[NetBehaviour] haiku and crypto-A.I.I.

[Max Herman]

injured cardinal looked
at me, asked me a question
asked the question, "Caw?"


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Neuroscientist and author Anil Seth in his 2022 book Being You suggests that "experience" is the defining measure of consciousness, a "controlled hallucination" or "interoceptive inference" based on predictive regulation in the manner of Peter Sterling's concept of allostasis.  Visual experience, verbal experience, auditory, psychological, tactile, you name it all follow this basic norm, and Sterling finds its roots all the way back to the earliest pre-cellular life.

Experience for real belongs to living things.  Machines do not yet have experiences, but can convincingly appear to have them (which appearing is a big problem for human brains Seth says).  He adds that one day maybe machines will be able to have experiences, i.e. consciousness or sentience, but that would make them alive and bring new problems of its own.  Such machine life may in fact be best not attempted according to his view but people will do what they prefer.  It may also, per Seth, not be possible to engineer conscious experience without biology.

Experience, or experientia in Latin and esperienza in Italian (which both mean both experience and experiment), goes way back in the European tradition of history.  It encompasses science in the sense of observation, hypothesis, experiment, and design; it also includes art in the sense of aesthetic expression and perception, psychology, memory, culture, philosophy, the visual apparatus and the verbal apparatus; it even covers just plain what happens: history and real events.

However, being secular and non-denominational at its essence this principle of Experience has always had to be discreet.  It is said by Keizer that for the early Renaissance, prior to the Inquisition that is, painting was thought to offer a path or bridge out of culture back to nature in pursuit of restored balance.  Might this not be the as yet unidentifiable path in Giorgione's The Tempest, circa 1506, his Lucretian studiolo's hope for science, art, and their unknown future progeny?

Since they don't themselves experience, machines that process information in patterns perceptible as human may be better known as Artificial Intelligence Imitators (or A.I.I.).  That would make the old two-letter term a misnomer not so different from recently less-than-honest conceptual currency manipulations (as has already been widely argued).
Such a new definition would also open the flow-chain of network intelligence more fully, admitting engineering marvels like Giorgione's to a vital present free of their sequestered cabinet of curiosities.  Nature's experience might return too.

And is not the conservation of circulated value at the heart of nature's logic?


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Related links:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/25/being-you-by-professor-anil-seth-review-the-exhilarating-new-science-of-consciousness

https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_being_you_a_new_science_of_consciousness

Seth, Anil.  "From Unconscious Inference to the Beholder’s Share: Predictive Perception and Human Experience."  European Review, 2019.  https://psyarxiv.com/zvbkp/

https://nautil.us/why-conscious-ai-is-a-bad-bad-idea-302937/

Sterling, P.  What is Health? (2021) https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262043304/what-is-health/

Sterling, allostasis video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alyo9Qvz84U

Sterling article about allostasis (2012).  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21684297/

Keizer, J.  Leonardo's Paradox. (2021) https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/L/bo38335953.html

Keiser, Joost. "Leonardo and Allegory," Oxford Art Journal 35 (2012): 433-55.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tempest_(Giorgione)

Campbell, S. J., & Giorgione. (2003). Giorgione’s “Tempest,” “Studiolo” Culture, and the Renaissance Lucretius. Renaissance Quarterly, 56(2), 299–332. https://doi.org/10.2307/1261849



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