate that there is indeed only one objective reality. Otherwise it all falls apart.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 08, 2025, 06:58:21 am
content: Humans just started three new wars in advanced countries, there are your everyday atrocities in less developed nations which don't even make the news, just all the every day small scale horror humans visit upon innocent humans and megascale horror it visits upon animals (and other animals visit upon animals).Nature is a shit, not sure artificial intelligence can do better, but its worth a try. Consistent moral progression among humans is clearly a fantasy at this point.

author: pcprogrammer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 08, 2025, 07:07:49 am
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 08, 2025, 06:42:20 amAnd there in lies the problem, how to demonstrate this. As an "intelligent" species we came up with all sorts of explanations for phenomena we encountered, and even though most can be proved by using experiments, it is still based on our interpretation of such phenomena.Take the idea of that we are in a simulation, one can ask themself "who is running this simulation", but then one can also think, what if our simulation is part of another simulation, and so on. Another one is the idea of a god. We can't proof the existence, but we can't proof the non existence either. Than there is quantum physics and the parallel universes theory, where there is no conceivable method yet on how to proof that. So what is the truth?Enter philosophy, and think about it all.RoGeorge's philosophy sounds good, but like Analog Kid pointed out, a single objective reality can's be proven with our current knowledge. What SteveThackery quoted, "If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.", I have used that quote many times before. I heard it over thirty years ago and liked it very much.And it does show the problems with understanding difficult things. It requires a well trained and developed brain to do so, but there are limits.But now we are trying to put this all into a machine and think we can control it, I would say it to be very arrogant of us as a species. In the end it most likely will do us in. Brian Cox has some down to earth views on this.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 10, 2025, 05:34:13 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 08, 2025, 06:42:20 amYes.No.No.Depends how each of us understand the world.Let's look a little closer what does it means to understand. When one will say "Oh, now I understand!". Let's start with the dictionary definition:QuoteQuoted fromhttps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/understandYeah, OK, but let's be more specific, from the perspective of neural networks.I would say that understanding comes when a neural network (or a brain) manages to decompose an input data stream into enoughinternally-availabletokens.- (input data stream can be any train of neural impulses, an image, spoken words, text, etc.)- notice the new notion of "token", that is a "nugget of knowledge" you already have from previous personal experiences, or previous learning. So, you will say you understand what a car is, if you see windows, and wheels, and such. Most of the "tokens" you probably have, like the token for "window", "door", or "wheel". If you, or somebody else, "disassembles" the car for you in terms (or tokens) you already know, you'll say you understand what a car is.Some parts of a car might be totally unknown to you. Such parts of the car will have no corresponding token inside your head. You'll be puzzled by the unknown, or you might not even notice those parts at all, because the brain might not have yet the token for "carburator".The idea is, once you identify enough known tokens, you say you understand, and you are satisfied with that level of understanding, even if that understanding is only partial. That car has many details, many hidden components.As you see, understanding is all about identifying something new, in terms of (or based on) already known tokens. But where from do we form those tokens? We form them by interacting with nature, in the first place, and later by school learning.Note that the type of tokens, and the number of tokens can vary wildly from one individual to another, or from one species to another. For example, an Eskimos will have hundreds of different words to describe snow, while other people from warmer places might have only 2-3 words for snow. Another example might be the dog that has a ton of tokens for smells, when compared to human smell. Or the huge number of tokens about human anatomy that every doctor will have, while most don't know much about human anatomy. And so on.I've wrote once about how I see these tokens coming into existence, and I will just quote that entire other post, because most of what is written in it, about tokens and how a mind is formed, will be necessary later, when trying to construct a sentient neural network (sorry for the accompanying personal tales):Quote from: RoGeorge on May 19, 2024, 02:24:27 pmAbout tokens, somewhere at minute 3:30 tokens are mentioned in the context of a LLMhttps://youtu.be/wjZofJX0v4M?t=210and that is the term that I'm using as a generic "brick" of knowledge, used to build more complicated tokens. A token can be either very simple and indivisible, like an "axiom" in math, or can be the result of some processing, like a "theorem".Now, most of the other things I'm talking are seen from the perspective of neural networks (NN), in general. NN are of many types, and can do different things, but I'm having in mind the most simple type, and very generic, something like it is seen in the thumbnail of this video from 3b1b (that "3" at the output of the NN in the thumbnail is an example of a "token"):But what is a neural network? | Deep learning chapter 13Blue1BrownYou may ask why yet another very long rambling, this time about "tokens", NN, and "understanding". The tokens, and their role in how a mind works in general (in my view), is essential for the rest, for how to turn a normal NN into a sentient one.Back to your question, you must keep in mind that all we know, and all we think, is based on those tokens. The very first tokens are formed by direct observing the world we live in, and later, as toddlers, by interacting with the world. So all the rest is represented in terms of those primal tokens we acquired by observing and by interacting with this world we live in, the objective-reality.Any human thought, any reasoning, any "demonstration", is based on tokens acquired from nature, aka from theobjective-reality.So, you want to proof theobjecting-reality, when all you know, and all you do, and all you think, is based onobjective-reality. Not possible. In philosophy, this impossibility was explained in various ways, and I think it's a consensus about this impossibility.Knowledge is not absolute, knowledge is relative to the tokens extracted from nature, extracted from the objective-reality.Similar happens in mathematics. One can not prove axioms. Axioms are given as truths, and from there you build the entire mathematics. Absolute mathematics is not possible, it is all based on axioms. Even so, there are still things that can not be prooved (not even in the context of a set of accepted axioms, thinking here "Gödel's incompleteness theorems"). So not possible to know everything at perfection, not even in mathematics.Same in physics, you can not know, or measure everything with absolute precision, thinking here the Uncertainty Principle.Same in computers, here thinking about NP completeness, and so on.All that we are, and all that we do, is emerged from the Universe we live in, from the objective-reality. Including thinking. If you can think, it means there is an objective-reality.

author: pcprogrammer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 10, 2025, 06:55:40 pm
content: To do or not to do?

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 10, 2025, 07:11:16 pm
content: Quote from: pcprogrammer on May 10, 2025, 06:55:40 pmMeh. Color me skeptical.I only watched the first few minutes. When I got to where she asked what if we create something with more intelligence than us, I stopped watching.This whole "singularity" thing (that Elon Musk also warns about) assumes thatit is possible to create machines with superior intelligence.Sorry, not buying it. It's the 21st century equivalent of alchemy, of turning water into wine, lead into gold.

author: pcprogrammer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 10, 2025, 07:20:20 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 10, 2025, 07:11:16 pmInvest a bit more time in it and you will see that it goes deeper. Near the end she talks to a neuroscientist about the brain and where we stand in knowing how it works. It still boils down to we don't know, but on smaller scale like a worm brain there is advancement.The biggest question is how to define intelligence in all it's forms you can think of. Like emotional intelligence, or artistic intelligence, etc. There is so much more to it all than a "simple" neuron network.On the matter of turning lead into gold, checkout the latest discoveries in the large hadron collider. It seems it can be done.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 10, 2025, 07:49:54 pm
content: Quote from: pcprogrammer on May 10, 2025, 07:20:20 pmGreat. So maybe in 40 years we'll be able to construct a machine with the intelligence of a housefly. If that.Which is not at all to snarkily belittle the intelligence of such an insect: it's considerable.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 10, 2025, 08:18:39 pm
content: Quote from: pcprogrammer on May 10, 2025, 07:20:20 pmIt can be done, but with a considerable amount of energy. That's called nuclear transmutation:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutationAt the time of "alchemy", this wasn't known. But they may have had the intuition of it. It was absolutely not understood though, and still is not practical in the sense that alchemists were looking for.As to "intelligence", I agree that what we currently do with AI is not completely unlike what alchemists were doing.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 10, 2025, 08:47:13 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on May 10, 2025, 08:18:39 pmRight. Similar to the practice of lobotomy, where we knew what the outcome might be but really had no idea what the underlying principles were--in other words,whya patient's symptoms went away when we cut away a certain part of the brain. At least in the sense that neuroscience was, such as it was (and in some ways still is) not very far advanced from earlier principles of phrenology (that is, judging intelligence and other aspects of human behavior from the size and shape of the skull, and the supposed location of various centers of cognition in the brain; pretty much akin to palmistry).

author: Andy Chee
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 11, 2025, 04:37:26 am
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on May 10, 2025, 05:34:13 pmHuman brain does not use tokens.For example;Aoccrnidg to rseearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, the oredr of ltteers in a wrod deosn't mttaer as lnog as the fsrit and lsat ltteer rmeian in pclae. Becaesu you hvae neevr ecntoenured tihs sceipfic cbimontiano of ltteers bferoe, it is evicdnee agianst huamn birans uisng toekns.Also, for more differences;

author: pcprogrammer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 11, 2025, 06:26:53 am
content: Quote from: Andy Chee on May 11, 2025, 04:37:26 amOn the first couple of words I thought, he is drunk and makes typos.But it does show the ability of the human brain to automatically correct noise like this. This is similar to how the brain can pick the correct musical notes from white noise put in place of missing notes.And even though, compared to a computer, our neurons fire at a fairly low rate, due to the parallelism, it is quite fast in making decisions, but this is where a computer can beat us.Another question it how it comes that there are so many differences in the ability to learn between individual humans. Are there fundamental differences in the construction of these brains, or is it due to chemical processes in the system that vary? Or does it boil down to the nurture differences instead of nature differences?So many questions can be asked about the human brain, to which the answers still remain unknown.But like Sabine mentioned, we should not try to fully mimic the human brain, we should build something that can help us do things better in ways that we can't. A problem with this AI stuff, mentioned in the video I posted, is that it dumb's a lot people down and makes us loose the will to learn for our selves.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 11, 2025, 08:26:57 am
content: Quote from: Andy Chee on May 11, 2025, 04:37:26 amTokens is a borrowed term. They are not groups of letters in a certain order. If you want an analogy, tokens are similar with axioms and theorems from math. I'm convinced any brain uses of tokens.They do resemble classes from programming, but since I'm not a programmer, I want to avoid that term, because classes have specific meaning and very specific properties, and any programmer will be tempted to take the tokens I am talking as literally classes.Maybe an example can make it more clear. The brain receives trains of pulses from sensory organs, and at first, the brain does not make any sense of these data streams. However, some of them will repeat more often. At first, the neurons are connected at random, but the neurons that fire together, wire together. Eventually, the most frequent signals will make their own path in the brain.Imagine a newborn, for example. The newborn will hear very often the mother's voice. "Mother's voice" will eventually become a token for the newborn.Once a language is known, the brain is able to reconstruct the words and the sentence by first + last + middle-scrambled letters. That's a prediction trick, and it is possible only if one is fluent with the language.I can tell you the same trick works for Romanian, too, not only for English. However, for French, a language in which I'm not fluent, the scrambled middle letters trick doesn't work any more for me. Though for French people, the trick works. If I could only know French well enough, the trick would have worked for me, too (with French scrambled words).That is because I do not have enough tokens about the French language. I don't know enough French grammar tokens, I don't have enough French words tokens, I don't have enough French phrasing tokens. Overall, my brain doesn't have enough tokens to properly reconstruct the meaning of a French phrase with scrambled middle letters.If one doesn't know the language very well, that trick doesn't work.To me, that proves what I was saying a few posts before: the brain is an oracle, an anticipation machine. We are living in a driven illusion. That illusion is the inner-world. We only take draft snapshots from outside, and correct our inner dream based on those snapshots, such that our inner-reality won't diverge too much from the objective-reality.The outside world isreconstructedbased on the brain tokens. The continuity of awareness we have it's more of a reconstruction of what's out there, rather than a direct observation.The awareness we have in our heads is made by the brain, it is made of animated tokens. The animation is a best guess of the most common outcome. Most common from the previous experiences, and previous learning.In case of the scrambled middle letters, the exact order of the middle letters is not mandatory. The tokens can be identified by letter composition + phrase composition, disregarding the sequential order middle letters.Wanted to watch your video after typing this, but apparently, you deleted the first video about the scrambled words? Why?I see now an almost unrelated video about differences between brain and NN.Watching now the second video, and disagree. Neurons in NN do not have values between 0 and 1. Neurons are adders, they don't have values. During inference, they sum whatever values they see at their inputs. It's a pondered sum, where the coefficients for each input are the ones kept after training. So a linear combination of the inputs. And then (after adding) the neuron fires in a certain manner, according to its activation function.I couldn't watch the entire video, (in fact, I could never ever go through an entire video from that channel, not sure why). Don't know why YT is pushing that channel so much. Every time I watch something from that that channel, I found the content to be doubtful, at best.Side thought here, about the ability of neurons (no matter if they are neurons from a brain, or from a NN):It is critical for the activation function to have somenon-linearityin it, so the brain, or the NN, can construct something new. When I say 'construct something new', the image that comes to mind is that of the transfer function of an (audio) amplifier:If the response is linear, you will get at the output the same shape of the signal, only louder. No frequency is missing, no frequency is added. If the amplifier is not linear (we say, it produces distortions), then the shape of the output signal will start to have new frequencies in it (harmonics) of the original signal. Distortions mean new harmonics. You get new "shapes".As a very broad generalization, you can not get new shapes without a non-linear transfer function.The non linearity is an essential property of a neuron. Without non-linearity, neurons will act just like a mirror, without the ability to produce something new out of a given input.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 11, 2025, 05:25:20 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on May 08, 2025, 06:42:20 amActually that isn't really how science works. Science is always "our current understanding, subject to new evidence". And the reality of a single objective reality (subject to the complications arising from Special and General Relativity) is certainly what all the evidence is suggesting.There are theories about multiple universes and all that stuff, but they don't have experimental evidence yet to support them.My point is that just because we can't prove beyond any doubt that there is one, and only one, objective reality, it's still the best bet by far, based on the evidence, and as such it's quite wrong that "everything falls apart" in the absence of incontrovertible proof. In fact the only time "everything falls apart" would be if we suddenly find evidence of the opposite: that there really is more than one objective reality!

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 12, 2025, 03:46:11 pm
content: My answer to the objective reality thing is practical. What works? When I analyze a circuit or a bridge. When I compute gas mileage or time to travel. When I design a rocket to launch a satellite. There is one unifying point of view that solves those problems. I can identify no reason that matters to me whether that point of view is the rules of a simulation or the ones that apply in one of many.universes. Some people find such speculations not just entertaining, but important. To me they are in the same class as the discussions which once went on about the number of angels which could dance on the head of a pin

author: booscrawl
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 12, 2025, 06:25:53 pm
content: Quote from: Andy Chee on May 11, 2025, 04:37:26 amIt should be possible to make a tokenizer which encodes words in a more durable way than what we have today. You could do a word-level tokenizer as f(first_letter, last_letter, ). You could also do an anagram tokenizer, which cares only about the frequency of each letter in the word, though that might fail to distinguish between "cat" and "act."The interesting part about tokenizers today is that they _do_ help sequence-to-sequence engines work, despite their flaws. They're simple functions that map character sequences to a number, which itself can be easily embedded in a trainable higher-dimensional space to have operations done on it.Coming from a human perspective myself, I suspect (most) auditorily socialized humans tokenize by sequences of phonemes. People who read much more as children might do it visually.Phoneme tokenization could explain how we can literally "hear" ourselves talking as we think, or why it's funny to say one word but change the last syllabus or two to something sunrising.

author: Andy Chee
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 12, 2025, 08:27:25 pm
content: The McGurk effect/illusion also suggests human brains do not tokenisehttps://youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0

author: booscrawl
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 13, 2025, 05:51:33 pm
content: Quote from: Andy Chee on May 12, 2025, 08:27:25 pmYour claim doesn't really follow.Sound of "ba" + no visual = "ba" phonemeSound of "ba" + visual of "ba" = "ba" phonemeSound o f "ba" + visual of "fa" = "fa" phonemeWho says tokens can't be optionally multimodal?This example is also particularly contrived since the lost information of audio encoding means the high frequency hiss of preceding a "fa" is lost. We're forced to fall back to visual clues.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 13, 2025, 06:31:25 pm
content: Quote from: booscrawl on May 13, 2025, 05:51:33 pmIsn't that the point? There is no high frequency hiss because "fa" was never recorded, only "ba". I would understand your point if they also let us hear a real "fa", but that isn't what the demo is about. It's just saying "ba" sounds like "fa" if it looks like "fa".I'm sorry if I've missed what you were getting at.