A dream

I was in a university lecture room, and waiting for Kim Jong Un. There was tension around, with many security guards. 

Among the students sitting near me were apparently expatriates from the North. I had a rather large black camera which looked like a cylinder, and was worried that the guards might mistake it for a weapon. 

However, nobody seemed to notice or care, slightly to my disappointment. As expectations rose high, finally the great leader came into the room. I originally planned to film my own reaction to the lecture, but decided at the last moment to record the movements of Kim Jong Un himself. 

He was accompanied by a female officer, and started to move around, in an agitated manner. He showed a famous Japanese tv drama, and said how he loved the theme. Kim Jong Un started to dance in front of the screen, as if choreographed by the music in the drama.

A growing uneasiness troubled my heart, and finally there was a click of realization. 

Precisely at that moment, a courageous student beside me said "Isn't his all fake?" Kim Jong Un stopped dancing. The organizer, through a microphone, immediately admitted that this was indeed a fake Kim Jong Un. He apologized and explained. They were planning the whole thing with comical intensions, but the authorities giving permission became increasingly serious. So the student union had to fake everything, and they were sorry. 

Listening, I was relieved and disappointed at the same time. I noticed that there were deep wrinkles on the face of the actor who played Kim Jong Un, and realized he did not look like the great leader at all. 

The light was turned on in the class room and I woke up, found myself in my hotel room in Hokkaido. When I opened the window, the streets were covered with snow.

Christof Koch talk at #SfN2023

 I attended the talk by Christof Koch at #SfN2023. A great take on the state of the art on the neural correlates of consciousness. Discussions on the no report paradigm and the need to dissociate between NCC per se and processes temporarily prior or posterior to it, e.g., attention modulation, motor response etc. were extremely interesting. 

It was heartening to see Dr. Koch intellectually still committed to Integrated Information Theory (IIT). I was there at the #ASSC26 in New York earlier this year when the rivalry between global workspace theory (GWT) and IIT was declared to be over in favor of the latter. In view of the turmoil that followed regarding the validity of IIT, it was audacious on the part of Dr. Koch to stick to his principles, although this author does not necessarily agree with the views put forward by proponents of IIT. 

The different ways that correlations between consciousness and intelligence appear in theories of consciousness is particularly interesting. I stood up and asked the first audience question to Dr. Koch, as regards his view on the biological constraints on the relationship between intelligence and consciousness, which, as was mentioned in his own presentation, seems to be roughly linear in actual biological systems. Dr. Koch seemed to imply that there could in general indeed be dissociations between them. IIT would assign low consciousness values to AI systems such as AlphaGo and ChatGPT, although they do exhibit sparks of intelligence. 

Another audience question also addressed the possible biological constraints between intelligence and consciousness. As Dr. Koch suggested in the questions and answers session, there could be dissociations in artificial systems, but in biological systems intelligence would be associated with consciousness in typical states of mind due to evolutionary constraints. I thank Dr. Koch and the organizers for this interesting session.