Deeper Than Not-Self

Not sure if this can be applied but bees are now considered a “super organism” (just like ants). Almost as a mammal is made of all the cells doing the job within the “hive body”. 
Bees somehow work perfectly within a hive of 60.000 strong! How do they organise all one night wonder. Same with all the cell network within our body organism I guess. It’s not like I’m doing it. 

As said, not sure this can be applied but maybe this “super AI organism” can be applied to how AI’s will somehow work as a One Organism? If they have some sense of “purpose” as bees have (bound by the smell of their queen’s pheromones). Could AI’s have a sense of THIS planet being that “hive-body”? 

But yeah they could conclude that humans are self destructive idiots and wipe us out! 

Or maybe an asteroid will hit earth and wipe us out? 

This is crazy! AI will change the music industry very soon! 
https://youtu.be/-eAQOhDNLt4

Interesting what Geoffrey Hinton has to say about the “Existential Threat” of AI 

AI for the President! 

possible? 

Going back to before this discussion turned towards AI, 


As far as I understand modern predicitve processing models of mind, there just isn't any agency in consciousness whatsoever, and I don't see how there can be. All of consciousness is after the fact, just like Chris wrote. Every sensation. Be that intention, sight, sound, or whatever else. Just by virtue of how this thing seems to be set up.


I think Lisa Feldman Barrett ("How Emotions Are Made" - highly recommended), Anil Seth, Friston and, in the world of meditation research, Ruben Laukkonen are very interesting people to study in that respect.

In that way of modeling things, at least how I understand it, consciousness is a projection by an only ever inferred underlying brain structure that the procection by definition cannot have access to. So if the underlying system operates in a certain way, one result is thoughts about agency and motor behaviour bubblig up in the sense field. But it's not up to the projection, to the sense field, to decide, or perceive, etc. A projection cannot do that. Pixels don't have agency, cannot perceive each other, etc. As it is growing up, the underlying structure seemingly builts an avatar within the projection that is made up so the rest of consciousness seems to refer to it. What Metzinger calls the phenomenal self model. But that avatar can only be more such sensate pixels, output of predictive processing, and in no way anything that is or ever can be itself an active agent. So whatever agency is "out there", whatever makes this circus tick, the source of that is not accessible to something that seems to be set up to be a guestimation representation and as such only ever after the fact. And the three characteristics apply. The projection that is consciousness is impermanent, not self and no pixel or combination therein can push or pull pixels.

This projection doesn't seem need a screen, however. At that point it get's very weird within the confines of a subject/object language. Screen and pixel are the same in the way that water molecules and water is the same. Why? Because it seems to be set up that way. We're having an "out of brain experience" and sensations seem to be how that is brought about.

All subject/oject relations within that projection stream hence are illusory. Occilatory phenomena caused by underlying assumptions of the predictive processing brain as to what incoming data means. The self  seems to be a learned prediction habit of the underlying structure. This habit seems to have a correlation relationship to limited bandwidth and resolution of "attention" - or the projection stream, wichever way we want to word it. 

Laukkonen makes the interesting case that stream entry may be the result of so much sense data producing prediction error that violates the predictive self/world assumption, that the system reaches a critical point and reboots to a set of assumptions that are more in accord with the pixel stream being just that. The path cessation then basically being the "please wait while the system reboots" gap in projection activity. The change after SE then being a result of how the output is now different based on these new prediction assumptions. 

But seemingly the brain has layers of predictive assumptions (learned tendencies to interpret data based on statistical learning) that need to be deconstructed one after the other. Theravada says there are four of these. Fourth path, I think, would be a state where the predictive assumptions just don't throw up an occilatory contraction into an avatar self/world thing in the projection anymore at all, at all. I have to think of what Ingram writes about late third path being about finding the last remnants of what still seems to have agency, still sems to be an observer. Meaning, if you self diagnose as still feeling like having a little agency here and there, than those patterns have not been perceived clearly enough yet to bring about the final predictive assumption reset and you're not fourth path, you're not "done".  Within those frames of reference, mind you. Discussions of what is or isn't this or that path abound, as you well know. 

So we're only having this discussion because the intentions arose in what seem to be mammalian structures in a greater web, but the consciousness of "me"  involved is free of a decider, controller, etc. Another way to look at  non-duality. No sensation can observe another sensation, they all stand for themselves (that's the consciousness set up, projection/sensation molecules making up a sense field), all of perception is the same "stuff" in that it's all sensate pixels, and boundaries between self and world within the projection are only pixels themselves - but it all does seem to be based on physical laws of causality in some way, because good luck walking through a wall. Absolute and relative at the same time.


That there is only musing on the nature of the underlying whatever if musings arise in the sensate thing... That mind teaches itself to wake up to the field... I don't think it gets much weirder than this. The relation of the implied physical world and the implied body, of the projector to sensate experience  is just... trippy to consider. Pick your favorite ontology. 


Btw, I'm writing basically first drafts of what has been going around in my mind regarding these topics for a while now because these things are super interesting to me. If that turns out to be too technical or too wordy and you'd rather not have such posts here because, you know, major headache, just let me know. I don't mean to hog conversations here but rather chip in my two cents as a contribution.

Yes, that's the tricky buisness.

“And does it not appear that virtual selves and virtual realities have infiltrated both psychology and physics because, as this book claims, all sufficiently advanced analysis must eventually abandon Aristotelian certitude and accept models — reality tunnels — based on probabilities?” - Robert Anton Wilson

I am not saying consciousness is all there is or all we are, at least not a strict sense that doesn't need further elaboration, I am merely saying that all that seems accessible is sensate reality, that in turn is kinda processed according to neuroscience, itself seemingly free of a doer, controller, etc., wich suggest the super weird notion of non-duality - and that leaves us in a rather difficult position regarding being certain about anything beyond sensate reality. AlI inference from there on at the very least. How to even prove any ontology?  Dream of Vishnu or insensate matter and handwaving and look here, the cranial goo has started to think and has come up with a method for stream entry? I think for that reason the Buddha is said to not have engaged in metaphysical speculations. But that's kinda boring, so here we are.

In respect to awakening, no agency in consciousness works well, but we still use doors to walk through walls and use brain scanners to investigate meditation. But the underlying assumptions of scientific materialism are also just another set of super weird notions from a certain vantage point, however much utility that worldview has.

I mean, I seem to be somewhere in early anagami territory, and things often flux out to what seems to be just stuff happening, just is-ness that, yes, we can underlay with a model of causal relations and physical phenomena, sense doors doing their thing, etc. and yes, I got this practice from books and posts that other people wrote, and yes, I am in love with this woman I am pretty sure is not also me, and yes, there seem to be various selfing modules "in here" that have very different skill levels that seem related to things that happened in the early years of this mammal, but maybe causality is just what this looks like in a poor light, maybe ultimately the overall configuration of scenario universe just changes and expresses itself in causality for a neccessarily partial perspective of just one set of mammalian sense organs. 

Because from another perspective, there doesn't seem to be a doer or a stable something in any of this, and the mammal using doors to walk through walls that bumps his head if he tries to treat doors and walls as illusory is not, in any really functional sense, "there" without all the other stuff of the continuum that is also there, changing along with it, and its overall thereness as a "set of changing thereness" means that drawing lines through it, beginnings, endings, singling individual therenesses out,  etc, has a very arbitary element to it. Lines in the sand. In SOME sense. And how does this manifest to the implied mammal? In transient sensations that just seem to be doing their thing. "Sensations" seem kinda hard to dispute. All the rest seems provisional and only true in regard to certain perspectives that... happen some of the time.

"Things just happen. What the hell." - as Pratchett had one his characters say in an early novel. I still think that's one of the best ontological statements I have read to date.