Not-Self in Sci-Fi: Blindsight by Peter Watts

Yes, I think that's right in the big picture. The story reveals the humanity of Siri (especially the scene when he connects with his father)... or maybe you could say that it reveals the potential in Siri -- I don't think he's quite there yet. I suspect the other books in the series will show a continuing transformation in Siri.

I don't know quite how to argue the case, but I was constantly seeing Siri as emotionally like a 12 year old boy discovering girls and vague at odds with his parents and overwhelmed by the "adult" world and "becoming small" and observing. So the narcissism that I'm talking about could also be described as self-centered immaturity. I guess the narcissism aspect is Siri really wants to be right in the middle of the adult world, but wants to be not involved and has a bit of a victim mentality when it comes to things --- wants to explore a relationship but doesn't really want a relationship --- he doesn't really own his situation in the same way that the others do. 

Siri is the student and Sarasti is the Zen master who leads him (and everyone else) around by the nose and then confronts him with that humanity.

Random thoughts this morning: Is a self necessary for something to have meaning? Or is meaning just another term for how this organism maps the world? Is meaning something that could arise in a scrambler, or in Rorschach?

It's one of those words like consciousness, I know what I mean but I can't pin it down. I suppose there are several kinds of meaning - linguistic, in the sense that words/symbols point to something. Another one would be like purpose, as in 'What is the meaning of life'.

Could a scrambler point to a sense of purpose?

Art has meaning, would not-self organisms produce art?

Edit:
- and art has emotional impact, how does that play out for a scrambler, if at all?

Rorschach appears to get angry at one point, but if there's nobody in there, then is it just a clever simulation of emotion? How does it differ from an angry wasp? Is an angry wasp more emotional, more 'real'?

So here's my theory of self/consciousness...

Everything we do is made up of accumulated habits. We don't really "know how to ride a bicycle", it's actually a hundred little mini-habits that get wired in which allow us to ride a bicycle. (This is funnily tested by giving people bikes which work exactly the same but the handlebars are reversed, even though you "know" what do differently the body just can't do it:  Reverse Steering Bike on National Geographic Brain Games - YouTube ) There is nothing conscious/intentional about most things, it is really just a manifestation of past habit-skills. 

But everything is like this. Even interpersonal stuff, psychology, etc. All past habit-skills

These microhabits are created and changed through intention, the narrowing of awareness to sensations and intentional adjusting the body. This is something that only exists in the present moment and can only be done for a short while. This is learning, rewiring. Like balancing: lots of many tiny sensations, lots of adjusting of body to fit some idea of balance. Classic baby-learns-to-walk idea: intention to move somewhere, lots of failures, eventually building a habit. A baby doesn't suddenly understand "how to walk", it accumulates the micro-abilities/micro-habits iteratively.

So really a lot of the things we identify with self (ability, skills, knowledge) isn't really "us". It's accumulated habit.

The "self" is another algorithm of the mind that basically judges how close we're meeting our intentions. It's an odd thing that is so simple minded that it focuses on one aspect of living and in the moment really truly believes it is the MOST IMPORTANT THING. This is the felt feeling of being a self. We all know that experience changes, but the assessing-judging and the "am I on track?" vibeness of being alive is the thing that FEELS like self. It's a bit of a tautology: the thing that feels like our most important thing (our self) is the thing that identifies the most important things. (Read that a few times, it was a mind blowing insight to me... but I'm dumb.)

So 99% of our life is unconscious wired-in habit, 1% of our life is intention which can slowly create/change new habits. The aspect of mind which judges whether our attempts at achieving our intention is what >feels< like a self.

As for what part of mind knows/infers this... That's a good question.

I personally don't think a sense of self is required for intelligence. I think there is lots of bodily-wired intelligence (athletic performance, artistic performance) that doesn't rely on a sense of self, yet involves learning, training, development. Seems like it makes sense to call it intelligence. I ultimately feel fine calling fish intelligent and trees intelligent and AI intelligent. 

I think for all practical purposes people conflate self and sentient and it might not be obvious but eventually it is revealed that it's a circular definition. ("One has a sense of self... if they are sentient." and "being sentinent means... having a sense of self"). I actually don't think there IS a singular "sense of self" even in humans, but rather lots of senses of self and periods of no sense of self. The closest thing to a core self is the "I AM" but that too comes and goes. The "sense of self" is a belief like I "have a name", but really I don't HAVE a name even though I use one.

I think emotions are like smells... usually useful information, sometimes painful, but better with than without. Emotions are very fast packets of information, slower than sensations but faster than thoughts, giving just enough intel to make fairly fast adjustments while we're waiting for thoughts to fully occur. Of course performance robbing mental anquish is the flip side, so it isn't always adaptive to have emotions. 

Even in AI, there is going to be higher level processing of sensations into something quasi-emotion-like. Packets of condense information, sort of like averages of a bunch of inputs, to create something like directional urges... just like emotions in humans.

I notice lots of times in my life where my body/mind behaves Rorschach-like. It does it's thing and "I" really am not involved. 

Unfortunately, I don't have a good source. I pulled that out of a conversation on AI automobile driving maybe on Lex's podcast? But the basic idea is that the cars have access to very fast raw data, and the AI learning is a kind of intermediate steps of lumping raw data for higher and higher processing (and there might be multiple levels of that lumping). The interesting thing is that it's kind of impossible to analyze "how" this lumping is occurring, only the predictiveness of the outputs --- in other words, whether it works well or doesn't. You can't really dive into the code and re-program it, because it isn't that kind of linear/narrative code. If you want to improve the outcome, you run more training loops... or you scrap the whole thing and re-run all the training loops and build a completely new kernel.

It struck me as very similar to human development. A toddler's body-mind doesn't know how to walk, but it's only through the iterative process of trial and error and the positive reward/rewiring that occurs over time that the body-mind "knows" how to walk. But if you said "how do you know when to fire your psoas muscle to put a slight forward lean to the spine when lifting your leg so that you fall forward and land on your next foot" --- there is nothing conscious about that. It's buried down in lower levels of somatic learning. So very similar, I think. 

This also relates to one of my favorite books "The Inner Game of Tennis" -- which basically says there are two Selfs. Self 2 is the entire incredible body that learns and adapts. Self 1 is the intentional self that provides attention... but which sometimes incorrectly assumes responsibility for Self 2. Self 1 thinks it can berate Self 2 into performing better, but Self 2 just needs time and repetition. It's a really great book, and includes all the sub-games that Self 1 plays on the court (trying to win, trying to look good, trying to be nice, etc.) and it conclusion is that honoring Self 2 in a non-identifying way is essentially spirituality and a spiritual practice.

The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance by Tom Gallwey – The Rabbit Hole (blas.com)

Anyway, this is also where I have a problem with the vampire's over-the-top slamming of self-consciousness (Self 1 in the above paragraph). Self 1 isn't worthless, it has a value. But it's also clear that Ego/Self 1 isn't everything.

In pondering the book some more, the more I think the answer is that for every system of knowing, you can't observe the premises... because knowing is essentially a lumping/reducing of data. Like we were discussing earlier, nothing exists without consciousness, but what exists in the domain of consciousness is... consciousness. There is no accessing the-thing-that-creates-consciousness with consciousness. Similarly, there is sense-of-self-experience but the-thing-that-creates-sense-of-self-consciousness can't be accessed with self-consciousness. Or to go in the other direction, there is a sense of balance, but the-thing-that-creates-a-sense-of-balance can't be access with a sense of balance. 

It's sort of like each "knowing" paradigm is a tautology... and now I'm getting some deja vu sense that probably Godel's incompleteness theorem says this all more simply and elegantly.  ???

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLchieBLgZ4

An interview with an Iranian-American AI researcher who is also a Buddhist meditation teacher 

In one of those random convergences, I got an email from my old sangha-mate, David Chapman, about a newer project of his— about the dangers of AI. Since it’s been his milieu since he was investigating it at MIT, it should be interesting.

https://betterwithout.ai/

oooh thanks for this. Chris, you're going to love it.

Really enjoyed "Echopraxia"