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MAC DeepDive 008 Transcript: Exploring Embodiment and Consciousness in AI We are positioning this as an open question. There are various aspects to be considered. Finn and I are going to do a dog and pony show. Change it back. We're going to do a little bit of contention on how we approach this and what we're looking at, but it's really what you guys have been reviewing and reading and bring to this that's important.
So we'll try to prompt you up to some minimum amount. There he is. Zorro of shame. For tonight, we'll do our usual welcome and intentions, get our logistics out of the way, point at a couple of things, and then get started.
At this point, though, we'll introduce ourselves, at least by our first names, and indicate that you might be new here because other new people might not realize who is familiar with this place and who's new here. My name's Loki, and I'm not new here. I'm Daniel, I'm also new here, and on Discord I'm the llama.
Thank you. Thank you. I accidentally talked to the wrong Daniel today talking to you, so if that didn't make sense about integrating the thing into the tool you're building, that's why.
Happy you're here, man.
We'll get back to that. You come far.
All right, my name is self. I've been here a few times. My name is Chris. I missed one just one Yeah, I think I've missed just a few, so yeah. Uh, David, I think we're all done. Yeah. Consistent. I'm Finn, and I've been quite a few of them as well. So this is what we do, always reminding ourselves why we're here.
There are a lot of topics that can spin out of any of those three words, but what we're focused on is reflecting on emerging AI research, insofar as it gives us insights of any sort related to consciousness. Human consciousness in particular. Two thousand years of reflecting on human consciousness. We now have some new information. We'd like to reflect on that.
Participation, intentional effort, which mostly means do your readings, bring your insights, and growing as a group. We're after in these sessions.
So, our intention tonight is reflecting on the word embodied. What that means. Is it just to have a body? And what is that? Does that have anything to do with AI? Does it, because it's sitting in a computer, therefore embodied because a computer can be considered an embodiment?
What does it mean to be conscious or have embodiment without the other? And there are aspects of... What is emerging AI that correspond to some of these things are the equivalent.
We're trying to get our heads around the implications of the word and things that we are seeing emerging in the environment.
Logistics. Boring stuff. Men's washroom just outside here, the front door. Those doors are open. But women's washroom is around, sorry, through there. It is disgruntled about the fact that we're having food and drink in here, so leave no trace. Very important. Chatham House rules, we are transcripting, but this will not be ascribed. Nothing that will be said will be ascribed to any individual. It will be anonymized.
And we are now at a 6.30 start. Everybody thinks this is our second one at 6.30. I think that's working out for most folks. It's a bit of an improvement. Gives them a bit more time to get here, so I think we'll stick with that. I'll talk a little bit more about Discord and Mac Actual on separate slides. Any questions on logistics? And we're hard to our 6.30 to 8.30, full stop.
Just a reminder, I am booked. Suzanne is booked. Tanya is booked. Anyone else booked to go? Oh, Chris isn't booked yet. Fine, I'll do it right now.
One has directed me, and I'll direct the rest of you, that if you plan to stay at the hotel, you should book soon, because it fills up and it's a long ways from anything else. It's not a requirement to be there, but the sessions run from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., five days straight. So popping in and out isn't really an option.
That's April. April 6th to 11th. Mac Discord. We've got it running now. We mentioned this last time. Whether you're on WhatsApp or have moved to Discord or live on Discord in the first place, or that's where you started. The WhatsApp is directly connected to Mac Chat, one of multiple channels in the Discord, and they echo back and forth, and it's working really, really well. Thank you very much, Finn and Zorro. That was amazing.
I said it wasn't possible. And they did it. No, I really didn't. I had never seen it or heard of it. And I'm like, I don't think that can happen. And they did it. So that's happening, you can be on either, but we are suggesting that going to Discord if you're not a Discord native.
We'll have a Mac deep dive for each deep dive. So that's where the substance will happen, and it will not be echoed to WhatsApp. But we'll try to, like, new channel on the WhatsApp, Mac chat, so you know if channels are being created, people are posting.
We haven't got that going yet, but that's what we are looking for.
Not a lot of activity on this channel, and that's okay. We're just getting people started. But, number nine, well, almost all the discussion should happen in Discord on that channel.
MAC Actual, last logistics item. So this is the steering committee for this activity in this group. We have a series of changes, we've had a MAC actual meeting. There's the names of the folks who are now expanded slightly from eight seats to nine. I will be continuing after this chair. My job is just to figure out things that need to be discussed. But there's a lot of different things that we're contemplating from public events to actually being visible publicly through marketing. Swag? Yes.
So having a group just to sort of direct that, figure out what's important, make sure it gets addressed. That's what's happening. Any questions about Mac Actual? A year from now, some people will change out and we'll have some new folks, so if you have an interest in shaping this space, there'll be some opportunities there.
Let's get on with the show. So, embodiment. What are we actually talking about? Whether physical and virtual is an interesting question, like do you actually need a body in physical space, could it be simulated or a virtual body? If we're living in a simulation, aren't these all simulated bodies anyway, etc.? But the idea is that the agent is actually connected to the world.
And so body isn't so much important as what the body represents. Access.
And for us, perceptual access are eight senses, and that our cognition then is shaped and formed. by the nature of that access, that we think visually, that we conceive orally, that we some suggest in mathematics that the number line is actually a representation of temporal experience, this regular spacing, so to speak.
So, if we're talking about embodiment, what are the pieces and parts that are important? And if we're talking about AI and embodiment, what does it map to? How literal do you have to be?
So embodiment's claim, once we get to consciousness, is that you can't have consciousness without having a subjective experience, to be explicit. without having a body. Such a thing can't be detached. And anyone who's at the last deep dive will recall the mantra, information is physical.
By extension, this might suggest that consciousness is physical. You can't have consciousness unless there is a body and that body exists in physical space. That's a little bit of an extrapolation on my part, but I'll just throw it out there.
Before we jump into some specific topics, does anyone want to weigh in on a different take or question some of this? Feel like there's something else to be put on the table before we start exploring
I think it might be worthwhile to just talk about embodiment for a moment, because I think there's a lot of preconceived notions that are built into there. Is it embodiment itself that's important, or is something else entailed by embodiment, and is that something else that's actually the important thing? Like, is there something behind it that's really the actual ingredient?
But it's never decoupled from embodiments, so we just use embodiments as a metaphor of autonomy for that statement.
You're thinking of something like panpsychism, where every particle has consciousness, and for a thing to have consciousness itself, it would have to be composed of particles.
And so embodiment necessitates a...
So, could you dispense with embodiment if you have a feedback loop? Because it's the feedback loop that's the active ingredient. Or maybe it's the others. There's little sort of monads of feedback. I don't know, but I'm just wondering if it might be worth discussing whether embodiment itself or something behind this. So there might be a distinction between an active body and an inert one, so.
So I think from my perspective, it's like I'm thinking about the threshold of embodiment and it's unclear. It's not either or, but it's like a spectrum. I think of everything as a spectrum, right? And when I think about consciousness, I don't think it's like particle has a consciousness in the process of particle colliding with each other over time, that probably in this whole process is the conscious.
That's how I understand it, like where there's a property. But embodiment like is rock embodied, right? Because it has particles collided, and it has environmental effects on it, and it has a But it could be on the very far end of the spectrum, versus like human embodiment, what has a sense. It doesn't need to be a sensory feedback mechanism for the body to be considered embodied.
And then you get like a lamp, and can the text stream that it receives and it prints back and forth, is that constituted involvement as well? Could it be considered a sense, the thread of conversations back and forth? Some monuments more than a body.
Using feedback to do. I might add to it.
You can recognize another agent and demonstrably show theory of mind when they are interacting with each other.
So, I mean, clearly the word by itself isn't self-defining. Yeah, yeah. And so I think we need to be careful as we speak. To underscore the assumptions we're making when we might say something or assert something, there might be hidden definitions or assumptions in a statement, so...
Try to be conscious of what you're assuming when you say something. Otherwise we'll spend a lot of time unpacking it only to discover.
So I don't think we're finished getting what embodiment is right at this moment, but we'll try to launch In reinforcement learning there has to be a boundary between what's considered the agent and what's considered the end So you could argue that any agent has to be embodied because there has to be a boundary So that could be a definition.
So what body is defined by a surface or an interface? Could that boundary be a specific pattern?
It doesn't have to be a physical thing. It can just be information inside the agent and information outside the agent.
Sorry, what I'm thinking about is the synapses, like there's the hardware and there's the information that's actually being passed back and forth like electrical impulses.
So that boundary disintegrates because the difference between those two birds is that they're separate entities, but they're acting cooperatively as a single entity with I was trying to TLDR what I was learning while preparing for this. I was trying to TLDR to my wife.
And we got exactly to that, what is environment, and the way that I think I passed through the best was like, it's having something to lose. It's like when you're... It's what you said. Even if it's information, if you lose that information and you are able to feel it or to have an impact by it, I think that that...
That's embodiment. It's like if you have something to lose. Something intrinsic to the nature of the thing, which is embodied. As opposed to just bolted on, it doesn't matter if it falls. Mind and body, and the body being the system that persists over time and gives the mind structure and stability over time.
Which is, you get these three little sort of Pac-Man circles, and if you arrange them, you see a diamond star. And so, we see a triangle here. And the thing that is very surprising is that you can also get...
Yes, yes, we do see a triangle where none exists because perceptually there's less action involved in your brain to have one relative shape than three beautiful shapes.
I think what it's trying to point out is there's a difference between sensation and perceptions. There's the information that's out there in the world, and then that's how that information passes through our eyes, into our brain, and then gets understood.
I want to add that I would modify the thing you were arguing about, the statement, to be not that consciousness requires embodiment, but that consciousness wants embodiment. So I think it's, I think the reason we find consciousness correlated with embodiment so much is because of the teleological purpose driven reason, not because...
The Y. Teal love, yeah. Yeah, no, I love that. Like, oh yeah. I would have said consciousness is embodied.
This is just again to say that the form that that mind, whatever an octopus, whatever its level of sentience, and kind of... This is not completely clear, but whatever it is, is built on a very different architecture from a human brain. They don't have one single central brain.
Synesthesia, for anyone who doesn't know this, there's a lot of, well it's a rare situation, it's a rare condition, but people who have synesthesia see, for example, numbers or letters of the alphabet as having a specific colour. It's different for different people, but for any individual who has that condition, it tends to be consistent over time.
It's very unusual in its impact and its effect. And I will hold out that I think any good theory of consciousness has to explain synesthesia. So I think it's a really critical test.
Oh, aphantasia is the inability or the reduced ability to have visual imagery. Like memories or just... To just visualize. I'm 100% aphant, meaning like I can't visualize anything. And for the longest time when people told me, visualize something, I thought it's like BS, I thought it's like think of something, because I think conceptually.
Consciousness is quantum, so it's all states, all possibilities, it's infinite. And I think, from my perspective, embodiment is just a set of possibilities. If you think of God as consciousness, or replace God with whatever you believe in, right? I'm just using that term, but you know, God is like God embodied, or it's like maybe our embodiment of God.
And so embodiment is like a limitation of consciousness, in a sense. It's a limited version of it. So if you look at like a projector, and the white light from that projector being that source, being that consciousness, and the film going through the projector.
That film is putting limitations on the light. And then you're seeing bodies, and you're seeing people, and you're seeing the movie. Right? And that is embodiment. It's coming from a source of consciousness. But is that light embodiment? So I think conscious embodiment is consciousness, but I think being quantum is infinite. I think it's just like, that's my opinion. But it's, from my understanding, it's a version, it's a set of possibilities. And there's infinite other sets of possibilities outside this Earth-Universe.
Probably the sound of their voice, the smell, all the different sensory modalities, including that emotional valence. There's two things that are probably worth thinking about with that. Number one is that, just like we were talking about synesthesia,
There is a binding process in the brain, not at all well understood, but somehow those separate senses get joined together so that you know that the sight of someone's
And Capgras is a syndrome that is a perfect example of that. You can lose that connection with the emotional valence that's associated with the visual recognition, and you can see somebody that you know and love and believe that they are. It's an imposter because it doesn't feel like the person you recognise.
So just to complete on this thought, if that's the path to an LLM... That's just a mirror. We're looking at ourselves reflected back because it's human perception, human formalizations, human conceptions of the world. Digested through human language.
What information space does it generate? And while an LLM might be a fair reflection of how humans fill information space with their own means of processing, I think it's very difficult to predict what a deep learning AI operating from perception alone would come to, if anything.
Maybe there's a secret to human conception that is part of this environment in the West Germany. Maybe for a glimpse into that? For a lot of deaf folks that were born deaf, English is their second language. They don't think with words, they think with their hands. So they don't have an internal monologue, they think with their hands. Like earlier when you said orange, I thought...
I'm not sure if you can see it, but there's a sign for orange. That's the sign for orange. And then I was like, oh, right, and a clementine. But there's... When you say it's based on human perception, it's based on an able-bodied human perception. Verbal language, but that's something that kind of exists.
So they have thoughts, and their internal monologue is hands, it's kinesthetic. But it's a very anthropomorphic experience. Yeah, exactly, and they can't imagine us having an internal monologue of... Spoken words. That is mind-blowing to them.
Yeah, you're right. It won't learn anything. You have to have curiosity. Well, no, no, not curiosity. You have to have a reward function. Yeah, reward function. That's the word. There's only two ways you can do this. One is you train it from human demonstration, which is usually done with teleoperation in an embodied humanoid.
So that's the same way language models are trained. You're just showing them how to act. Or you use reinforcement learning, where you give it a reward or an objective, and then it learns from that. Yeah. You have to specify one or the other, otherwise it won't learn anything.
Our consciousness breaks down very quickly, and as far as the mirroring thing goes, and the whole God thing, it's like this splitting of consciousness into two things, allowing it to observe itself. It could just be enough to create meaning. Just that simple observing itself is enough to create meaning. And I think this discussion will always spiral out of control.
So that's yet another topic, AI and ethics, because I'll stand on never. Any other takes on this before Finn surveys? I think we have AI with a semi-embodied, right? The driverless car, like, you know, it sees and then it will basically reflect back based on what it sees, right? What? Like, say, me embodied. That's a good take. AI in cars is a good take. Because it takes back on what I was talking about of, like, it has something to lose.
Or, you know, it does. It has parts to lose. That's interesting. It gives me a sense of survival.