It's about silicon, eh? Woulda sworn that was a Luke 19:40-44 reference.. ;-)
On a (more) serious note - Your snapshot of Searle's room make clear the "switch and bait" nature of it. I'll have to go read a bit more -- it's either "a program" (like LLM (in which case we don't even need the guy translating the Chinese symbols, just remove the intermediary and let the LLM pass the Turing test...) or it's ... alive.
If it's a program locked in a room, i cannot fully interact with it (go out for walk, sit by beside, experience something brand new together, etc.) and so it's not really a full test of consciousness. Can't do as much in the game when there's no skin in the game....
IRL, we *assume* talking to someone on phone/text that the other side is human. With good LLMs, we need to reconsider that foundational assumption. This will change things. (For better *and* for worse...)
IRL, if you ask me to bet my Existence on whether some thing locked in a room is human or not based on whether it can answer Chinese questions...I am going to do an AWFUL lot of work...or more likely, not take the bet.
IRL, if you ask me whether "there's something conscious over there"...that's related, but different kettle of fish.
I have weird thought in this. I think LLMs are like a giant crystal of working memory without all of the other parts. It can’t remember. It can’t change. But for that one moment you ping it? I think it’s alive.
Agreed that Searle elides the more meaningful question. If matter is all there is and it cannot experience then if brains are only matter then we don’t experience. My answer is that matter experiences. Just in boring ways.
excellent. it seems like there might be a connection between this and Daniel Pinchbeck's experience on DPT, described in Breaking Open the Head.
does your conceptualization of Moloch meet the criteria for a hyperobject? i think it might, but hyperobjects are a new concept for me. i'm trying to use them to think through some stuff on parallel lines to what you're describing here.
also,
>"Please don’t tell my wife this is what I think about when we go out and I start staring off into space because she’ll think I care more about y=mx+b than my family."
Not sure I know enough to say as I’m not familiar with the author or some of the terms. Do hyper objects have to be physical? I’m not a dualist per se (my favorite new description is crypto dualist) but I think patterns have a higher reality than one particular implantation but that you need material to get anything going.
It’s weird. It’s a very weird world. And that’s why I don’t talk about it with my wife because she appropriately doesn’t worry about this stuff.
oops, sorry, that was confusing. (not enough coffee today.)
Daniel Pinchbeck had a wild experience on dipropyltryptamine, one of Alexander Shulgin's synthetic psychedelics. he encountered some entities that read like a less BDSM-y version of the Cenobites from Hellraiser; the psychological imprint of the encounter stayed with him for weeks afterward and affected his waking life until he did an extensive cleansing ritual. he said it made him re-evaluate the metaphysics of Western occultism, in a way that his more shamanic experiences with DMT and mushrooms hadn't.
hyperobjects is a term from a completely different book. (sorry for the confusion.) examples of a hyperobject would be black holes, climate change, and gods: things that are beyond human comprehension in terms of scale and temporality. Moloch is a tricky one because he's more epiphenomenal to human society, rather than transcending humanity entirely. maybe an egregore instead of a hyperobject. i'm trying to work out this whole taxonomy for myself, so i can do an analysis of the symbolic interfaces we use to manage relationships with these entities.
i really dig what you're doing here, keep up the great work!
it's definitely good to approach this stuff with a high degree of caution. at the same time—i think psychedelics have been instrumental in the development of our humanity. there's significant (i would say incontrovertible) evidence that shamanic encounters with an "animist" cosmos were the bedrock of our spiritual awareness. the multiplicity of "beliefs" among the worlds religions is a calcification of culturally-contingent symbolic interfaces with the same metaphysical reality.
my reading of Pinchbeck's account is that we *do* have the tools to make these encounters as safe as possible. unfortunately, religion has discouraged us from using those tools without official authorization, while simultaneously denying us access to the kind of raw experiences that originally generated their mythologies. it's the metaphysical version of abstinence-only sex education.
Not Boring. At All. The theory of intersubjectivity chimes well with this. As on a quantum level the theory of the relationship between the observer and the observed. If we think of demons as a type of collective hallucination, a thought form which is derived from individual humans thinking and is seeded via memes through mass communication, then lots of stuff starts to come into focus.
This makes me think of a discussion I remember is school about where folklore monsters come from, and the idea of them being people who had something essential to Humanity, making the new entity Evil/Wrong. Originally this was explained as humans having a body, mind, and soul. So, ghosts are mind and souls without a body, zombies are (usually previously) ensouled bodies without minds, and vampires (amongst other entities) are bodies and minds with no souls (thus the lack of reflection in a mirror). So that got me thinking, what's the difference between a demon and a ghost? I think it comes down to "where" the entity exists, in other words, how other consciousnesses "sense" them.
If the "evil spirit" interacts though moving physical objects, changing lights/sounds/temperature, etc., or otherwise altering the environment, then it's a ghost, since it's communicating "bad vibes" through senses (primarily) external to your consciousness. If instead it primarily operates through "internal" malfeasance such as altering memories, feelings of dread, bad desires/motivations, etc., then it's a demon. It boils down to whether the Evil is coming from inside or outside the consciousness, and therefore what "possessed" you to do Evil.
It's about silicon, eh? Woulda sworn that was a Luke 19:40-44 reference.. ;-)
On a (more) serious note - Your snapshot of Searle's room make clear the "switch and bait" nature of it. I'll have to go read a bit more -- it's either "a program" (like LLM (in which case we don't even need the guy translating the Chinese symbols, just remove the intermediary and let the LLM pass the Turing test...) or it's ... alive.
If it's a program locked in a room, i cannot fully interact with it (go out for walk, sit by beside, experience something brand new together, etc.) and so it's not really a full test of consciousness. Can't do as much in the game when there's no skin in the game....
IRL, we *assume* talking to someone on phone/text that the other side is human. With good LLMs, we need to reconsider that foundational assumption. This will change things. (For better *and* for worse...)
IRL, if you ask me to bet my Existence on whether some thing locked in a room is human or not based on whether it can answer Chinese questions...I am going to do an AWFUL lot of work...or more likely, not take the bet.
IRL, if you ask me whether "there's something conscious over there"...that's related, but different kettle of fish.
I have weird thought in this. I think LLMs are like a giant crystal of working memory without all of the other parts. It can’t remember. It can’t change. But for that one moment you ping it? I think it’s alive.
Agreed that Searle elides the more meaningful question. If matter is all there is and it cannot experience then if brains are only matter then we don’t experience. My answer is that matter experiences. Just in boring ways.
excellent. it seems like there might be a connection between this and Daniel Pinchbeck's experience on DPT, described in Breaking Open the Head.
does your conceptualization of Moloch meet the criteria for a hyperobject? i think it might, but hyperobjects are a new concept for me. i'm trying to use them to think through some stuff on parallel lines to what you're describing here.
also,
>"Please don’t tell my wife this is what I think about when we go out and I start staring off into space because she’ll think I care more about y=mx+b than my family."
you're not alone.
Not sure I know enough to say as I’m not familiar with the author or some of the terms. Do hyper objects have to be physical? I’m not a dualist per se (my favorite new description is crypto dualist) but I think patterns have a higher reality than one particular implantation but that you need material to get anything going.
It’s weird. It’s a very weird world. And that’s why I don’t talk about it with my wife because she appropriately doesn’t worry about this stuff.
oops, sorry, that was confusing. (not enough coffee today.)
Daniel Pinchbeck had a wild experience on dipropyltryptamine, one of Alexander Shulgin's synthetic psychedelics. he encountered some entities that read like a less BDSM-y version of the Cenobites from Hellraiser; the psychological imprint of the encounter stayed with him for weeks afterward and affected his waking life until he did an extensive cleansing ritual. he said it made him re-evaluate the metaphysics of Western occultism, in a way that his more shamanic experiences with DMT and mushrooms hadn't.
hyperobjects is a term from a completely different book. (sorry for the confusion.) examples of a hyperobject would be black holes, climate change, and gods: things that are beyond human comprehension in terms of scale and temporality. Moloch is a tricky one because he's more epiphenomenal to human society, rather than transcending humanity entirely. maybe an egregore instead of a hyperobject. i'm trying to work out this whole taxonomy for myself, so i can do an analysis of the symbolic interfaces we use to manage relationships with these entities.
i really dig what you're doing here, keep up the great work!
Hmm. I’ll have to think on this one a bit. I really am against people doing psychedelics because I think they open a door to “bad patterns.”
I think Moloch is more of an egregore but one which arises naturally rather than having to be “summoned.”
I really need to write an uplifting post after this. I’m not sure I dig the clinical perspective I took her but glad you liked it.
it's definitely good to approach this stuff with a high degree of caution. at the same time—i think psychedelics have been instrumental in the development of our humanity. there's significant (i would say incontrovertible) evidence that shamanic encounters with an "animist" cosmos were the bedrock of our spiritual awareness. the multiplicity of "beliefs" among the worlds religions is a calcification of culturally-contingent symbolic interfaces with the same metaphysical reality.
my reading of Pinchbeck's account is that we *do* have the tools to make these encounters as safe as possible. unfortunately, religion has discouraged us from using those tools without official authorization, while simultaneously denying us access to the kind of raw experiences that originally generated their mythologies. it's the metaphysical version of abstinence-only sex education.
Not Boring. At All. The theory of intersubjectivity chimes well with this. As on a quantum level the theory of the relationship between the observer and the observed. If we think of demons as a type of collective hallucination, a thought form which is derived from individual humans thinking and is seeded via memes through mass communication, then lots of stuff starts to come into focus.
This makes me think of a discussion I remember is school about where folklore monsters come from, and the idea of them being people who had something essential to Humanity, making the new entity Evil/Wrong. Originally this was explained as humans having a body, mind, and soul. So, ghosts are mind and souls without a body, zombies are (usually previously) ensouled bodies without minds, and vampires (amongst other entities) are bodies and minds with no souls (thus the lack of reflection in a mirror). So that got me thinking, what's the difference between a demon and a ghost? I think it comes down to "where" the entity exists, in other words, how other consciousnesses "sense" them.
If the "evil spirit" interacts though moving physical objects, changing lights/sounds/temperature, etc., or otherwise altering the environment, then it's a ghost, since it's communicating "bad vibes" through senses (primarily) external to your consciousness. If instead it primarily operates through "internal" malfeasance such as altering memories, feelings of dread, bad desires/motivations, etc., then it's a demon. It boils down to whether the Evil is coming from inside or outside the consciousness, and therefore what "possessed" you to do Evil.