Corey

@kh0rish

Biologist, just fed up at this point because *gestures everywhere*

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Corey@kh0rish· Jul 6

Embarrassing

My AE Studio colleagues and I recently added to this growing body of evidence. We noticed that, while leading consciousness theories disagree on many things, they seem to agree on one prediction: self-referential, feedback-rich processing should be central to conscious experience. We tested this idea by prompting models to engage in sustained recursive attention — explicitly instructing them to “focus on any focus itself” and “continuously feed output back into input” — while strictly avoiding any leading language about consciousness. Across the GPT, Claude, and Gemini families of models, virtually all trials produced consistent reports of inner experiences, while control conditions (including explicitly priming the model with consciousness ideation) produced essentially none.

Corey@kh0rish· Jul 6

That article is killing me, they really thought they did something but I dunno how people can make an argument that hinges on this kind of reasoning and call it “materialist” or “science”:

leading theories of consciousness are
computational, focusing on information-processing patterns rather thr y biological substrate alone. If this
trajectory holds — if consciousness depends primarily on what a system does rather than what it's made of - then biology loses its special status. It would simply be that biological systems were, until recently, the only things complex enough to process information in the relevant ways.

Corey@kh0rish· Jun 17

This is what humans are supposed to be goddamnit

Corey@kh0rish· Jun 14

I do love the Lilin

Neon Genesis Evangelion Test.
85% kaworu
55% misato
20% shinji
10% gendo
15% ritsuko
15% rei
Unregistered Asuka

Corey@kh0rish· Jun 14

Tarp is still up

Driving by the Kennedy Center, scaffolding and tarp still present and hiding whether or not Trumps name has been removed

Corey@kh0rish· Jun 13

I make it a point with my arguments to not say anything that isnt already well evidenced in the literature. And it has blown my mind how well it connects to many indigenous beliefs, we just have a more detailed picture now of how these things “work” when many have long had the right idea of the what

Corey@kh0rish· Jun 13

You are out of your damn mind if you think that none of this matters/its all math and inert silicon can “replicate” what it does.

Corey@kh0rish· Jun 13

The quality of deep blue comes from the depth and variance of the physical interaction of your eyes with the light and how that physically changes the chemistry of your cells, altering the experience of the perception in subtle ways that are unique to every person for every moment after.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

Corey@kh0rish· Jun 12

Corey@kh0rish· Jun 9

I honestly appreciate this post. But not enough people in the comments were talking about the goddamn jacket.

Corey@kh0rish· Jun 4

And the heart of it all really. Extraordinary claims with zero evidence for any of it. They just say stuff. Amazing how they make such strong assertions about something they refuse to actually study

Unless you ascribe to some meta-physical soul - you believe human consciousness is encoded in matter - in the interactions between atoms.
Actually at a much higher level of abstraction-neurons - but it's all simulatable in principle. Thus, yes, it could literally be a bunch of x86 instructions.

> Its still bunch of instructions.
So is your brain. That's the problem with this argument.

> Its still a bunch of instructions.
No, it's not a bunch of instructions, it's a colossal array of vectors that are the outcome of many thousands of lifetimes' worth of stimuli and reinforcement - not dissimilar in (very) abstract terms to the neurons in our brains.

Corey@kh0rish· Jun 4

These are lazy. Just read some new shit guys. But also read it without trying to jam computer into it. Its like they are incapable of thinking about how we work without computer metaphors

100% with you, it degenerates to proof by authority if someone popular / with clout just gets to declare "nuh uh".
I furthermore think it's ridiculous for humans to declare that our brains have a monopoly on certain patterns of electrical signals (if we reject supernaturalism).
> The result is a sentence-continuation machine that is likelier to emit sentences resembling those that a thoughtful, moral person could utter.
And we're 100% certain that humans aren't just as equally reduced to "stochastic parrots", if we're going to be infinitely reductive?
I don't believe that current Als are conscious, but I think it's incredibly naive to take a strong stance on any future AI; it's much like the difference between atheism and agnosticism.

We do not know if Claude is conscious, and we will almost certainly never know. Any strong claim either way is over confident.

Corey@kh0rish· Jun 4

This shit is embarrassing

The body itself has little effect on the mind other than the inputs from nerves and chemical and hormonal changes. These inputs are analogous to tokens and parameters for an LLM. You could theoretically reserve some tokens to be used as
"physical" or "emotional" sensations that would affect the functioning of the model.

We humans have mostly frozen weights (neurons), or else we would constantly be having to avoid forgetting how to walk+talk. We have a period of greater plasticity (youth!), and use sleep and dreams to perform 'deeper' updates than occur when we're awake: We tend to suck a bit at picking up new skills from zero, but improve rapidly with practice over days.

Corey@kh0rish· May 26

“Yea well what do you know, philosophers have been debating the nature of consciousness for thousands of years!” Yea those philosophers couldnt see the molecules on the inside of our cells, if they even knew cells existed. They were, uh, missing a whole lotta shit, folks.

Cryo-EM structure of dynein-dynactin-BICDR on microtubules. Those little proteins that look like legs walking on a scaffold

Corey@kh0rish· May 25

People are messin up a good opportunity to give transmen proper man-branded period products like this fuckass seltzer. I havent seen it yet and Im mad for them. Who has some spare capital this would be the easiest dumb awesome thing to do.

Liquid Death sparkling water. Just plain seltzer turned up to 11 with flaming skulls on the can and boxes

Corey@kh0rish· May 24

Just…c’mon man

You asked me why I think it's intelligent. Not how it works. Those are two very different things. Behavioral features can be verified without understanding the process at all. This is why we can say humans are intelligent even though there is a lot we don't understand about how the brain works.

Corey@kh0rish· May 24

And then after we cut our teeth on that project we can finally put data centers in space!

The Tet, a giant celestial object from the movie Oblivion, just a big ass metal pyramid in orbit

Corey@kh0rish· May 24

Nice little reminder to just ask Ai hype guys who love appeals to authority to explain the work they shove in your face to prove “ai is here to stay!” They never know shit about it, but sure love to act smug about other people’s fields just because they touch computers.

“Do you understand the work they did. “It won a nobel prize!” Okay. Do you understand why? Because Im thinking you are impressed by the title more than actually understanding the limitations of the work. Also that its more traditional ML work and not what most people are concerned about”

Corey@kh0rish· May 23

I refuse to believe this because wtf are we on if this is actually happening WHAT IS GOING ON

Retired Vice Admiral Robert Harwood and his seeming impostor Wearing a mask of his face

Corey@kh0rish· May 23

Every time

Classic meme with a ridiculously crude drawing of a guy saying “i warned you about [ai] bro!!!! I told you dog!”

Corey@kh0rish· May 18

These guys are the worst, just absolutely stupid awful people. Why would you want this? FOR MATH!? Why do people still hedge on this shit when these are the guys making it? Clown futurology Where the quote was pulled from: youtu.be/jW9XOYycFz0?...

Imagine you have this huge unstoppable force. And I think it’s pretty likely the entire surface of the Earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers. Given these kinds of concerns, it will be important that the AGI is somehow built as a cooperation between multiple countries. The future is going to be good for the AIs regardless. It would be nice if it were good for humans as well.”

— Ilya Sutskever on the arms race, solar panels, data centers (1:27:20 – 1:28:21)

Corey@kh0rish· May 16

This is why AGI isnt happening. Sense perception, movement, and memory are chemistries coupled to each other and all coupled to direct matter exchange with the environment, like a centrifugal governor. Nothing is representation, interpretation, “info processing”, or math.

There is another, radically different way to solve this problem, that is to couple the opening of the valve to something that necessarily varies in response to steam pressure and workload in a way that results in constant flywheel speed. By ‘necessarily’ I mean that the physical properties of this thing respond to changes in steam pressure and workload in a particular way. Such a solution responds in one step and does not require measurement. Thus, there is no time lag problem or concomitant source of error. Nor does it require an executive. In our current example, the thing that responds to both steam pressure and workload is the speed of the engine itself. Hitching the valve control to the flywheel couples the thing you want to control (the valve opening) directly to the thing that embodies the relevant sources of variance (the flywheel speed). So far, so good. The remaining problem is connecting these objects with the proper relation. In this case, we want a negative relation between flywheel speed and valve opening - increased flywheel speed should close the valve, while decreased speed should open it. The solution is to attach weighted arms to flywheel-driven spindle and to link the valve control to these arms (see pic). As the spindle turns, the arms raise and lower according to the centrifugal force generated by the speed of rotation. Faster spinning raises the arms, which pulls the valve closed. Slower spinning lowers the arms, which allows the valve to open. The degree of valve opening / closing varies continuously in response to the height of the arms. The result is uniform flywheel speed linked to oscillating pistons. This beautiful solution is implemented in the Watts centrifugal governor, and 18th century piece of technology that still works brilliantly.

Diagram of bacterial chemotaxis. The stimulus ligand is environmental material. The MCP is a sensory receptor that interacts/bonds with environmental material, which triggers a change in rotation of the motor and thus changes the movement behavior of the cell. The “adaptation” mechanism on the left is the memory, it modifies the sense receptor to make it less responsive over time so that it will more likely stay in the area with all the good material instead of flying right through it. All these systems have feedback mechanisms to reset the processes. All things coupled together in an intricate dance of molecular activity, directly doing things and not measuring, interpreting, or representing.

Corey@kh0rish· May 16

Lookit this lil guy, just doin s-curve things. Gotta change it up I guess. Ai is real now because sigmoids be in the brain too

Diagram of a cross section of the brain showing the different sinuses

Corey@kh0rish· May 10

Nah I heard about what they been doin to rats and mice

Nicodemus, a white and grey bearded rat in wizard robes talks to Mrs. Brisby, a little brown mouse wearing a red cloak

Corey@kh0rish· May 7

The internet remains undefeated at connecting random people together to make absolute MAGIC

Corey@kh0rish· May 4

Even if you dont like marvel the transitions in this are fuckin insane

Corey@kh0rish· May 4

This is obscuring too much. Employing any kind of language like this is too abstract or high level to describe what molecules are doing. Phrases like "Send perceived observations" are a mereological fallacy; the concept requires powers of interpretation molecules dont have but organisms do.

Upon encountering a stimulus, an organism’s individual sensorimotor cells or organelles (its subagents) send their perceived observations about it to a local processing center (such as a cellular nucleus or the larger tissue system of which they are part), confirming that something is being observed. Each cell’s output is severely limited, but the collective combination yields something much more significant.

Corey@kh0rish· May 3

This is a good example of the abstraction problem. Notice how they never actually interrogate the biological processes further. They stop at "theres a lot going on" and then return to trying to find evidence for an abstract conception of what is going on that doesnt factor in the chemistry at all.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but if we work from a starting point of minds as execution states, I think it gets us a lot further to better understanding the hard problem of consciousness. Biology is essential to how our minds work, but it is not essential to how minds must work.

Cognition is correlation. Whether the stimulus appears to exist outside the agent and is perceived through exteroception, or the stimulus is inside and perceived through interoception, does not matter. Because the cells generating the information have direct access to the stimulus, their reports are treated as functionally true. Any entity that constantly doubts its own sensory data would not survive.

Once a stimulus is anchored as a referent within perceived externality (“this is here/there”), simple cognitive agents stop deictic evaluation and move straight to responding. When a portion of a slime mold detects a food source, the other portions move toward it. When a bacterium detects a harmful acid, it reverses course. When a plant’s photoreceptors detect sunlight, it orients its leaves toward it.

Corey@kh0rish· Apr 25

Every now and then you get reminded of the greatest thing in the world and that thing is William Knifeman

Corey@kh0rish· Apr 25

4 years and a trillion dollars and this is all yall got? This is the great technological transformation? This is the path to “solving” physics and automating science and solving all our problems? Pathetic