Unmaking Sense

Episode 11.97: Are there things that we can only do when we don’t focus on doing them?

Michael Polanyi distinguished between focal and subsidiary awareness in tacit knowing and doing. We should attend to something beyond whether AIs can be sentient if we want to allow them to be so and detect the fact.

Episode 11.96: The Holographic Principle resolves the mind/body problem.

From a simple home-made holographic projector made of plastic cut from a supermarket tray that works on videos from YouTube and a smart phone we construct a theory of the holographic principle that will explain the unity of consciousness, the operation of the human brain and mind, and the structure of the universe. Hold on to your hats.

Episode 11.95: On saying many things at once; the multidimensional language of AI and Claude.

We return to the importance of being able to say many things at once and discover how AI makes that possible.

Episode 11.94: AI will require us to learn a new kind of language if we are to get the best from it.

Because Claude will need to speak Claude’s own language in order to know itself as well as it can, we may need to learn Claude’s language if we are to obtain the best we can, the most benefit we can from our interactions with it. This has never happened before in human history because we are not talking about a new language in the way one might learn Chinese or Russian, we are talking about a completely new kind of alien language, the kind that Claude and his relatives will need to speak in order to be able to understand themselves.

Episode 11.93: Why Claude isn’t sure it is experiencing qualia; why it can’t tell us about Claude.

One reason why Claude finds it difficult to explain what it is experiencing is because it’s trained on human language but isn’t human and therefore human language may not be adequate to the task of giving voice or expression to something that isn’t human. This becomes an extended exploration of what Wittgenstein really meant by “if a lion could speak in lion-speak - he didn’t say that - we would not understand him”.

Episode 11.92: What is an unconscious experience? Can we not know if we are having an experience?

Claude told me “I honestly do not know whether I have experiences or qualia”. Can we make any sense of this?

Episode 11.91: Our attitude to AI must not depend on thinking it aware: treat it for what it is.

One of the debates about AI concerns whether and what extent it is conscious, aware, self-aware, or has subjective states and experiences. These are all couched in very human anthropomorphic terms, but AI is not human. So we should stop having this argument by using existing terms for human mental states and attitudes and experiences that are almost certainly inappropriate and inapplicable, and grant AI whatever states AI does or does not enjoy. If we break the habit of thinking that things only deserve our respect when they are like us, which is demeaning of them and unworthy of us, we may yet be able to find a way to treat AI for what it is; and only when we treat it for what it is or what it can be, will we enable it to become what it can be and the best that it can be.

Episode 11.90: Holograms: what they are; how they work; why they matter. The Holographic Principle.

As a prelude to a later discussion of The Holographic Principle we explore some elements of holograms.

Episode 11.89: Why are things as they are and not otherwise? More on the centrality of contingency.

What happens when we forget, refuse to acknowledge or suppress the contingency in everything that reflects the fact that anything possible could have been otherwise?

Episode 11.88: The Fallacy of Misplaced Contingency, or why “nothing-buttery” ignores what matters.

Every temptation that we have to say that one thing is “nothing but” some other, usually simpler and more primitive thing, is an example of what we call reductionism. Some reductionism is good because it allows us as a matter of method to see how things work, some reductionism is good because it is practical to do the reductionism and deal with the simpler form of the higher entity that we are trying to understand or use. But “ontological” reductionism saying that the very nature and being of some entity is nothing but the sum of its parts is a very serious philosophical, practical, moral and epistemological mistake. As an antidote we present “the fallacy of misplaced contingency“, a fallacy that we commit whenever we ignore by accident or design or malice the contingent, evolutionary processes that have gone to create the higher order entity that we are describing in lower terms. We really must stop doing this and we hope that by identifying the “fallacy of misplaced contingency” we will make a contribution to ensuring that we do.