QUICK THOUGHTS

Why conscious AI is a bad, bad idea...

5/9/2023

(Yogi)

"[B]eing conscious is not the result of some complicated algorithm running on the wetware of the brain. It is an embodied phenomenon, rooted in the fundamental biological drive within living organisms to keep on living."

An urgent reminder from consciousness researcher and neuroscientist Anil Seth: "[C]reating artificial consciousness, whether deliberately or inadvertently, is a very bad idea."

(a) It would have its own agenda, and
(b) we'd be responsible for its well-being.

Anyway: machine consciousness is not happening any time soon. But systems that seem conscious are dangerous enough already!

Read Anil's article here.

OPEN STUDIO

5/8/2023

(Marcus/Bronwyn)

Bronwyn Lace and Marcus Neustetter hosted an OPEN STUDIO in Vienna on 5 MAY 2023
Here is a video of the opening talks by Johannes Jaeger, Bronwyn Lace and Marcus Neustetter of the works in process for the research: Pushing the Boundaries – Agency, Evolution, and the Dynamic Emergence of Expanding Possibilities

Some images of the studio are here.

ZooM ZoNE - Julian Gough

5/8/2023

(Yogi/Marcus)

THE ZoNE sits down with writer and philosopher Julian Gough to discuss his project called “The Egg and the Rock”, the End Poem in Minecraft, and how to navigate that space between arts and science.

With “The Egg and the Rock,” Julian is arguing that our universe is more like an evolving organism than a dead machine. He’s backing up this seemingly outrageous claim with physicist Lee Smolin’s theory of cosmological natural selection, and a whole number of predictions about what the James Webb telescope will see when it turns its eye on the first million years after the Big Bang. Several of these predictions have already come true, to the surprise of everyone except Julian.

When he is not turning our view of the world upside down, Julian writes children’s books and science fiction novels. In the past, Julian was a rock star. He is known as the comedian who kidnapped a pig. The pignapping video is here.

Julian's reading suggestions and books, papers, and other resources mentioned in the discussion:can be found here.

The Great Silence

4/28/2023

(Yogi/Bronwyn)

Some food for thought as the week is slowly ending.

Check out this amazing collaboration between artist duo Allora & Calzadilla and the best contemporary science-fiction writer of our age, Ted Chiang. It is a short film, featuring Chiang's story "The Great Silence," about alien consciousness on earth, and the great silence in the sky, which will soon be matched by a great silence on our planet. Heartbreaking. Art & science full of meaning. An essential part of tasting the pickle we're in.

The video is available on Vimeo. Chiang's story is part of his collection of short stories called "Exhalation."

Foundations of Archdisciplinarity

4/24/2023

(Paul)

One of our Pushing the Boundaries team members, Paul, has recently contributed to the Archdisciplinarity Research Center (ARC) project. He was involved in research that focused on comparative analysis and theory building. Paul's contribution has led to a booklet titled "Foundations of Archdisciplinarity", which you can check out here.

Longtermism as an evangelical cult...

4/23/2023

(Yogi)

The Guardian (Long Read) ran an excellent autobiographical story today, describing the all too short path from evangelical fundamentalism to the pseudo-philosophy of longtermism. You can read it here. Longtermism is a radical escape from reality, this time not based on any supernatural deities, but on superhuman machines we ourselves create.

The argument in this article is almost the same as Yogi's recent essay on techno-transcendentalism as a cult, only that this time the comparison is with medieval (catholic) christianity and its feudalist politics.

The bottom line is: longtermism is an unhealthy and cultish outgrowth of a radical view of the universe as a machine. It is not only delusional, but also highly dangerous, since it is by now shared by some of the most powerful humans on this planet. We must not let them determine our future.

Machine Metaphysics and the Cult of Techno-Transcendentalism

4/17/2023

(Yogi)

I know there is too much talk about #AI at the moment.

But I've written a blog post, anyway, because I think I have something to add.
TechnoTranscendentalism and AGI as a religious cult, with a neo-feudalist political program.

TL;DR:

TechnoTranscendenalism is a pseudo-religious cult that stems from a strongly computationalist world view (the world is computation) and the TESCREAL movements (transhumanism, extropianism, singuaritarianism, cosmism, the rationality community, effective altruism, and longtermism).

It's popular among AI engineers, tech entrepreneurs, and tech nerds in general.

The article makes three simple points:

1. TechnoTranscendentalism resembles medieval Christianity strongly with its salvation narrative of the technological singularity, and its anti-democratic neo-feudalist politics.

2. TechnoTranscendentalism (and techno-optimism more generally) are based on the completely unsupported belief that physical processes actually constitute some kind of (Turing-)computation.

3. AI researchers like to accuse the general public of ignorance, but they themselves have absolutely no idea what the terms "agency," "thinking," "cognition," "intelligence," and "consciousness" mean and how they manifest in living systems. Neither do they know just how different organisms and algorithms are, and what that means for the development of AGI.

I conclude that the current moment in AI is truly dangerous for humanity, because of the deluded hubristic world view of the #AI community, their anti-democratic politics, and the massive amount of power they have amassed in recent times.

They need to be strictly regulated, urgently, held responsible for their actions, their business model made illegal, their insane ideology placed far outside our Overton window, and the massive external costs they cause must be internalized.

It is not AGI that is the problem here. Conscious machines are not a thing. We will *never* have true AGI (unless we construct new life in a lab).

It is narrow AI and those who produce it that are the true danger here.

Don't be fooled by their deluded ideology.

Don't be a serf in their neo-feudalist scheme.

Don't give your agency away to algorithms that have none.

That's the revolution in AI we need.

Are you with me?

Yogi Speaking at the Optimist Café this Friday (Apr 14)

4/12/2023

(Yogi)

This Friday (Apr 14), at 10am, Yogi will be speaking at the Optimist Café, an online forum to discuss AI and its impact on sustainability and the future of work.

Here's the blurb:

Are we misunderstanding #artificialintelligence? Is #AGI actually possible? After a short Easter Break, the one and only Optimist Café is opening its doors again. This time we proudly present Johannes Jaeger, a systems scientist, evolutionary biologist and natural philosopher with an extremely transdisciplinary track record. ☕️ 🌷

👉🏼 Join us this Friday, 14 April 2023, at 10 AM CET for a talk & discussion by & with Johannes aka Yogi. He will focus on the philosophical reasons why #artificialgeneralintelligence is “completely impossible” within the current algorithmic framework and on why our fundamental misunderstanding of what #AI can and cannot do is very dangerous.

🤓 And yes, there will be some #optimism too.

Register here.

This is water...

3/31/2023

(Kevin)

A little bit of inspiration for the weekend, by one of our favorite authors, David Foster Wallace.

"This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t."

You have agency. You are alive. Don't give that away easily.

Full-length audio and text here.

More than machinery we need humanity...

3/25/2023

(Kevin)

Kevin has pointed us to this wonderful rendition of Charlie Chaplin's speech from "The Great Dictator" overlaid by Hans Zimmer's majestic "Time" from "Inception," and has highlighted just how much this amazing performance is speaking to the topic of our project. Check it out! Full text below.

Full text of the speech:

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone - if possible - Jew, Gentile - black man - white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness - not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men - cries out for universal brotherhood - for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world - millions of despairing men, women, and little children - victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” - not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power - the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then - in the name of democracy - let us use that power - let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world - a decent world that will give men a chance to work - that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!

Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world - to do away with national barriers - to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

Ontogenesis, Organization, and Organismal Agency

3/25/2023

(Yogi)

I gave an invited talk this week (online) for a workshop held in Paris with the title "Toward a science of intrinsic purposiveness: shaping development." This workshop was organized by our excellent colleagues and project collaborators Matteo Mossio and Ana Soto, and was sponsored by the "Agency, Directionality & Function" project of the John Templeton Foundation.

The talk is based on my essay on "Ontogenesis, Organization, and Organismal Agency," which is to appear as a book chapter in Jana Švorcová's "Organismal Agency: Biological Concepts and Their Philosophical Foundations" later this year.

The essay and the talk make a few very simple points:

organismic development (ontogenesis) and agency are only indirectly related, through the fact that they both require organizational continuity (persistent closure of constraints) during the complete life cycle of an evolving reproducer (which is the minimal evolvable biological unit),
this puts a sever constraint on the variability of an organism, which is what natural selection will act on,
in return, it means that we cannot understand ontogenetic processes by purely mechanistic means (see the mechanical duck below); instead, some of their features will be determined by the global constraint of organizational continuity, i.e. the necessity to produce a complete life cycle,
it is difficult to identify such constraints by purely theoretical considerations, they must be mapped using a comparative empirical approach to evolving ontogenetic processes that yields so-called cross-lineage explanations based on the concept of the homology of process,
this requires a new research program (a work package, in Alan Love's terms) in developmental biology, which uses traditional molecular, genetic, and tissue-mechanical experimental approaches, but is guided by the new framework of cellular agent theory (developed by Mossio, Soto, and colleagues).

I intend to record the lecture and upload it to YouTube, so stay tuned! In the meantime, check out the preprint of the essay, which is also listed in our publications section.

They're Made out of Meat

3/9/2023

(Yogi)

I have no idea, why I have never come across Terry Bisson's "They're Made out of Meat" before. It is so good I'll reproduce it in full below.

There is also a short film by Stephen O'Regan, starring Tom Noonan and Ben Bailey. It will be totally worth 7 1/2 minutes of your time!

TERRY BISSON, THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT

"They're made out of meat."

  "Meat?"

"Meat. They're made out of meat."

  "Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

  "That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."

"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

  "So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."

"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."

  "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."

"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."

  "Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."

"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?"

  "Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."

"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."

  "No brain?"

"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"

  "So... what does the thinking?"

"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."

  "Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"

  "Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."

"Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."

  "So what does the meat have in mind."

"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."

  "We're supposed to talk to meat?"

"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing."

  "They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"

"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."

  "I thought you just told me they used radio."

"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

  "Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"

"Officially or unofficially?"

  "Both."

"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."

  "I was hoping you would say that."

"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"

  "I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say?" `Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"

"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."

  "So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."

"That's it."

  "Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they won't remember?"

"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."

  "A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."

"And we can marked this sector unoccupied."

  "Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"

"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotation ago, wants to be friendly again."
  "They always come around."

"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone."

Thought experiments in the studio

3/8/2023

(Marcus)

Last week the studio was transformed as we are processing ideas in 3 dimensions and hosted a small get-together to explore first ideas in our scientific, philosophic and artistic pursuits.

Back from beyond the age of machines...

3/5/2023

(Yogi)

The last few weeks, I did literally go beyond the age of machines. The power unit of my laptop died and the following week I learned a lot about the fact that all laptops have their own power units, which are basically all incompatible with each other... All hail to the coming standardization with USB-C! That's all I can say. I had planned for many contingencies, but not for the case that a new power unit would have to be shipped from the U.S. and would take three weeks to arrive. So I bought a cheapo "universal" power unit, which seems to have fried the laptop completely.

Now, buying a new laptop on the quick wasn't easy, with all the supply chain issues right now. It seems to take on average between four and fourteen weeks to get a new laptop.

Also: I did learn that no philosophers use Linux, and there is no way the Philosophy Department could give me a Linux replacement laptop...

It is quite amazing just how much one's life and work is impaired by the inability to start up one's laptop. It'll be quite the readjustment.

Anyway, I'm happily in possession of a new Dell laptop running Pop!_OS 22.04, and the world can go on as it always has. Nothing will ever go wrong again...
Finally back to writing on the book at least! Also: big article about the neo-theistic death cult of silicon intelligence coming up. I'll keep you posted...

Beyond the Age of Machines

2/25/2023

(Yogi)

This week I gave a flash talk at an event called "Human Development, Sustainability, and Agency."

You can find its text in full length here, and a recording here. It's a three-minute read.

Pushing the boundaries...

2/23/2023

To start the conversation, here is a blog post written in September 2022 by project leader Johannes Jaeger, which explains what this project is, for how long it will run, and where it is hosted, including a few thoughts about the funder and their grant selection process.