Category: Neuro-Philosophy

Leaving a Message to the Future Human

I would like to send a message to the future but I am not sure it will get through. In the message I would like to remind future humans about our peculiar way of being conscious. And how our “way” is different from synthetic reasoning systems.

Over the coming years we will be surrounded with more and more synthetic reasoning, so much so, that we might adjust how WE think, to how machines process information, and risk becoming a less conscious species. Our thinking might adapt to synthetic reasoning a bit like how our language adapted to mobile phones with emoticons, smileys and weird abbreviations.

I recognise how difficult it is to send a message to the future, especially in these circumstances. For one thing, any message I send will be a drop in the ocean compared to all the synthetic generated written material. For another it is very likely that, in the future, all human communication will be conveyed through synthetic reasoning systems. And, I am pretty sure, for example, that anything I might write that is anti-AI will be sectioned off to the specialised literature section, next to revolutionary anarchist texts.

I have no specific axe to grind with technology but I do worry we might underestimate diversity of intelligence on a rush for efficiency.
Also I have no magic wand and what I am trying to do may not succeed. But I feel it’s worth a shot, enough to try to share.

Now, for a message to make it across to a future human without being affected by the synthetic AI filtering in between, there needs to be a shared element. A bit like Penelope requesting to move the matrimonial bed Ulysses had carved out on the roots of an olive tree. A shared bit of knowledge that both me and the future human know but that a synthetic intelligence would not.

In this case, for the future human I am trying to reach, I know nothing specific. So I need to use a process to use that is common to any human consciousness. Something anyone could do but an AI would struggle with, and struggle to copy.

One example process of this sort would be to describe a mental process as it happens. One candidate would be the work we need to do remember a specific word. The actual word chosen is less important, but it should be a word that the person cannot remember but has ways to try to work to eventually remember.

I give a personal example: for some reason there are some words that I tend to regularly forget and so I try to recall them when I am tired or confused. After Covid, I had a brain fog that lasted a few months and there were many words that lived on the tip of my tongue. I held on to them and I use these words as a library of things I struggle to remember, but which I can also eventually manage to remember.

One of these is a Hotel in the Giudecca, in Venice that I always forget even though I have walked by it many times. My process to try to reconstruct the name of the hotel goes something like this:

  • Its an Italian surname
  • Its elegant, more than 1k per night!
  • Its right next to the tax police, Guardia di Finanza
  • There is a pool there
  • A nice garden behind with a small orchard
  • The guests would look down at me when there
  • The owner has another place like a bar
  • Harry’s Bar, no its Harry’s Dolci
  • English Rock musician lived there
  • Not Eliott Smith, Elton John
  • But he has another name on the doorbell
  • My stepdad lied to a french photographer that asked him if he was Elton John (he said yes)
  • There is a floating platform for breakfast
  • There is a very trim tree, an Oak I think
  • Cipriani is the name of the Hotel

A synthetic intelligence can surely generate similar scripts but the associations it will follow will not feel right. I expect that the associations will make much more sense than mine, as I try to remember. An LLM based AI will tend to blend the mix of past people in with its answer. I think even if it was primed to try to pretend remembering as if it was me, Yates; it would tend to follow the most likely associations, giving a sort of cliche’ sense to the recollection.

So for the actual message I want to send to the future, I could hide it in an exercise given to the reader. The key to the message would be the process itself: one revealing a texture of human conscious thinking near impossible to synthesise.

Here is a first example exercise:

Dear future person,
This is an exercise humans can do in year 2025.
Try to remember names of people or places you’ve known, and while you do so, write out what you are thinking, and how you go about remembering. And while you do this, let yourself discover how you are grateful for these memories.

In effect, the message is something like: treasure a world in which you are free to love. The message is abstract but synthetic intelligence will make some sense of it, but when it comes to actually performing the exercise the feeling of what you do will be different. I think a future consciousness similar to ours will know what this means.

Here another variant exercise:

Dear future Person,
This is a game we play in 2025 that you can play as well. Think of a name, any name, then someone who you know has that name and while keeping notes on your thinking pattern jump from this person to another related person and try to remember their name.
While doing this appreciate how connections between people can be of such a wide variety. Take note how people seem to exist in relation to each other and as an emergent whole.

Finally a sort of activity involving communicating with an AI:

Dear future Person,
When we play with synthetic intelligence in 2025 we like to challenge it to tell us stories about characters that forget things and how this affects their life in different situations, and to different degrees of impact. This exercise shows how useful synthetic intelligences are, but also is an extremely difficult exercise to perform realistically.

I think any one of these examples offer an interesting starting point for punching through to a deeper future awareness. But for this to really work it will require attention of many and to become ingested somehow inside the LLMs themselves so it can then be re-propagated through future science fiction novels, accidentally.

Or if I am very lucky in this original form.

Pin Standing

A pin on its sharp that you make stand
and wait to tell which way it land

A message you wish to share with other
but wait to for motivation to recover

Your world is full of you but odd
you don't even know what makes you nod

Such place could be called a Will
a lone piece without its puzzle still.

I want to define Will as the unique individual inscrutable emergent process leading to a new state of an entity. It’s not very useful because by this definition it is not something we can understand. But with this definition we would accept that the forces that come into play in what we call Will are broad. We have to include everything: evolution, integration of experience and variations in physical processes. And this makes it near impossible to separate the act of Will from its component factors.

In this sense an AI could never replicate a human Will, though it might imitate it. And if its rules are understandable to us, it definitely would be different from our Will. And the moment we make our Will understandable, say by looking at brain function will be the moment we decided to cut off and reduce the influence of some distant factors on it. It will open the choice of making humanity robotic by cutting off the history of the universe from it, or accepting that Will is by definition not understood.

The Moment Circular

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The mystery solved
was something you
whispered to me
while I slept,
and grumbled,
something
incomprehensible,
a muffled snort.

The aspect joined,
dimensional aberration,
deconstructing​ causal flow,
bayesian consequent,
juggling atoms,
all in this moment
pushing at the boundary
we call time.

Suspense is expectant
of prophetic delivery:
of a natural configuration
approaching and from
the many possibilities
becomes strictly one
improbable moment:
a conscious edge.

The dissolution and
reconfiguration of
instants in this
very moment - now -
are not happening
as you might think
not linear, nor sequential
nor measured.

It's​ just that the only
lonely path that retains
a record of its flow
is that which layers
on top of others and
leads to illusions of
willed consequence
as conscious mechanism.

If you were dropping
breadcrumbs to find
who you believe to be
its not the paths
where birds have
feasted on your trail
that lead to your
sense of existence.

And so, I was thinking about causality, free will, consciousness and all that kind of universal tangle of puzzles. While I was doing this, I became very much aware that the only way I could tell it was me making these considerations, was because I could remember where I came from, to be who I am, and what I am doing right now. Maybe, in a sense, you don’t need causality if you have memory… or maybe that is all causality really is: a path you went through.

Consciousness Conservation

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The mode we think with today,
will be inaccessible,
a mysterious jar,
of umami flavour,
something to have,
on crispy crackers,
at sunset to remember...
And compare where we went,
to where we subjectively thought we might.

We can’t have a means to conserve what we don’t really understand very well. And yet we have a sense of what consciousness is, and that it will not be easy to conserve. For each individual, alone, and as a member of society, this process is transforming. You get a sense of this change not only from the stories of past but from their rhythm, their attention to particular details we find unusual today.

In a similar vein, our future will not know how to make sense of how we go about our reasoning today. How our internal perspective on the world affects the decisions we take, what we consider important, what is close to us in a personal way. Despite so much of our lives being shared, across digital channels: subjective experience is missing, complex, and really hard to make sense of.

Take Homer’s Odyssey: this ancient world is clear. A world of large feasts to celebrate surviving life-threatening​ risks. A world of committed ideals, and naughty deities, tricksters or worse. A journey of self-discovery​ and growth, achieving wisdom through challenges and love. But we can’t see, in the least, how this world ever existed subjectively, whether in the subject or the author.

I guess ​we have, a moment to treasure what we have uniquely…