<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Dear Luke,<div class="">That is a summary of what I said, what you said: "... in other words: i invite you to consider that it is<br class="">only *your* consciousness that considered the interaction valuable."</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">You say: "i therefore come back to that (proposed) definition of</div><div class="">consciousness i posted a few weeks back, which iirc involved</div><div class="">a storage mechanism, ability to process input, ability to</div><div class="">generate output, the ability to perform basic computation</div><div class="">(add/subtract/and/or/not etc) *and* the ability to perform</div><div class="">differentation and integration with respect to time.”</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Not for me. Not enough. Empathy and sympathy is needed.</div><div class="">And you yourself pointed to Chat’s or the Monkey’s lack when you said</div><div class="">"in other words: the successful random generation of the work</div><div class="">did *not* come with the recognition capacity of its generator</div><div class="">(the monkey) to *appreciate* the work's value.”</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">It does not bother me that GnuChess does not appreciate what it does because I can appreciate it.</div><div class="">Chat gave me a proof of a theorem I needed. I appreciated that. It does not know about appreciation.</div><div class="">I am sure that in the future we will have dialogues with Chat’s descendants that have words of mutual appreciation.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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.</div><div class="">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.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Now one thing. Please do not react by deciding to punish the LKWordProcessor for this sort of talk.</div><div class="">The LK has lots of experience of being bashed when it speaks this way. It will be quite useless for you to do that.</div><div class="">Even though drawing that kind of ire from you may show you that you are more than a computational storage unit.</div><div class="">Best,</div><div class="">Lou</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Jan 28, 2025, at 8:34 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <<a href="mailto:lkcl@lkcl.net" class="">lkcl@lkcl.net</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class="">On Tuesday, January 28, 2025, Louis Kauffman <<a href="mailto:loukau@gmail.com" class="">loukau@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br class=""><br class="">> When a dialogue with an entity like ChatGPT has value for me,<br class="">> I am willing to attribute consciousness to the this exchange.<br class=""><br class="">ah. i am reminded of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's comment that one of<br class="">the things he valued and treasured was when TM practitioners<br class="">interacted with objects/systems that had much lower consciousness<br class=""> and *raised their consciousness level as a result*<br class="">(even temporarily)<br class=""><br class="">> The exchange below happened within the consciousness that I <br class="">> know. I do not need to ask whether Chat “has consciousness”<br class="">> to possibly value the conversation <br class=""><br class="">i like to relate the continuation of the "million monkeys"<br class="">famous quote at this point: the millionth monkey, on successfully<br class="">typing the complete works of shakespeare, then ate part of it<br class="">and wiped its ass with the rest :)<br class=""><br class="">in other words: the successful random generation of the work<br class="">did *not* come with the recognition capacity of its generator<br class="">(the monkey) to *appreciate* the work's value.<br class=""><br class="">now, a rather remarkable aspect of ChatGPT is its ability<br class="">to combine the interactor's input (statements, questions)<br class="">with a massive database (selected internet-trawling and more)<br class="">and, from successful language-parsing and "seemingly magical"<br class="">combining of your input with the training-set by way of<br class="">"AI nets" which boil down in the case of ChatGPT to very<br class="">very very *very* large Sparse Matrices, come up with "some words"<br class="">that, as far as the majority of humans are concerned, look<br class="">*indistinguishable* from a "real conversation".<br class=""><br class="">i.e. ChatGPT is - rather poignantly - acting like how most<br class="">*humans* sleep-walk through conversations on autopilot<br class="">their entire lives, putting out platitudes and snippets<br class="">that fool the people interacting with them into believing<br class="">they had a real heart-to-heart conversation when in fact<br class="">they got nothing but "very sophisticated knee-jerk responses"<br class=""><br class="">... in other words: i invite you to consider that it is<br class="">only *your* consciousness that considered the interaction<br class="">valuable.<br class=""><br class="">put another way: would ChatGPT have ever *initiated* such<br class="">a conversation - if the conversational roles were reversed?<br class=""><br class="">i therefore come back to that (proposed) definition of<br class="">consciousness i posted a few weeks back, which iirc involved<br class="">a storage mechanism, ability to process input, ability to<br class="">generate output, the ability to perform basic computation<br class="">(add/subtract/and/or/not etc) *and* the ability to perform<br class="">differentation and integration with respect to time.<br class=""><br class="">a computer (aka a Turing Machine) in other words, where<br class="">differentiation and integration is a rather advanced set of<br class="">basic operators for a Turing Machine, i do appreciate!<br class=""><br class="">the only other aspect being that the storage mechanism<br class="">also stores the FSM of the Turing-like "Machine" and thus<br class="">the "conscious" being can *modify its own Finite State Machine*.<br class="">(computer terminology again: self-modifying code)<br class=""><br class="">note that this definition may cover everything from the<br class="">neutrino and electron upwards (!) - i stress these two<br class="">elementary particles are *the* absolute bare minimum<br class="">that satisfy the definition.<br class=""><br class="">l.<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">-- <br class=""><div dir="ltr" class="">---<br class="">geometry: without it life is pointless<div class="">the fibonacci series: easy as 1 1 2 3</div></div><br class="">
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