Given that the main use of knowledge is to navigate through the world and through life, we can say that ontologically knowledge is our model of the world.
A humanistic world through a mechanistic world-view
A mechanical world-view without belief in free will leads to a more humanistic world.
It takes a human to find the dragons
Without intrinsic motivation, the ability to hypothesize beyond training, or the capacity for real-world experimentation, AI will remain a tool that processes human-created information rather than a creator of new knowledge.
Does an AI produce knowledge?
The LLM can interpolate within the knowledge space it’s been trained on, filling in gaps by blending concepts in novel ways. However, it will stay within the convex hull of its training data, constrained by the boundaries of what it has learned.
Open and closed loop learning
Closed-loop learning is almost a law of nature. It is applied by all sustainable natural systems and in most successful human endeavors.
Despite the obvious benefit or even need of closed-loop learning, we fail to implement it in many contexts that would clearly benefit from it.
Subjective experiences from an information differential
A hypothesis that I’d like to investigate is that subjective experiences arise as a consequence of state changes in an algorithm. I provisionally call such state changes information differentials.
Can an AI take responsibility?
A mantra repeated several times at a healthcare conference that I attended recently, is that only humans, not AI, can take responsibility for something. This made me think more deeply about what it really means to take responsibility and what, if anything, sets humans and AIs apart in this respect.
Losing ourselves
Equipped with a neolithic brain architecture, legacy brain software, and an old repertoire of subjective experiences we don’t see the world as it is but in a way that has ensured our survival and reproduction over the milennia. This has been all good up until now.
About consciousness
There are as many theories about consciousness as there are definitions and the philosophical and scientific community is still far from consensus. This post represents my current understanding.
Emergent properties misunderstood
Most systems have the properties they have because they were designed that way, either by humans or by nature, not because they “emerged”.