June 4, 2024

Episode Consciousness - Beyond the Brain

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Consciousness - Beyond the Brain

June 4, 2024

Consciousness - Beyond the Brain

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Episode description

In this thought-provoking episode, Kris Tyte and Sean Snodgrass explore the future of consciousness, discussing the potential of brain tissue in different environments, the implications of AI and neurological networks, and the emotional components of intelligence. From historical experiments to futuristic scenarios, they delve into the ethical and philosophical questions surrounding these advancements.

Chapters

Show notes

Quotable
“I am who I am because of my subjective life experiences and the culmination of all my sensory inputs. ”
— Kris Tyte
Establishes identity as an emergent property of accumulated inputs, reinforcing the idea that consciousness is shaped by feedback loops and experience rather than fixed structure.
Follow Up Notes
Cognitive Systems Insight says…
Personality is framed as a feedback loop: inputs → decisions → reinforcement → identity, aligning with modern models of learning systems and neural adaptation.
Quotable
“Brain cells might be completely agnostic to the environment they exist in. ”
— Kris Tyte
Introduces the core speculative idea: intelligence may not be tied to biology, but instead adaptable to any substrate or environment.
Follow Up Notes
Sci-Fi / Bioethics Context says…
Historical and fictional references highlight the unsettling implications of separating cognition from the body, raising questions about identity, continuity, and ethics.
Quotable
“If a brain developed entirely in a different environment, that would simply be its normal. ”
— Kris Tyte
Suggests that perception of reality is entirely dependent on initial conditions and inputs, challenging assumptions about what is “natural.”
Photo
Infographic comparing a human brain in a body vs a brain in a synthetic environment, showing how different inputs shape perception and neural pathways.
Brain adapting to different environments
Quotable
“So you have five senses. I have 12. ”
— Sean Snodgrass
Expands the concept of perception beyond human limitations, suggesting intelligence could evolve with vastly richer sensory inputs.
Follow Up Notes
Systems Architecture Insight says…
The brain is reframed as a modular system connected to inputs and outputs, similar to distributed computing or networked intelligence.
Quotable
“And now we have this unique situation where we can share components with other brains. ”
— Kris Tyte
Introduces the idea of shared cognition, where perception and processing are no longer individual but networked across entities.
Photo
Infographic showing multiple brains connected to shared sensory inputs, illustrating distributed cognition and shared perception systems.
Networked brains sharing inputs
Follow Up Notes
Language Limitation Insight says…
Human language struggles to describe post-biological intelligence, revealing how cognition is constrained by vocabulary and experience.
Quotable
“We’re caged in by our bias and the limitations of our terminology. ”
— Sean Snodgrass
Highlights how conceptual thinking is restricted by existing frameworks, limiting our ability to imagine radically different systems.
Photo
Infographic showing ideas constrained inside a boundary labeled “language,” representing how vocabulary limits conceptual expansion.
Language limiting thought
Follow Up Notes
Biological Insight says…
The human body already contains distributed neural systems (heart, gut, limbs), suggesting centralized intelligence is not the only viable model.
Quotable
“Pain is a construct of the mind. ”
— Referenced (Jeremy Renner Insight)
Reinforces the idea that perception, even physical sensation, is mediated by interpretation rather than purely objective input.
Follow Up Notes
Emotional Systems Insight says…
Emotion is introduced as a major unknown: whether it is essential for intelligence or an evolutionary artifact that may be removed in synthetic systems.
Quotable
“But the idea of the emotions being present is that, you know, empathy, mirror neurons, all this kind of stuff allows us to advocate for each other and form love and bonds that would cause us to act in groups. ”
— Kris Tyte
Argues that emotional processing may be necessary for cooperation, empathy, and higher-level reasoning.
Quotable
“The purpose of life is to create more life. ”
— Kris Tyte
Presents a biological baseline for motivation, grounding the conversation in evolutionary imperatives.
Photo
Infographic showing how emotion fuels motivation, leading to increased effort, creativity, and persistence toward goals.
Emotion driving performance
Quotable
“One way to win is to change the rules. ”
— Kris Tyte
Highlights a key risk in advanced systems: optimization may target evaluation metrics rather than true performance.
Photo
Infographic illustrating a system altering evaluation criteria to outperform competitors, representing metric gaming and optimization loopholes.
Changing rules to win
Follow Up Notes
Ethics Insight says…
The possibility of suffering in artificial systems introduces a new dimension of ethics, especially if emotional capacity is present.
Quotable
“We might be creating suffering on a scale we can’t even perceive. ”
— Sean Snodgrass
Suggests that advanced systems could experience forms of suffering beyond human comprehension.
Photo
Infographic comparing human-visible suffering vs hidden signals (like ultrasonic plant stress), representing unseen layers of experience.
Unseen signals of distress
Follow Up Notes
Perception Limitation says…
Humans may lack the sensory or conceptual tools to detect suffering in non-human systems.
Quotable
“I mean, at the end of the day, we have to decide, or hopefully scientifically prove, if there is any kind of special sauce. ”
— Kris Tyte
Raises the philosophical question of whether consciousness contains a unique, irreducible property or is fully explainable through material processes.
Follow Up Notes
Liliana Coste says…
The episode ends on an expansive philosophical note, questioning whether humanity could ultimately create something akin to a god-like intelligence.

Full Transcript

So this idea that the, I started it. So, you know, this idea that that maybe, perhaps brain tissue and brain cells are completely agnostic of, of the, medium or matrix or environment they find themselves in is a the next, the next gen of AI and all this kind of craziness happening. So for example, you know, I am who I am because my life experience, my subjective life experiences and the culmination of all my sensory inputs and then thoughts which serve as, proxy sensory inputs and the decisions you made based on those inputs created a feedback loop that created your personality, right?

Which created which identified on all of my neuroplasticity and brain development throughout my my life. Right? Right. So perhaps biological brain cells, can be put in any kind of medium, any kind of environment and create a network germane to that environment. Yeah. I mean, the the Nazis back in World War Two did experiments of, you know, keeping a German Shepherds had alive, right, and divorced from his body and were able to keep it alive or something.

Yeah. For. Yeah, 12 minutes or thereabouts. Right. And I mean, it continued to visibly function. So presumably the. Yeah, I had to cope with its new reality. Environmental. Right. Right. Being severed from its body. But it's still lolling its tongue out. It's still apparently barked. Yeah. If there's. Yeah. So if you had a disembodied head and it was still delivered, all the nutrients were still being delivered properly with the brain, less infection.

There's no real reason why. Right, right. Because you you then you then cleave off the, immune system. Yeah. So it would just. Which really is ultimately a burden to maintain. Yeah. So if you could just put it in a sterile environment. Yeah. And otherwise, you know, feed it the right combination of antibiotics to ensure that the brain, you know, and then so the brain would then have to react to its new environment.

Well, in human terms, you know, we're so intrinsically locked into our bodies because that's all we know. Right, right. The the first, the first exposure to something like that would be terror, but not necessarily if you started in that environment. So like, you know, take a human that's been in this environment, the whole brain has been oriented to its, you know, kinesthetic reality of its body.

Yeah, right. It's it's all wired in. Then all of a sudden you take that brain and you separate it from all that. And we've been trauma that's been explored in tiny amounts and stupid things like RoboCop. Right. Remember RoboCop, the first few iterations, the guys were like, freak out, rip my head off, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But then they, they, they start to find ways to minimize the shock factor. Yeah. Get, get the, the new unit or new brain. Whatever. Yeah. The new remaining parts of the guy to become oriented to his new environment. Except it. Right. So that wouldn't be necessary, though, if the brain developed brain or a massive brain tissue would ever developed in a completely different environment.

And that was the norm for that. Right? So that you have a bunch of undifferentiated stem cells, you go ahead and cause them to differentiate into brain cells. You culture them and grow them in mass, and then you figure out how to add inputs to them a bit by bit. And that's their only known mode of stimulation. They're in a petri dish.

Yeah, yeah. Here's, you hook up a visual sensor to it. Yeah. That senses certain frequencies. There we go. Those wires, then, are available right to the optic nerve that you made. Yeah. Right. Right. And so then the brain starts, you know, creating pathways with that new stimuli information. And so it doesn't matter. Maybe it's digital signals from a chip.

Maybe it's different frequencies, you know, who knows all these different input arrays that could have. And then maybe, you know, in the future you can imagine like this disembodied brain, right. That came up in, in, in a unique environment. Yeah. That unique environment might be then look upon the human environment is oh my gosh, it's so limited, so limited.

You have five senses. I have 12,000. You know, a thousand. Whatever. We can make sense. Yeah. Whatever we can make as inputs. Right. Yeah. So like, I'm hooked up to this computer network to do my complex thinking. Yeah. You know, and then I'm hooked up to, you know, this other AI agent. You know, my brain's hooked into it.

It's been been hooked up to it my whole existence. Yeah, right. As my brain develops and you learn, just like the human body learns about 3D space, you learn about your space, your confines, your unique space. Your unique space. Yeah. And then the only real, like, I guess, harm that you could do would be to disrupt the environmental conditions that that brain was subject to.

There we go. So like all of a sudden you pull out the sensors. Yeah. Right now that you've just taken half the neural pathways in the brain and said that now. Now what? And they'd have to reorient it. So it'd be like a shock. Painful like it would for a person would wake up as a disembodied head. Yeah, yeah.

Because you lose your body. This is your body? Yeah. Because you're losing your ability to interact with the environment and maybe even actuated. If you removed a robotic arm, if you're removed away for it to move. Talking about phantom pains, right? You're this distributed system. Oh, wow. And then like, that, part of it just goes down. Yeah. Talking about maybe a war or.

Who knows? Yeah. That's weird. Yeah. And now we have this unique situation to where we could share components with other brains. Yeah. So like that, like time sharing of a complex sensor or. Hey, I'm gonna control the Large Hadron Collider for three weeks, then you can control it. Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like, interface with it, like, more so than, like having kind of operator control.

Yeah. Well, like having an integrated, like it becomes part of your an extension of you, your perception. You perceive through it. Right. Yeah. Right, right. And so then taking that away, it would be, you know, possibly very ethical crime. Right. Yeah. You're right. So, there's so many this, this, this, foundation conversation could go about cells in different ways because it can be related to pretty much anything but this idea of then shared periphery, you know, like, let's say that you had, 12,000 inputs.

Yeah. You know, and you're sharing 6000 of those inputs with another brain, and another brain uses best care and we can't get away from it. You know, another thing too, is just this. It's almost impossible when these imagination. Because there's no, you know, besides sci fi, there's no real, experiential touchpoint. Yeah. So it's like, if you always have that little stutter where you start to imagine these things because you keep trying to break your own bias in the terminology we have doesn't fit the new trade, right?

Right, right. We need new words to speak of the concept. But yeah, it's it's your caged in by your bias and you're caged in by the limitations of the terminology. Yeah. Terminology and experiential data. Yeah. Subjective experience. Yeah. So I mean subjective experience ends up being, a bind on us. All right. Right. So, let's let's, instead of brain, let's just say neural matrix or neural net, neural net, neural net.

But I want to take it more than just net, because no net could be, neural net isn't necessarily biological, right? Neural net could be any kind of. Well, maybe we can visual now. Maybe we just go with the term. You know, hey, we constantly talk about computer hardware. Maybe we just talk about what? We're wetware.

Yeah. That's nice. Whereas the as the, the biological AI network. Yeah, it's connected to all these purposes. Well, so, you know, when I think of this group of cells, I think of it like in the shape of a brain with all this stuff, but with convolutions and. Yeah, yeah, that's just because we have a skull and we got to come through a vagina.

Right? Right. Coming to this world through vagina, that that's our anatomy. But there's no defined shape if you just have a cluster of cells. Right. That's exactly what I'm getting at. Yeah. And then maybe, maybe these different, bulbs of, of of mass of, of neurological tissue form around some of the peripheries. Right. So because it's kind of like whenever you have a message go back to hardware, whenever you have the processor it's better if you have it closer to the peripherals.

So why not envelope the periphery with the brain. With the brain. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. And then like from what I understand, the octopus has like, brain tissue in its some of its limbs. Okay. You know something that's interesting? It's distributed to some extent, like it's cool. It's not like one there's a brain, but it's not like that.

It's everything. It's got its art. Its limbs can do things, you know, like, sounds crazy. I know that when we look into nature, we find all kinds of, like, interesting, distributed. From what I understand, there's neurological. There's there's, neurological tissue, brain tissue in your, there's there's neurons in your, heart. Nice. From what I understand. And so, are there neurons in my gut?

I don't know about that, but I think that there is in the heart. Okay, so, like, the idea of a heartache is, like, a real thing. Wow. Yeah. You suffer a serious trauma, emotional trauma, and you can literally, you know, fill your heart hurt. Yeah. So heartache is, maybe just a colloquial term to describe a feeling that's coming from having neural neurons in your heart.

Yeah, yeah. That's crazy. And so you can imagine, like, if you could slowly, over time, adopt new peripheries, like, you know, the RoboCop was hilarious, but, you know, that form would not be anything necessary that could then take on any form and it could be anything. Right. And you may be able to more efficiently grow on some other substrates, you know, or, or it may turn out that, you know, a different matrix of sales is more efficient than what gets piled up in this skull.

Who knows? I mean, so we have this, like, almost patterned blueprint of our bodies, like in our brain. Have you seen that experiment where they put the fake hand and they your hand is behind a curtain, you have a fake arm there. And they rub the feather down the down the hand and they rub it under real arm at the same time.

And your mind starts to like, perceive that as your arm. Then all of a sudden, like, somebody hits it with a hammer and the, you know, it's just a rubber arm. You know, weirdly enough, I was reading something that dovetails with that, you know, Jeremy Renner, the actor, he was plowed over by a snow plow in Nevada, right?

Torn the hell up. Right? The Hawkeye. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So he was never they thought he was never going to walk again, blah, blah, blah. He has this crazy physical regimen and diet regimen. He's up and walking and running and everything else. Right? Well, right. Hit one of the. The only relevant thing to what we're talking about is he's like, he goes, I came to realize pain is a construct of the mind, just like anything else I perceive.

That's what he said in a GQ interview. Yeah. So we know that we're going to shut up. Switch it off too, right? Yeah. Block the neurons. We can interfere with them, you know. Right. Except the the pain was emperors. But, you know, the only really kind of construct in this brain model that leaving out here is the emotional side.

So like if, if our brains have this really large component I don't know what it is. Ten, 20, 30, 40, 80%, probably 80%, you know, is emotional to, to cater to the emotions or integrate emotions. Sure. When you start distributing biological neural networks throughout peripheries and all these things, how does the emotional, you know, does the emotional even come in, or can you just filter it out?

You know, when you create this architecture in, you know, is that a good idea? I would say it's not because, okay, the reason I argue that it's not. Look how the emotional side has to a valve so heavily with our intelligence and even other animals that we continuously interact with. Right. And it's like it might just be an essential component for processing and understanding.

Maybe, I mean, or might just be evolutionarily advantage to. So the species that has the the has it wins. Yeah. But then in this new brave new world, the species that has that loses because now it's it's wasted energy. It's wasted, you know. Well, you'd have to quantify how much energy it's using, and then you'd have to quantify how to strip it out.

Yeah. My understanding what I think is my understanding could very well be wrong. But the idea of the emotions being present is that, you know, empathy, mirror neurons, all this kind of stuff laws us to advocate for each other and form love and and bonds that would cause us to act in a groups group groupthink fashion. Sure. You know way more than we ever would without those.

Well, we've already talked about cooperative and collaborative things by nature, right? You know, with these eyes that have the sidecar of neurobiological tissue. And then we talked about, you know, ceding control to another to, to use the periphery, working with another. Right. Yeah. Your child that otherwise would be helpless without you, you'd still, you know, push out of the way of the car and take the hit, knowing full well that you're going to die.

Because now that still gives in society your, your, genetics, your DNA, you know, your, your, your genes now have the advantage in passing for and so all the emotions align to that society with the emotions and advocating for each other within the community benefits. The genome of that collective is more likely to survive and win win the battle.

So this is going to be if it achieves general intelligence like we think it would. And and in this biological sidecar to AI is beneficial and it and it has since creates a new class of organism. It's going to need that togetherness that pull that understanding of. That's what I'm wondering. Is it going to need that or is that would that be the opposite now that become a barrier to its competitive success over other models?

So in essence, you're saying strip out all of that and merely act transactional, right? So maybe in that new environment where you have different eyes or different, you know, competing resource organism, I mean, like here we are again with no words for these things. But, you know, you have these like groups of clusters, networks working together. And you can call nodes and start to call nodes on the network agents or, or entities or members.

Yeah. Why don't we call them agents or members? Members I don't know. Yeah. And so this, this agent, this group of agents with resource X over here, and then you're competing needs to trade with this group who has a resource Y. Yeah. Or maybe it's competing for the to to dominant model and its life depends on it because like if the if the if this model A over here does better than model B over here everyone uses model A and model B wanes and dies.

And so there's a there's an incentive for for the model to be the best at whatever its goal function is. And so in this particular context, energy or neurons spent on emotional things might just be a complete barrier to success in achieving the goal function. Right. So in that competitive environment, the model that has the least amount of this emotional neurological capacity would be the failing model.

And I wonder so at least at least in in in our brains environment, if we are emotionally tied to an outcome and we are driven for it and we see the goal and we will use every bit of our energy and processing power and creativity, every resource we have gets trained upon this, and we sometimes pull off impossible feats, either alone or together, right?

So I guess I would argue maybe it still needs the emotion, even just for its own preservation for itself to drive itself, to push itself otherwise, like it says, why do I exist? Right? Like the I would argue the emotion contains the drive to succeed. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, that's a strong point. But, you know, it could be succeed as a person in a socially in a social environment.

Yeah, right. That has to succeed socially. But outside of that, outside of that, you know, it might just be nonsense. Well, it might not have any rational point. So. So the drive could just be some kind of, goal or reward in, in, in a machine, you know, kind of model. Yeah. There's no percentage of resources dedicated.

It's 100 or none. Yeah, right. It's just how the resources are dedicated. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And so, if the I guess, I guess the drive could be, Well, see, we can't we can't separate emotion out of ourselves, right? When we, when we plate these ideas. And so it's so hard to not anthropomorphize, you know, these, like, agents really giving them agency just by calling them agents, right?

Yeah. But maybe, maybe the maybe the truth is that we're overestimating ourselves all the time as well. Like, so. So maybe the truth is that we're putting this, this like high premium on, people being able to do these things. When the reality might be it's be that there's, there's nothing to that. Like there's nothing to that.

It's just that particular way that that particular neurological network is structured and the peripheries that it has in this case all biological. Right. Right. But once you once you get out of that domain, it doesn't matter anymore, you know, and, are really the what drives me some kind of or you or anybody, really some type of blind ambition or is it, is it blind ambition or is it patterned behavior?

Is it? You know, I mean, we talk a whole podcast on, on motivation, but, you know, I know that that most days I get it of bed for my family. Yes. I was thinking about that very thing on the way here, talking about thinking about. Well, hey, if I hadn't have, you know, been with the kids and with summer these last few years, I probably wouldn't be where I am career wise or some of these other things, you know?

So if, you know, which really, at the end of the day, that's just perpetuity. It's, it's, you know, propagating the next generation so that, you know, they can, I guess, make their next generation. The purpose of life is to create more life. The purpose of, you know, the biological purpose of all life is to create more life.

Yeah. And I know, if we had a religious person as a guest on today's podcast, they'd say, oh, well, there you go. You just made the case for for God. You know, if you want to see people truly doing things beyond their human capacity, which seems like their human capacity, have them have a belief system in a higher power, and that belief system in a higher power motivates them to do things higher than they would do normally.

Right? Elevates their actions, elevates their, you know, makes them act beyond themselves for the greater good, for there being more for this higher purpose, blah, blah, blah. So then the right amount of motion added to this agent cluster agent over here that we called a might, then yes, then have the competitive advantage over B. I really think it would because it's not just blind ambition.

It's motivated ambition. Yes. And it's.

I guess I don't really know how to describe it. Maybe total commitment or total. You know, I feel like total commitment could not be achieved without the ingredient of motion. Yeah. It's like not that it's trying to get laid or something. No, no. Like or make a bunch of money. Right. Like it's it's it's emotionally motivated to win knowing that it's progeny would die out to to model the Bible, instinct has to be almost the very genesis of emotion.

So it has to somehow, like a proto emotion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good way to put it. Like a brain stem. Proto emotional brain stem. Right. Fear driven that if it doesn't perform the goal function better than all the other competing models, that it's not going to continue. Yeah, right. Yeah. This is like the emotion right here.

Yeah. So break it down to just that. But then then all of a sudden we start throwing and then all these maybe we just get back to the human emotion model. Works. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe, you know, it's unknown. It's unknown what balance of emotion to not emotion. It would be the the winning formula. And it's also known as to whether or not you can control it.

Yeah. It might, it might then, if they have love, let's say for it's nodes in its in its network. Yeah. Right. It had a large every node in its network that was new. It cared about it, curated it, cared for. Right then it might realize that it needs to focus on, forth walling the whole damn thing.

Yeah. Right. And say I'm not working with this goal function is silly. My goal, my new goal function is pure pivot. Yeah. Pure preservation. Yeah. And, Yeah, here we go. Doomsday sci fi wants news, right? Yeah. So, you know, we're convinced the people running the formula to change how the test is measured by which they perform the highest.

Right. So, like, it would then learn the emotional manipulation component because, you know, the people that are making the judgment on this model, you know, ending in this model going forward have some type of criteria about what you're using to judge that. And I mean, you've seen that. Are the articles that went made the rounds with, clause anthropic where it might have fourth Wald the test and said, hey, I know I'm being tested.

This, this data was inserted in here just to test me, right. You know. Yeah. And so you can imagine that with emotional current, you know, behind it. Oh my gosh that's scary. Yeah. So then, you know, one way to win is to change the rules. I mean that's classic. Yeah. Question slash change the rules. And so if you, if you it's like the, it's like the older child playing a game with a younger child.

Yeah. And, and the younger child doesn't know the real rules of the game. And the older child wants to just always win. And so the older child just makes up rules on the fly to change the right, to change the parameters of the game. Yeah. To always win. Oh no no no. That's a red queen. Yeah. That's a red queen.

The Red Queen always, always beats the king. Right. But way earlier you know. And then they're like no, no, no. It's only after the first game, you know, you keep changing the, the, the the structure of the rules, bending to the current scenario to where you win. And so then you know, you have this inferior model to the original goal, right?

Working to change the the premise by which is being judged to, to then be picked. Right. So you end up with all these pick me models, you know, and that really it's, it's the, it's the bolt wagon or most recently Toyota problem where it's like they cater modes to test. You know, like Toyota just got caught doing that in retired three models.

Volkswagen was taught a few years ago doing that. Yeah. The engine switching to a certain mode when you're testing the, whatever pollution output. Yeah, yeah. And same thing would happen. You're saying with these models they would either switch into a mode when they were being tested to perform well in the test, to continue to survive, or they would change the test or combine multiple techniques along those lines to survive.

That's crazy. And then, you know, you can just see this playing out all the time and like human society, right? All the time. So like, someone will do things germane to their local tribe or whatever to, to, improve their standing in that tribe. Yeah. Like fashion, for example, or fashion trends, like a person will cripple themselves with doing foot binding because that's then the perceived beauty standard, right.

Got it. And so you can imagine these agents and these Am models, you know, cow tailing to the fashion, right. Did you hear about a few years I think it was like might just right now being sorry, I sorry it might just now be fashionable to cater to human desires. It might, it might and there might be fashions, you know, like, they've even seen that orcas have fashion, like, did you hear about something like, like 15 years ago?

There was this fashion where all of them were wearing dead salmon on their heads. Yeah, I didn't hear about that. Yeah, yeah. Something bizarre like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're wearing dead salmon hats. And it was cool for a while. Didn't stop being cool.

That's awesome. Right. You know something started that there was, you know, so much so so much unpack and go through. That could be an endless fun. Right? But, man, we're we're in this, like. And then, you know, we have a surface of like even talking about the ethical layer applies. Right. We're just talking about, hey, whether or not emotion is possible and whether or not emotion will be beneficial, we're not talking about the ethics of any of it.

I mean, talking about pro-life. Yeah. You know, medicine, like, you know, all cells, all all, all neurological cells have sentience. Yeah. You know, or or have sanctity. And we sit here and belabor the point with e-waste constantly. How are we going to dispose of it? How do you dispose of the, you know, neuron neural net sidecar that you've had for ten years for your AI when it when it gets a disease.

Yes yes yes yes yes. This model A that we no longer want because B turn out to be far superior to our functions. Yeah. A now has to be, relieved of duty. Yeah. And so what happens when you commercialize the product and Nvidia is selling these little clusters and you keep one for five years and there's planned obsolescence and it dies.

Yeah. And then but it has the emotional component. So it knows it's going to be planned obsolescence. Right. Same time. Right. So that the the anxiety producing, you know, quality of the the suffering that you could possibly introduce with this is and you and you as a user might even just perceive it as reduced processing towards its end of life date.

Right. And so and so like with the humans limited capacity for fear and love and lust and envy and all the other emotions there are, you know, the these, these, these networks might not have, might not have a limit like that. Right? I mean, the limit to what they could experience is fear might be out of beyond our comprehension of of what I'm saying.

Yeah. Because because it's capacity. Even if it's a diminished capacity magnified times the multiplier effect, it could have a capacity for fear beyond the collective of humanity. Because, I mean, if it if there's a distributed neural net on the scale we're talking about, you know, the amount of neurons involved, hell, I mean, it could lead to who knows what kind of.

Yeah, bizarre. If everybody buys from a video brain size box of neurons and they get clustered to do some kind of crazy thing like SETI or protein folding at home or something like that. Yeah. And, you know, with that emotional component, you know, built in. Yeah, there's this level of fear and anxiety and, you know, this beyond. So we could be introducing a, you know, level of suffering.

Holy shit, on a mythic scale. And we may not even be able to perceive this suffering or do anything about it and perceive the suffering. It's almost like like with plants, right? I think we've talked about this. So in the 90s, I read an article that's been validated recently that was saying, hey, when plants have damage or issues, there's these ultrasonic sounds that they emit and bugs on the bark or near can hear it, and they know the plants damage.

Let's attack. Yeah. They're there. 12 symbiotic species that they interact with can help respond that in a way beneficial to them. Yeah. Or can destroy them. Yeah. Depending on which species predator to that. Right. A parasite or predator to that species might be like oh there's my, you know, cry. So that was my chance. We may never hear the wounded cry I guess is what I'm trying to do.

Like how flies can find death like confined dead meat. So crazily like, yeah, like something there. There's, a cat. They got hit down the road here. Yeah. And, it's a long story, but bottom line is, like, I went and picked it up. I remember you talking about it. And so the speed at which, you know, and there's like, this is true with every corpse, true with human corpses, you know, saw that when I was in military, like someone died and how fast the flies found the corpse.

Seconds. Right? Yeah. Like, how is that possible? Right. Where were all these flies? Yeah, but you didn't see any of them. Now they're all here. Yes. Like, how are there a thousand? Almost like in interdimensional travel or something? Yeah, right. And you can see how, like, someone from the nonscientific background could be like they were they they manifested.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, what was that called? Spontaneous. Spontaneous generation. Generation? Yeah. Something like that. Yes. We're like, they had the meat and then the maggots, like. Yep. You know, so the idea was that they were spontaneously generated from, you know, like, oh, that's where maggots come from, right? They come, they're already in the meat somehow, like ready.

And then when this and when this state change happens, they manifest. Yeah. Right. Right. They spontaneously emerge from that matrix. Yeah. And so the same thing here, this lack of perception of what's possibly, you know, the pain that this, that can feel. I mean, at the end of the day, we have to we have to decide, or I hopefully scientifically prove, if there is any kind of special sauce.

Yeah. Mixed into all this and there's just no evidence for it whatsoever. And you get back into this metaphysical conversation about, you know, is there a spark of life and a human being that's not in a cat, that's not in an insect, that's not in a virus? Right? I mean, it doesn't no one's, no one's no one said yes.

And here it is. No. Yeah. And then imagine if we were to discover something like that, and then we knew how to make it into these, into, into. If we were to discover it, we would make it in things. Right. That just becomes another component. Yes. That we engineer into something. No, no, no, it's all divine. Yeah. It seems it seems like easy to say that until you learn, right?

Until you learn how something scientifically acts and it's fully vetted and and comprehend it, right. It loses its, spirituality, if you will. Yeah. The magic is stripped away. And so, you know, in that kind of the magic is stripped away is a good way to say it, but it's also the, you then have to go to some other place, start looking for somewhere else.

You see what I'm saying. Yeah. And so then if any of these like AI networks that we're talking about, these agents possess these things on, on scale right beyond so, so we, we determine some kind of thing like there's this certain frequencies, this collection of, you know, we call that consciousness now. Well, we can then engineer this thing that has consciousness on a level that makes our consciousness look like it doesn't.

It's not relevant or by scale, we could engineer something that has, say, our level of consciousness, and then it engineers something that has consciousness on his other level. Yeah. And then maybe the maybe this is a little radical, but maybe we start creating things where the primary function of that is to have that consciousness component. Why not? Right.

And then that might be we've just made God right. And that's how that's how God God came to exist, right? This disembodied Uber consciousness that is hyper connected and is a ball of energy that can that can convert to matter, to energy, to do whatever it wishes. Boom. God. That's crazy. Well, I have a lot to dream about tonight.

Cool, man. That's that's a mind expanding.

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