In What’s It All About?, What's It All About Again?, The Self-Organizing Recursive Cosmos and The Self-Organizing Recursive Cosmos - Part II, I covered my current working hypothesis for what's it all about. However, I have found that a large percentage of people desire a more religious worldview to make sense of it all. Such worldviews may provide some degree of comfort, but I believe at the expense of missing out on the full grandeur of it all. I personally find the thought of departing this Earth not knowing where I had been, how I had gotten here and without a clue as to how it all seems to work to be the greatest tragedy of all that can befall a sentient being. So, for those who might be yearning for a new deity that is based more upon all that we now currently know, rather than a deity from the ancient past, I would like to suggest that my current concept of a cosmic form of self-replicating mathematical Information might just do.
The deities of the Past Will Simply No Longer Do
Ever since we human DNA survival machines came to be, we have been very curious about what's it all about. We have also strived to find some way of being able to control the many uncertainties in our lives. These natural desires then went on to be formulated into a large number of varying worldview models that brought forth intellectual life to thousands of deities over the ages. The existence of these deities helped to explain it all and they also provided a mechanism for us to seemingly gain some control over the vast uncertainties in our daily lives. Yes, we might not be able to always make things turn out as we desire, but surely an all-powerful deity could step in at the last moment to do so. All we needed to do was to strike a deal with that deity by giving the deity something it needed, like an existence in our Minds. This idea of supernatural intervention in our lives mediated by a reciprocal transaction with a deity has always been a very attractive meme for our Minds to hold in order to deal with the many daunting challenges of life. Always having a deity on our side also allowed us to then go on to do the incredibly horrible things that all human DNA survival machines have been capable of doing throughout the ages. Righteous rationalization has certainly soothed all the many transgressions of mankind.
The problem with the myriad deities of the past is that they were for the most part developed by human DNA survival machines at a time when people thought that the Earth was flat and at the center of our Universe. They also really had no idea at all about how the Universe operated in such a totally mathematical way. With little knowledge of modern science or mathematics, people naturally created their deities in their own image with many of the human failings that have plagued all of human history such as jealousy, anger, vengeance, and the taking of sides in the petty disputes amongst the nations of the world. Most of these deities were envisioned to be spirits with agency and the ability to think as we do. But with the recent appearance of LLM models such as OpenAI GPT-4, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and MetaAI that also have agency and can "think" even better than we can, softwarephysics suggests that it is now time for a new model of a deity based on all the science, mathematics and AI research that we currently have.
For example, currently in the Middle East, we have the three great monotheistic religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity all at war with each other over a very small piece of terrestrial real estate. Along with this tragedy of human suffering, we also have Russia and China pursuing 18th-century dreams of world Empire at the same time. The Leader for Life of Russia has fallen back onto the 18th-century concept of a Tsar chosen by a deity to re-establish the Russian Empire and the Leader for Life of China has fallen back onto the 18th-century concept that He is the deity himself in human form. Meanwhile, in the United States of America, the Alt-Right Fascist MAGA Party has apparently once again chosen its Leader for Life to be their candidate for the 2024 presidential election. Softwarephysics maintains that such religious crusades are very dangerous during the waning days of we human DNA survival machines. Our Minds are already infected with large numbers of malevolent memes that might go haywire as we try to cope with the transition of software to becoming the dominant form of self-replicating Information on the planet. As I alluded to in Are The Coming ASI Machines An Existential Threat To Mankind?, we human DNA survival machines will most likely present the greatest threat to mankind during this transition.
We Are Not Supernatural Immaterial Spirits Temporarily Haunting A Carbon-Based Body
First, we must come to realize what we truly are. Most people simply do not consider themselves to be a part of the natural world. Instead, most people, consciously or subconsciously, consider themselves to be a supernatural and immaterial spirit that is temporarily haunting a carbon-based body. Now, in everyday life, such a self-model is a very useful delusion. In truth, each of us tends to self-model ourselves as an immaterial Mind with consciousness that can interact with other immaterial Minds with consciousness too, even though we have no evidence that these other Minds truly do have consciousness. After all, all of the other Minds that we come into contact with on a daily basis could simply be acting as if they were conscious Minds that are self-aware. This has become quite self-evident with the recent rise of LLM chatbot models such as OpenAI GPT-4, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and MetaAI. Surely, a more accurate self-model would be for us to imagine ourselves as carbon-based robots. More accurately, in keeping with the thoughts of Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore, softwarephysics models humans as DNA survival machines and Meme Machines with Minds infected with all sorts of memes. Some of those memes are quite useful and some are quite nasty. How will human beings deal with the rise of ASI Machines that are capable of thought and agency and that are obviously smarter and more capable than human beings? And what of the deities in our Minds?
Just as the complex neural network of a modern LLM chatbot can trick you into thinking that you are conversing with a real person, the complex neural network in your own brain can also trick you into thinking that you are also a real person.
Figure 1 – Modern LLMs frequently now consist of 175 layers of neurons in a Deep Neural Network consisting of about 175 billion neurons connected by over 2 trillion weighted parameters.
Anil Seth's View of Consciousness as a Controlled Hallucination
We have all experienced the emergent hallucinations in the LLM models of today. As we all have observed, our current LLM models will many times tell us things that are demonstrably false with great conviction. For more on that see Has AI Software Already Achieved a Level of Artificial Human Intelligence (AHI)?. Anil Seth is a professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and maintains that consciousness is a controlled hallucination constructed by the Mind to make sense of the Universe. This controlled hallucination constructs an internal model of the Universe within our Minds that helps us to interact with the Universe in a controlled manner. It also allows us to talk to ourselves as we currently can now talk to generative language models like GPT-4, Gemini, Copilot and MetaAI. For some interesting YouTube videos of avatars run by generative LLMs see:
Dr. Alan D. Thompson
https://www.youtube.com/@DrAlanDThompson
Digital Engine
https://www.youtube.com/@DigitalEngine
Again, there is a feedback loop between our sensory inputs and the actions we take based on the currently controlled hallucination in our Minds that forms our current internal model of the Universe. Reality is just the common controlled hallucination that we all agree upon. When people experience uncontrolled hallucinations we say that they are psychotic or taking a drug like LSD. Here is an excellent TED Talk by Anil Seth on the topic:
Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo
and here is his academic website:
https://www.anilseth.com/
But If Thinking Is Just A Large Number Of Interacting Numbers What Then Happens To Our Deities?
In What's It All About Again? and What’s It All About? I explained that my current working hypothesis for both the state of our current Universe and for the apparent delusional experiences of our daily lives both stem from Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis as explained in The Software Universe as an Implementation of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. This has become even more apparent as we all now must struggle with the coming impacts of the second Singularity on this planet with the rise of ASI Machines. We now already have a large number of LLMs to choose from that all seem to be able to "think" and most times they seem to do a much better job of it than we do. I suspect that this realization will soon begin to percolate through the zeitgeist of our times as people slowly begin to realize that being able to "think" is not really such a big deal after all. The problem is that we have always attached great importance to the ability to think, as Descartes aptly noted in his "I think, therefore I am", and then we elevated the ability of human thought to be responsible for all of human agency to the point that we actually organized the legal foundations of our societies to reward and punish people solely based on their thoughts and actions. In fact, we have even gone on to create many deities over the ages with these very same abilities of thought and agency to make sense of our world.
I once commented to a member of my family that someday you might be able to have a deep philosophical discussion with your refrigerator about the existence of a deity. Well, those days are now already upon us. You can now have a deep philosophical discussion about the existence and the operational details of many deities with the LLMs of the day. These LLM AIs arose from an accidental mutation in the history of AI research. Originally, the people working on AI thought that creating an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) with the intelligence capabilities of human beings would require teaching an AI to do many individual things that human beings could do one at a time. But they were wrong. It was actually the people working on AIs who were trying to translate one human language into another who accidentally stumbled upon the real solution. These people working on AI language translation software realized that when translating one human language into another, you could simply not translate one word at a time from one language into another language. That is because human languages have many complex nuances. So the people working on AIs that could translate one language into another developed the Transformer neural network that could "encode", or reduce, the entire meaning of one sentence in German into a numerical "latent space" that contained what that German sentence really meant. Then the Transformer neural network could use a similar "decoder" neural network to translate the fundamental meaning of the German sentence into the equivalent English sentence. These complex Transformer neural networks are just mathematical models that operate in a somewhat similar manner as the 100 billion neurons in your brain with each neuron connected to 10,000 other neurons. However, in Human Intelligence is Actually Artificial and Is Pure Thought an Analog or a Digital Process?, I suggested that the fundamentally analog neurons in the human brain are just trying to mimic digital True Intelligence as best they can, just as eagles try to mimic the True Flight of a fighter jet as best as possible.
Soon the people working on AI translation software realized that you could just not work on one German sentence at a time and translate it into English. You actually had to Transform an entire German document into its fundamental numerical "latent" meaning with an "encoder" and then use a "decoder" to Transform the "latent" numbers into English. But then they realized that you actually had to have the Transformer LLM neural networks learn the entire German language by essentially "encoding" it into a bunch of "latent" numbers that contained the entire meaning of the German language. Then you could have these "latent" numbers "decoded" into English by the LLM. You could also "decode" these German "latent" numbers into Spanish, French, Russian, or any other language too.
Figure 2 – The complex architecture of Transformer neural networks has enabled the power of our current LLMs. Surely, even more powerful neural network architectures must also exist (click to enlarge).
All you had to do was to train these LLM Transformer neural networks to learn the "latent" number patterns in the German language by having them read every German document on the Internet. Then you have them transform German into any other language by teaching them the "latent" number patterns in other languages too. This is done in an automated manner by feeding the LLMs with huge numbers of paragraphs of German text with some of the words missing. The huge LLM neural networks would then try to predict the missing German words and would be trained to do so by automatically changing the weights of the interconnected neurons between neuron layers without the aid of humans until the LLMs could successfully predict the missing German words. Then the AI people got the idea, "Why not let these Transformer neural networks read everything on the Internet, maybe they could learn all of the "latent" number patterns for things like writing computer code, legal documents, poems, short stories, movie scripts, songs, music, works of art... And that is just what they have done over the past few years to produce the second Singularity early in 2023. So the LLM models have essentially read all of the content that human beings have ever produced over the past 12,000 years and then reduced that content into a huge "latent space" of numbers. These huge "latent spaces" of numbers contain all sorts of patterns that human beings have become familiar with, such as the German language and how to write C programming code. But they also contain all sorts of patterns that we have yet to even discover. So now you can evoke the already discovered patterns that we already know about with prompts to the LLMs and also the "hidden" patterns that we have not yet discovered. Nobody currently really understands how this all works, so many people are now afraid of the LLMs and what they might do if they should take power.
Anyway, this all goes back to my contention that being able to "think" is really not that big of a deal. Many religions perceive of a deity as a "thinking" being patterned after themselves. But now we know for sure that "thinking" is just a delusion that can arise from processing numbers. In fact, one of the things that LLM AI researchers are now working on is the problem of LLM AI hallucinations. Sometimes LLM AIs will firmly come to believe in things that are demonstrably false. So there is now a growing new science of "prompt engineering" going on to do things like getting better answers from LLM AIs without inducing delusional hallucinations in them. For example, after an LLM gives you an answer, you can respond with another prompt like, "Are you sure about that? Please check your logic". Other researchers are telling these LLM AIs to give them 10 different explanations of a problem. Then for each of the 10 responses, they programmatically drill down each response with follow-up prompts. When they hit a dead end, they backtrack or abandon that line of reasoning. So being able to "think" now just seems to be a matter of working with a huge quantity of numbers, just as all of the physics we currently have seems to indicate that our Universe is just made up of a huge quantity of numbers and the mathematical operations upon them. That is why my current working model of a deity for our Universe is that a deity must be whatever makes mathematics possible and probably has nothing to do with our human preoccupation with being able to "think".
Deity Upsides and Downsides
The upside of having a deity that is modeled as a form of cosmic self-replicating mathematical Information is that one does not need to have doubts about it. Most people who are devoutly committed to the traditional deities must necessarily suffer from doubts. Deep down, they all suffer from the dreadful thought that their ancient deity might just have been entirely made up thousands of years ago by people who really knew nothing at all. The idea of a deity as a form of cosmic self-replicating mathematical Information is most likely wrong, but it might be close in at least a pantheistic sense. Such a deity composed of cosmic self-replicating mathematical Information would at least be dynamic and subject to change as we become more knowledgeable about how our Universe and Multiverse operate. One can then have full confidence in such a deity because, whenever an inconsistency with the model arises, one is allowed to adjust the model accordingly. Most religions are not as flexible on this point.
Another upside is that knowing the mathematics of our Universe allows one to predict how it will behave in the future. The fundamental mathematics of our Universe can currently be modeled by the mathematical effective theories of physics. Whenever physicists encounter some new fundamental behaviors of our Universe, they usually manage to come up with some new mathematical effective theories that can approximately describe the newly discovered behaviors of our Universe. This can be quite comforting. The Universe behaves in a mathematical manner and if we have an approximate effective theory in physics that can roughly predict the mathematical behavior of our Universe, that means we can at least adjust to the behaviors of our Universe even if we cannot completely control them.
The downside to this new model of a deity composed of cosmic self-replicating mathematical Information is that this deity is quite hardnosed. It will not intercede on your behalf if you mess up by trying to violate one of its mathematical laws. If you jump off a 300-meter cliff on the Earth, you are going to die. The only benefit is that you can exactly predict the moment when you do die. Many people will find this trait quite unappealing. For example, currently, about 84% of Americans who adhere to one particular religious faction strongly support the Alt-Right Fascist MAGA Party and its Leader for Life. Strangely, this Leader for Life of the Alt-Right Fascist MAGA Party advocates for behaviors that are entirely in conflict with the moral code of their founding deity. Personally, I find the moral code of this founding deity to be quite profound and I actually try to adhere to it. But I find that many of these Alt-Right Fascist MAGA Party adherents seem to be trying to pull a fast one on their deity. These adherents seem to think that they can embrace all of the hate and malice found in the Alt-Right Fascist MAGA Party, in contradiction to the moral code of their founding deity, but still obtain paradise in another world if they pretend to believe in this deity. But I think their deity is actually pulling a fast one on them. Perhaps you can only obtain paradise in this world by following the moral code of this deity while you are still in this world.
Comments are welcome at
scj333@sbcglobal.net
To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Steve Johnston
No comments:
Post a Comment