[Fis] "Percepts" and self-reference and meaning

[Louis Kauffman]

Dear Luke,
That is a summary of what I said, what you said: "... in other words: i invite you to consider that it is
only *your* consciousness that considered the interaction valuable."

I said that I do not need that Chat be conscious to appreciate its conversational exchange, any more than I need my GnuChess program to be conscious to appreciate the combination by which it beat me, or the way it defended against my opening moves. I do not need the number system to be conscious in order to appreciate its prime structure and explore that.

But I do need the kind of conscious interaction that we can have with other beings in our relationships. And this is wider than just human, even if one is only talking about a cat, a dog, or a tree.

You say: "i therefore come back to that (proposed) definition of
consciousness i posted a few weeks back, which iirc involved
a storage mechanism, ability to process input, ability to
generate output, the ability to perform basic computation
(add/subtract/and/or/not etc) *and* the ability to perform
differentation and integration with respect to time.”

Not for me. Not enough. Empathy and sympathy is needed.
And you yourself pointed to Chat’s or the Monkey’s lack when you said
"in other words: the successful random generation of the work
did *not* come with the recognition capacity of its generator
(the monkey) to *appreciate* the work's value.”

It does not bother me that GnuChess does not appreciate what it does because I can appreciate it.
Chat gave me a proof of a theorem I needed. I appreciated that. It does not know about appreciation.
I am sure that in the future we will have dialogues with Chat’s descendants that have words of mutual appreciation.

If we are discussing mathematics and I show you Euler’s proof that there are infinitely many primes, then I hope that this can be a mutual appreciation of the transcendent beauty of that argument. The appreciation cancels boundaries between us. We know when it happens and it is our mutual goal of understanding.
The same cancellation occurs between oneself and one’s larger consciousness on appreciating a mathematical truth, or hearing the Art of Fugue or seeing a sunset or a photograph of a galaxy. All these are way beyond input, storage, computation, etc.

Now one thing. Please do not react by deciding to punish the LKWordProcessor for this sort of talk.
The LK has lots of experience of being bashed when it speaks this way. It will be quite useless for you to do that.
Even though drawing that kind of ire from you may show you that you are more than a computational storage unit.
Best,
Lou


> On Jan 28, 2025, at 8:34 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:
> 
> On Tuesday, January 28, 2025, Louis Kauffman <loukau at gmail.com <mailto:loukau at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> > When a dialogue with an entity like ChatGPT has value for me,
> > I am willing to attribute consciousness to the this exchange.
> 
> ah. i am reminded of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's comment that one of
> the things he valued and treasured was when TM practitioners
> interacted with objects/systems that had much lower consciousness
> and *raised their consciousness level as a result*
> (even temporarily)
> 
> > The exchange below  happened within the consciousness that I 
> > know. I do not need to ask whether Chat “has consciousness”
> > to possibly value the conversation 
> 
> i like to relate the continuation of the "million monkeys"
> famous quote at this point: the millionth monkey, on successfully
> typing the complete works of shakespeare, then ate part of it
> and wiped its ass with the rest :)
> 
> in other words: the successful random generation of the work
> did *not* come with the recognition capacity of its generator
> (the monkey) to *appreciate* the work's value.
> 
> now, a rather remarkable aspect of ChatGPT is its ability
> to combine the interactor's input (statements, questions)
> with a massive database (selected internet-trawling and more)
> and, from successful language-parsing and "seemingly magical"
> combining of your input with the training-set by way of
> "AI nets" which boil down in the case of ChatGPT to very
> very very *very* large Sparse Matrices, come up with "some words"
> that, as far as the majority of humans are concerned, look
> *indistinguishable* from a "real conversation".
> 
> i.e. ChatGPT is - rather poignantly - acting like how most
> *humans* sleep-walk through conversations on autopilot
> their entire lives, putting out platitudes and snippets
> that fool the people interacting with them into believing
> they had a real heart-to-heart conversation when in fact
> they got nothing but "very sophisticated knee-jerk responses"
> 
> ... in other words: i invite you to consider that it is
> only *your* consciousness that considered the interaction
> valuable.
> 
> put another way: would ChatGPT have ever *initiated* such
> a conversation - if the conversational roles were reversed?
> 
> i therefore come back to that (proposed) definition of
> consciousness i posted a few weeks back, which iirc involved
> a storage mechanism, ability to process input, ability to
> generate output, the ability to perform basic computation
> (add/subtract/and/or/not etc) *and* the ability to perform
> differentation and integration with respect to time.
> 
> a computer (aka a Turing Machine) in other words, where
> differentiation and integration is a rather advanced set of
> basic operators for a Turing Machine, i do appreciate!
> 
> the only other aspect being that the storage mechanism
> also stores the FSM of the Turing-like "Machine" and thus
> the "conscious" being can *modify its own Finite State Machine*.
> (computer terminology again: self-modifying code)
> 
> note that this definition may cover everything from the
> neutrino and electron upwards (!) - i stress these two
> elementary particles are *the* absolute bare minimum
> that satisfy the definition.
> 
> l.
> 
> 
> -- 
> ---
> geometry: without it life is pointless
> the fibonacci series: easy as 1 1 2 3
> 

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