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.

A great divide in the world today.

In the contemporary world, the greatest divide would not be between the liberals and conservatives. It would be between people who believe in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and those who don't. Alternatively, there would be a deep chasm between believers and non-believers of the idea that the world is a simulation run on a huge computer (presumably designed by some superintelligence, natural or artificial).

When someone says that he or she believes in the simulation hypothesis, the most appropriate and fun follow-up question would be:

At what time exactly in your life did you realize that this world, including you, is a simulation? Did you notice a bug in the program, or was there a noticeable hole in the visual field?

Neither has happened to me so far, and I don't believe in the simulation hypothesis.

I thought about this rather humorous idea after a close friend of mind, Kaoru Takeuchi, who got his Ph.D in string cosmology from McGill, said that he believed in both the many worlds interpretation and simulation hypothesis. This is indeed a great divide. Rather unsettling, actually. I needed some psychological defense mechanism, and I came up with the above thoughts.

Once you become adequately connected to the central ideas of consciousness, you would become a sincerely ignorant person.

 One of the most important things in consciousness studies would be to realize that you don't understand consciousness. 

It is too easy to fall back on a particular idea, theory, and set of data to (falsely) believe that one has understood the nature of consciousness. Too many people have gone that way and basically never came back, perhaps tragically for themselves. 

I am not necessarily arguing that the cognitive closure argument of Colin McGinn (which, by the way, is a beautifully presented exposition) is correct. I am just making an observation that one of the blessings of learning the facts about the neural correlates of consciousness and related ideas in the philosophy of mind is that one becomes aware of the tremendous difficulty involved in understanding consciousness. 

Indeed, the more you learn about the intricacies of the mind-brain problem, the less confident you become as regards the power of any specific theory (be it the integrated information theory, global workspace theory, quantum theories of mind, etc.) to account for the origin of consciousness. 

In consciousness studies, an intellectual hubris of understanding would come from an insufficient understanding of the field. Once you become adequately connected to the central ideas of consciousness, you would become a sincerely ignorant person. 

The enigma of free will evidently equals that of time.

 Conventional arguments about free will seems to be missing one fundamental aspect, which is the essentially non-existent nature of the future. 

Albert Einstein admitted that his theory of relativity cannot handle the enigma of the now. 

A particular point in time proceeds from the future to the present, and on to the past, in a way described in the historic McTaggart paper.

 In this temporal procession, the future does not seem to exist in any sense, until it becomes the now. 

The past is also non-existent, for sure, even allowing for the possibility of Bertrand Russell's five minutes hypothesis, which suggest that the universe came into existence five minutes ago, with all the relevant memories of the past. 

Henri Bergson's concept of pure memory would complicate this argument, which would solidify the reality of the past if taken seriously, but the five minutes hypothesis is not a logical impossibility on the surface within the conventional worldview. 

So much for the past. The future, on the other hand, is absolutely non-existent, or so it seems from the nature of the stream of consciousness. Any models of free will ignoring this remarkable asymmetry of time would be at best good for all practical purposes, but ultimately hollow. 

The enigma of free will evidently equals that of time. 

If an AGI system is truly general, then it should have nothing to do with intelligence

There is a fundamental problem in the concept of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). 

It is possible to conceive of a system with great computational capabilities. However, at a particular time under a specific context, the hypothetical AGI system can execute only one computation. Other possible computations exist only in the counterfactual.

 When it comes to designing the "personality" of an AGI, in line with, for example, Eliezer Yudkowsky's Friendly AI concept, the system would implement only one of the possible configurations in the vast personality space at one time. 

Thus, AGI can never be general, given the physical constraints in space and time.

 Indeed, Spinoza's argument about the infinity of God in his magnum opus Ethica beautifully addresses this issue. In this historic treatise, Spinoza states that God, the absolute infinite, has nothing to do with intelligence or personality, which by nature necessitates states of finite configurations. 

If an AGI system is truly general, then it should have nothing to do with intelligence. The same for ASI. As it stands, an AGI or ASI is likely to exist only as a sharply tuned specialist machine, rather than the conventionally conceptualized system of ubiquitous and omnipotent nature. 

We perhaps need to sort things out before we set about this supposed race to AGI, or even as we run on the competition track.  

Let flowers bloom out of the Johnny & Associates desert.

(This is an updated and longer text based on an earlier tweet)

From the cultural point of view, the disservice inflicted by Johnny & Associates has been that the stars from the agency were fakes, avoiding serious auditions, propelled by favoritism of the deceased founder and endorsed by complacent and uncritical Japanese media. If the talent agency endorsed a particular boy group, Japanese media casted them at the main stage, without asking seriously what the nature and quality of the performances might be. This applied, sadly, to the national broadcaster NHK, too.

Japanese entertainment deteriorated in quality as a result, including the film industry in which many from J&A were cast on the premises of dubious stardom, a far cry from the excellence of Ozu and Kurosawa. Needless to say, great films are still created, by people like Hirokazu Koreeda. If you go to a movie theater in Tokyo, and have the misfortune of being exposed to the tasteless trailers of latest Japanese films, many of them with the faces from J & A as the front roles, you would be shuddering in your soul, at the tragic demise of the once mighty and proud Japanese cinema. 

It is now time to say good bye to the kingdom of false stars.  Let flowers of individuality and serious talents bloom from the cultural desert left by Johnny & Associates, after the rain of regret falls on the ground, if tv producers indeed regret what they have been doing. I have no expectations for people at J & A. I wish they would change the name of the agency, and even better, perhaps dissolve the organization all together, as a service to the entertainment industry here. 

Japan deserves a much better entertainment industry than one dominated by the likes of Johnny & Associates. We've had quite enough for a long time.