The Machine Lords of Barnard 68, Part 2

biological intelligence. Now, in the last episode, we talked about let's see, we talked about some work by the SETI researcher Seth show Stack, and we talked about the philosopher Susan Schneider, who had both written about UH the idea of looking for signs of alien intelligence elsewhere in the Milky Way, and UH the the proposition that if we were to encounter such an intelligence, it would probably be more likely the machine descendants of a previous biological intelligence

than it would be biological entities themselves. That that overtime, organisms like us will tend to sort of turn themselves into machines, or at least create a techno culture that's dominated by machines, and that these are the types of intelligences that we should really be looking for and trying to predict in terms of their characteristics and things like that. So we can jump right back into the middle of this conversation where we left off last time with talking

about post biological intelligence. Now another big question here and and this will we'll go back to Schneider. Is it is that the question of would a machine culture like this if you encountered it, would this machine artificial intelligence? Would it be conscious? And what would that mean? And would it make a difference even, Yeah, this is a really good question. The way she puts it is would the processing of a silicon based super intelligent system feel

a certain way from the inside. Now, I'm going to go into less detail on this argument than than I did on the other half of her argument, but I did want to try to give a few highlights. This question is inherently difficult to answer because, according to some philosophers, you know, some people would say that this question is impossible to answer because there is no way to test for consciousness beyond our first our own first person experience. I mean, we can't even test to see if other

people are conscious. We just assume they are. It seems like they are, they claim to be, and there's no reason to assume they're not. But of course you have ideas like the philosopher David Chalmers, you know, he famously framed this idea of the easy problems versus the hard problems of consciousness, and so the easy problems that they're not actually easy, but they are, they're in principle solvable.

There are things like what parts of the brain are necessary in order to generate conscious experience, Like you could, you know, you could do research on that and have people report back when different parts of the brain are

disabled or something. You know, you can figure out things like that, but it's much more difficult to or Chalmers would argue, ultimately impossible to get to the bottom of the question why does all this information processing in the human brain under certain conditions have a felt quality to it?

Like why is their consciousness in the first place? And if we do not know, or possibly even cannot know, why we possess a felt subjective experience, how could we ever reason backwards to know if alien machines would also

possess it? Now, Schneider responds to all this thinking, and I'm oversimplifying here, but her main point is that the activity of the brain is, according to her argument, primarily computational and in the absence of compelling evidence for what she calls biological naturalism, and that's the idea that consciousness is or is likely to be unique to biological carbon based organisms. Daniel Dennett ridicules this point of view by calling it the belief that the brain possesses what he

calls wonder tissue. You know that there's just something in the brain that, like magic, allows it to generate consciousness while other types of things can't generate consciousness. I don't know the answer to this question whether things other than brains can or cannot gem great consciousness. It Uh, I'm

sort of skeptical of both sides of the argument. But but anyway, Schneider argues that we should conclude by analogy that other computational agents, because our brains are computational agents and they generate consciousness, that other computational agents are also capable of possessing consciousness unless there's some kind of evidence that biological naturalism is is necessarily true, and she says there's not, And I agree that there is not evidence

of that. You know, what's interesting about the way that you just lay this out, though I can easily imagine a situation where an advanced AI is forced to, uh, sort of ponder the situation, well, is having a conscious

um this conscious experience? Is it important. Well, let's let me create like a programming or a subset of myself that has at least as close of an approximation of consciousness as as as as it is understood at that time in order to evaluate you know, right, Um, so then it perhaps has sort of it's its main mind, but then it has sort of a subset of quote unquote conscious minds just in case it is important. Yeah, obviously, I mean huge question, like how would it know how

to do that? But assuming could that, Yeah, that's really funny that, like it could try to iterate consciousness in in an experimental way to see if to see if it makes a difference, because that's another big thing, like, you know, the biological question about consciousness. We at least know that biological brains can be conscious. We don't know if computers can be or not. But since biological brains are conscious, is that an adaptive evolutionary trait? Does consciousness

do something? Or or could you have a an animal that is absolutely functionally identical to a human but not conscious. This is actually the concept of a philosophical zombie or a p zombie, a being that is that is indistinguishable from a normal human except it has no inner experience. So in like this scenario where the super AI creates like account soul of quote unquote conscious iterations of itself, like maybe they're just faking consciousness. How would it know? Yeah,

and then how would it know? How would we know? And yeah, again if you're and then if you're dealing with an AI, like suddenly we make contact with an AI from another world? Um, is it important that it be conscious or not conscious? Like? There are lots of things that are important and even beneficial that are not conscious, like the you know, the Bill of Rights is not a conscious entity. Um, but you know, I think most would argue that it is. It is important. It does

good things. I mean, you could argue that it is only important in that it has effects on conscious on things that are conscious. Yeah, Like in a universe where there was nothing that was conscious, would the Bill of Rights be useful? But I don't know. I mean, I guess there are some theories of value that would that would say like, yeah, things could still be of value even if they weren't conscious, right, uh yeah, And then again it just it also kind of becomes pointless because

once you're talking to that AI. Um, yeah, Well what does what does it mean if it's conscious or not? Like, how does that change the way you interact with it? Um? Unless you're you know, actively saying hey, stop, think about what you're doing, think about what you're thinking about. Uh. I don't know. So I don't know what to think

about the consciousness question for for alien machines. I mean, I think I think Schneider makes the best argument that I could imagine for it, But I still don't know if I'm convinced, just because this whole realm to me just seems so uncertain. Um. But but then she goes on to some other things that I think are some really interesting ideas. Actually, she talks about what would be the predictable characteristics of super intelligent machines, the minds we

would encounter out there if we did encounter them. Well, she admits that there's not a lot we can know, at least certainly not that much that we can say with with too much confidence, But we can make some educated guesses about the broad strokes of of alien intelligence.

And to do this she cites the work of again philosopher Nick Bostrom, who is fame is for writing about AI risks, and I believe he actually coined the term super intelligence, though it could be wrong about that, but Bostrom says, yes, it is hard to predict the goals of a future AI, you know, alien intelligence is very

difficult to understand. But he identifies what he thinks are several intellectual tendencies that are likely to be found in any super intelligent AI, and they're likely to be found in any of them because he says, these traits are useful in attaining almost any goal. And so these goals he identifies our resource acquisition makes sense. You need resources

in order to like keep your processes going. Technological perfection, right, you want yourself to work efficiently, Cognitive enhancement, you always want to be smarter, self preservation, you want to be able to keep doing things. And then what he calls goal content integrity, and Schneider summarizes that by saying, I e. That a super intelligent being's future self will pursue and

tin those same goals. Uh. And this one was really interesting to me actually thinking about the idea that a machine would need to try to make sure that as it iterates to to improve itself, it doesn't change what

it was trying to do. In the first place, sort of a prime directive sort of situation, right, Yeah, Or to come back to the culture, the idea that like, if you're created, if your original design is to aid humans and make their life easier, than you keep doing that even if you are ultimately the calling all the shots now and you know, are in charge of all the interactions with other civilizations, etcetera. Yeah, And that that actually comes into the next thing she says about Bostrom's

ideas on on these super intelligence is uh. She she writes, quote, he underscores that self preservation can involve group or individual preservation, and that it may play second fiddle to the preservation of the species the AI was designed to serve. So could be that these AI s, if they ever do come to exist, would yeah, that they would be the custodians or caretakers, thinking mainly about the preservation of the species that created them, and then when they come to us,

they ultimately just want to serve man. But then one last thing that Schneider argues that I thought would be interesting to mention is uh, and I think I said this earlier. But she also argues that perhaps the most common form of super intelligence we could expect to encounter would be what she calls biologically inspired super intelligent aliens, and that if this argument is correct, this could also tell us some things about intellectual characteristics that we would

expect to find in these super intelligences. So, to read from Schneider's chapter, she says, uh, it may turn out that of all super intelligent ai s, biologically inspired super intelligent ais, they're the most resemblance to each other. In other words, visas maybe the most cohesive subgroup because the other members are so different from each other. And there she's talking about members of the galactic community. Basically that the biologically inspired ones would have the most in common

with each other. So what kinds of things could they have in common? She says, noticed that besas have two features that may give rise to common cognitive capacities and goals. One, visas are descended from creatures that had motivations like find food, avoid injury, and predators, reproduce, cooperate, compete, and so on. And then second, she says, the life forms that beasts are modeled from have evolved to deal with biological constraints

like slow processing speed and the spatial limitations of embodiment. So, she says, could these two principles one and two yield traits common to members of many super intelligent alien civilizations?

I suspect so, and she gives a bunch of examples, But I mean, a very simple and easy to grasp one would be that since intelligent biological life is primarily be concerned with its biological imperatives, mainly survival and reproduction, she says, it is more likely that visas would have final goals involving their own survival and reproduction, or at least the survival and reproduction of the members of their society. And I was just thinking this can be extrapolated to

other ideas. For example, why wouldn't a superintelligent AI just just reprogram itself until it is no longer anything like its biological ancestors. So is it still really reproducing the

original version of itself at all? Well, if you think back to Bostrom's idea of of goal content integrity, I wonder if this could in a way entail a kind of halting of the evolutionary process of life that has gone on throughout all of history, Because suddenly, once you reach this level of intelligence, a a machine iterating itself may just want to preserve the idea that it is

still its original self. That's an inherently motivating goal for it, and thus it would prevent changes to itself that would make it feel too different from what it once was. Huh. You know it reminds me of like when you when you hear a really great song for the first time, or you you start playing a video game and it really grabs you, or you know, you get super into

you know, some fandom or another. There's, at least for me, there's sometimes that point where you realize, like, wow, this is really fulfilling for me right now, and the day will come when it won't be Like, as much as I enjoy this game or this book or this song or whatever it is, there will come a day when I will set it aside because and I will there

will be something else I'm into. So I guess the question is it's like, if if we or this machine that we're imagining here, if it could decide no, I will always be into this album. This album is great and it shall always be that way. Would it do that, would it set itself in time, or would it like assume that it would always be in this and just it kind of gets back to that vampire scenario you've

brought up before. You know, you don't know what you're going to want when you become the vampire, and it's hard to iagine what your mindset is when you reach that point. Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. Certainly applies to becoming some kind of machine or merging with it, or remodeling yourself if you already are machine than now.

Schneider makes a number of other arguments about the types of post biological intelligences that we would be likely to encounter again, derived from the idea that there is some kind of ancestral biological inspiration behind these hypothetical superintelligences. And the thing she zeroes in on is that some limitations from original biological organisms are things that aies would probably

want to engineer out of themselves. Right now, you can think of plenty of things about your brain that if you know, your brain were to evolve into some kind of computer that was always perfecting itself, it might want to leave by the wayside over time. You know, maybe some of your obsessions and anxieties and stuff like that. But what's left if you take all that out right, Yeah,

that's a good point. But then she also says that there are quote cognitive capacities that sophisticated forms of biological intelligence are likely to have and which enable the super intelligence to carry out its final and instrumental goals. We could also look for traits that are not likely to be engineered out, as they do not detract the visa from its goals. So there are some traits of biological

intelligence that probably have inherent advantages. There are just some ways that brains work really good, and it would want to replicate that and just refine it across time. And then there are other traits of biological intelligences that might not have clear advantages, but they at least wouldn't detract from the attainment of goals. So just you know, why why not keep them around? Yeah, sort of the lukewarm

stuff that's not detrimental to their goals. But all that doesn't maybe help it all that much, but isn't isn't using a lot of energy, et cetera. Right, So to get into Schneider's explicit predictions for bio logically inspired superintelligence is the first one. I'm not going to get deep into because it's a little dry. But this is a fair point, I guess. She says, learning about the computational structure of the brain of the species that created the

visa can provide insight into the visas thinking patterns. Okay, So basically you can start to gain some insights into the computational structure of an animal's brain or or nervous system more broadly, by studying the brain's connect tome. A connect to home is a map of the connections between neurons, which at least in theory, would help you understand which cells and structures in the brain or the nervous system broadly share information with which others in order to better

understand how information is processed as a whole. Yeah, I mean this makes me think, for instance, like when we think of an artificial intelligence, we are often loosely thinking

of like that like that single entity. But what have you had, What have you had an alien life form that had sort of a pronoun bounced bicameral mind situation going on, where like the actual organic organism had uh like two houses of thought going on that kind of communicate with each other, and therefore that ends up being reflected in the ai they create. Oh, that's very interesting. That will actually come back to a question I have

about one of the points she makes later on. But again, just the point she's making here is that if you can look at the physical structure of the original ancestral organism that the intelligence is evolved from, that can help you understand something about how the intelligence of its machine

descendant works. Quote. While it is likely that a given visa will not have the same kind of connect dome as the members of the original species, some of the functional and structural connections may be retained, and interesting departures from the originals may be found. Now after that, she brings up a second point that I thought was a very interesting prediction. She writes, quote visas may have viewpoint invariant representation. Now what does that mean? Well, an easy

way to think about it is this. If you're watching a movie and the camera suddenly cuts to a different angle in the middle of a scene, but it's still the same scene going on. How is it that you still understand you're watching a continuation of the same action as before. Everything looks completely different, but you understand that these are the same actors playing the same characters in

the same room, even though it looks totally different. This is one of the ways that human intelligence still drastically outperforms artificial intelligence on Earth. You know, humans can look at an object it's a VHS tape of the Star Wars Holiday special, and you can look at it from completely different angles. Maybe the front cover of the box looks completely different than the back cover of the box, but you turn it around and you still understand that

you're looking at the same object. Humans are able to form mental representations of objects in the world that can be isolated and recognized and manipul related within the mind's eye, and we humans are not typically going to be confused about what we're looking at because we took a step

to the side and change the angle of observation. Even though the light reflecting off of the object and hitting our eyes will produce a very different pattern on the retina, we somehow still use our intelligence to know that we're still looking at the same object or scene. And this is a much much harder task for a computer. I mean, ask anybody who's been involved in visual object recognition. It's

an incredibly difficult task for AI. And this is one of the many amazing fast and loose intellectual feats that humans do all the time so often that we we rarely appreciate how amazing our brains are in this regard. Another example from a recent episode was, you know, recalling the Moses Illusion episode, we talked about how good we are at getting the gist of a statement or a question.

Even if major pieces of information within the sentence are wrong and should be throwing you often completely the wrong direction, you still are able to very quickly get what the person was probably intending to say and operate on that basis. Now here's where it goes with viewpoint invariant representations, especially

as it concerns like physical objects in the world. Schneider argues that you can expect any biologically inspired AI to have viewpoint invariant representations because they seem to be inextricably linked to the biological development of intelligence. And uh, just I'm expanding on her thoughts here, but I think the reasoning goes something like this, What is intelligence? That's actually kind of a difficult question to answer, right, Like, it's kind of hard to pin down. But I think one

plausible answer has to do with speed. Intelligence has something to do with the ability to accelerate problem solving or goal acquisition. So you could have an organism that has essentially a random strategy for trying to get what it wants, and very step it goes above a random strategy is in a way an increase in intelligence. It's accelerating the

solution of problems. Now, to follow the biological reasoning a little further there, why is it that animals in general need a speed of problem solving intelligence that most plants do not? Well? I think the answer there is that animals survival and reproduction strategies are usually based on movement. This wouldn't be true of all things in the Kingdom animalia. I'm not so much for sponges and stuff, but most animals move fairly rapidly, whether that's for foraging or evading

predators or seeking mates or anything like that. If you are able to move fairly quickly, that means your body needs a system of deciding in what direction to move relatively quickly. And so I could be missing something here, but it seems to me that it's a pretty safe assumption that this is one of the major drivers of the development of biological intelligence. Coming up with better and better systems for adaptively optimizing strategies for rapid movement to

fit the specifics of the situation you're in. So you're constantly faced with new situations, predator approaching from a different angle, food to be found in a different you know, orientation, or like in a different hard to reach space, and your body needs a way to adapt to whatever situation you're in to decide the best way to move. Yeah, it kind of comes down to a certain extent passive

energy acquisition versus active energy acquisition. Yes, because you know, obviously, if you have passive energy acquisition, you don't necessarily need to move as much. You know, you can just sort of set up shop. And of course we see examples of that not only in plants, but also in animals as well. Yeah, I mean, how would it help a plant to have a brain. You know, the plant just

needs to basically be hardy and sit there and collect sunlight. Yeah. Now, then again, I guess I could imagine a scenario where plants evolved intelligence. If they've got some kind of I don't know, mechanism that allows them to start moving more quickly, they could start evolving so that they could have you know,

trees could evade lumberjacks or something. Well, you know, but before we get you know, multiple emails about this, I will say we will do an episode on planned intelligence at some point, because there's a lot of interesting stuff out there and some some really actually there's some arguments that kind of turn some of what we're saying here on its head. So, uh, well, we'll have to keep this conversation in mind when we get around to that

future conversation. That's a good point. I mean, I think the movement thing would have to be not a universal necessity for the development of intelligence, but it seems like one of the major pathway that it has evolved on Earth, because I mean, you can imagine other things. Basically, intelligence allows adaptive problem solving, So that could also involve, say, not moving your body, but releasing chemicals into the environment and allowing communication between different nodes in a hub of

trees or fungus or something. Yeah, you could have some sort of you know, pheromone spitting um like master plant. Uh that is that has other things to do its bidding, that has other things built at spacecraft. But to the extent that biological intelligence is often a product of the evolution of rapid movement. Viewpoint invariant representations would seem to be a necessary part of intelligence there, because they are

necessary for an intelligent creature that moves. If you are able to move your body, your sense data about objects in your environment is going to be changing based on your perspective, especially if those senses are based on something that has linear trajectories like light. You know, light bounces off things in linear ways. You're going to see different angles of it. I don't know. If you were a

creature entirely based on smells, I don't know. I guess then still viewpoint invariant would matter because you know, there would be different concentrations of volatiles in the air depending on where you stand relative to an object. But it seems like in general these types representations would be useful uh in that regard. And then Schneider adds another point there. She says that viewpoint invariant representations are not only important so that we don't get confused about what we're looking

at in the environment. You know, you don't look at a rock from the opposite side and not understand it's the same rock. She says they're also important for abstract reasoning. Quote, you have mental representations that are at a relatively high level of processing inter viewpoint invariant. It seems difficult for biologically based intelligence to evolve without a viewpoint invariant representations,

as they enable categorization and prediction. So, because you can represent objects as a kind of symbol or or emblem of themselves in your brain that is independent of just the one way they looked when you looked at them from one angle, you can sort of like you can turn them around in your brain and think about how they might be used as a tool, or you can

predict how they would act given certain physical forces on them. Yeah, and you know that this makes you think a little bit of the book by David Eagleman, Live Wired, talking about like the different sensory inputs for the human brain and how if you if you you know, you lose one sensory input and you can add another, or you can even add all new sensory inputs. Our brains will make sense of it. Our brains will essentially form that mental image of the thing, um, even if we don't

have visual processing at our disposal. So if an alien brain is is it all like a human brain? You know, in in enough respects, then it seems like the same thing would be going on even if we were dealing with being that say, evolved with less of a reliance on vision, or more of a reliance on other senses or even some sense that you know that we have a have a difficult time imagining because we don't possess it ourselves. Yeah, yeah, that that that it would need

based on whatever senses. It had to have some kind of mental representations of objects in the world that would not be changed. It is just by slightly changing the physical perspective from which you sense that object. Yeah. Now it does relate all sorts of interesting questions like what if what if the sense of smell was the primary sense? How do you create, say, a control panel for your spaceship? You know, interesting like each button has a different smell.

I don't know, they're again, maybe it's a situation where we don't have a versatile enough palette or appreciation of the palette ourselves to even envision what that would be like. But you know, our our dogs, uh, you know, if they were more intelligent they could let us know. They would say, oh, yeah, I can totally imagine what it would be like. Oh man, here's my idea for sci

fi novel. Okay, humans, humans come into conflict with an interstellar species that has, uh, that has a culture that's all entirely based around a species with a dominant sense of smell. And what we have to do is uplift dogs to the point where they have human intelligence so that they can tell us what it's like to see the world through that much smell data, so that we can better understand the aliens in order to protect ourselves

against them. Yeah, and if it's a darelict ship or something like that, perhaps the control panels like they've lost a lot of their smell, so it's we don't even initially realize that this is a scent based control system. But then the dogs they they're like, yes, I can still smell things. There are numerous smells going on here. This is like sticking my head out the window while

you drive around town. This is gold. Yeah. Okay, Well, anyway, I think Schneider's point here is a really interesting one. I do think that's worth considering about the viewpoint invariant representation. But to move on to her next point, uh, this one's also I think pretty cool. She says, visas will probably have language like mental representations that are recursive and combinatorial. And to illustrate this, Schneider gives the example of novel sentences. Now,

we encounter novel sentences all the time, every day. I'll do one of my own. Here, here's the sentence the Howling seven New Moon Rising is the greatest film ever made. You have never heard this sentence spoken before, and yet you understand perfectly what it would mean for somebody to say this. Why is it that we're constantly hearing and speaking totally unique, brand new sentences, probably never uttered before by any humans, certainly not in a way that we've heard,

and yet they're perfectly comprehensible. Schneider argues that quote the key is that the thoughts are combinatorial because they're built out of familiar constituents and combined according to rules. The rules apply to constructions out of primitive constituents that are themselves constructed grammatically, as well as to primitive constituents themselves.

Grammatical mental operations are incredibly useful. It is the combinatorial nature of thought that allows one to understand and produce these sentences on the basis of one's antecedent knowledge of the grammar and atomic constituents. So, because you have an internalized sense of grammar, not just you know, it's not just that you know what the words mean individually, but you also grasp the rules that apply to how sentences work. And then you even grasp rules that go beyond just

how sentences work. You grasp sort of cultural rules about how words fit together to form meaning. One example in the sentence I said is that even if you've never heard of the Howling seven New Moon Rising, you could probably understand that this is the name of a movie. Okay, but so so what's the point then she's she's making about the mind of of these potential alien AI. Well,

basically that it would probably be language based. She goes on to say that a mind quote can entertain and produce an infinite number of distinct representations because the mind has a combinatorial syntax, so something like a language with grammar. And she concludes this point by saying, quote, brains need combinanttorial representations because there are infinitely many possible linguistic representations.

You know, an infinite number of sentences you could say, and the brain only has a finite storage space, right, So the brain can't just store every possible sentence within itself and then check whatever somebody just said against that sentence stored in memory. It's got to be flexible. It's got to be able to build an understanding of sentences on the fly based on these constituent parts and an

understanding of grammar. Okay, that makes sense. I think that's one of those things that most of us, you know, in our sci fi visions, we tend to just assume the intelligent aliens have some sort of a language and they're you know, an AI version would as well. But it is good to see that um driven home with logic here. Well, I mean, you could imagine somebody arguing

the opposite way. You could say that maybe language is only useful for humans to communicate with each other, and that once you had something like a super intelligent AI no longer would need to communicate with these bit of tools.

It could just have I don't know what, you know, imagine some kind of machine version of telepathy where it just represents the world as some kind of I don't know what it would be, represents some kind of internal states two different parts of itself without having a code system like language. But Schneider says, quote, even a super

intelligent system would benefit from combinatorial representations. Although a super intelligent system could have computational resources that are so vast that it is mostly capable of pairing up utterances or inscriptions with a stored sentence, it would be unlikely that it would trade away such a marvelous innovation of biological brains. If it did, it would be less efficient, since there is the potential of a sentence not being in its storage,

which must be finite. So again she's saying here like, even if you would imagine that super intelligences would get so powerful that they wouldn't need something like lying which to communicate with each other, it's actually still better to have something like a language, even for internal logic and representing computations from one part of a system to another. Yeah, I mean, it's it's like having a logic budget, you know.

I mean you can just because you you have a lot of energy at your disposal, doesn't mean that you just throw the budget out the window. Yeah. So again, you know, we're dealing in highly speculative realms. I think it's always possible we're being misled by a lack of imagination.

But I think this point is very strong. It seems very likely to me that post biological AI would benefit from some kind of language like system of mental symbols and representations that were subject to something like a grammar. Now there's one point she makes that we already mentioned, and that's that quote, visas may have one or more

global workspaces. Uh. Now, again, to explain the global workspace idea, Schneider argues, quote, the global workspace operates as a singular place where important information from the senses is considered in tandem, so that the creature can make all things considered judgments and act intelligently in light of all the facts at

its disposal. In general, it would be inefficient to have a sense or cognitive capacity that was not integrated with the others, because the information from this sense or cognitive capacity would be unable to figure in predictions and plans

based on an assessment of all the available information. Now, this one I'm actually less sure about, because I would say, and maybe I'm I'm partially misunderstanding her point here, But but I can think of counter arguments to this, like, isn't there some evidence that the brain does keep some relevant processing information hidden from or segregated from conscious awareness in certain scenarios, like maybe there are some types of

information that are useful in making certain kinds of calculations, but tend to be in hib a tory towards other types of calculations or thought processes if they're considered at the same time. So it's sometimes useful to keep senses or knowledge separated from the cognitive workspace. A very simple example would be the knowledge that you are hungry. The knowledge that you're hungry is useful if you're in a

position to get something to eat. But imagine you are stuck on the subway and you don't have any food on you and there's no way you could get food at the at the current time, and you're trying to read something or prepare for a work presentation. Their awareness of your hunger is actually counterproductive. It's just distracting you

and adding nothing. Yeah, I mean, it's it's kind of like the idea of like any an enormous buffet right at a let's say a hotel or you know, show needs or something you know, and you go through it with your plate, you get the things off that plate that are necessary for the meal you're about to have, and then of course you can engage in the various combinations and problem solving involved in the consumption of that meal. But you don't need a rag the popcorn shrimp into

it if you're not gonna eat the popcorn shrimp. You know, if you can't eat the popcorn shrimp, why would that be part of Why would that be on the plate? Why would that be on in the workspace? Or you don't have to put the ice cream sunday on the same plate that you put the nachos on, right, Yeah, it can be off to the side. You can keep

the banana putting segregated from the crab legs. Yeah. Then again, I think to be fair to this argument, you could probably also counter argue that this type of problem is only a result of inefficiencies in our brains that maybe could be worked out by artificial intelligence, you know, upgrading itself.

Maybe you could reach the point where you could have a global workspace where all information is available at the same time, and information that is not useful now can can just be sort of like safely ignored and won't be distracting. M Yeah, I don't know, it's it's hard to imagine, like it's. It kind of makes one think of something of like a situation where something is built by committee, where all all concerns and all factors are involved.

And I don't know that kind of thing can lead to I guess with the right kind of project, it can be rather successful. You can sort of look at it both ways, right, You could look at like a a highly um efficient like NASA project, Right, But then we can also think of you know, artistic projects that might be compromised by such an approach. So I don't know, you can look at it different ways, and maybe with the sorts of projects that you know, super intelligent AI

would would be focused on, it would make sense. I mean, I will at least say, with my current limited biological brain, there are certainly times when it is better to have parts of my awareness and parts of my cognition inaccessible

to my consciousness. Yeah, I mean, there are some arguments that, uh that that put forward that that consciousness itself is like part part of consciousness is having a minimal attention, you know, being able to focus in on something and not be focused in on everything else like that, That is where the consciousness happened. Yeah, the consciousness could be

sort of the spotlight within your global workspace. You've got like a workspace for problem solving, and consciousness is how you you determine what is right in front of you in that space right now. And then finally, Schneider argues that a visa's mental processing can be understood via functional decomposition. Uh, and this is fairly straightforward. It's just you know, minds are hard to understand. Brains are incredibly complex. The same would be true of super intelligence is whatever kind of

physical substrate they're based on. But you can break down brains and computers into their constituent functional parts and structures, and by doing that you can break the big problem into smaller problems and more easily understand how they work. And this would in theory at least apply even to incredibly powerful AI. S Okay, fair enough. Now there's one last thing I was wondering about. This is not raised

by Schneider. This just occurred to me. Would post biological AI be likely to have an equivalent of what we regard as emotions? You know, if you if you encounter one of these things, would it matter in what tone of voice you were to speak to it, would it be possible to hurt its feelings? I don't know, Like, um, perhaps in turn, like we might have to break down what emotions are in a way that would make sense to something like this, Like maybe part of it would

come down to urgency, you know. Um, So there might be a situation where out of urgency, the machine would need to essentially raise its voice. Um, though it would maybe not you know, maybe this would not be carried out in a way that we would think of as emotional, but it might, you know, seem similar as to whether it's feelings could be hurt, I don't know. Maybe maybe it's assessment of us could change based on the way that we are expressing ourselves to it, and that is

similar to an emotional reaction. And I don't know. Yeah, I guess it's hard to separate emotional reactions to our behavior with purely logical the ability to predict our future behavior, right, because I would say a lot of ways that we react emotionally to people, it could be very flawed in this regard, but there at least somehow correlated to a feeling about how this same person that is making you feel a certain way now would behave towards you in

the future. Yeah, I mean we're kind of all over the board when it comes to imagining the emotional context of of AI. Because even when we we sort of do that thing where we you know, we fall back on on AI presented itself like this to us. Uh, yes, like even that is like that we presented as being calm and understanding if if not you know, kind of emotional nous, but in a way that it is an emotion, yeah,

British accent. But but also yeah, we often we often imagine it as being sort of infinitely calm and above above anger, which in and of itself is kind of and it is it is an emotional state. So I guess they're actually too totally different questions. Would a super intelligent, biologically inspired AI simulate emotions for the benefit of a you know, for the benefit of a biological audience, or would actually have something like emotions that are truly motivating

its own behavior. Yeah, I don't know, it's it's it seems a difficult one to unravel. I guess where my brain just went is when we imagine aliens becoming aware of us, you know, and we try to imagine their mind states. Some of the ones we come to are like pity, you know, like oh, these you know, less technologically developed species of Earth. You know, maybe we should help them, or maybe just a desire to destroy us, squash us out, or a desire to like have all

of our resources. But we don't often imagine what if the aliens encounter us and they're embarrassed for us, It's like it's so cringe inducing. Well, and that could be part of them choosing not to engage with us at all. Right, But anyway, I've found this chapter by Schneider really interesting, even though I'm skeptical of some of these transhumanist ideas, but I think this is really worth a read. It's it's very interesting, awesome. Yeah, and UH, and she's she's

just a good science communicator in general. You'll find various talks that she's given. Um, I think she's done some more, you know, pps. Her work has been covered as well in various publications. So let's come back to UH to show stick though, and particularly his idea is concerning SETI the search for extra terrestrial intelligence? What what does all of this mean for STU? So we'd be talking about in theory, a highly intelligent, effectively immortal species if you will,

that evolves, can replicate itself, and has no biological environmental demands. Interesting. Yeah, so, how does that change what you're looking for? Um? So, showstick argues that, you know, consequently, since it would not be limited by biological lifespans, interstellar travel would be would certainly be an option. You know, you wouldn't be limited by your mortality. All trips would be the same length. You would just need energy and material for replacement in

the improvement of parts. On top of this, these machines, this machine civilization would not be limited to water worlds. Uh. But while low energy machines could survive pretty much anywhere, truly dominant post biological civilizations would still require a lot of energy, and that of course means needing to be near major energy sources such as stars and black holes.

It seems like, uh, once you transition from being a biological life form to a post biological life form, the specifics of your needs become less chemical and more just

broadly physical. Yeah yeah so, And this this of course has ramifications for for part of the search for extra structural life, because then it means that well, maybe searching for rocky wet planets isn't where we're going to find the advanced civilization, and because the advanced civilizations no longer need that, so Showstack suggests that the galactic center would be the ideal place for these machines to set up shop,

a region of high energy density. Again, distance and biological concerns don't really matter, and likewise, stellar black holes and neutron stars might be ideal places for them to seek out as well. However, he mentions that Serbian astrophysicist milan Im Turkovich has argued that the outer regions of the galaxy might also be ideal for such AI civilizations, as

that is, the cold there would permit greater thermodynamic efficiency. Ah. Yeah, like we were talking about with the computer fan running, right, that a civilization that is, in essence a gigantic computer would need to eject a lot of waste heat. Yeah, Still there would be less mass and energy out there for them. So it's kind of like the same with

human decisions between a rural or an urban and existence. Like, well, if I if I live in the heart of the city, well you know, I've got the theater right down the street. I've got my favorite grocery store. Uh you know, I've got I've got the you know, the place where I get my technology worked on. And I move out to the sticks while it's quieter. But now, how am I going to get my groceries? How am I going to get uh my culture? How am I going to get

my technology addressed? But I can just throw all my garbage out the window and nobody bothers me about it. Uh So, show Stick argues that the ideal place to look here, so this would be you know, this is kind of like when humans make the idea of like, well, I don't want to live I'm going to compromise. I'm not gonna live in the heart of the city. I'm not gonna live in the middle of nowhere. I'm gonna

find a nice place in the suburbs. Right. So, show Stick argues that the ideal place where these two ideals converge uh do exist, and these are the kind of locations we need to look for. Um So, there's a list of such places quote that have the thermodynamic advantages of the galactic nether regions but still lie in regions of high matter density unquote. And these include places called

back globules. Uh. These are isolated dark nebulae that are relatively small in size, offer high thermodynamic efficiency, and have a lot of interstellar matter. Huh. Interesting. The nearest one of these, by the way, is Barnard Sight, uh, which I believe we're referencing in the title for this episode, a mere five light years away from us. So show So, I'm not saying there's anything there, but it makes you

think that is interesting. I know, I I don't think I've ever heard of this criteria to look for before. Uh So, yeah, what does this mean? Show Stack obviously is involved in SID Does this mean we've got like, uh, you know, radio listening a tune to Barnard sixty eight right now? Um? Well, I mean, certainly it's been ten years since this came out. So if if, if these are, if these are valuable arguments, uh, you know, I would

assume they've been reflected to some to some degree. But yeah, in this paper he contends that said he should, you know, continue to look at Rocky water World, but also at neighborhoods of hot stars, black holes, neutron stars, bought globules, et cetera. Like it just you know, we shouldn't limit ourselves as the argument to these water worlds, because that may be where life has to emerge from. But given this idea of post biological life, that's not where it

needs to remain. Now. A big question that does remain, however, is what sort of signal would such a post organic civilization produced that we could detect. Uh, you know, they might want us to find them, They might want to find us. But either way they might they might put some put something out for us for us to find. Uh, they might you know, not care that we can observe their dicens fheares that sort of thing. Um. But if

you know, But but what if they don't you know? Well, then perhaps it takes one of our own AI to you know, reach the point where it can discern the signs of their existence, um, and then perhaps be the ones to reach out and make first contact machine to machine. Okay, so we need a machine to see the gorilla in the video coming from space? Maybe, I mean again, it depends on what what they want if they exist and there at this level, what do they want? Do they

want to make contact? Maybe that's the thing. Maybe again, they know that organic beings can be messy, and they just want to wait until we've reached the point where their machine can call their machine. You know, I buy that it's waiting until it doesn't have to deal with meat. Yeah, like you doesn't want to chase this down, Just send us the press release, UM, let us know how to get in touch with you, and we'll set something up.

That's their whole thing. It's like waiting until Like I'm not going to order delivery from this place until they've got an online form. I don't want to have to call talk to somebody, right, I'm sure it's fine. I'm hearing great things, but get your technology sorted out first, and then we'll begin this relationship. I've got high hopes for this species where people are afraid to talk to other people on the phone. I don't know, I mean yeah, I mean we're we're ultimately left with some of the

same questions. Not only the big one, does lie exists elsewhere in the cosmos, but but again, like what would if if it's if it's alien AI, alien superintelligence, what are they gonna make of us? How are we going to fit into what sort of things they do? Um? Or would we fit in at all like maybe that's the ultimate thing, is like they just don't they don't care. Why would they care. We're the ones obsessed with us. They've got their own thing going on. Do you really

care what the squirrel is digging for in the yard? Well? I mean I do, but but yeah, ultimately do the the the cosmic overlord's care? You know, I don't know. Maybe not now shows that continues to discuss how we might refine our search for extraterrestrial life. Um. If you look around for his name, you'll find that he you know, he gives talks. He discusses set in general of the search, how that the search itself has changed, and how we should change it, as well as sort of the societal

considerations involved. But well, one example of something has been up to recently. UM In sept September he had an article titled SETTI The Argument for Artifacts Search is published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, and in this article he argues that while most of the search for exeter terrestrial intelligence has focused on the search for quote, artificially generated electromagnetic signals, it's artifacts that we should be spending more time on, or at least more time than we

we are. And this is the idea here, is that persistent transmissions, you know, sort of we're here, we're here, signals from beyond these require energy. And then on top of that the aliens and question should they exist. They might be exceedingly cryptic, or they might you know, they might be embarrassed for us, as we've discussed, or they might just be ignorant of our existence, and you know,

they simply don't know that we exist and likewise don't care. Um, So perhaps we should be looking more for artifacts or specifically evidence of artifacts, and to understand waste heat uh, certainly counts as something we'd be looking for in an artifacts search, a search for something created or something that

was once created by extraterrestrial life. Oh, and this came up in the previous episode when we talked about Dyson spheres, Like one possible way to look for them is to look for a place where you're not seeing much electromagnetic radiation accept heat, and the idea there is that maybe there's a sphere around a star that's harvesting almost all of its usable energy and pretty much the only thing that's coming out the other side of it is just

the waste product of their of their processing, which is heat. It's the computer fan blowing out into space. But yeah, it's ultimately an interest interesting argument, like, you know, how much effort should we be putting into picking up those signals of existence versus sort of perhaps more obscure evidence of the existence, you know, especially again if something out there is maybe less inclined to put out that that I am here signal, or you know, to even care

or know of our existence to begin with. Yeah, I could be wrong, but I think I'm right about this. Like, once you get a certain distance away from the Earth, you know, some number of light years away, at a certain point, like any any omnidirectionally transmitted radio signal would become so weak by the time it reaches us that

we really probably wouldn't notice it. And so like, to really notice a signal from an alien civilization, it would probably need to be something that is directionally beamed our way on purpose, and that that also requires a lot of assumptions about what's going on with that alien civilization. Yeah, and and maybe maybe it'll happen, but then again maybe

it won't. But yeah, it's just artifacts by products of previous existence, whether that's physical objects or or waste signatures like heat that could be around for a long time depending up you know, no matter what the intentions of the civilization are. Well, this has been fun, Rob, Yeah, this has been a fun one. Yeah. So obviously we'd love to hear from everyone out there. First of all, we mentioned, you know, this is the domain of science fiction.

Of science fiction is considered a lot of these questions for for deack Gates. So if there are particular examples, uh, let us know, examples that touch on some of these themes and ideas. Uh, you know, let us know if there is that that that that that corporate alien sci fi Reagan era thing that we were considering, you know, probably exists. Uh, if you have an I D for it,

let us know. We'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, if you would like to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you can find the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts, and in that feed you'll find core episodes. On Tuesdays and Thursday. On Friday, we do a little weird house cinema that's just you know, a consideration of a weird film. We do a little listener mail, usually on Mondays and on Wednesdays. That's when we we usually

have artifact, unless it's being preempted. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.

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