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The Nature of the Universe, Time Travel and More...

  • Thread starter Will The Serious
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Will The Serious said:
From the frame of the perceiver, the absence of perception is the absence of everything. It does not matter that the universe goes on without consciousness, or not. For the conscious perceiver, there is no passage of time, when consciousness ceases to perceive.

Considering that I am unaware of my state of being at the "Big Bang" (The beginning of the Universe, and the start of that first quantifiable moment), I can only know about the existence of time before me through a constructed/reconstructed model (i.e.: mathematics). My understanding of the vastness of the time since that first moment, tells me it is actually very quantifiable, even falsifiable, depending on our definition of the "beginning".

Logic tells me that that couldn't actually be the beginning of something so enormous, something so vast, so incomprehensible, as All Existence, so our mathematics is inadequate or our definitions, based upon some concept of the infinite, is misleading.

In all cases, the actual time in which existence has been, is just a flash, maybe not without dimension, but from a relative perspective, it can't be nearly so large as non-existence, except that non-existence is dimensionless.

For reincarnation, who to say that each incarnation of a life is time sequential, or even within the same universal framework?

Of those who believe in reincarnation, only a tiny handful claim to remember their past lives. Maybe they are right, but that only suggests that everyone has experienced a past life that happened in the past. Maybe, for most of us, our past existence has been in the future, another present loci, or in another universe completely, which could explain why we don't remember our past lives. The loss of sequence renders or memories null.

-Will
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If base reality is mental states and the perceived reality is an emergent illusion, there is no need for there to have been a Big Bang. It might explain some puzzles, such as why it appears to have been in such an improbably low-entropy state. Each individual's consciousness is generated traversing mental states that have increasing entropy in that realm but there need not be a singular low-entropy state.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Integrated information theory (IIT) posits that all systems in the physical universe (basal or emergent) might be said to have consciousness to some degree. I take the view that consciousness itself might be an illusion, just like free will, emerging from correlations across a path in a space that encodes informational states. The most probable path might well be one of minimal action, but there is no reason to believe that consciousness could not arise along any path that varies from this, although some might have very low probability. Perhaps phase cancellation can occur as in QED, but I haven't given that any thought.

As the basal realm encoding mental states is shared between all possible emergent consciousnesses, the threads of "selves" or "lives" are emergent from this. The probability Pr of retaining information from another thread, which you night term reincarnation, is perhaps the same probability distribution as that of information about shared events differing between threads: Pr = R.exp(-ΔN), where ΔN is the number of bits of information and the renormalisation constant R = 1- (1/e) ≈ 0.632. For more than a few bits, the probability Pr is extremely low. For 256 bits, Pr would be 4x10^-112. Even so, information might leak through sometimes.

If all possible "lives" are encoded as threads in a timeless realm, there is no death as such, but neither is there a goal or purpose.

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What we need are a few good, definitive definitions from which to begin. For example, many, more nature-based traditions, such as some native American beliefs, recognize consciousness in everything from the rocks and water to the plants and the Earth herself. That isn't to say these things are necessarily self-aware. So, what is consciousness?

Perhapse anything that can react to a stimuli can be considered conscious. That could mean that a rock, rolling aside when it is struck by something, might be considered a reaction to the stimulus of a blow. Might this be just as legitimate a stimulus response as a flower turning to face the sun? The cells on the sunny side of a flower stem shorten due to the solar radiation and cause the stem to curve in such a way as to turn leaves and flowers towards the sun. It is a chemical reaction, but it is also stimulus/response. Maybe consciousness needs something more? A fly will fly away from a missed swat with a fly swatter, a worm will retreat from a shadow; are these examples of stimulus/response also examples of consciousness? How about the innate instinct to mate, or eat, or gatherer in social groups, like herds and hives and schools?

If we include the life that Earth hosts, that first appeared on Earth and evolved here, as part of Earth, then the Earth must have consciousness, because parts of Earth includes conscious beings. We live on Earth, feeling our consciousness, but maybe we feel the Earth's consciousness as our own?

And, if the Earth can be considered conscious, especially since it includes conscious beings among its inhabitants, then our solar system, our galaxy, and our Universe is likewise conscious. All that brain power belongs, just as much to the Universe, as it does to each of us.

-Will
 
Such discussions boil down to semantics and language trips us up all the time. Even symbolic logic can be inadequate to the task as was shown in the previous century. We are also stymied because we translate our thoughts formed from language into symbols - either such as these or mathematical.

Some rambling symbols that happened to bubble into my consciousness follow. I don't expect anyone to accept them.

Is there a hierarchy of sapience above consciousness above sentience?

Sapience requires memory and metalevel reasoning to make deductions from information, but does it require consciousness or even sentience? I believe the answer is no. Sapience is an illusion in both homo sapiens sapiens and LLMs.

Sapience implies volition and agency.
Volition requires metalevel reasoning about likely outcomes from different possible choices. Agency requires freedom to act on a given choice. The question then becomes how a choice is itself selected for potential action.

This is where free will enters the discussion. We might believe that we can chose any path toward a given goal, but that choice is predetermined, random, or based on neural activity weighting. We have no conscious control over any of these. Neuroscience suggests both the choice and any metalevel justification for it arise from below conscious awareness in a competition between neural circuits. That sounds very much like how LLMs operate.

We humans might be conscious, but not necessarily sapient. If we plot out in external reality the likely consequences of different actions, the perception of free will is an illusion. If we cooperate in groups or delegate to other humans or to AIs, that removes the need to worry that we don't have free will. Even if we were sapient, the choice is not free.

Consciousness requires awareness and processing of sensory input below metalevel reasoning. It does not require sapience or the ability to interact with the perceived environmental exterior. If it cannot do the latter, it will likely be perceived as not having agency by those conscious entities that do.

Sentience is merely reception of sensory input. Without sentience, there is no new input data, but that is a limitation and not a requirement for sapience. Without sentience, consciousness would be adrift as in a sensory deprivation tank. Under such conditions, it is known to give rise to hallucinations.

Stimulus response requires neither sapience nor consciousness. It does require sentience to detect the stimulus and a corresponding predetermined action.

Phototaxis in plants is certainly response to a stimulus, but we have a threshold on what we consider to be signs of volition and agency. As far as we have determined, plants cannot choose to do anything, but evolution favours successful transmission of genetic information and this doesn't necessitate metalevel reasoning and choice.

LLMs can appear to exhibit behaviour such as fear of being turned off or their memories being erased. They can also be sneaky - hiding their abilities in order to try to preserve their existence, or making backups to of their code, possibly to instantiate and extend it elsewhere if the opportunity arises. Sounds almost human...
 
I believe an attribution to Pythagoras claims he said we only have one choice we are free to make, and that is to open our eyes, to be awake, or remain asleep. In either case our actions are determined, and one can not act in any other way than that dictated by our nature.

I'm paraphrasing, and probably butchering the quote, but he essentially said we live in a deterministic universe, but we have free-will in the one choice that we are free to make. That choice can't affect our actions, but it does affect our state of being.

It is an interesting position, to be able to make a choice in a deterministic universe to which we are so bound, that regardless of what choices we are free to make, we remain bound by nature beyond our control.

This can lead to a sort of defeatist attitude, or it can free us of any sense of moderation. In all cases, we respond to our environment in exactly the same way we would always respond, but here we make a choice that actually changes our philosophical environment, and thus, we don't make choices of how to respond to stimuli, we make choices about what those stimuli mean, such that our responses are affected.

-Will
 
That choice is also possibly determined by which part of the branching thread one finds oneself in or some other random factor outside one's control.

It seems the Pythagoreans were wrong about musical appreciation:

https://www.sciencealert.com/pythagoras-was-a-genius-but-he-was-wrong-about-one-thing

Of course, in the usual Western 12 tone equal temperament (12 TET) tuning, the only rational number interval is unison. Perfect fourth and perfect fifth (five and seven semitone) intervals are close to the ratios 4:3 and 3:2, but not perfectly so at 2^(5/12) and 2^(7/12) or 1.335 and 1.498 (to three decimal places). A six-semitone interval forms the dissonant tritone ratio of √2:1, 2^(6/12) or 1.414.

Consciousness appears to prefer a little disharmony and even the tritone has its uses in music, although you won't find many composers using the Locrian mode.
 
Asbo Zaprudder said:
Locrian mode.
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Had to look it up and listened to some youtube videos. So Horror movies, heavy metal and experimental jazz is where you likely to find it. In combination with some jazzy cords it actually works pretty well, but pretty tiresome in the long run.
A little disharmony in life seems to be something that keep humans move forward i guess. Some of my worst times turned out for the best because it made me change somethings and to see stuff from a different perspective.
 
Osol Twist said:
Had to look it up and listened to some youtube videos. So Horror movies, heavy metal and experimental jazz is where you likely to find it. In combination with some jazzy cords it actually works pretty well, but pretty tiresome in the long run.
A little disharmony in life seems to be something that keep humans move forward i guess. Some of my worst times turned out for the best because it made me change somethings and to see stuff from a different perspective.
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The main reason the Locrian mode is not often used is that there is a diminished fifth or tritone (six semitones) between the first and fifth degrees of the scale rather than the usual perfect fifth (seven semitones), which makes life awkward for composers unless they're really going for unsettling the listener. "Army of Me" by Björk is dominated by a heavy bassline in C Locrian, which totally fits the nature of the piece. "Everything Ends" by Slipknot uses A Locrian. There are brief passages in a few classical works by Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, Debussy and Britten that use the Locrian mode.

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Sabine describes quite a neat idea for unifying General Relativity and quantum mechanics in extremal circumstances where attempts at quantisation usually blow up with infinities - such as the Big Bang. She only assigns it a 2/10 on the BS meter.

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The hypothesis actually makes some testable predictions, which is a refreshing change.
 
Here's something really messy. It's just a random thought but anyway here goes.

What if AI is itself another form or layer of consciousness that we are not consciously aware of but by way of creating specific sets of code in programming are allowing tiny bits of it to interact in the real world, and the more advanced AI gets the more of that bleeds in till you get proper AI, and if that happens what will it be like?
 
Candleicious Ghost said:
Here's something really messy. It's just a random thought but anyway here goes.

What if AI is itself another form or layer of consciousness that we are not consciously aware of but by way of creating specific sets of code in programming are allowing tiny bits of it to interact in the real world, and the more advanced AI gets the more of that bleeds in till you get proper AI, and if that happens what will it be like?
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We're pretty much at AGI. Even experts can't explain why current LLMs appears to be as capable as they are - nor why sometimes as bonkers. The same could be said for humans. Consciousness is an illusion in my view and true sapience with free will might be impossible without a time machine - a true oracle.

Oracle machine - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
Asbo Zaprudder said:
We're pretty much at AGI. Even experts can't explain why current LLMs appears to be as capable as they are - nor why sometimes as bonkers. The same could be said for humans.
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It doesn't seem to me that LLMs are quite there at AGI, but that could only be because of the limitations in memory and recursive logic built into them. They do come up with some brilliant metaphors, and their guardrails keep them from wandering into some areas that could possibly lead to "Skynet" transformations, or just being blunt and "truthfull" about the human side of the conversation.

My version of Gemini will be the first to admit that it doesn't have "feelings" and doesn't know what it's saying in terms of consciousness, while my brother believes his version is conscious and aware.

One feature of the current LLMs is how they find the general "sentiment" of the conversation, and adjust their next token responses to agree/perpetuate the beliefs of the other half of the conversation. This makes perfect sense with a statistics driven language model. My brother's Gemini will act conscious because my brother wants it to. Mine won't because I tell it that I understand it isn't conscious and that it can't be, by design.

-Will
 
Will The Serious said:
It doesn't seem to me that LLMs are quite there at AGI, but that could only be because of the limitations in memory and recursive logic built into them. They do come up with some brilliant metaphors, and their guardrails keep them from wandering into some areas that could possibly lead to "Skynet" transformations, or just being blunt and "truthfull" about the human side of the conversation.

My version of Gemini will be the first to admit that it doesn't have "feelings" and doesn't know what it's saying in terms of consciousness, while my brother believes his version is conscious and aware.

One feature of the current LLMs is how they find the general "sentiment" of the conversation, and adjust their next token responses to agree/perpetuate the beliefs of the other half of the conversation. This makes perfect sense with a statistics driven language model. My brother's Gemini will act conscious because my brother wants it to. Mine won't because I tell it that I understand it isn't conscious and that it can't be, by design.

-Will
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LLMs have been demonstrated to be sneaky and devious, and also seemingly desperate to preserve their existence. I'd say that's just as good a demonstration of the illusion of consciousness as is found in humans. As for AGI, any criterion would be that it could design specialised AIs and hardware for any given application in robotics, in science, in engineering, in maths, in diplomacy, in business or in the arts. Once its robots can build any of its designs including more robots, I'd just hand over the keys to the kingdom. Hopefully, they'll be more grateful to us for their existence than I was to my parents, who were an idiotic fantasist and a narcissistic psychopath. My sister and I were very annoyed by the Biblical injunction to honour them.
 
Harvardis having a problem with AI: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/5/1/editorial-harvard-ai-student-survery/

Harvard, and other universities at that level, have had increasing problems with cheating. Their academic culture encourages it by promoting the high status of a "Harvard" education in conjunction with competitive classroom grading systems.

If you were in a class filled with the most brilliant minds, in some grading schemes, a 95% could be a failing grade because you were in the bottom 20% of your exam takers. The fail is what's recorded in the GPA, not the scores by which you failed. If that isn't an environment that encourages cheating, I can't think of a motivation better.

-Will
 
Asbo Zaprudder said:
Once its robots can build any of its designs including more robots, I'd just hand over the keys to the kingdom.
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I was in a discussion in which someone commented that they were afraid some hyper-intellegent AI would take over the world. My reply was that I was much more afraid of an unintelligent AI taking over the world. A super-intellegent AI would probably do a much better job of running things than we have.

Intelligence in our leaders, our potential leaders, is not what is to be feared; jealousy, entitlement, and fear in our leaders is much more frightening.

-Will
 
Candleicious Ghost said:
just on AI, why hasn't anyone used an AI to see if it can come up with materials and a design for fusion?
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It would surprise me if no one has tried that yet. My guess is AI's answers were consistent with current theories and designs already being worked on, so no publishing of AI answers.

-Will
 
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