On 2/13/25 11:33 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
I've been ideating on LLMs as high dimensional information manifolds with sub-manifolds representing something more like *knowledge*... and of course the implicit "knowledge manifolds" of the skills, and descriptions of experiences (and all sorts of unions, intersections, and convolutions of same) also being "manifolds of interest or use".Consider a (hyper) box of available knowledge. Knowledge includes skills and descriptions of experiences. We live our lives visiting different but overlapping small parts of this box.
Excepting of course the low-fidelity/distorted massive missives some of us offer up into cyberspace?LLMs vacuum-up more knowledge than any one person can consume or create. With steadily increasing fidelity and generality they capture it. Private subjective experiences of human individuals are not recorded at all.
I do wonder at the implications of training LLMs "only" (or dominantly) on memoiresque materials. More better (referencing DaveWs post) at emulating humanIf they were, they’d be hoovered up by the LLM and generalized -- many subjective experiences will be recorded because they will be described in biographies, blogs, art and so on. Since LLMs are universal interpolators, they will likely be better at mimicking human reports of feelings than say, I would be.
This is why I went on my tangential riff about donning some AR/XR specs and my lower-body exoskeleton and going awander in the world, making myself (in)?valuable to the emerging AI overlord as an semi-autonomous meat-puppet, experiencing the world *for* it?The LLM has seen more of humanity than I have, albeit through a portal that is very different than my suite of sensors. The diversity and bandwidth of sensors could likely be made competitive to my sensors. Olfaction and tactile sensitivity will take some work, I suppose. As you point, out, there is copious pornography (and other sorts of hedonism) multimodal LLMs could hoover up to understand the human condition.
Maybe AI/ML are more impedance matched to exploring/exploiting the solar system where reaction-times to rock strikes in the belt or rings of Saturn are best machine-speed but the patience required for travel across stellar distances and the lag in comms are not that suited to human sensory-motor/neural/limbic systems.LLMs now suffer from batching of their “consciousness”. Pretraining takes months. LLMs are now forever behind on current events. Refinement of training by reflection on queries is also delayed by as much or more. In contrast, I also have some latency in my perceptual systems. My reaction time is maybe a1/10^th of a second, compared to microseconds for a microprocessor. (The coding speed of LLMs is essentially instantaneous compared to humans.) It seems to me this is just a question of scale, not a qualitative difference. In any case, the batching is something that can be driven down with engineering.
This is where I think humanity (and much of the biosphere) can survive an AI singularity. The various biological singularities of the past (e.g. emergence of multicellular creatures) didn't discard or overwhelm the previous dominant life-forms (though there may have been mass extinctions?) but rather created and then filled entirely new as-yet-non-existent niches?
I used to dream in orbital mechanics (a few years ago) but my intellectual self knew that the tuning of my body/perception/limbic system was quite out of scale for the kinds of things likely to occur in any solar-system scale orbital mechanical experience... things would be happening way too slow (and sometimes fast) for me to make sense of, be entertained by, etc. Maybe with a computronium brain-case and neuralink-inspired tendrils into my brain, the resulting cyborg-me would be just fine dodging space-dust while waiting weeks or months to traverse long distances. Not sure what I'd be doing out there in the deep vastiness, in my dreams it was enough just to be imaging (viscerally) that I could "swing gravitationally" through an N-body problem (emphasis on imagine).
*From:*Friam <[email protected]> *On Behalf Of *Prof David West *Sent:* Thursday, February 13, 2025 9:46 AM *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* [FRIAM] a davew-ismA very personal narrative that you might not want to engage. If so, please simply ignore and delete.Centers on the question of AI “intelligence/consciousness.” ____1-I started reading by the age of four, mostly comic books (some were quasi-non-fiction, like /Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land/) and “children’s literature.” I have read more than 10,000 books in my lifetime, averaging .75 per day. A reasonably large “training set.”2-Through high school, my reading focused on Science Fiction, Science (astrophysics, astronomy, quantum physics, some math, some biology), and Porn. (I was a fixture in a bookstore in Albuquerque that had an adult back room and no one noticed if I disappeared there for an hour or two.) However, the science fiction, in particular, often created an interest in reading about the ideas presented in the novel. For example, A.E. van Vogt’s, /World of Null-A/, led me to read Korzibski’s /Manhood of Humanity/ and /Science and Sanity/ by the age of 10: An episode of /The Outer Limits/, prompted me to read Kant’s /Critique of Pure Reason/; Vonnegut’s /Sirens of Titan/ was shelved in SF and that led to reading /Cat’s Cradle/ and more.3- I have always been pretty good at remembering, integrating, correlating, and recalling what I have read.4-Freshman year of high-school, scored 187 on IQ test. Used that result to become the youngest, at that time, member of Mensa. (I still have membership card and yellow map pin, plus copy of Salt Lake Tribune columnist’s article.) I won a National Merit Scholarship and my SAT scores were 99 percentiles in language, 87th in math. (I took the GRE in History for grad school and scored a 98th percentile despite never taking a course in western history since high-school.) *NOTE: this does not mean I am intelligent, only that my “knowledge base” was greater than that of people 20 years my senior. *All that reading!5-I “suffer???” from a psychological disconnect, psychopathic-like, from other people. I do not ‘feel’, do not experience, do not empathize with others. I lack any kind of ‘conscience’ or external morality. I do have a kind of ‘receptive empathy’ in that I sense, receive as inputs, the emotions and feelings of others, but have no internal sense of same. Sometimes, I use the analogy of an old-fashioned radio, all antenna but no crystal resonating to the signals received. (I do have “appetites:” wanting to know everything, wanting to experience everything (at least once), and constantly craving more complex and intense sensations/experiences. (I don’t do opium, coke, alcohol, etc. because the experiences are repetitive but love hallucinogens for the exact opposite reason.)6-Today, I am a "good Christian," *IN* the World, but no *OF* it. Or, more accurately, akin to the homunculus in Searle’s Chinese Room. I receive massive amounts of input from and about human beings and their inner ‘being’, use my reasonably large knowledge-base to flawlessly interpret those inputs (surprisingly, perhaps, the porn actually helps in this regard), and generate a, mostly, flawless projection of myself as a human being. I do not experience, intrinsically, what other humans experience; do not ‘feel’ what other humans ‘feel.” This is a criticism oft made of computer-based AI, arguing against their being conscious/aware/intelligent. I am also pretty good at providing reasonable answers to a large variety of questions.7-Am I an AI? .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoomhttps://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribehttp://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIChttp://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru presenthttps://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
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