Anil Seth is a materialist but admits that living systems are somehow very special. He was also skeptical about conscious AI and stressed that the substrate matters whereas AI people think that eternal life is achieved by replacing the human brain with a program running in a computer.
The lecture began with an enjoyable discussion of visual illusions, which support his view that sensory perception makes a prediction rather than a representation of the physiological state of the brain at a particular moment. Prediction is understood in a very general manner. It can mean anticipation of the future but also a guess for a sensory percept. In the TGD framework, the meanings of anticipation and prediction are more or less the same since sensory perception is essentially 4-dimensional. This leads also to a new view of memory and anticipation. The reason is that space-time surfaces satisfy almost deterministic holography being analogs to 4-D Bohr orbits.
- The illusion related to color perception included a cube at a checkerboard, whose presence changed the white color to grey consistent with the symmetric checkerboard coloring. In TGD sensory representation is an artwork built by iteration using virtual sensory input and eventually leading to a standard mental image. This process predicts what is there and favours symmetries. Checkerboard symmetry won over realism.
- Second illusion was related to the shapes. Human faces are central for our perception. For instance, we tend to see faces in the clouds. The illusion was associated with a rotating mask representing a human face. Both sides of the faces were perceived in the same way! The image was a mask or its planar reflection. The direction of rotation was also changed in the percept.
- The third example was a video representing a model for how emotional coloring very strongly affects what seems to be there. The pattern recognition process was weighted so that the features associated with a face of a dog (I experienced it as a wolf) are over emphasized. The psychedelic video described people moving on the street. By this weighting their faces were very wolf-like. Everything was very wolfy!
- I could imagine that schizophrenic or paranoid could experience the world in the same psychedelic way as in the video. What also comes to mind are the artworks of Salvador Dali, Hieronymys Bosch, and Vincent van Gogh.
- I had many discussions with people about the recent world-wide rise of militarism and also about the extremely cruel policy of the recent Finnish government in which the cuts to social security strike the poorest people hardest. Government is also systematically destroying social healthcare and effectively performing a massive income transfer to the rich people.
The discussion groups were filled by fanatic males defending militarism and the actions of the government. I learned this morning that about 20 percent of finns belong to this group and males dominate. Basic Finns is the party in which most males see violence as a way to solve problems and agree with the policy of the government. I guess that most of these people in the discussion group belonged to the right wing parties.
These participants did not even try to represent comments based on logical arguments relying on facts and their responses were typically personal insults. Even small hints that the opponent is behind the standard human values such as equity, economical safety, justice and peace made these people to identify the opponent as a bloodthirsty bolshevik or a benchman of Putin receiving orders from Moscow.
These people seem to suffer from a paranoia-like state very much like that in the video full of wolfy faces. One can wonder whether interaction with more normal people would help them to widen their perceptive field and end up in a less skewed mindframe. Ordinary people do not however usually want to interact with them and they are doomed to live in the small bubbles of similar fanatics.
- Also a connection with language models such as GPt is suggestive. These models rely on the formation of associations and the response to a question is very much like a perception induced by a sensory input, essentially a prediction. Here the teaching process defines the perceptive landscape as a region about which the data comes from. There are many white regions in this sensory landscape of language models and this is bound to create a very skewed view of reality.
For instance, the teaching material included gives an overweight for the mainstream view of science and can totally neglect the non-mainstream, which is actually the really interesting part of science. This makes possible a powerful censorship and I would not be surprised if it were not used.
For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.
For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.
No comments:
Post a Comment