Monday, January 22, 2024
how to make something heavier.
I have always liked thinking about how you get a swing to go, without any external pushes. A dynamic not a static issue. And also the eqivalent problem of trying to balance while putting your sock on. Basically in practice, if you don't move your foot you are going to fall over. Fundamentally you have to split in two parts, one part rotates, and the other falls freely in gravity, and then you rejoin the parts. They only seem like different because one is stable and safe, and the other is unstable and unsafe.
But it made me wonder if you could just miraculously change the mass. And to my surprise you can do this without altering the structure. Now beware the problems of expressing the situation clearly. Just jiggle or rotate something! These atoms are now moving faster, and energy has mass. You can change the centre of gravity, by importing or exporting energy. A hotter body is heavier than a colder body. A spinning object is heavier than a stationary object.
You will still fall over unless you move you foot.
M
Thursday, January 18, 2024
data modelling of the human brain
After years of modelling of business processes one can get very encouraged about how this aids clarity, and reduces structural errors. Then one spies the human brain, and gasps at its apparent lack of order and structure.
Is the physical brain just a single data entity with lots of links with itself. Essentially an unstructured mass of linked blobs. Probably.
Now you could argue that evolution, can add complexity or specialisation, but has more difficulty in reorganising or restructuring or simplifying.
Now think about AI as we currently have it. I think the data model cannot be so different. Blobs of words have a 'probability' of being the next blob in an expanding chain of blobs. Pretty much the same data model.
But it clearly could be used to emulate something with a complex data model. Emulations in the computer world are often fraught with weaknesses and bugs, and maybe this holds true in the brain as well. It will certainly be slow, and could very easily be out evolved.
I personally think that we might not recognise the next generation of mind.
M
Tuesday, January 16, 2024
how do you tell if someone has consciousness?
I know i am conscious, but how on earth do i determine if anybody or anything is similarly conscious.
It is not that it is about making decisions.
It is not about observing their environment.
It is not about remembering your past decisions.
I feel it is something about being able to do layer upon layer of maybe useless abstractions, and being able to reject them all. And also not being able to stop doing them.
If i do something automatically, i often think ' who did that. Not me.'
I imagine this is a tiny part of my physical brain, and would be a small sub-process that could envelope a large language model AI.
It must also fiddle with one's appreciation of time, making it appear as if consciousness is upto date. It could be way behind. You should beware thinking things are all syncronous. I doubt if you are going to be conscious of any sudden accident, until you come round.
Indeed this might be the beginnings of a test for consciousness.
Martin
Thursday, January 11, 2024
consciousness is post processing
AI like operations may be the major determinants of actions and decisions, and generally run the human body. Consciousness is likely to be after the actions, as an analysis of these operations. So a form of post processing.
It may seem as if they are syncronous with the actions, but i think this very unlikely. So i have a Machine that does most things in pretty much a deterministic fashion, which is then analysed into a story about what has just happened, and may lead to a feedback loop to alter future routines that generate actions.
It may lead to a funny delay when a piece of information does not pop straight into your mind.
The conscious may be able to feed questions to the main AI engine, and indeed may depend entirely on the AI for memories.
This sort of model could explain why people might think that AI alone is not a real threat, but it also might imply that there is not much to add to make it conscious.
Martin
Monday, January 01, 2024
parallel straight lines an approximation
A straight line is a ray of light in real space, and can be bent by nearby masses. So parallel lines will be bent slightly differently as they pass through space. Indeed one might be able to get them to cross, and recross multiple times.
I think this makes it difficult to difficult to define surfaces.
Lensing by blackholes might produce a ring of images, as if out of focus, which you would have to refocus. I think things could even get inside out, in some sense.
It all begs the question whether we get hoodwinked by euclidean geometry
M
