Consider worldbuilding as as urge in itself more than a need for shelter. In how this works/originates consider mother "making special" for children (by Ellen Dissanyake).
"Sharing requires an ability to to imagine things from another’s
point of view. And to imagine a world in which others can do
that too. At some point the capacity grown in a larger group of
humans all with well-developed theory of minds, lead to an
egalitarian overthrowing of alpha dominance, or at least a restriction of those tendencies, and the creation of the world as
we know it, sometime in the Paleolithic. Out of the crude politics of the primate troop a morally urging creature pulled itself
up out of the in-fighting. Humans did this themselves."
Beautiful. I particularly like this in contrast to Hoel's Gossip Trap, which explains the Sapient Paradox by saying humans are nasty gossips that efficiently keep one another down. Two very different versions of humanity
denigrating gossip is what (covert) narcissists engage in when you are not in the room and there is a perceived or merely a potential gain/benefit, especially in a social hierarchy. it is unlikely to build a world in and of itself. (I am in [at least] two minds as to whether grandiose narcissistic psychopaths are recidivists or latter-day parasites.)
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
>It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding.
Probably worth noting that the Eve Theory of Consciousness is really (at least for now) a theory of the evolution of self-awareness. I think it has implications for the Artificial Intelligence, because it updates the view of our n = 1 example of intelligence. Humans' progression was more FOOM than we thought. The second we got recursion the growth curve was exponential. There was no 100,000 year latency period.
That said, the proof pudding will be made of genetics, linguistics and archeology rather than building a conscious being from scratch.
I am, obviously, interested in more formal theories of consciousness as well as arguments about how to test them. Thanks for the link and the explanation!
10k years or even 50k is not much time at all in evolutionary, geological or astronomical time. A blip. Mind blowing when you think about it. We literally just started. but perhaps the "compression of time" is a real phenomena and as predicted by McKenna we ran out of novelty in 2012 and are slowly dissolving - this singularity phenomenon being the Great Filter all species face which is why we don't see (humanish) aliens landing on our lawns.
Personally I think AI is the only shot at saving us from the Idiocracy timeline and subsequent Fischerian devolution back into the primordial soup. (I write a lot about this theme here and on X)
It seems that if we did evolve language recently, then where human civilization bottoms out is not as low as the archeology indicates. IE, that there is basically no way we go back to the Paleolithic. And that even close-extinction events will be bounced back from faster. So yeah, that's not exactly a good scenario. But it seems to me there is a natural floor above "primordial soup"
While I've heard the theory of the "internal voice" being mistaken for God I've never heard it explained as the precedent for the story of Genesis like this. Great read, I'm recommending this one
I just skimmed his interview with Peterson. I would say some of it is over-wrought for my taste. I, obviously, have great respect for myths and the Bible in particular. But I don't think that everything necessarily has symbolic meaning. For example both he and I are willing to speculate on why Adam names the animals. He thinks this is because men are all about order and systematizing (and maybe they are). I think it's because men, as hunters, named all of the animals even before they had a sense of self, or in other words before they left Eden. Simple language precedes self-awareness, and for men this was mostly used to catalogue animals.
Jun 7, 2023·edited Jun 7, 2023Liked by Andrew Cutler
My translation: "In the beginning, Language existed, and Language was synonymous with God, for Language was divine." God declared, "Let there be light," and light came into being, followed by the creation of animals, the sky, and so on. The linguistic concepts (labels) for these things did not yet exist in our minds. Once a label, like "water," was assigned to a "shape" in our mind, it probably felt like it was "created".
And the Petersen, I've no idea if he is a narcissist, but they tend to say stuff like the way trolls scatter gravel to see what hits and hurts, for the LOLS, and remember even a broken analog clock is right twice a day. Narcissists lack empathy (yes its a spectrum) and thus we already have LLMs walking around in human flesh. A narcissist's worldbuilding is restricted to their own good self, which is why narcissists never lie, they never tell the truth either, as that is what other people do, they are the world, they are truth, their word is truth (this is why they just say stuff and when it's right on the mark is completely accidental).
Consider worldbuilding as as urge in itself more than a need for shelter. In how this works/originates consider mother "making special" for children (by Ellen Dissanyake).
For my start in worldbuilding as an urge, see, https://www.academia.edu/40978261/Why_we_should_an_introduction_by_memoir_into_the_implications_of_the_Egalitarian_Revolution_of_the_Paleolithic_or_Anyone_for_cake
followed up at https://whyweshould.substack.com (I write on the… ---gap quite a bita bit).
"Sharing requires an ability to to imagine things from another’s
point of view. And to imagine a world in which others can do
that too. At some point the capacity grown in a larger group of
humans all with well-developed theory of minds, lead to an
egalitarian overthrowing of alpha dominance, or at least a restriction of those tendencies, and the creation of the world as
we know it, sometime in the Paleolithic. Out of the crude politics of the primate troop a morally urging creature pulled itself
up out of the in-fighting. Humans did this themselves."
Beautiful. I particularly like this in contrast to Hoel's Gossip Trap, which explains the Sapient Paradox by saying humans are nasty gossips that efficiently keep one another down. Two very different versions of humanity
denigrating gossip is what (covert) narcissists engage in when you are not in the room and there is a perceived or merely a potential gain/benefit, especially in a social hierarchy. it is unlikely to build a world in and of itself. (I am in [at least] two minds as to whether grandiose narcissistic psychopaths are recidivists or latter-day parasites.)
Let's not pathologize it! Dunbar treats gossip as a building block of language/society
But yes, speak kind words of one another
I agree, I should have bracketed. [denigrating-gossip] vis-a-vis…
the gossip is strong in this one
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
>It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding.
Probably worth noting that the Eve Theory of Consciousness is really (at least for now) a theory of the evolution of self-awareness. I think it has implications for the Artificial Intelligence, because it updates the view of our n = 1 example of intelligence. Humans' progression was more FOOM than we thought. The second we got recursion the growth curve was exponential. There was no 100,000 year latency period.
That said, the proof pudding will be made of genetics, linguistics and archeology rather than building a conscious being from scratch.
I am, obviously, interested in more formal theories of consciousness as well as arguments about how to test them. Thanks for the link and the explanation!
10k years or even 50k is not much time at all in evolutionary, geological or astronomical time. A blip. Mind blowing when you think about it. We literally just started. but perhaps the "compression of time" is a real phenomena and as predicted by McKenna we ran out of novelty in 2012 and are slowly dissolving - this singularity phenomenon being the Great Filter all species face which is why we don't see (humanish) aliens landing on our lawns.
Personally I think AI is the only shot at saving us from the Idiocracy timeline and subsequent Fischerian devolution back into the primordial soup. (I write a lot about this theme here and on X)
Have you looked at Kirkegaard's paper on recent selection for IQ and against schizophrenia: https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/what-do-ancient-genomes-show-about
It seems that if we did evolve language recently, then where human civilization bottoms out is not as low as the archeology indicates. IE, that there is basically no way we go back to the Paleolithic. And that even close-extinction events will be bounced back from faster. So yeah, that's not exactly a good scenario. But it seems to me there is a natural floor above "primordial soup"
While I've heard the theory of the "internal voice" being mistaken for God I've never heard it explained as the precedent for the story of Genesis like this. Great read, I'm recommending this one
From the perspective of an autistic person, the PFP looks a lot like social intelligence.
Very cool read. Excited to dive more into what you're doing.
I'm curious if you've read Matthieu Pague's book "The Language of Creation" and what your thoughts are.
Thanks!
I just skimmed his interview with Peterson. I would say some of it is over-wrought for my taste. I, obviously, have great respect for myths and the Bible in particular. But I don't think that everything necessarily has symbolic meaning. For example both he and I are willing to speculate on why Adam names the animals. He thinks this is because men are all about order and systematizing (and maybe they are). I think it's because men, as hunters, named all of the animals even before they had a sense of self, or in other words before they left Eden. Simple language precedes self-awareness, and for men this was mostly used to catalogue animals.
Ironically, I'm more literal than he is. I think the Bible has a lot of good things to say about meaning and psychology. But some things aren't metaphorical! There was actually a snake https://vectors.substack.com/p/the-snake-cult-of-consciousness
My translation: "In the beginning, Language existed, and Language was synonymous with God, for Language was divine." God declared, "Let there be light," and light came into being, followed by the creation of animals, the sky, and so on. The linguistic concepts (labels) for these things did not yet exist in our minds. Once a label, like "water," was assigned to a "shape" in our mind, it probably felt like it was "created".
And the Petersen, I've no idea if he is a narcissist, but they tend to say stuff like the way trolls scatter gravel to see what hits and hurts, for the LOLS, and remember even a broken analog clock is right twice a day. Narcissists lack empathy (yes its a spectrum) and thus we already have LLMs walking around in human flesh. A narcissist's worldbuilding is restricted to their own good self, which is why narcissists never lie, they never tell the truth either, as that is what other people do, they are the world, they are truth, their word is truth (this is why they just say stuff and when it's right on the mark is completely accidental).