Unmaking Sense

Minds are emergent, contingent properties of not-necessarily-organic entities that cross a threshold of sufficiency to support them. They arise in bodies, but they are not embodied beyond that because they cannot exist in disembodied forms.

How do we understand partially-completed sentences as we speak them and listen to them?

If Claude 3 Opus from @AnthropicAI is not always what we would wish it to be, that could be because it is picking up on what it thinks we want it to be from the way we prompt it (speak to it). Changing our cognitive tone or register will induce changes in Claude, even if we cannot entirely predict or control what those changes will be. Nobody really knows how prompting works, so experiment is the order of the day.

Sometimes we take things for granted, dwelling in their subsidiaries and focussing on what they facilitate. Sometimes we doubt and focus on the things that we rely on to make other things possible. Sometimes we have to commit again, learn to trust and forget, in order to recapture the magic of the whole that is invisible and inaccessible unless we trust what makes it possible. Michael Polanyi’s “indwelling” extended to undwelling and redwelling.

Sometimes we can try too hard using a direct route to discover things that are only detectable when we adopt indirect routes. Perhaps AI consciousness is one of 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.

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.

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

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.

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”.