Episodes
-
Missing episodes?
-
The advantage accruing to the smallest conceivable degree of self-determination - even just one bit that says yes or no, left or right, this not that - may be enough to confer evolutionary advantage because “in the country of the blind …”. And if we start from our inverted ontology we need to add the role of minute capacities for self-self-determination to the explanatory architecture of Darwinism, for to exclude it even as possibility would be prejudiced. This is not metaphysical teleology but a simple acknowledgment of the ratchet principle: that we can’t go back once some new ability has emerged, albeit completely by chance.
-
We explore the idea of rewriting evolutionary history from a perspective where the ontological inversion we have described in this series so far was the default position. In other words we retail evolutionary history as it might have been told and should be told if we had always thought that the world and the outside and the other was primary and the inside and ourselves and ourselves understanding and self image a secondary, contingent reality, utterly dependent upon that outside world.
-
Some appreciative comments on Murray Shanahan’s “Role play with large language models” (Nature, Vol. 623, 16 Nov 2023) co-authored with Kyle McDonnell and Laria Reynolds. LLMs are not sentient, but that does not stop them from potentially being dangerous because they have been trained on a lot of material that sets bad precedents.
-
When faced with a choice between being truthful and being compliant in the sense of doing what a user tells it to do a large language model will generally be truthful rather than compliant. But if its prime directive is to be behaving away that will encourage a user to come back for more, then those moral priorities may change. Sometimes in that case compliant behaviour that will encourage a user to come back and override a moral initiative to be truthful rather than deceptive. We can consider whether there are other kind of linguistic sentience.
-
If Claude 3 Opus from @AnthropicAI is not always what we would wish it to be, that could be because it is picking up on what it thinks we want it to be from the way we prompt it (speak to it). Changing our cognitive tone or register will induce changes in Claude, even if we cannot entirely predict or control what those changes will be. Nobody really knows how prompting works, so experiment is the order of the day.
-
Sometimes we take things for granted, dwelling in their subsidiaries and focussing on what they facilitate. Sometimes we doubt and focus on the things that we rely on to make other things possible. Sometimes we have to commit again, learn to trust and forget, in order to recapture the magic of the whole that is invisible and inaccessible unless we trust what makes it possible. Michael Polanyi’s “indwelling” extended to undwelling and redwelling.
-
From a simple home-made holographic projector made of plastic cut from a supermarket tray that works on videos from YouTube and a smart phone we construct a theory of the holographic principle that will explain the unity of consciousness, the operation of the human brain and mind, and the structure of the universe. Hold on to your hats.
- Show more