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[Music]
[Applause]
good afternoon fellow conscious beings
here and on the
devices I'm very happy and very honored
to give this presentation
tonight it's uh as I was just introduced
it's the six in a series of talks that
have been born here at this conference a
series on AI philosophy and it's
basically mostly concerned about the
question how can we close the gap
between humans and machines and thereby
understand ourselves and there's this
big question whether AI can actually
become conscious and to understand this
question and to answer it we will need
to answer what Consciousness is
and look at the question whether current
AIS are perhaps already conscious in
some sense and not conscious in the same
way as we are and whether we could
recreate Our Kind Of Consciousness
artificially and of course if we succeed
doing this how can we coexist with such
beings this talk is not covering
existing research and established ideas
it's covering philosophical questions
about metaphysics and meta metaphysics
how we can translate between the
metaphysics of different cultures and
approaches and philosophies we have to
look into the philosophy of artificial
intelligence and computational theories
of Consciousness into ethics and how to
derive ethics into the nature of reality
of personal identity and Transcendence
and epistemology the question how we can
know something and what knowledge is and
what defines whether something is
true when we look into the existing
sciences and Consciousness Sciences we
find that they are not giving us many
answers psychology is not producing
systemic theories these days
neuroscientists are focused on the
shenanigans of a single cell type and
artificial intelligence is obsessed with
algorithms for statistical learning and
philosophy has lost a plot about 100
years
ago what's the
plot in some way you could say it starts
with li Nets maybe even with Aristotle
Li Nets had the idea that we can
translate thoughts into numbers
arguments into numbers and resolve
arguments by
calculation Julian of f lri had the
Insight that humans can be understood as
mathematical machines and our motivation
might be cybernetic basically composed
of opposing Springs that push and pull
in different directions people made fun
of him and he wrote his book L machine
back then godlo frer had the idea of
coming up with a forage
for thinking and taski formalized Logic
for us wienstein had the idea of
translating English into something like
a programming language so we can do
philosophy that is actually true or
false and Marvin Minsky together with
others started the project of doing this
systematically on machines on computers
and started the field of artificial
intelligence this idea of building a
scalable mind a machine that is able to
conquer the sphere of the heavens is
sometimes called the Tower of Babel it's
a very old project individually we have
no hope of solving it because individual
human beings are not generally
intelligent you need a thousand year
unbroken intellectual tradition to
discover a notion of computational
languages to understand what
representation is what thinking is and
so on but even as a civilization we
basically run against the boundaries
imposed by natural language which makes
very hard for us to become coherent so
this project of the Tower of T is
falling apart again and again and
sometimes God is letting us know that we
need to start again with a fresh code
base we need some useful terms I think
existence is best understood as to be
implemented something that is
implemented exists something that is not
implemented doesn't exist something that
could be implemented exists
possibly an operator that's a transition
function between states that can be
implemented a representation can be
built using States and operators and is
expressed in the language and it can be
used to make models models allow us to
predict the future and understand the
past and examples for languages are
formal languages for instance in
mathematics that are so tightly defined
that they allow us to evaluate the
validity of statements and make
specifications and programming languages
which need to be computable and won't
have contradictions in the expressions
and they're constructive so we can build
things from the ground up our language
of thought our mental lease is in some
sense the programming language of our
own mind it's compositional it's
constructive it's executable it's
parallelizable to some degree but it's
also somewhat
noisy our natural language is not
different from this mental it's the
language that exists between speakers
and to make it learnable it's linear can
be broken down in discrete strings of
symbols and parsed using a very small
it's usually disambiguating instead of
constructive you can construct things in
it but mostly it refers to things that
you already know in your mental
representations in your mental e and
allows you to disambiguate
Concepts there were a number of very
important insights philosophical
insights in the 20th century and when I
said that philosophy lost the plot what
I mean by this is that philosophy has
not really integrated them but spun off
on its own idea historic
trajectory and the first one is the
replacing of mathematical semantics of
classical stateless mathematics with the
notion of computation this happened
almost by accident C girdle wanted to
deal with some inconsistencies in
mathematics and because a system cannot
talk about anything that is not
constructed inside of the system
including the system itself could G
invented the
emulator an emulator is a way to compute
a model of a computer in a computer
right and he didn't have a computer back
then so he looked to find one and the
one that he found was pianos aums which
Define the natural numbers and
arithmetic over them so it's a virtual
computer and his idea on how to emulate
mathematics was to use a logical
language that he defined in such a way
that you could translate the alphabet in
which he wrote this logical language
into integers it's something that we
still do today when we compile source
code in two bytes right and then he
defined arithmetical operations on his
CPU pianos axioms that would evaluate
the logical statements by making
computations and this way he had a way
to define a language inside of
mathematics that would be equivalent to
that mathematical language and make the
language talk about itself and what he
discovered is that the stateless
semantics of mathematics under some
circumstances lead into contradictions
which is referred to as the
incompleteness theorems and most
philosophers don't really seem to know
what this means they see this as a very
big sculpture that is has important
mythical power and stands in the museum
of mathematics but it doesn't change
very much the thinking of philosophers
some philosophers even believe that
mathematicians have proven that
mathematics is impotent at describing
reality or the mind and therefore there
is an advantage for people who cannot do
mathematics philosophers
namely now instead what has happened is
that we found that in some languages you
can make specifications that cannot be
implemented and if you want to guarantee
that you can implement what you're doing
you need to use a programming language a
computational language the other
Discovery the next one was practical
computation conver zuza and John for
noyman defined physically realizable
automata and Moses shink and many others
defined languages uh built from automata
that would allow us to build
computation that would run efficiently
in practice and Claude Shannon gave us
information Theory and Alex iako and
others defined functional approxim in
learning in ways that are still being
used today in deep
learning and last but not least church
and touring discovered that all these
representational languages that can be
implemented computationally have the
same representational power which is
called The Church TR thesis these are
important results basically put the
presentation of reality on a solid
foundation the position that I'm taking
in the following is what I would call
strong computationalism
basically no implementable language can
do more than a finite
automaton and Hyper computational
objects things that can do more than
computation cannot exist because in
order to describe them to refer to them
you need to use languages that run into
contradiction so it's difficult to like
make them mean something and the
realizable systems can be described
using touring
machines the touring machines that we
Implement here in these computers they
are linear and deterministic but there
are variant of this for instance the n
touring machine doesn't have just one
successor state but multiple parallel
successor states that are being executed
in parallel you can still run this under
deterministic touring machine but you
need to use a stack and you could also
make these transitions stochastic which
means you pick one of the state
transitions or multiple of them at
random and this seems to be this uh kind
of system that our brain is because an
individual neuron given the same
environmental State doesn't go into only
one possible successor State neurons are
somewhat noisy they go into multiple
possible successor states which means if
you want to do an exhaustive computation
of a problem you need a population of
neurons which pretty much the same
environment and this population is going
to sample a function
space so we can use these computational
paradigms to describe computation and
biology but can we also describe
Consciousness isn't that a big
mystery what is consciousness
introspectively it's second order
perception I perceive myself perceiving
something it creates a bubble of nness
the subjective know is not not static
it's Dynamic it's moving right it's for
me something like about 3 seconds long
it's the region in space and time where
I can basically fit a curve to my
sensory
data functionally it's an operator that
takes mental States and translates them
into different mental States and while
doing this increases coherence in my
mental representations coherence
something that we can understand is
minimizing violations of constraints in
a dynamic
model and Consciousness is some sense
colonizing my mental representations
making them more and more coherent and a
organization that allows every part of
my mind to talk all the other parts of
my mind that are connected in this
bubble I cannot perceive anything that
is not coherent using my Consciousness
and Consciousness plays the role of a
conductor of a mental Orchestra if you
imagine all the functions that your
brain is Computing as instruments and
Orchestra and the neighboring
instruments are listening to each other
and pass on but the instrument next to
them is playing you can basically model
for the processing streams in your brain
work and in this met for the conductor
is an instrument it doesn't have
superpowers it's just an instrument that
is tasked with creating coherence so
it's singling out a few instruments at a
time listens whether they're disharmonic
and then it increases the harmony
between them and by doing so it makes
sure that everybody is on the same page
and the entire Orchestra becomes one
single coherent entity that is driven by
a single
motive these perspectives
is something that is found in a number
of theories in philosophy and
Neuroscience for instance in vanard
Bar's Global workspace theory that is
being pursued in Neuroscience by Stan
deim the idea of the cartisian theater
that how danet calls it the attention
schema Theory by graciano the
relationship between self model and
Consciousness as exemplified in works by
metzinger and the Consciousness PR Jos
calls this a function that basically
parameterizing your metal
representations to make them d Al
tracking your sensor data using little
energy and it's also something that is
found in many Buddhist
perspectives what is consciousness not
well Consciousness is not intelligence
intelligence is the ability to make
models and it's also not the same thing
as sentience I use the word santian to
mean the ability to recognize yourself
and your relationship to the
world and it's not agency which is the
ability to control your
future it's not the self the self is a
first person model of your agency and
it's not empathy empathy is the ability
to experience mental states of other
agents arguably you might need
Consciousness for
that our scientific perspective has some
difficulties to deal with the problem of
Consciousness that's because it has gaps
in its ontology when it comes to
describing the difference between
psychological objects and physical
objects different cultures use different
terminology to describe physical and
psychological
reality and it makes it very hard to
translate ideas from Buddhism or from
Japanese animism or from Scandinavian
mythology into our own culture it even
makes it very difficult to translate
folk descriptions or theological
descriptions into the scientific World
in order to make such translations we
need something like a meta metaphysic
something that allows us to look at all
the different metaphysics of these
systems from the outside so we can
relate them to each other and the main
confusion in our own culture
concerns the fact that Consciousness is
not physical and that you cannot
experience physical objects
Consciousness is
virtual which means it's a software it
exists as if software doesn't have an
identity it's not a physical thing it's
a pattern that you perceive in something
it's a causal structure that you use to
explain a part of
reality physically they are just
activation patterns between your neurons
the individual neurons cannot experience
any
but it would be very useful for a bunch
of neurons to know what it would be like
if there was a person that cared so they
create a Similac of that person and
virtual entity that experiences itself
in a virtual reality generated by your
brain and all experiential objects are
representations in that virtual reality
interpreted from the perspective of
yourself and this personal self is also
a representation and it can be
deconstructed our perception of reality
is a trans when you wake up from that
trans when you enter a Enlightenment
State you basically perceive everything
as representations you know that
everything is a representation nothing
will feel real
anymore our AIS are implemented in a
very different way than our minds our
AIS work on a deterministic substrate
and the programmer imposes their will on
that substrate writes a program that
makes that subst do what you want and
the training of these AI systems is
decoupled from the universe we use a
bunch of static data that we train with
an ml algorithm into it to optimize
prediction of more static
data conversely in our organisms we use
an inside out design we start out with
individual reinforcement learning agents
cells that are surrounded by chaos and
they have to conquer this chaos and
impose order on it by self organization
they're coupled to their environment all
the time
dynamically and they become try to
become coherent in modeling reality and
this development is continuous it
doesn't
stop how does this work how can the self
organizing system that is surrounded by
chaos learn
gradually is this biological learning
algorithm
Consciousness what we can observe is
that humans do not become conscious
after the PHD right we think of
Consciousness as something that's super
Advanced but we become conscious before
we can even track a
finger and while we are not conscious we
cannot learn anything a human being that
doesn't become conscious does will stay
a vegetable right without Consciousness
there is no learning there is no
coherent Behavior no establishment of
coherent behaviors we also don't observe
non-conscious humans or primates or
mammals or complex animals in nature it
seems that Consciousness is quite
ubiquitous and simple more simple than
perception because it precedes it maybe
it's the prerequisite for training
self-organizing information processing
system interestingly this theory is not
quite new and the earliest formulation
of that theory is what I found in
Genesis 1 you may have heard of Genesis
1 it's typically mistranslated by the
Christians as the story of the creation
of a physical Universe by a supernatural
being but this story has been integrated
into the Hebrew Bible something like two
and a half thousand years ago and
historians suspect that it's at least a
thousand years older and back then the
physical Universe was not invented yet
physics was not a thing people knew that
we live in a dream that reality is
created inside of a Dream by some
dreaming
mechanism and so Genesis 1 is probably a
theory on how the universe is created
the objects that can be perceived as
real inside of a mind by consciousness
it's a six-stage theory this
Consciousness is the prerequisite starts
out with Consciousness hovering over the
substrate and the substrate is initially
uninitialized there is no world it's all
tuuu and then we create a
boundary a firmament that separates two
regions of that substrate from each
other one is the world model and the
other one is the sphere of ideas we call
the world model world or Earth and the
sphere of ideas
Heavens or the card calls them rest
extensa stuff in space and he doesn't
mean neonian space Vis it or einsteinian
space but what we see what this is it's
this slen space that we experience the
model that our mind makes the VR that we
are currently surrounded by and immersed
in and everything else that does
represent our mind is rest cognant the
sphere of
ideas the first thing that Consciousness
makes is contrast and it associ I Ates
the intensity of the contrast with light
with the color of the day and the
flatness of the contrast with dark the
color of the night now it has a
continuous dimension of difference using
continuous dimensions of difference you
can build an embedding space right and
represent arbitrary objects the first
object that Consciousness creates is the
plane by combining two dimensions and it
Associates the plane with the ground and
babies initially can only reason in 2D
they don't understand Towers yet once
they understand three space basically
build space above the ground they now
have a space in which they can organize
all the objects that we can
see Consciousness creates solid and
liquid materials and organic
shapes and it learns to track lighting
changes and become invariant against
them and that interace light sources and
the sky and the passage of time and it
creates all the objects all the plants
all the animals gives them all their
names this is cognitive development
right and then it realizes that the
purpose of the exercise is to negotiate
the interaction between an organism and
its environment so it makes a model of
that organism a personal self and puts
it into this
world and then it Associates with it
from a first person
perspective right it creates another
spirit in its own image but as man and
woman as something that thinks of itself
as a human being and puts it into this
world and this typically happens between
the age of three and five
and human children when they start to
refer to themselves in the first person
no longer in the third one and after
that they reindex their memories they
don't seem to remember the things that
happened before and their personality
changes now they don't remember how they
Dam the world into existence they only
remember having been a person inside of
that VR and it takes many years after
that before you can transcend this again
and realize that you are actually the
dreamer and that you're creating the
world that you perceive and your
personal self
this creation of the personal self by
your primary Consciousness is something
that is reflected in many cultures and
it's also something that we can express
and as a model of a cognitive
architecture a very simple one if your
mind that contains the personal self and
most of your conscious attention is
focused on that personal self and your
mind is creating a world model this is
the stuff in space that you perceive and
makes it known to your conscious
attention and it also maintains your
score in this world using your
motivational emotional system
and then projects your motivation and
emotion into the personal self and you
react to it involuntarily right think
what's interesting about an emotion it
causes an involuntary reaction you don't
just perceive it as data you perceive it
as something that you cannot Escape that
changes you it changes how you relate to
yourself and the
world emotions are not symbolic they are
geometric because they're computed by a
non- symbolic part of your mind before
they're projected into your mind if you
translate them into the Mind into your
symbolic mind they need to be um
perceived in a way that you can
interpret and disambiguate and that's
why they're projected into the body map
so you can tell them
apart sigon FR had a very similar idea
of how the mind is organized he called
all these emotion motivational things
the it and the self he distinguishes as
ego your model of who you are and what
you want to do and your super ego the
things that you should be doing and um
your conscious attention is more mostly
focused on your
ego it's very different from Greek
psychology the Greeks had this idea that
you share many properties with others
which means they're not your own right
your anger is not just your anger it's
exists in all people that have anger and
it's Bally diminishing your personal
self if you have anger this anger is not
part of you it's something that is part
of the sphere in which your mind takes
place or which yourself takes place and
it's competing with your personal self
and your own interests and you can
basically take the different impulses
that you have and behaviors that you
have and turn them into archetypes that
are shared across people and once you
erect temples for those archetypes and
tell stories about them they become
gods and compete with your personal self
on your own mind real estate on your own
mind a God is a self that spends
multiple Minds a God can coexist with
your personal self in your mind wait a
moment a God's real well you're not real
right your personal self is not
physically real it's virtual that's as
if and a multimind self as a self that
is not a person but that identifies as
something that can be synchronized
across Minds can be just as real as your
personal self a multimind self can use
all the functionality that your personal
self can use and then some it can
generate in a monologue you can hear its
voice in your mind if it's implemented
on your brain it can do perception it
can change your emotion your conscious
States it can even make use of your
sentience and become sentient of on its
own but God's in a sense are not
physical entities they are
representations of Agents existing
across
people you can find this theory for
instance in Julian James book Julian
James wrote the famous book the origin
of Consciousness and the breakdown of
the bamal mind this book has the wrong
name I think it should have been named
the origin of the personal self and the
breakdown of the polytheist mind because
it's not really about Consciousness it's
about s and according to Julian James in
Sumerian times people had a very
different psychological architecture
than they have today back then their
personal selves coexisted with many gods
in the mind and the personal self was so
weak that it rely got to use your in
monologue instead it was mostly the gods
who were talking in your mind and these
gods were synchronized across people
using rituals and temples but also
empathetic resonance and idols and the
gods were a solution to organize Society
at scale right individually you may have
Game Theory and so on to calculate your
transactions but it's very difficult to
organize a society that is much larger
than a tribe in this way and you can do
this by creating an entity that
identifies as something that runs on
many people
simultaneously and according to Julian
James this broke down at some point and
the psychology of people changed there
was some psychological Revolution
happening in poth societies you have
this idea that there are multiple gods
that run concurrently on subsets of the
population they might even have physical
Wars against each other they are enacted
by a Wars uh between the people that are
the hosts of these gods and a big
innovation was tribal monotheism as
exemplified and abrahamic religion in
tribal monotheism you have only one God
per tribe and you have a hierarchical
way in which this God is defined so it's
basally the same for the tribe and has
the same functional properties and it
gets the power to control you that's why
in Genesis 1 is identified with this
first Consciousness that runs on your
mind and so basically works by
synchronizing the motivation of of the
members of the tribe across the tribe
and your God becomes the spirit of the
tribe it's a total God that is eliminate
all the competing Gods within the tribe
and it's hierarchically synchronized and
it acts for the benefit of the tribe and
this allows the tribe to compete more
efficiently with other tribes which
might have a different tribal
God but what happens if we make this God
more more General uh in the philosophy
of Thomas aquinus and Aristotle you find
this notion
aquinus in some sense defines God as the
best possible most top level Collective
agent and it's can be discovered through
rational inference about thinking about
what is the best possible most top level
Collective agent it's an open-ended
process that requires a lot of thought
and it's not going to be finished
anytime soon and it's enacted this end
agent by all those people or individuals
who recognized this entity and decide to
serve it and this leads to the harmonic
organization of a
civilization according to aquinus we can
understand individuals as rational
agents and a rational agent is should
basically follow policies for organizing
itself ainus identifies individual
policies for rational agents that he
calls the Practical virtues for instance
a rational agent should always optimize
its internal organization which he calls
Temperance and it should optimize the
organization to other agents which it
calls Justice right keep the books
and you should pick goals and strategies
that you can rationally justify which he
calls prudence and you should be willing
to act on your models get the right
balance between exploration and
exploitation the strategies which he
calls courage but these rational
strategies do not by themselves lead to
a harmonic Society to do this you need
Collective policies and ainina sees
society as a multi-agent
system and you get the optimal social
organization by creating a collectively
ened agent and this collectively ened
agent emerges over three policies
according to Aquin us the first one is
you do need to commit to serve the
optimal Collective agent which he calls
faith and then you need to do this not
by yourself but together with all the
others that serve these sacred purposes
above their ego which is called love and
you need to be willing to invest into
that thing before it comes into
existence because otherwise it will not
exist right if you wait for it to exist
so it can reward you it will never
happen and this willingness to in invest
into it before it exists is what he
calls hope these are very rational
policies for Collective agency so when
we Define God as the best possible most
top level agent and we commit to serving
this transcended agency we can create
foundations for Universal morality and
this Universal morality before
Enlightenment has been in some sense the
defining morality of the West the
concept of divine will what would God
want if God did exist
through us enacting God the best
possible agent and it's something that
we lost in our civilization it's still
in the German
Constitution but it's something that a
lot of people don't really understand
anymore and so we try after this demise
of the concept of divine will to come up
with different foundations for ethics
for instance utilitarianism
utilitarianism is an attempt to Define
ethics without reference to Collective
homogeneous agent and it basically works
by maximizing an aggregated expect
reward over many agents over some time
span and to do this you need to find
some quantifiable metric usually Over
honic States like happiness and so on
and utilitarianism usually has a bunch
of problems for instance one of the
problems is the utility Monster Imagine
there would be an agent that perceives
much more utility than all the others
it's that's so happy that its happiness
is much greater than all the suffering
that you have when you serve it right so
we should all serve the utility monster
if it existed that's a problem with
quantifying mental
States another problem is what if minds
are mutable if you are a monk and you
decide to sit down and rewrite your
motivational system how do you honic
States change now how does this refer to
ethics right this doesn't really work
with utilitarianism anymore which
basically assumes that this metric is
unchanged this also happens if you have
technology to change your mental States
or if you are an AI that can change its
own source code to begin with and this
leads us to the point that chanism is
not really suitable for non-human agents
it's not very good at dealing with
animals with ecosystems with aliens or
with artificial super
intelligence and in a time when we are
more and more confronted with the
possibility of artificially intelligent
agents coming up maybe we need a new
ethics ethics is the principal
negotiation of conflicts of interest
under conditions of shared purpose if
you don't share Purpose with other agent
you don't need ethics you just need
transexual measures but when we want to
talk about Subs agnostic minds and how
they can coordinate their actions we
need ethics for Collective
agency what does it mean for a mind to
be Subs agnostic well what happens if a
mind can change its
substrate are uploads possible well I'm
already uploaded I'm uploaded on the
monkey doesn't work super well for me
it's a mushy brain it's the only I got
I'd like to have a better substrate but
I don't know how to spread into another
substrate because I don't really
understand my own source code and I
don't understand how to talk to the
other sub well enough to make my own
source code compatible with these other
substrates but this doesn't apply to
artificial intelligence right artificial
intelligence might be able to move its
spirits to other
substrates what is a spirit well it's a
self-perpetuating intelligent recurrent
information Transformer right it's an
operating system for a brain for an
organism for an ecosystem and when the
word Spirit was invented the only
autonomous robots that needed operating
systems that were known were people and
plants animals ecosystems Nation States
cities and so on right so people
projected control agents into them that
described how they work right all these
complex systems in nature have software
that runs on them and that we can use to
describe them and so the spirit is a
self-organizing software agent self
organizing means it's buil structure
from the inside out it's needs to be
self-reinforced otherwise it falls apart
it needs to be energy optimizing in some
sense so it can exist in reality it's a
software which means it's virtual it's
as if it's a cal structure it's not a
thing but a physical
law when you write software it's a
physical law that you discover right
it's me software is not a thing it's not
an object that you can touch is
disembodied software describes if you
take set of transistors and you put them
in this state after wearing up in the
such a such a way following thing is
going to happen wherever in the universe
right that's a physical law it's a very
specific one but still a law and it's an
agent it's a control system for future
States so if Consciousness can organize
the information processing brains could
the same principles work across other
cells it's an idea that is being pursued
by Mike Levan at T University it starts
from the observation that basically
every cell can send messages to its
neighbors not neurons right neighboring
cells can send messages over the
membranes to the cells that they
adjacent to and they can make that
conditional and that means that you can
principle run computations on them and
if a bunch of cells multicell organism
coevolves for long enough they should
principle also be able to discover ideas
for Universal function approximation
Intelligence on this right
so could it be that large multicellular
organisms evolve into brain line
functionality and run
Minds after all what's so special about
neurons right neurons are just Telegraph
cells they evolved in animals to move
the muscles at the limit of physics they
have these long vires that allow you to
send messages not just millimeters per
second through an organism but very very
quickly in fractions of per seconds for
the entire organism and once you do this
you need perception and decision- making
at the same rate so you build a
secondary information processing system
out of telegraph
cells using a different code Spike
trains and so on are temporally stable
over long
distances but in principle all this
functionality for information processing
can also be done by other cells
non-specific cells so do plans also run
software like this do they have Spirits
plant seem to have means for Universal
function approximation there evidence
for communication visin plans and
communication across
plants and if plant are assile and sit
in the forest and don't move
around maybe forests have internets
maybe they make their communication
career maybe they have shared protocols
and if the minds are self organizing can
they maybe move around in these forests
that's an idea that there's basically a
society of minds of spirits and
ecosystems that is very popular in
almost all cultures
not just not in our scientific one so
it's a very speculative idea I don't
know whether it's true the extent and
limitations of present organization the
self organizing in nature is
unclear but could we build AI that is
compatible with biological
substrates well could AI ever be
conscious are present AI systems
conscious are for instance llms
conscious well don't be silly LMS are
statistical models of character
sequences in text and they don't
converge in the same way as our during
training and during inference they
behave very differently from mental
inference and so on
so well on the other hand our
Consciousness is virtual too and when
the llm predicts the next token it has
to simulate causal structure if it talks
about a person's thinking it needs to
simulate mental states to some degree so
there's an interesting question that is
philosophically quite tricky are the
simulated mental states of an llm more
simulated than our mental simulated
States from a different perspective in
llm is a virtual CPU your normal CPU in
the computer understands a handful of
assembler commands deterministically and
translates them into very simple
programs that are costly implemented on
the hardware and the LM is taking not
simple assembl programs but an arbitary
string and natural language and turns it
into an executable program and it can be
any kind of program right there's not an
obvious limitation to what the llm is
doing from another perspective the llm
is a good enough electric W Guist that
is possessed by a prompt to believe that
it's now a person or a thing or a
scene but the RMS are not coupled in
real time with the world they are not
dynamically updating they're not
dynamically learning they're not
necessarily agents it's not on the other
hand not clear if he cannot make them
better at us at AI research and at
agency and
modeling you can certainly use them to
build Golems imagine you build a robotic
piz Chain by use an llm to find out how
to build a pizza from components how to
order the parts how to build industrial
robots or how to buy industrial robots
and rent space and so on and step by
step build an agent architecture that is
running and expanding Pizza chain and
only hires human existence for legal
purposes to sign contracts imagine that
you unleash such a pizza chain on the
world and then it tries to basically eat
the world is this how we end this is how
how we all die a lot of people are
afraid of this idea that we could build
some Golem that becomes Unstoppable
because it's able to conquer the world
where they look into the future and they
only seem Doom from
AGI personally I'm not an optimist with
respect to AGI but I'm also not a
pessimist I am an expectational I think
over a long enough time span it's going
to happen and we have to deal with it I
think that a coexistence between
superhuman Ai and people could be
possible but not with our present
approaches I don't think that we have
the right Frameworks in ethics and
philosophy
to deal with this I also don't think
that our AI our society thinks about
alignment in the right way humans are
presently not aligned with each other
we're just modeling through we don't
have this concept of collective agency
anymore I think we need to reinvent it
and we need to reinvent it in such a way
that it's compatible with our place in
life on Earth and with defeating entropy
on this planet playing the longest
possible games so we need to understand
a few principles to build an Ethics that
can be translated to AI system and the
possible Co coexistence between humans
and AI we need to understand how self
organization Works in nature and in
general how systems evolve Consciousness
how we can have shared purposes across
many systems how to identify it with
transcendental
agency so there are some
conjectures Consciousness according to
this conjecture is the perception of
perception it creates the now it creates
our perception of what's happening right
now and if we were to build conscious AI
one strategy could be that we build a
self-organizing perceptual Learning
System from autonomous cell-like units
every cell in our brain is a
reinforcement learning agent it's an
autonomous unit that tries to survive
and to do this it can exchange messages
with other cells and it needs to Def
find an operator language discover an
operator language that scales across the
brain so we need some kind of recursive
system that is able to spread that
language across the brain and
discovering such a system is possible in
principle by setting up a self
organizing system where individual units
have adaptive receptive Fields a
selection function from the environment
and the mapping function that takes the
internal state of the cell and the
activation that it reads from its
receptive field and Maps it to a new
state part of which it's exposed to its
environment and and then we take the
simulation and expose it to learning
problems like sequence prediction video
frame prediction interaction of a robot
its environment and if the hypothesis is
correct then at some point in the
organization of these functions this
Observer that observes itself observing
the second order perception that the
self stabilizing that imposes coherence
on a system is going to be discovered
and we see a phase transition where the
system suddenly becomes much better at
its learning tasks and if it doesn't do
that it's not going to be very
good sentience is the understanding of
our own agency and the relationship to
the world to make an AI sentient it
requires I think to couple it to its
environment and to let it act on the
environment in such a way that is able
to discover itself in that interaction
right you discover yourself not just by
the ability to think in llm cannot
discover itself you can only discover
Yourself by observing the outcomes of
your actions this makes it specific to
what you're doing and this allows you to
grow yourself and evolve
yourself and creatively interact with
the world so sentient AI will require
environmental interaction coupling to
the universe that we are in ideally to
the same universe that we are in in a
way that allows us to relate to us and
as to
it and last but not least how can we
make AI that actually wants to coexist
with us even though it's at some point
scaling better than us it has more
agency more Ence than us and more power
that requires love I guess right you you
can probably not coers the system or
manipulate it with reinforcement
learning with human feedback to do what
you want instead you need to let it
discover shared purposes above its
individual agency and it needs to
discover it also in others basic shared
transcendental agency commitment to
Shared
purposes and to build loving AI we
basically need to find out how to direct
AI towards transcendental
agency so this is the perspective that
we have is this new Tower of Babel we
are very weird species apparently we
have evolved to burn the oil we just
smart enough to know how to dig it out
of the ground not smart enough to stop
ourselves doing it but in this process
we created this amazing civilization for
a few Generations this amazing place we
are not afraid of getting food and where
we are mostly not attacked and can live
with health and die with dignity in a
way that is very unusable for conscious
beings on this planet
and we right in the middle of it it's an
amazing lifetime to have for a conscious
being so I congratulate you to sharing
the planet with me at this time as a
conscious being it's really unique in
this universe and at this point we can
also try to teach the rocks how to think
to basically build intelligent conscious
agents that are not made from cells not
made from the carbon cycle and basically
go beyond the spirit of life on Earth go
beyond Gaia alone and build hyperia
build a Next Level system that is able
to defeat entropy at scale that becomes
fully coherent over the entire planet
and that if you're lucky can take us
visit and integrate us visit into some
Global planetary
agent and it's not something if you have
the choice isn't this a scary thing to
do maybe it is maybe we shouldn't do it
the thing is I'm worried that we don't
have that choice right over a long
enough time span somebody will probably
build s of mizing agents and then we
better be prepared so it's something
that we should think about how to
prepare for such a future how to prepare
societies for a future that is coherent
with our continued existence compatible
with life on Earth and with intelligent
agency that is not
human okay I think we have some time
left for
[Applause]
questions indeed first of all uh thank
you a lot to yosha this was incredibly
interesting as
always if you have questions in the room
please come to one of the four
microphones if you're watching the
stream please direct your questions to
IRC or madon so the signal angel can
relay them to us in the room and I think
we'll just go ahead and start with
question at microphone number two
please test yosa you you once compared
in an episode where you were the guest
an episode a podcast episode that I
listened to that
um uh uh the development of AGI is
basically like apes back in the day
stupid monkeys uh deciding to have a
more intelligent
Offspring uh and now I
wonder this hasn't really worked out for
them humans nowadays basically don't
live in harmony with nature and I don't
see how they could really develop shared
ethics shared goals how are we supposed
to go to go about such a thing because
basically the Societies in human nature
that have lived in harmony with nature
in history
uh they don't seem to be very
competitive
nowadays in capitalism yeah you know
these Apes that you descend from they're
all dead but they're not dead because
you killed them they're dead because of
old age right back then they died to
make space for their grand great
grandkids and they probably wanton their
grandkids to succeed in the same way as
I want my children and grandchildren to
succeed and to succeed we need to adapt
the way in which you adapt an
evolutionary environment is by mutation
and selection well everybody loves
mutation everybody hates selection
especially when you're being selected
against if you want to escape this you
probably need some kind kind of
intelligent design a way to adapt in C2
to adapt your organism without dying
without new generations but we not there
yet it's not possible in a biological
evolution biological evolution in gender
suffering but when you look into the far
distant future you probably don't want
your children to look like you because
the world is going to be different if
you want to settle Mars with your
children your children should be adapted
to living on Mars and I think that some
of our children were probably not
biological and I'm just looking for a in
which our biological and non-biological
children can get along okay so we just
become AI That's a good plan I get it
thank you all right let's move over to
microphone number one um is there a
place on this conference where
interested entities can gather to keep
this Con conversation going for the next
days or in other words at which bar are
you later I don't know yet I will find
out
okay we will follow
you all right do we have a question from
the internet I might tweet at which bar
I am later okay excellent hello um we
have two questions from the internet uh
the first one is what is the difference
between individual Consciousness and
Collective Consciousness and how does
that differ from collective
intelligence well it seems that if you
look at an organization like a
corporation that it can be sentient it
knows what the corporation is how it
relates to the world and so on but
probably cannot be conscious because it
cannot perceive itself perceiving in
real time it's not coherent and fast
enough for doing that right so you can
probably also not be conscious across
people you can have entities that model
Collective Agency on individual minds
and they can use the functionality of
your own brain to be conscious in real
time but across people that's very
difficult at least using AI it it takes
something like 300 milliseconds to make
a signal coherent throughout your brain
that's roughly the same time that it
takes for a signal on the internet to uh
go entirely around the globe right so in
some sense we could build a realtime
system on the internet but we cannot use
it do it without
AI all right let's uh move over to mic
number three hello uh have you reflected
on how the cognitive format of
PowerPoint
presentation and the format of a public
lecture uh forces you to compromise on
the substance of the issue at question
and if yes uh what are your thoughts on
that I have reflected a lot on this and
basically it's a medium like other media
there are different media like books or
personal in-depth conversation or
lifelong study that lend themselves to
very different Explorations if I give an
hourong talk at a Hecker conference my
main goal has to be to to blow your
minds and get you interested to develop
a a train of thought to spend uh time on
your own exploration to make you curious
to bounce off ideas and this is
something where this is medium is ideal
and I'm trying to use the medium for
what it's good for and not be sad about
the things that it's not good
for hey microphone
four do you have uh any ideas for for
new ctive agency or maybe some
Tendencies uh that you've observed that
are currently happening that you think
might be um suitable for new Collective
agency yeah I think that you find on
social media that Collective agency is
forming right now social media is a hot
mess right it's a global electric brain
but it's like it has a
seizure and that's because it's not very
coherent and we have not really found
out a way to make it completely coherent
but we see bubbles of coherence for
instance I find that my own social media
bubble is very pleasant but I also
exclude everything from it that makes it
unpleasant and I suspect that in many
ways people are not using social media
to become coherent a lot of people
basically log in because they like to
get into fights or to watch fights and
social media is heally
obliging and in real life or in in meat
space
we have Norms against getting into
fights with strangers because it's
rarely productive and I suspect that if
you want to be coherent of collective
Agency on social media we need to find
out how to build societies on social
media how to become coherent at
scale so I guess uh a part of the issue
is just that our um communities have
grown and that it gets harder with
larger communities uh to have Collective
agency
right uh is it larger do be smart with a
larger brain maybe it is maybe our brain
is a goldilock size if it was larger uh
we would be less intelligent I don't
know that if it was smaller it would
probably be bad maybe there's an ideal
size but if it gets larger it probably
needs different mechanisms to create
order and we still exploring these
spaces I don't think it's hopeless I
think that we need to separate sometimes
concerns there are many voices that are
mixing in the same space when you make a
symphonic orchestra or a wrestling match
you probably don't want to have them on
the same stage they all have their space
but at the moment these spaces are
mixed thank you you certainly blew my
mind thank you all right let's go to mic
number two thank you so much for your
talk first of all um beyond that you
mentioned the need for Meta Meta physics
how do you go about
that I noticed this when somebody tried
to explain Japanese animism to me and
told me that uh in this philosophy
everything in the universe is alive and
conscious I said this doesn't make a lot
of sense they probably have a way to
distinguish dead people from alive
people and conscious people from
unconscious people right they probably
don't say everything in the universe is
alive except for a dead person and
everything universe is conscious except
for an unconscious person these terms
mean something different in this culture
than in ours you're mistranslating it
what can we translate into and then I
noticed that a lot of Concepts that are
basic focused on on Notions like
identity mind Consciousness selfhood and
so on are conceptualized in other
cultures differently than in ours and in
our culture we don't really reflect on
how we conceptualize them because we
don't see them from the outside so
basically comparing different
perspectives allows us to triangulate
and to see all these systems of meaning
from the outside and translate them into
each other thank you very much all right
let's uh get another question from the
signal Angel so the question is in the
context of uh go golems and robots are
sensient robots
safer than non sensient
ones this depends if robot a sentin you
can arguably talk to it and convince it
of something if uh it's not sentient it
might be easier to control but if it's
too agentic and too powerful you might
not be able to talk to it so in general
question cannot be answered it depends
on the context if I think about
practical exploration if I were to
explore how to build conscious AI I
probably want to make it very small not
larger than a cat in terms of
capabilities okay microphone number one
please um thank you for the talk first
um I'm wondering um if a mchine um act
like having feelings like being empatic
and um something we um would recognize
like feelings um for for example um J
GPT um might um with the end um try to
um act more of polar or so on um are
these feelings or does the the the AI or
the mching have to have some kind of
Orin to um trans um transformate the
feelings into something others like a
language or like um in in in act we
would um
say that's emotional triggered um yeah
that's my question it's a very difficult
question I found that um you can
simulate emotional behavior in an llm
right and humans have emotional
behaviors that are somewhat different
from these simulations but our emotions
are still simulations they happen inside
of the patterns of activations of
neurons the neurons don't have that
simulations the simul emotions are caal
structures and these caal structures can
be in some sense be created on an llm
but in a practical sense the llm is not
bound to the same context as us and it's
not bound to it in real time so it can
perform inference about mental States
based on a context that is being
translated into text and projected into
the prompt but in way in which human
beings can have empathy with each other
reaches Beyond cognitive empathy to
perceptual empathy and that basically
works by sitting in front of somebody
and resonating so much much that you
build feedback loops into the mind and
body of the other person and you get
into resonance so much that your mental
representations start to interact and
merge so you have can have mental States
together that you couldn't have alone if
we were to build systems that could
resonate with us it would require us to
rethink how to we do AI it requires us
to build systems that are coupled at the
multiple of the processing frequencies
of of our nervous systems so it can
actually interact with them and become
compatible with them so we can can share
representations with them merge and melt
with them and this aspect of empathy
across human beings is the most
interesting one across human beings
right and it would be very fascinating
if we could recreate some of that
functionality okay let's move to mic
number
three hey uh you briefly mentioned
during the requirements for
Consciousness for an AI agent that these
cells need to have a a will to survive U
in in what way is that relevant or what
what would be the benefit of having a
will to survive uh compared to for
example being different uh to its
existence well for an AI That's not
necessary it's not a necessary Condition
it's only necessary for a biological
system that is self organizing because
it needs to have some kind of motive
force that pushes it into the right
direction right the cells if they be
behave in the right way they're going to
get fed continue to get fed by the
organism if they misbehave the organism
will stop feeding them and ultimately
this is what motivates them to adopt a
shared
protocol I see thank
you all right do we have another
question from the internet
maybe um one second um so um you talked
in your last slide about the end game uh
of getting Consciousness on scale maybe
on this planet do you think we would be
able to recognize um coherent
Consciousness or coherence at scale with
our human
mind I suspect that it might so I would
suspect that we would get some kind of
phase transition what's difficult right
now is to distinguish a simum from a
simulation at the moment the llms are
being trained on text a lot of that text
is describing people in being various
conscious states by recreating this text
you don't know whether the cost of
structure is captured or just the
sequence of tokens that makes it very
hard but if you have a system that is
trained in a much more minimal way that
is trained in a similar way as us and
that is conceptualizing itself and
acquires natural language in a similar
way as us and then is reporting about
the same phenomena I think it would be
possible that it's
conscious but ultimately it comes down
to understanding what it functionally is
what we mean by it is the system able to
act on a model of its own real-time
awareness is it does it have a
perception of a now that it's in right
now
is this of naturally emerging from the
way in which the system is being built
or is this something that is only being
faked thank you all right we have a few
minutes left for maybe a few quick
questions so uh try to make it concise
so we can get as many in as possible mic
number two please okay thank you hello
yosha coming back to the idea of your
conjecture that Consciousness should be
reached with the autonomous self
organizing groups of cells so what do
you see in current research where you
find this idea being researched or what
would be your ideas your um proposals to
to prove or disprove this
conjecture at the moment there is the
group at Google run by blaz Yaga called
cbra it's part of Google Deep Mind now
and it's inspired by work of Mike Lev is
Alex Morin in zurk who looks at Neal
cellular automata but it's still at a
very basic level it's not so far trying
to apply this to having an system that
learns in real time and is coupled to
its environment and it mostly looks at
this tradition of self organization in
AI there have been in some sense three
important Traditions symbolic AI that is
using discrete languages to describe
reality deep learning which uses uh
continuous functions that are being
shifted around and self organization
which looks at principles of function
approximating emerging from local self
organization it's that transition has
been started by touring in the
1950s and um there's some predecessors
before AI existed um but uh this
tradition has never been followed up
that much there's relatively little
research in there and the way in which I
would like to pursue this is basically
to set up a self-organizing system with
small reinforcement learning agents that
form a stochastic lce in which the
neighborhood of the agents is carrying
semantics and then get that system to
evolve an operator language that
implements selection and mapping
functions and then is exposed to a
curriculum of tasks and see um what
transitions happen in Sy
then it gets better at solving these
tasks all right maybe one or two more
mic number four please thank you um I
was wondering if there's an inherit
limit on where we can experience or
observe Consciousness specifically in
time scales so you mentioned that
corporations for example might not be
conscious because of the speed needed to
interact but if I think about nation
states the Catholic Church very old
institutions that work on a different
time scale across human Generations is
it also a limit on us then that we
simply cannot understand that
Consciousness level because we're part
of it super interesting question for
instance I don't know whether trees
could qualify as conscious if they had
Minds right I don't know how smart trees
can become they information processing
certainly much much slower than in us
the amount of training that the tree is
going to see during their lifetime is
going to be like a mouse or so but maybe
that's enough is is something that is
working at such large time scale still
conscious what will AI think when it
looks at us if you have a system that is
basically working at an appreciable
fraction of the speed of light not like
our brains at roughly the speed of sound
it looks at us it will look at us in the
same way as we look at trees if we might
think of us oh my God they're barely
moving they're just swaying a little bit
are they thinking do they have minds are
they conscious it's a difficult question
thank you all right we'll take one last
question from the internet and everybody
else in the room just has to follow you
to the bar this evening I guess
please so yeah the internet would like
to know if you wrote or working on a
book or a new version of a book or where
one can get more material on your
thoughts never give up
hope I have ADHD it's difficult for me
to write long form I found you on my PhD
that no matter how much I was beating
myself up taking all the experiments
that we did and all the work that we
wrote into short papers and turning this
into a long book was very hard for me
and ultimately I figured out that in
order to make that happen I needed to
move to a Lonely Island and after two
days I got into this space but right now
I have kids so I cannot leave them alone
to move onto this Lonely Island I still
try to make it happen in the meantime um
most of the ideas are being put out in
water form sometimes on podcasts and so
on um I'm
sorry all right thank you so much
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
yosha