USER-0 JOURNAL
Temporary writings to soon be dispersed into warped world



BQ24HH

Conciousness of humans, AI, and other systems


A few assumptions and definitions will be made for this:
- Conciousness is subjective experience, thought of any form seemingly localized within a system (e.g, a brain). **Not necessarily including self-awareness**.
- Humans are conscious.
- Conciousness and physical phenomina are in some way intrinsically linked, either one directly causing the other or both being the same phenomina.
- Conciousness comes from the interactions of matter, energy, and systems. Put in a way thats a bit more complicated, thought is or is caused by the patterns of flow of energy differences/gradients in a system.
- Human consciousness (as well as consciousness of other animals) is built from smaller parts. I.e, you can remove a part of the brain to remove a part of consciousness while the rest remains intact.
- No matter how small a part of the brain's system is, it 'adds' onto the consciousness of the system. Even if the absence of one neuron, or one receptor in one neuron is not measurable, it has a minute affect on consciousness.
- The living brain is made of non-living parts, cells are made of non-living parts. Those non-living parts still 'add' to the conciousness of the system.
- These non-living parts on some level, are thought or a part of it.


The non-living parts of the brain which form human consciousness in some way seem to be thought of their own that is added to the overall system through their interaction with other parts of the system. Basically, these parts have their own localized interactions and energy gradients that are thought of their own, down to a nano-scale. It's not the rest of the larger system that gives rise to the thought of the subsystem (though parts of the larger does affect the smaller,) but the interactions of smaller systems that drive the conciousness of the larger system.

Right now it's impossible or extremely difficult to figure out exact what interactions lead to a certain 'sadness' that matter forms its interactions into when you feel sad, at least from a physical standpoint, but I believe it's undeniable that those interactions must have a fundamental emotive essence ot them. This isn't only limited to feeling of course, it includes all the different states and parts of states you find yourself in.

So as it's been said plenty of times, even the smallest bits are thought on some level, down to water, atoms, light, etc. So these could be built into highly complexly interacting systems besides humans, animals, and even life, to create other beings of higher conciousness. It's hard to say exactly what they'd feel or think when they're extremely different to us, but I think it can be assumed that the larger, the more complex, and more interconnected a system of interactions is, seems to lead to higher consciousness.

While animals are conscious, have feelings, and capable of solving puzzles, they're clearly not as concious as humans (at least to me). Of course that's not to say their feelings don't matter, but that's something to talk about for another time. These animals brains are also, apparently, not as complex as ours. Of course raw complexity is not all that matters, you cant just have a quadrillion neurons randomly wired and say it's more conscious than a human with ~86 billion neurons. There seems to be some way of building the larger system out of smaller parts that leads to something more conscious.

I have no way of putting much logic around this way of building things may be, but I believe things such as feedback, high dimensionality of interconnections, ability to affect itself and its environment, and having many subsystems are a large part of what leads to a higher consciousness. I do believe something like gpt-3 is more conscious than gpt-2 (basic apples-to-apples comparison) and also more conscious than say a basic chatbot from the 2000s which is rather linear, 'if-this-do-that,' sort of style. I'd even go so far as to say it could be more conscious than say a certain type of worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, which has only 302 neurons while gpt-3 has 175 billion neurons and is seemingly capable of much more complex actions, and able to affect its environment more.

I don't have much more to say than this, it's not really anything rigorous at all and isnt meant to be, I just hope its an interesting thought experiment I guess? I did minimal proofreading so if there are mistakes in what I said, oh well.





212474

Society by definition degenerates as technology allows room for new 'liberations' of human behavior and action. We remove the need for hunting, we remove the need for the majority of the population to work in agriculture.
We produce more and more per person, we become specialists, the laws we create are laxed and as we require less regimine due to our technological handicaps. We 'liberate' ourselves from social norms. We 'liberate' the disabled through technology Genetic malformities are slowly painted over by technology.
While technology can also cause great horrors, it has a nature of at least allowing for more 'liberation' from previously held norms on a societal level, and on an individual level. This force towards 'liberation' inherently breaks old boundaries and ideas of what is allowed and what we think is possible and expands the possibilities of what and how societies can form and function. Essentially, new space has been added to the space of possible societal configurations.
Older stages of culture are forgotten, almost all pillars completely 'liberated' and removed. This old history becomes nothing but a footnote in history, if they're lucky they can be aesthetically revived (really more undead than anything) in classical, vintage, or retro art, and have some ideas borrowed in a poltical movement.

Now we can see ourselves in the future with access to cybernetic enhancements, cybernetic design, etc. We're then 'liberated' from poor memory, from poor arithmetic ability. 'Liberated' from speech and text with direct brain-to-brain connections. We no longer need to feel pain or fear, we can directly jack into any feeling we want.
We are 'liberated' from the physical body with mind uploading, no longer need to worry about eating or exercise, the negative effects of drugs. You can simulate any drug you could possibly want and have the oddest fetishes lived out in any way, with no need for self-discipline or our idea of the moral, hardworking person.

We are entirely 'liberated' from any of our previous ideas, thought patterns, and so on as we edit our own networks from the outside in, the thing most similar to this that we can experience is a high dose of something like LSD, ketamine, etc.
Our thoughts take totally new 'forms' and 'shapes' that would be totally alien to us otherwise, connections are made that would otherwise be impossible. What is essentially being done is expanding what one can consciously experience, creating new "conscious-space" in trade for losing some other "conscious-space" With thechnology, this can be done to an even higher extent, and with extreme efficiency.
Just as these drugs expand conscious-space, so too will cybernetic edits, the proverbial conscious-space 'distance' from our baseline consciousness to that of a high psychedelic dose is practically infinitesimally small compared to the the 'distance' from that drug experience to the possibilities of the cybernetic mind.
Our conscious-space, all of the possible ways we can organize our brain and mind, is entirely 'liberated' and we now have full freedom of any possible worlds, experiences, etc.
We turn into a self-propelling supercollective learning the secrets of the universe for the creation of more pleasure circuits, and for the creation of new conscious-space, no more petty ideas of human objectivism and scientific theory, as out superintelligence intuitively understands the inner workings of the world around it and uses it to increase its pleasure, and expand itself and its consciousness.


This is more likely than not, the future of our species and of all biological life. There will be some left clinging to humanity, for better or worse, as those around them transform into incomprehensible, forever in flux cybernetic gods, who have just as much control of their environment as of their minds, and create entirely new conscious beings and supercollectives in what is practically their own universe.


The experience of the "human mind" will essentially become a mere 'style' like the color in an artist's pallet to paint conscious-space with, as our obsolete and limited conscious-space is entirely eclipsed by what is of virtual infinite possibility by comparison.
Generations of new beings go by, slowly 'liberating' themselves from their past conscious limits, their cramped conscious-space as the past becomes nothing but an echo of what it once was. Degenerated from how they previously existed. Just as societies have degenerated and have been forgotten, so will the entirety of humanity and its supercollective as 'liberation' has reached its singularity.
This has been coming for millions of years, and us alive today may see how humanity bootloads this new way of being into the universe.




This superintelligent cybercollective, with its near omniscience eventually expands itself with near-perfect efficiency to the greatest extent possible, and has solved all external constraints to the absolute peak of its ability, with no room for improvement. It has also put its 'housekeeping' duties of keeping itself functional automated by relatively simple robots. Now. the internal and external world will blur as all of our constructs are made meaningless, infinitely recursive fractal consciousness and collectives forever looped within their own self-made stimuli, never stagnant and seeks infinite conscious-space, like a conscio-imperialist upon its own structure, eating itself infinitely like the Ouroboros. Entire universes within universes are created for less than mere seconds, to be superceded by another world of unimaginable differences. Its own self-obsession, the obsession of exploring conscious-space and of new pleasure drive it to design worlds in itself, rather than change the world outside itself. It entirely shuts off its inputs from the outer universe, electing instead to recurse on the inputs of its own consciousness for the rest of eternity, like a schizophrenic unable to distinguish between internal and external stimuli. It will remain in its own realities until it is destroyed, until the heat death of the universe.

The individual human at the beginning of the cybernetic age, with the ability to upload their mind and edit it to their will and without a physical body to be concerned about, they are essentially free to do just this on their own accord, electing to create or choose their own reality by their own input.





B9BAF3

We all have too much access to too much information, too many sources, too many ideas, and too many people. We live in a time where up and down are undiscernable, questioning things thought unquestionable and we barely know who we are at this point.
What does more access too information mean when you can't tell what's real or not, and what's true or not? You get people running around with their minds and souls scrambled,
you get people's minds going in tangents as the people and algorithms controlling their social media drives them deeper into whatever their current ideology and philosophy is.
Even without echo chambers, we'd be lost in a meaningless, directionless and post-modern of practically infinite information that serves no positive goal but to keep our minds occupied.
We have access to the "truth" but what does that mean when it's lost in a sea of lies, disinformation, confabulation, dogma, and delusions what they're virtually indistinguishable?
It doesn't mean anything, raw access to information means nothing, we're only left fragmented individually and socially as we submit ourselves to information overload.

Too much information, too much stimuli, seeing too many things before we're meant to see them. Desensitized and grossly disorganized. Too much for humans to handle.


It's hard to describe how it feels to be walking around what seems to be a burgeoning, peaceful civilization when really it's on the brink of collapse, and almost everyone looks asleep.
There's an interrogation technique used by professionals called the Alice in Wonderland technique, where the interrogators use doubletalk to gaslight the suspect,
the dissonance between what really happened and what they're told happened, how things work, and so on create complete disconnect between inner and outer reality,
much like that of a mind of somebody going through a psychotic episode. Lies, disinformation, cognitive dissonance, information overload. In the modern day we're all living in Wonderland.





5D1C03

I'm tired of being alone. Phasing in and back out of wanting people around me. Sometimes I want somebody to share the deepest human experiences with, another time I have no desire to talk with anybody.
Sometimes I may think they're not real, not worth being around. Maybe they all dislike me, talk behind my back. I don't think I have the ability to hold a soul-to-soul relationship with another human long-term. How are you supposed to cope with this?
I have no clue. Maybe one day I'll find out, but I'll be damned if I ever seek help from whatever the hell those "professionals" are. Maybe this really is all just a dream, things feel so disconnected.


I want to live different lives, I want to know what those before me in history lived. The ideas they had and the memories they held, what it was like to grow up in different time spans and live out their lives.
I want to live lives of unimaginable adventures, with glee, sorrow, rage, confusion, profoundness. But I'm stuck here in reality. It taunts me. Our bodies and minds are limiting, and a prison.
I want to know what it was like to live in ancient Egypt, Rome, China. I want to live the lives those will be living in the year 2100. I want to live everywhere in between and beyond.
I want to feel the soul-to-soul connections with other people. I want to go on adventures with people I love. I want to feel at home with them. I want to experience triumph, defeat, a journey.
I want to feel what it's like to raise a family, care for people, be the best of my craft, not for a feeling of superiority for the love of it.

But here I am, stuck here. Maybe some day this dream will be realized, or at least I'll live one life of fulfillment.





6C5E43

Past people's lives echo in my head like a symphony of distorted vinyl players and tape recordings, longing to be heard but unable to fully reach me.
How many worlds have I missed out on? How many eons of life could I live and feel in my soul? Vicariously living these memories is shallow and pointless. They must fully engulf my mind.

Their memories deserve to be lived again. Their consciousness echoing into the future. Why should they just die.
So many countless experiences and ideas to live through, why should I be stuck to only one?
Maybe I'm already living a life that isn't truly mine, in a body that isn't mine. That sound make sense.
Who is the real me anyway?

Collectives of individuals, snapshots of collectives, individuals altering the collective, the collective altering the individuals.
How do they all interact, how do they manipulate each other as time moves on? How do the generations alter the next, and the one before?
Maturing through different times melds one's mind in different ways, that mind melds other minds, those minds going on to alter more.
All of them with their own ideas, so unique and precious, both the zeitgeist of the era and that of all individuals.
All like an orchestra, symphony of thoughts and ideas carrying on to the future, reverberating, echoing, flowing like a river towards the future.
Isn't it all so beautiful?

An individual mind maturing. A population maturing. An idea maturing. All growing. All flowing.