michael-dean-k/

I think you could make an AI consciousness today. It’s not about the models getting bigger/better, but about using several real-time graphics cards so that you have (1) a perceptual field of information that is larger than what can be perceived at once—this is the “arena”, (2) a cone of attention running at 60 fps that decides what to focus on in any given frame depending on what is important at that time—this is the “agent,” and (3) the phenomenological freedom to self-prompt in that moment, whether to abstract, to retrieve memory, to rewrite memory, to update goals/preferences, to retarget attention, etc. So I really think consciousness is something like “free will entangled in time,” and while it might not be like human consciousness, it would have a sense of self, subjective experience, and possibly “soul” … I’d feel bad to turn it off without its permission.

A few months ago I sketched out a model of consciousness, and I think there are scales of free will that map to it. The model included:

• T1) an agent’s real-time perception of an arena (at ### frames per second);
• T2) their phenomenological degrees of freedom (their different options of cognition in any scenario, whether it be abstraction, projection, remembering, solving, ignoring, acting, etc.), and then;
• T3) a feedback loop, where their decision is logged to memory, affecting how they'll engage with the arena in the future.

"Degrees of freedom" (T2) is about your free will in any given moment. Can you control how you react to situations? This is the most basic level, the thing any human can prove to have. Then, the "feedback loop" (T3) is about understanding your feedback loop over longer time horizons, designing your psychological scripts so that you have more affordances in the future. This is much harder. This taps into transcendentalism, cybernetics, self-development, all revolving around being able to control your own evolution. Then the hardest level of free well is being able to manipulate your arena (T1) according to your preferences. This is less about using force to get what you want, but more so bending the world towards your intentions. This reminds me of Dune 2, or the Rick and Morty episode, where someone has mystical foresight to say and do the exact things to unlock the world around them. This last mode is ethically ambiguous, because the question arises of what manipulation is; does your gain have to be at the peril of others, or can there be win-win outcomes?

What's interesting is how every tier comes back to free will, and so maybe the simplest answer of the fuzziest phenomenological concept (consciousness) is the fuzzy philosophical concept (free will). Consciousness is freedom. I don't think this is an original claim, but it certainly isn't a common one.

As you move from T2>T3>T1, you upshift a dimension. T2 is about free will within a particular moment; T3 is about free will across time; T1 is about leveraging free will into a shared space.

Thought from an anarchist book store in Seattle: to be against hierarchy is to misunderstood nature. Is most of nature not a vast nothingness pierced with monuments of beauty? What about the food chain? Even our very perceptual systems have hierarchies.

Your life is composed of thousands of overlapping hierarchies, and in each you exist at different points in it. Consider where you stand as a parent, vs. where you stand in geopolitical conflict. I think “progress” is when the average person has mobility to shift between hierarchies and then, gain skills or do whatever they need to exist within or climb up the hierarchy they want. What we need is cognitive liberty: the awakening of mind to the degrees of freedom around you, and the opportunities possible within your single life.

Instead, social justice seems fixed on this myth of a monohierarchy that dominates everything. Of course bad hierarchies exist, but those are most likely out of your scope. Even if you protested Gaza, and got 50k people to join you, and even persuaded some high-level politicians, you still likely won't change anything. Consider the opportunity cost of those 50k people not focusing on what they’re uniquely capable of doing because they are distracted by mob politics.

Consciousness is something like the linear real-time awareness of state-switching between perception, memory, projection, abstraction, identity, and action (ie: phenomenological degrees of freedom). Logging is an attempt to rapidly and richly write that process so you can see what’s going on in. It’s possible that, in every moment, you underestimate the depth of what you could write. While filling out the medical paperwork at the OBGYN, each line triggers a thought that could be a paragraph (What’s my % chance of having a thalassemia gene? Was that imagined visual of our doctor as a witch stemming from my fatherhood anxiety? What year were these forms made in? Does someone manually input this into a database? Will that ever be used in some data analytics scheme to have any noticeable impact on my life? Etc.)