Writer on art, perception, science, AI, consciousness, and the strange edges of knowledge. Magic designer, director, and consultant.
Joined February 2010
- Tweets5.7K
- Following575
- Followers5.8K
- Likes1.4K
Pinned Tweet
Part III of Every Image Is Computer Generated is about the deeper question beneath the AI art debate: what actually makes art human?
Not struggle. Not exclusivity. Not some mystical spark.
I think the special ingredient is the relationship.
One of the peculiarities of producing a live event is that the audience usually experiences the result, not the hundred decisions that made it possible. When everything goes well, much of the work disappears.
Halloween may be my favorite annual celebration of consensual deception. For one night, the point isn't to eliminate the illusion. It's to enjoy participating in it.
I love that there are still small discoveries to be made. This week, it was the Japanese series Sai on @netflix , which I found beautiful and profound. It inspired me to buy persimmons, a fruit I've never tried. One discovery leading to another.
I highly recommend the show.
I have two increasingly intimidating reading lists: books I haven't read, and books I have read but now suspect I didn't fully understand. The second list is growing faster.
I wonder sometimes, when revising an essay, whether a sentence explains the idea or merely sounds like the kind of sentence that I like and hope explains the idea.
I've been trying to explain P versus NP to a friend whose math background stops at high school algebra. It's a useful reminder that understanding a problem and knowing the vocabulary used to describe it are not the same thing.
Where does the work of an image happen?
In the painter’s nervous system? In the film? In the phone’s computational pipeline? In the AI model? In the person deciding what survives?
Part II is about moving the argument from tools to agency.
Lucifer J. Rose retweeted
The Law of the Sublime comes out November 10th.
Get your copy today: link.amazon/B06zJY548
One of the pleasures of reading across disciplines is finding a distinction that becomes useful somewhere unexpected. The danger is carrying the analogy further than the evidence permits. I enjoy both parts of that problem.
This is a fascinating research direction, particularly the attempt to derive physical constants from quantum information rather than treating them as unexplained inputs.
The distinction worth preserving is between proving a mathematical result and establishing that it describes physical reality.
If Chain Theory can bridge that gap and generate independent predictions, the implications could be extraordinary. I'm very interested to see where this goes.
I know enough probability to understand that a bad opening hand in Magic isn't personal. I still reserve the right to take it personally.
Discipline is freedom.
Maintaining a clear mind is the hardest challenge of life.
By default we settle into patterns. We do what's easily available and pattern match what others do.
Getting swept away by the day which turn into years. Awaking one day and wondering what even happened to the time.
I've found my morning routine is the best antidote to becoming the System. That is, unthinkingly becoming the default patterns that dominate your era.
Each day, it's time without screens, messages, scrolling, interruptions, and social pressures.
It's filled with silence, the discomfort of discipline and the open space of thought.
There is something magical about the morning. A time when life is reborn each day. I find my greatest solace and joy in them.
p.s. those of you with kids, I hear you. I have three children. Morning routines are practically impossible. Hang in there and even if it's a 15 minute routine, it can be a good practice to maintain sanity amid the chaos.
I think this is exactly the right way to think about aging.
Aging and disease are physical processes, not immutable laws requiring our decline. The fact that we haven't yet fully learned how to prevent or reverse every form of biological deterioration doesn't establish that doing so is impossible.
The remaining questions are scientific and engineering problems. Difficult ones, certainly, but problems worth solving.
Lucifer J. Rose retweeted
What is life?
• Dostoevsky: It’s hell.
• Socrates: It’s a test.
• Aristotle: It’s the mind.
• Nietzsche: It’s power.
• Freud: It’s death.
• Marx: It’s the idea.
• Picasso: It’s art.
• Gandhi: It’s love.
• Schopenhauer: It’s suffering.
• Steve Jobs: It’s faith.
• Einstein: It’s knowledge.
• Stephen Hawking: It’s hope.
• Kafka: It’s just the beginning.
I've noticed a tendency in some to mistake a precise answer for a certain one.
You can describe an uncertainty with extraordinary precision without resolving it. Sometimes the most precise answer is a very careful explanation of what we don't know.
Lucifer J. Rose retweeted
David Deutsch (@DavidDeutschOxf) and I discuss AGIs and subjectivity on the Joe Walker Podcast (@JosephNWalker):
David Deutsch:
I think it’s inevitable that AGIs will be capable of having internal subjectivity and qualia, because that’s all included in the letter G in the middle of the name of the technology.
Me:
Well, not necessarily, because the G could be general computational power, the ability to solve problems, and there could be no one at all who’s actually human.
David Deutsch:
But there ain’t nothing here but computation. It’s not like in Star Trek: Data lacks the emotion chip, and it has to be plugged in. But there’s nothing possibly in that chip apart from more circuitry like he’s already got.
Me:
But, of course, the episode that you’re referring to is one in which the question arose: Is it moral to reverse engineer Data by dismantling him, therefore stopping the computation? Is that disassembling a machine, or is it snuffing out a consciousness? Because there is an alternative view that subjectivity depends also on whatever biochemical substrate our particular computation runs on. And I think there’s no way of ever knowing.
David Deutsch:
I think we can answer that question before we ever do any experiments, even today, because there’s no difference in principle between a computer that runs partly by electricity and partly by chemicals and one that runs entirely on silicon chips. Because the latter can simulate the former with arbitrary accuracy.
Me:
Well, we don’t have to solve the problem this afternoon in our conversation, but, in fact, I think it is not solvable. But the simulation doesn’t necessarily mean that it has subjectivity. It could just mean it’s a simulation; that is, it’s going through all the motions. It might even do it better than we do, but, you know, there’s no one home. There’s no one actually being hurt.
David Deutsch:
Well, you can be a dualist. You can say that there is mind in addition to all the physical stuff. But if you want to be a physicalist, then there’s this thought experiment where you remove one neuron at a time and replace it with a silicon chip, and you wouldn’t notice.
Me:
Well, that’s the question. An external observer wouldn’t notice. How do we know that, from the point of view of the brain being replaced—every neuron by a chip—it’s like falling asleep? That when it’s done and every last neuron is replaced by a chip, you’re dead, subjectively, even though your body is still making noise?
David Deutsch:
That means that when your subjectivity is—there is something happening in addition to the computation. And that’s dualism.
Me:
I mean, again, I don’t have an opinion one way or another, which is exactly my point. I don’t think it’s a decidable problem. But it could be that that extra something is not ghostly substance. It could be that the stuff that the brain is made of is responsible for that extra ingredient of subjective experience, as opposed to intelligent behavior. I think we’re going to be having the same debate a hundred years from now.
David Deutsch:
Yeah, maybe one of the AGIs will be participating in the debate by then.