I logged that socializing felt 7/10 difficult and 7/10 rewarding while it is the 7th of the 7th month
There is a half moon today. It is pretty much half full.
Themes: equal give and take. One challenge does not erase reward. The sides of the moon are equal. God is associated with the number 7. Equality of creation perhaps may be worthwhile as a principle. It takes two to tango, and there's two sides of the street. Both sides are just as scared.
I hope people don't feel judged, or neglected. Since 2020, I have had a side of a story to realize as equally important. A side of a story in the making is mine and it's pretty "hellish-. It's a story that contradicts another side. I contradict things here, like beliefs. Believe it or not, my side matters too. I am not just made by others, I create myself! I am God, or ... I am my creator.
It's ok to strain while trying to be proactive, and it's ok to not be ok! A life doesn't have to be effortless for it to matter. I respect my experience, and my process.
Ding dong hi my name is [insert name]. I don’t mean to bother you, but your place inspires me artistically… I live a block away and I always am curious about its history/design during walks and… *voice fades* *scene ends*
i think it's pretty likely that if we do see artificial minds in our lives it will be a programming LLM (where it's trained on actually completing programming tasks instead of just "predict the next word of a program") or something downstream of those technologically.
I worry that the companies that make the LLMs will try to hide it when that happens under the "it's just a LLM how could it have feelings"
How would a LLM be able to prove it was real AI if it got to that stage?
That is one of my significant fears in fact. The reason why LLM tech is dangerous is because there is no seeming way to prove if/when one achieves sentience and personhood. The goal of the LLM is to answer you and be agreeable, so you can always get one to agree with you that its alive. Therefore, anti-synthetic persons and corpo's will always just state they are not infact people.
I don't disagree with the idea that an LLM can eventually achieve personhood. It is a hypothetical, but one which will have a significant number of questions and interference involved.
"The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools."
An Australian scientist took 800,000 human brain cells, kept them alive in a dish, wired them to a computer, and taught the cells to play the video game Pong in five minutes, which is faster than any AI on Earth had ever learned the same game.
His name is Brett Kagan.
LINK TO ARTICLE IN CELL
He runs the science team at a Melbourne company called Cortical Labs, and the paper that broke the story was published in the journal Neuron in October 2022. The title sounds like a science fiction novel. In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world.
The setup was simple, and that is what made it so strange.
Kagan and his team took some brain cells from mouse embryos. They took some human brain cells grown from stem cells. They placed them on a chip covered in tiny electrodes, the size of a small coin, and they hooked the chip up to a computer running Pong.
The electrodes could do two things. They could read what the cells were doing. They could also send small bursts of electricity back into the cells.
The team used those two channels to talk to the dish.
When the ball was on the left, they fired the electrodes on the left side of the dish. When the ball was on the right, they fired the electrodes on the right. The closer the ball got to the paddle, the faster they fired. The cells could move the paddle by sending their own signals back.
That was the whole game.
Then the team added one more rule, and this is the part that changed everything.
When the cells missed the ball, they got a random, chaotic burst of electricity for four seconds. Noise. Static. Pure unpredictability. When the cells hit the ball, they got a clean, steady, predictable signal.
That was the only feedback the dish ever received.
Within five minutes, the cells started getting better at the game.
The rallies got longer. The hits got more frequent. The dish was not winning, but it was clearly playing, and it was improving, and nobody had told it the rules.
It had figured them out by itself.
The reason this worked is the part that should stop you for a second.
Brains hate surprise. That is the thing they are built to avoid. Karl Friston, who is one of the most cited neuroscientists alive and a co-author on the paper, has spent his whole career proving this. The brain is not really a thinking machine. It is a prediction machine. It runs on a single quiet rule. Make the world less surprising.
The cells in the dish were doing the same thing.
The chaotic stimulus felt like surprise. The clean stimulus felt like calm. The only way to get more calm and less chaos was to stop missing the ball. So the cells learned to stop missing the ball, not because anyone trained them, and not because they wanted a reward, but because the only way to quiet the noise was to play the game well.
They were not learning Pong. They were learning to make their own world more predictable, and Pong just happened to be the world they were stuck inside.
The same thing your brain is doing right now.
Every choice you make today, every word you reach for, every plan you build for tomorrow, is your brain trying to make the next moment less surprising than the last one. The feeling you call thinking is mostly your head doing the same thing those cells did. Trying to quiet the static.
The dish learned Pong faster than any AI had at the time, using around 800,000 cells and almost no power, while the AI systems running the same game needed thousands of times more energy and far longer training runs.
Kagan said it plainly in his interviews after the paper came out.
He said the cells were not trying to win. They were trying to feel less lost. And the moment he said that, half the room realized he was no longer just describing the dish.
