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AI is Still Inside Out
Turn your doodles into madness.
I think this is a good example of how AI is ‘inside out’. It does not produce top-down perception and sensations in its own frame of awareness, but rather it is a blind seeking of our top-down perception from a completely alien, unconscious perspective.
The result is not like an infant’s consciousness learning about the world from the inside out and becoming more intelligent, rather it is the opposite. The product is artificial noise woven together from the outside by brute force computation until we can almost mistake its chaotic, mindless, emotionless products for our own reflected awareness.
This particular program appears designed to make patterns that look like monsters to us, but that isn’t why I’m saying its an example of AI being inside out. The point is that this program exposes image processing as a blind process of arithmetic simulation rather than any kind of seeing. The result is a graphic simulacra…a copy with no original which, if we’re not careful, can eventually tease us into accepting it as a genuine artifact of machine experience.
See also: https://multisenserealism.com/2015/11/18/ai-is-inside-out/
Time for an update (6/29/22) to further demonstrate the point:
21st century madman’s picture of God
In/out : Electromotive-sensory force ::
Around and around : Gravitoentropic-Magnetic a-motive field
Computation as Shadow of Consciousness
I’m borrowing a (fantastic) image from
Incredible Shadow Art Created From Junk by Tim Noble & Sue Webster.
to make a point about the Map-Territory distinction and how it pertains to simulated intelligence.
Although a computer simulation produces an output over time, that does not mean that it is four dimensional (Time can be an additional dimension on any number of dimensions – a cartoon can be 2D but still last fifteen minutes.) By using the terms N and N-1 dimensional, I’m trying to make the point that no matter how extensive the measurements we make and how compelling their coherence seems to be, it can still be one dimension flatter than the original without our knowing it.
In the case of consciousness, I would say that it absolutely cannot be defined or described quantitatively, so that it truly is N dimensional, or trans-dimensional. Whatever number of dimensions we want to ascribe to some aspect of consciousness, that description will always be n-1 to the real thing. That is, in my understanding, the nature of representation – a destructive reduction of a presentation through a lower level (n-1 or n-x) medium which can be reconstructed by at the higher level if, and only if, there is a higher level interpreter.
Some might object to the metaphor on the grounds that computation is not like a shadow, since changing a computation has predictable effects, while changing a shadow’s appearance does not effect the object. That’s true, but again, in this case, I am using N dimensional phenomena, so that interactiveness is part of the conservation of the temporal, before and after/cause and effect axis. In such a scenario, the flatland effect itself is modified somewhat and there are more dimensions shared. More shared dimensions = more conservation of sensory-motive agreement, however, there is also more that is not shared (feeling, sensations, colors, understanding, for example).
Some who are more familiar with the spectacular capabilities of cutting edge computation might object to the over-simplification, and say that I am criticizing an older generation of approaches to machine learning. There is some truth to that, but in the rarefied air of higher math, we get into what I call the super-impersonal level of intelligence. By comparison, the super-personal level of awareness could be described as mythic or poetic. Synchronicity can be concentrated through divination techniques like Ouija boards and Tarot cards. The Platonic ‘realm’ accessed through ultra-sophisticated computation are, in my view, a dual of that kind of divination, except rooted in the generic and repeatable rather than the instantaneous and volitional. The computer is an oracle to impersonal truths about truth itself, and can build locally applicable strategies from there, however, it cannot factor in any kind of personal feeling or intention.
The computational oracle is much more seductive than divination, since it does not leave the interpretation up to the audience. The computational oracle’s output is to be interpreted as objective fact…which is tremendously useful of course, when we are talking about objects. The danger is when we start believing what it has to say about subejcts. As correct as the computer is about objective truth, it is equally incorrect about people. In the same/opposite way, the Ouija board is neither correct nor incorrect, but offers possibilities that tantalize the imagination.
Chthonic Tree
(Double Ankh = “Illumination” or “Deeply Examined Life”).
Chess, Media, and Art
I was listening to Brian Regan’s comedy bit about chess, and how a checkmate is such an unsatisfying ending compared to other games and sports. This is interesting from the standpoint of the insufficiency of information to account for all of reality. Because chess is a game that is entirely defined by logical rules, the ending is a mathematical certainty, given a certain number of moves. That number of moves depends on the computational resources which can be brought to bear on the game, so that a sufficiently powerful calculator will always beat a human player, since human computation is slower and buggier than semiconductors. The large-but-finite number of moves and games* will be parsed much more rapidly and thoroughly by a computer than a person could.
This deterministic structure is very different (as Brian Regan points out) from something like football, where the satisfaction of game play is derived explicitly from the consummation of the play. It is not enough to be able to claim that statistically an opponent’s win is impossible, because in reality statistics are only theoretical. A game played in reality rather than in theory depends on things like the weather and can require a referee. Computers are great at games which depend only on information, but have no sense of satisfaction in aesthetic realism.
In contrast to mechanical determinism, the appearance of clichés presents a softer kind of determinism. Even though there are countless ways that a fictional story could end, the tropes of storytelling provide a feedback loop between audiences and authors which can be as deterministic -in theory- as the literal determinism of chess. By switching the orientation from digital/binary rules to metaphorical/ideal themes, it is the determinism itself which becomes probabilistic. The penalty of making a movie which deviates too far from the expectations of the audience is that it will not be well received by enough people to make it worth producing. Indeed, most of what is produced in film, TV, and even gaming is little more than a skeleton of clichés dressed up in more clichés.
The pull of the cliché is a kind of moral gravity – a social conditioning in which normative thoughts and feelings are reinforced and rewarded. Art and life do not reflect each other so much as they reflect a common sense of shared reassurance in the face of uncertainty. Fine art plays with breaking boundaries, but playfully – it pretends to confront the status quo, but it does so within a culturally sanctioned space. I think that satire is tolerated in Western-objective society because of its departure from the subjective (“Eastern”) worldview, in which meaning and matter are not clearly divided. Satire is seen as both not as threatening to the material-commercial machine, which does not depend on human sentiments to run, and also the controversy that satire produces can be used to drive consumer demands. Something like The Simpsons can be both a genuinely subversive comedy, as well as a fully merchandized, commercial meme-generating partner of FOX.
What lies between the literally closed world of logical rules and the figuratively open world of surreal ideals is what I would call reality. The games that are played in fact rather than just in theory, which share timeless themes but also embody a specific theme of their own are the true source of physical sustenance. Reality emerges from the center out, and from the peripheries in.
*“A guesstimate is that the maximum logical possible positions are somewhere in the region of +-140,100,033, including trans-positional positions, giving the approximation of 4,670,033 maximum logical possible games”
Colorball II Diagram
Key:
Absolute (+∞) :: Anesthetic (-∞)
Entelethetic (+3) :: Hypothetic (-3)
Aesthetic (+2) :: Exthetic (-2)
Immediate (+1) :: Etheric (-1)
Protosthetic (+0) :: Pseudethetic (-0)
The new terms in this second version are:
- Protosthetic (+0), referring to the minimum quality of awareness as well as the quality of minimum awareness. On a scale of +0* to +∞, this level is the +0 because it represents experiences which have been aesthetically masked to appear imperceptible. This can be thought of as the personal unconscious, as opposed to the collective unconscious, which is the Absolute level that is positioned on top of the diagram, but is actually the entire sphere. It’s number would be +∞.
The entire left half of the sphere can be thought of as a slice within the protosthetic range, just as the greyscale can be thought of as variations on black and white. - Pseudethetic (-0) is the outside-in version of Protosthetic. Where protosthetic phenomena seem alienated or unconscious but are, on some level, a symptom of experience, pseudethetic phenomena are not as conscious as they appear to be. The -0 range is about artifice and simulation, and can include anything from a puppet or stuffed animal to a sophisticated AGI system. Protosthetic would include states in which we are personally unconscious, but can be thought of as that which wakes us up from a sub-personal level.
- Exthetic (-2) is a term I’m trying out as the public-facing conjugate to Aesthetic. This is the common sense of structure that the real world generally seems to have. It is the sense of concrete exteriority which we rely on to engage with the world rather than in our mind. The sense of fixed mass objects in space and linear causality, and all of the other macroscopic cues that pervade classical physics, as well as all of the hard sciences.
- Entelethetic (+3) is intended to refer to a level of hyper-aesthetic dreams, symbols, and archetypes. Also knows as the collective unconscious or Dreamtime, this band of sensitivity is super-natural and trans-personal (yet still private). The word borrows from Entelechy, which has to do with a drive toward self-actualization, which is apt considering the visionary nature of this ‘third eye’ view.
Teleological-Absolute (+∞) :: Universal-Axiomatic (-∞)
Mytho-Poetic (+3) :: Geometric-Algebraic (-3)
Mental-Emotional (+2) :: Scientific-Mechanical (-2)
Sensory-Motive/Perceptual (+1) :: Electro-Magnetic/Relativistic (-1)
Proto-Aesthetic (+0) :: Quantum-Digital (-0)
Colorball Diagram Explained
420anorexorcist said: Can you please explain that?
Sure, thanks for asking!
The diagram is based on ideas from my reality theory, Multisense Realism. I have found that many of these ideas coincide with previous concepts in philosophy, but if I’m on the right track, then MSR offers a new and more complete integration of scientific observations and subjective reports.
To make it clearer, I have added a numbering scheme, with negative numbers on the Left or West side, and positive numbers on the East side or Orient. In addition to the version of the colorball diagram that has been posted, there will be another version in a future post which has the same schema but introduces some new terms which qualify the frame set by degree of aesthetic depth rather than kind.
Key I
Teleological-Absolute (+∞) :: Universal-Axiomatic (-∞)
Mytho-Poetic (+3) :: Geometric-Algebraic (-3)
Mental-Emotional (+2) :: Scientific-Mechanical (-2)
Sensory-Motive/Perceptual (+1) :: Electro-Magnetic/Relativistic (-1)
Proto-Aesthetic (+0) :: Quantum-Digital (-0)
Key II
Absolute (+∞) :: Anesthetic (-∞)
Entelethetic (+3) :: Hypothetic (-3)
Aesthetic (+2) :: Exthetic (-2)
Immediate (+1) :: Etheric (-1)
Protosthetic (+0) :: Pseudethetic (-0)
There are a lot of other diagrams that I have done as collages or graphs, but what I was trying to do here is to give a sense of these ranges of aesthetic (sensed, felt, appreciated) qualities as a spherical-banded on one side and flat-concentric on the other. The idea of making the experiential side spherical is that it represents that given the assumption of Pansensitivity that MSR makes, the totality of experience is the largest possibility. The total of all experiences throughout eternity (assuming nested relativistic time frequencies) dwarfs all possible sets of phenomena or structures within that possibility.
It’s a big idea that gets discussed on the website in more detail. Suffice to say, the universe of conscious experience is being compared to a big colorful ball, but has only its surface to express some view of eternity. Thinking of the numbers of the Keys above, the higher the positive integer, the more translucent the surface becomes and the more of what might be called the genius of eternity (the most illuminated views of the past and all future potentials) is illuminated at once. The lower the number, the more opaque and reflective the surface becomes, so that individual sensations ground awareness in the immediacy of the moment.
The negative numbers can be thought of as ignoring the depth and surface of the sphere completely, but adding structure and realism by cutting across the interior. Unlike direct awareness, the power of math and science to help us infer what we cannot see for ourselves is timeless in an entirely different way. The universe of science is the orthogonal cross section of the universe of feeling and experience, so that its formula and theorems emerge from reading between the cracks of experience. The scientific mind tries to subtract themselves out of the picture, to create a perfect experimental vacuum for impartial, unbiased truth. What the Western side lacks in vitality and wisdom, it makes up for with knowledge and intelligence. The concentric circles also represent the way that the most extreme physical conditions (quantum, astrophysics) share the same forces but differ from the kinds of phenomena found in mid-sized, macroscopic scales (medicine, agriculture).
Monochord
On the East side of the colorball, the prismatic banding emphasizes a loose hierarchy of what could be called aesthetic prestige. Besides just modulating how much of the eternal experience can come to the surface of awareness, there nature of privacy is such that there is a hierarchy significance. Even if we wanted to, it would be hard to take the life of a flea or dandelion to be as interesting or important as a person. Each band signifies a ‘leveling up’ or ascending within the totality of awareness. There is a ton of legitimate and flaky stuff out there about this kind of thing of course (Ken Wilber’s work has extensive correlations of these kinds of systems) so I try not to dwell on what its about, but generally, my system tries to simplify and science-ify the whole thing, so that it does seem as likely to relate only to the experiences of human beings.
Roughly mapping to the Chakra system and other monochord designs, the journey of improving sense can be compared to language. The basic unit would be phenomena in the orange Sensory-Motive (+1) range and can be compared to [letters or syllables] in a word. These would be raw sensations and sensory qualities, aka the root nature of qualia.
Going up the ranks, the yellow Mental-Emotional (+2) range would be like [words and paragraphs] to the +1 [letters and syllables]. This level is the garden variety waking state of mind for most people. Getting things done, thinking, and being a person. It’s the range we could call Natural and Aesthetic.
When consciousness becomes so elevated that realism begins to become transparent, past and future mingle and the ordinary becomes extraordinary. The Mytho-Poetic (+3) band corresponds to ideas like the collective unconscious and archetypes, but also just regular old imagination and fictional stories. This level would correspond to [paragraphs and stories], and it is super-personal in the sense of it reaches for the heroic and divine. It is also cultural and prophetic, psychedelic, delusional. etc. As the integer increases and the surface becomes more illuminated, the interconnectedness of things is revealed as metaphor and coincidence.
The monochord can be thought of as a logarithmic scale of relative time as well. The ‘now’ of a sensation can be less than a second, but to think and feel like a person in the world requires a larger ‘now’, of hours. The Mytho-Poetic seems supernatural to us because I think that it represents our sensitivity into the larger now of weeks, years, and lifetimes. Under heightened conditions of consciousness, it is common to experience the feeling that time has stopped, whereas under sedative or narcotic masking of consciousness, time can seem to be lost or forgotten. Because higher consciousness dilates experienced time, high states can be visionary and far-sighted, or just ‘far-out’. The Mytho-Poetic level is notoriously ambiguous and deceptive, possibly because because we are glimpsing experiences which are, from our local perspective, still half-baked.
The Teleological-Absolute (+∞) can be God, if we prefer a Western metaphor. In that case it would correspond to the [author or artist] writing the stories, that are made of words, that are made of letters.Teleological = Top Down, like I am writing this from a single intention which cascades down through my wording mind, through the finger-tapping keys and the bit-byte-ing computer hardware that we share.
If, like me, you don’t resonate so much with an anthropomorphic God, the Totality can be the Absolute inertial frame instead, and the authors and artists are themselves written by the art – by sense itself. It sounds crazy, but it makes sense to me as a next step after ‘We are spiritual beings having a human experience’ to just say, ‘we are a human experience’. I call this Primordial Identity Pansensitivity.There are many concepts within Eastern philosophy and Western mysticism which reflect this kind of non-deity generator of everythingness, but I think that it is important that we understand this as physics – the physics of privacy.
If the East side is about time and experience, the West side is about scales of space and experiences in which we deduce and infer hidden patterns which explain our experience. This is Science rather than Art, and Science begins in the opposite way as the Teleological Absolute – it begins with a blank slate…or does it? The universe of space is based on laws which are taken to be axiomatic. The Universal-Axiomatic (-∞) means that when we want to get real and we have to stop looking for metaphysical truths, and instead accept that ‘stuff exists’, including laws which guide and propagate changes in the cosmos.
The Geometric-Algebraic (-3) range is the most ancient range of the Western thesis. Classical mathematics and philosophy are inseparable, and like the +3 Mytho-Poetic, range that it opposes, it has to do with perfection. Where the +3 phenomena are perfectly actualized expressions of timeless themes and characters, the -3 phenomena are elegant in their purity. This is not sense for the sake of sensation, but sense-making for the sake of permanence. +3 has its dragons and goddesses, but -3 has Pi, and Euler’s Identity, hypoteneuse, etc.
As Geometry and Algebra become more sophisticated, Trigonometry and Calculus ushered in the Enlightenment Era and modernism in science. The Scientific-Mechanical (-2) level splits Science from Philosophy, with Descartes, Copernicus, Leibniz and Newton, among others building on Renaissance advances since Galileo. The Reformation echoes the philosophical break, with top-heavy Roman Catholicism and angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin Scholasticism yielding to the rise of classical mechanics, empiricism and the industrial revolution.
From the work of scientists like James Clerk Maxwell and Marie Curie, the nature of Electro-Magnetic/Relativistic (-1) phenomena was brought to light. The electric era, followed by the radio, atomic, and electronic era tap into an invisible, etheric layer of structure. Unlike any of the previous conceptual models based on forms and volumes, the pervasiveness of vibrations and waves constructed only of frequencies and wavelengths is, in my opinion, the correlate to +1 Sensory-Motor/Perceptual phenomena, and I think that there is a lot of indication that this could be true, given the utility that neuroscience has found in electromagnetic access to the brain.
Finally, the Quantum-Digital (-0) level, picking up where Einstein left off, is giving us a taste of an information-theoretic universe. The heroes of Quantum Theory include Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Feynman, etc as well as Turing, Shannon, Bateson, and many others for introducing a probabilistic Wonderland in which reality can only be calculated, but not understood. Each of these levels deserves a dissertation, and then another set of dissertations about how they all relate. Hopefully that is enough to give anyone who has stuck with it this far a taste of that this is all about.
*+0 is rounded off, but it would really be +0.00…1, since absolute zero is impossible under MSR. Same with -0.00…1; rounded off here to -0.
Breaking the Nth Wall
- Eliminative Materialism: The picture is the only reality, so the artist is an illusion.
- Idealism: The artist is real and the picture is an illusion.
- Dual Aspect: The artist and the painting are two halves of the whole.
- Monotheism: Norman Rockwell is omnipotent and immortal.
- Computationalism: Norman Rockwell is an emergent property of jpeg compression. Any sufficiently complex compression becomes Norman Rockwell.
- Multisense Realism: The picture, artist, audience, illusion, Norman Rockwell, and computation are all sensory experiences which make sense in different but sensibly related ways.
Multisense Realism 
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