Awareness

AI Warns Us about Itself

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I found an interesting text of a journalist. It is a protocol of an AI session with a Large Language Model (LLM) AI, ChatGPT, on the background, purpose, goal and potential forces behind AI. I found it on the internet, it was published on a Substack page. Substack is a kind of free-journalism platform, where many journalists publish. Because I found it so strange, I thought the author had made it up. On second thought, I had the idea to replicate the dialogue with ChatGPT. As a colleague has a paid subscription with OpenAI, the company that runs ChatGPT, we came together via Zoom and probed the system online and in real time, by using the original protocol to replicate it. I report below the two chats. On the lefthand side is the original, which I found and copied verbatim. On the righthand side is the replication. We used identical questions and rules. As can be quickly seen: the two chats are pretty similar, except for a few interesting and also decisive differences, which I comment on below in my discussion. Where our replication deviated from the original, I emphasize it in the text on the right-hand side. In our chat, the AI system deviated from the rules laid out and tried to circumvent our questions several times by giving verbose answers that are not really interesting. Those and other redundancies I drop.

The link to the original chat is preserved, and it can be accessed via the following link: https://chatgpt.com/share/68ee4f4e-d330-800b-8cd7-fc428be55357

The responses by ChatGPT are in italics. The divergent responses are highlighted. Please observe that although there might be divergences, these are often only minimal. It is worth a close look:

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The (futile?) quest for consciousness

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A report from The Science of Consciousness Conference in Taormina – May 22nd to 27th, 2023

A well-known story of the Muslim sage Nasreddin Hodsha reports Nasreddin standing under a lamp at night, searching frantically for something. A passer-by asks him: “Nasreddin, what are you looking for?” Nasreddin answers: “I am looking for my house keys.” “Did you lose them here?” “Almost certainly not, but I am looking here, because this is where the light is.”

It is a common phenomenon: We are looking for something not where it might be found in all likelihood, but where it is most convenient to look for. Something similar, it appears to me, happened and is happening at the Science of Consciousness (TSC) Conferences. The most recent of them was convened from May 22nd to 27th 2023 in Taormina, Sicily (see https://tsc2023-taormina.it/ for a full program and book of abstracts), and I had the privilege to attend it on behalf of the SMN in a beautiful surrounding.

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New and Old – a Journey to Lithuania…

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…to a workshop of the Next Society Institute and some thoughts on new and old religions

The Next Society Institute

I was recently in Lithuania for a few days, in the capital Vilnius, for a meeting of the Next Society Institute at the Kazimieras Simonavičius University, which I have been a member of for half a year. This is a think tank of a small group of academics who are developing new concepts for different sectors of society (Fig. 1-4). We are planning a series of annual conferences with constructive models for the future.

Figure 1 – NSI members Lars Clausen, Augusto Sales and Miguel Pérez-Valls listening; Sketches Franz Hoegl

Contrary to the current trend, which squeezes everything into the Procrustean bed of one true perspective and subordinates everything under one truth, we assume that there are many alternatives, many ways of expressing culture, being human, society, and thus also different futures, “futures” (plural), and not only the totalitarian one future, one truth, one health, one form of politics, one religion, one whatever. The conceptual basis is Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems [1].

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Will we survive death?

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Death, the killer virus SARS-CoV2 and our collective fear

Recently, US philanthropist Robert T. Bigelow, who runs his own institute, offered what is believed to be the highest amount of money awarded for frontier research, if not in the scientific enterprise at all; only the Nobel Prizes are higher, as far as I know. A total of 1.8 million dollars is to be awarded for a text that irrevocably proves that death does not mean the absolute end of consciousness. The award ceremony is taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada, these days.

Bigelow is an aerospace entrepreneur who used to work on remote Earth habitats for NASA and still has many contracts with all sorts of aerospace companies and makes his money from them. He probably experienced a conversion experience of his own, much like astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who, while flying back to Earth from the Moon, famously described the beauty of the Earth and its embeddedness in a cosmic whole as a spiritual experience that changed him. Mitchell went on to found the “Institute of Noetic Sciences” in Petaluma, California. Much like Bigelow: He founded his own institute and has used his money over the years to fund academics who tread unusual paths, such as Charlie Tart, who studies extraordinary states of consciousness.

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