When AI Learns to Dream: Simulated Consciousness and the Future of Creative Problem-Solving
AI learns to dream by simulating consciousness, unlocking creative problem-solving and abstract thinking for future intelligent technologies.
As AI learns to dream, it may open new dimensions in creativity, abstract thinking, and intelligent problem-solving beyond human limitations. Researchers now explore simulated consciousness, allowing machines to process thoughts creatively, as if imaginingâŠ
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Welcome to a Rabbit Hole for TNETâs March-April 2018 Game Event.Â
The following piece is FRActal MEtafiction (FRAME); a Futurist Arts & Culture paradigm which draws upon the concepts of Culture Mining and Gamification, and is inspired by artists such as William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, and Marcel Duchamp, in addition to Postmodern theorists such as Jean Baudrillard.
The term âMontsalvatâ is a reference to the opera Parsifal, by Richard Wagner.
[13 3509] Simulated Addition, and Other Oxymorons
[from âPermutation Cityâ by Greg Egan]
Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed â no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?
A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its âsurroundingsâ in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. âSimulated consciousnessâ was as oxymoronic as âsimulated addition.â
Opponents of the Uploading (Whole Brain Emulation) idea only have two essential arguments to fall back on: Either that consciousness and cognition are not matters of information processing, or that in developing AI we are modelling the wrong information, in the wrong way. One of these claims is falsifiable, and the other can be remedied.
[14 9554] The Cave
[from âThe Republicâ by Plato]
âNext, then,â I said, âmake an image of our nature in its education and want of education, likening it to a condition of the following kind. See human beings as though they were in an underground cavelike dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave. They are in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way around. Their light is from a fire burning far above and behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a road above, along which see a wall, built like the partitions puppet-handlers set in front of the human beings and over which they show the puppets.â
âI see,â he said. âThen also see along this wall human beings carrying all sorts of artifacts, which project above the wall, and statues of men and other animals wrought from stone, wood, and every kind of material; as is to be expected, some of the carriers utter sounds while others are silent.â âItâs a strange image,â he said, âand strange prisoners youâre telling of.â âTheyâre like us,â I said. âFor in the first place, do you suppose such men would have seen anything of themselves and one another other than the shadows cast by the fire on the side of the cave facing them?â
Platoâs Allegory of the Cave is composed of elements which illuminate any discussion of simulated worlds and the predicament of minds trapped within them. For example, in the allegory the slaves could in principle escape toward the light, understanding that what theyâd thought of as primary phenomena are in fact shadows or simulations of something else, something more ârealâ. What would such a process of escape and/or realization require within a Matrix-like virtual world?
[15 8222] NASA are Idiots
[from âAccelerandoâ by Charles Stross]
NASA are idiots. âThey want to send canned primates to Mars!â Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: âMars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isnât even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, itâs the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now â dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isnât thinking, it isnât working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!
If abandonment of the human form is necessary for serious colonization of space, then is it still humanity which has conquered the stars?
[16 2201] Sects and The City
[from âNaked Lunchâ by William S. Burroughs]
All streets of the City slope down between deepening canyons to a vast, kidney-shaped plaza full of darkness. Walls of street and plaza are perforated by dwelling cubicles and cafes, some a few feet deep, others extending out of sight in a network of rooms and corridors.
At all levels cross-cross of bridges, cat walks, cable cars. Catatonic youths dressed as women in gowns of burlap and rotten rags, faces heavily and crudely painted in bright colors over a strata of beatings, arabesques of broken, suppurating scars to the pearly bone, push against the passer-by in silent clinging insistence.
Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant aquatic black centipede â sometimes attaining a length of six feet â found in a lane of black rocks and iridescent, brown lagoons, exhibit paralyzed crustaceans in camouflage pockets of the Plaza visible only to the Meat Eaters.
Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, drinkers of thee Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent amber of dreams.
Also in Naked Lunch, Burroughs said âThe study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.â Do you agree? To your ear, does his statement sound critical, neutral, or celebratory?
[13 3509] A World of Stories
[from âOpen Source Democracyâ by Douglas Rushkoff]
We are living in a world of stories. We canât help but use narratives to understand the events that occur around us. The unpredictability of nature, emotions, social interactions and power relationships led human beings from prehistoric times to develop narratives that described the patterns underlying the movements of these forces. Although we like to believe that primitive people actually believed the myths they created about everything, from the weather to the afterlife, a growing camp of religious historians are concluding that early religions were understood much more metaphorically than we understand religion today. As Karen Armstrong explains in A History of God, and countless other religious historians and philosophers from Maimonides to Freud have begged us to understand, the ancients didnât believe that the wind or rain were gods. They invented characters whose personalities reflected the properties of these elements. The characters and their stories served more as ways of remembering that it would be cold for four months before spring returns than as genuinely accepted explanations for natureâs changes. The people were actively, and quite self-consciously, anthropomorphizing the forces of nature.
Let us assume for a moment that (as is highly likely if youâre reading this) you are critical of religion, both in theory and practice. As long noted by philosophers and other observers, you cannot be consistently critical of a thing without having a consistent understanding of its nature, and thus partially incorporating it into your own identity. In other words, if you know it well enough to oppose it, then it is part of you and your world. If you do oppose religion in this way, you probably think of yourself as a rationalist or empiricist of some sort.
Isnât it an interesting irony, then, that part of your worldview is caught up with arguing against a naiive, and indeed increasingly infantile notion of what âgodsâ are. Once they were commonly understood as metaphors, symbols, or representations, but now both the defenders and antagonists of religion spend their time arguing over straw men, or fictional superhumans. Donât waste your time on such primitivism. Instead, enjoy the fact that you live in a time when ideals which the ancients could only portray as allegorical superhumans can now be realized through technology. Now, we can be the gods, if only we can remember what that means.
 Thoughts to [email protected] or in comments below may be rewarded with ARG info. Conversations held elsewhere and linked back to that address or comments below will definitely win clues, hints, & info.
 ARG1 Zone of Nothing
ARG2 Twenty Thousand Years
ARG3 Cataclysmic Renewal
ARG4 MONTSALVAT
ARG5 Houses of the Outer Court
Ready Player One: AR Gaming Meets Transhumanism
ARG4 MONTSALVAT was originally published on transhumanity.net
Understand something too easily and it is funny; understand something with too much difficulty and it is boring. Those most amused by the formulation of the minutia of existence experience more foundationally than those who see too deeply into the abyss at the edges of the future and past. Such is the experience of a consciousness simulated by others around them.