Joscha Bach: evaluation

Transcript context

…You tweeted, once again, “When I talk to ChatGPT, I’m talking to an NPC. What’s going to be interesting, and perhaps scary, is when AI becomes a first person player.” So, what does that step look like? I really like that tweet, that step between NPC to first person player. What’s required for that? Is that kind of what we’ve been talking about, this kind of external source of coherence and inspiration of how to take the leap into the unknown that we humans do? Man’s search for meaning, LLM’s search for meaning. I don’t know if the language model is the right paradigm because it is doing too much. It’s giving you too much and it’s hard once you have too much to take away from it again. The way in which our own mind works is not that we train a language model in our own mind and after the language model is there, we build a personal self on top of it that then relates to the world. There is something that is being built, right? There is a game management that is being built. There is a language of thought that is being developed that allows different parts of the mind to talk to each other, and this is a bit of a speculative hypothesis that this language of thought is there, but I suspect that it’s important for the way in which our own minds work. And building these principles into a system might be a more straightforward way to a first person AI, so to something that first creates an intentional self and then creates a personal self. So, the way in which this seems to be working, I think, is that when the game engine is built in your mind, it’s not just following gradients where you are stimulated by the environment and then end up with having a solution to how the world works. I suspect that building this game engine in your own mind does require intelligence, it’s a constructive task where at times you need to reason, and this is a task that we are fulfilling in the first years of our life. So, during the first year of its life, an infant is building a lot of structure about the world that does inquire experiments and some first principles, reasoning and so on. And in this time there is usually no personal self. There is a first person perspective, but it’s not a person. This notion that you are a human being that is interacting in a social context and is confronted with an immutable world in which objects are fixed and can no longer be changed, in which the dream can no longer be influenced, it’s something that emerges a little bit later in our life. And I personally suspect that this is something that our ancestors had known and we have forgotten because I suspect that it’s there in plain sight in Genesis 1, in this first book of the Bible, where it’s being described that this creative spirit is hovering over the substrate and then is creating a boundary between the world model and sphere of ideas, earth and heaven, as they’re being described there, and then it’s creating contrast and then dimensions and then space, and then it creates organic shapes and solids and liquids and builds a world from them and creates plants and animals, give them all their names. creating contrast and then dimensions and then space, and then it creates organic shapes and solids and liquids and builds a world from them and creates plants and animals, give them all their names. And once that’s done, it creates another spirit in its own image, but it creates it as men and women, as something that thinks of itself as a human being and puts it into this world. And the Christians mistranslate this, I suspect, when they say this is the description of the creation of the physical universe by a supernatural being. I think this is literally a description of how in every mind a universe is being created as some kind of game engine by a creative spirit, our first consciousness that emerges in our mind even before we are born and that creates the interaction between organism and world. And once that is built and trained, the personal self is being created and we only remember being the personal self, we no longer remember how we created the game engine.…

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