To update this post from (gad) three months ago on the book “Superintelligence”, I’m finally slightly more than halfway through it, and it has addressed pretty reasonably my thoughts about perfectly safe AIs, like for instance AIDungeon or LaMDA, that just do what they do, without trying to optimize themselves, or score as many points as possible on some utility function, or whatever. The book calls such AIs “Tools”, and agrees (basically) that they aren’t dangerous, but says (basically) that we humans are unlikely to build only that kind of AI, because AIs that do optimize and improve themselves and try to maximize the expected value of some utility function, will work so much better that we won’t be able to resist, and then we’re all doomed.
Well, possibly in the second half they will suggest that we aren’t all doomed; that remains to be seen.
Conscious experience is unitary, parallel, and continuous
Another book I’ve read some of, and in this case just a little of, is Daniel Ingram’s “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha” (expanded 2nd edition). There’s a page about it here, which includes a link to a totally free PDF, which is cool, and you can also buy it to support his various good works.
An internal Buddhists group at The Employer has had Daniel Ingram join us for a couple of videoconferences, which have been fun to various extents. There’s a lot that one could say about Ingram (including whether he is in fact a Buddhist, what one thinks of him calling himself “The Arahant Daniel M. Ingram” on the cover, etc.), but my impression of him is that he’s a very pragmatic and scientific (and energetic) sort of person, who has a project to study the various paths to things like enlightenment in the world, in a scientific sort of way, and figure out what paths there are, which ones work best for which kinds of people, what stages there are along the paths, what works best if one is at a particular point on a certain path, and so on. There is apparently a whole Movement of some sort around this, called Pragmatic Dharma (I was going to link to something there, but you can Web Search on it yourself at least as effectively).
I’m not sure that this is an entirely sensible or plausible project, since as a Zen type my instinctive reaction is “okay, that’s a bunch of words and all, but better just sit”. But it’s cool that people are working on it, I think, and it’ll be fun to see what if anything they come up with. Being both pragmatic and moral, they are all about the Kindness and Compassion, so they can’t really go far wrong in some sense.
Having started to read that PDF, I have already a couple of impressions that it’s probably far too early to write down, but hey it’s my weblog and I’ll verb if I want to.
First off, Ingram says various things about why one would want to engage on some project along these lines at all, and I get a bit lost. He says that in working on morality (by which he means practical reasoning in the relative sphere, being kind and compassionate and all that) we will tend to make the world a better place around us, and that’s cool. But then the reasons that one would want to work on the next level after morality, which is “concentration”, are all about vaguely-described jhanas, as in (and I quote):
- The speed with which we can get into skillful altered states of awareness (generally called here “concentration states” or “jhanas”).
- The depth to which we can get into each of those states.
- The number of objects that we can use to get into each of those states.
- The stability of those states in the face of external circumstances.
- The various ways we can fine-tune those states (such as paying attention to and developing their various sub-aspects)
Now it appears to me that all of these depend on an underlying assumption that I want to get into these “states” at all; unless I care about that, the speed with which I can do it, the depth, the number of objects (?), the stability, and the fine-tuning, don’t really matter.
I imagine he will say more about these states and why they’re desirable later, but so far it really just says that they are “skillful” (and “altered”, but that seems neutral by itself), and “skillful” here just seems to be a synonym for “good”, which doesn’t tell us much.
(In other Buddhist contexts, “skillful” has a somewhat more complex meaning, along the lines of “appropriate for the particular occasion, and therefore not necessarily consistent with what was appropriate on other occasions”, which a cynic might suggest is cover for various Official Sayings of the Buddha appearing to contradict each other seriously, but who wants to be a cynic really?)
It seems that if the jhanas are so fundamental to the second (um) training, he might have made more of a case for why one would want to jhana-up at the point where the training is introduced. (One could make the same sort of comment about Zen types, where the reason that you’d want to meditate is “the apple tree in the side yard” or whatever, but those types make no pretense at being scientific or rational or like that.)
In the Third Training, called among other things “insight”, Ingram talks about becoming directly aware of what experience is like, or as he summarizes it, “if we can simply know our sensate experience clearly enough, we will arrive at fundamental wisdom”. He then talks about some of the ways that he has become more aware of sensate experience, and I am struck by how very different from my own observations of the same thing they are. Let’s see if I can do this in bullets:
- He starts with basically a “the present moment is all that exists” thing, which I can get pretty much entirely behind.
- He says that experience is serial, in that we can experience only one thing at a time. He describes focusing on the sensations from his index fingers, for instance, and says “[b]asic dharma theory tells me that it is not possible to perceive both fingers simultaneously”.
- Relatedly, he says that experience is discrete, and that one sensation must fade entirely away before another one can begin. At least I think he’s saying that; he says things like “[e]ach one of these sensations (the physical sensation and the mental impression) arises and vanishes completely before another begins”, and I think he means that in general, not just about possibly-related “physical sensations” and “mental impressions”. He also uses terms like “penetrating the illusion of continuity” (but what about the illusion of discontinuity?).
- And relatedly relatedly, he thinks that experience is basically double, in that every (every?) “physical sensation” is followed by a “mental impression” that is sort of an echo of it. “Immediately after a physical sensation arises and passes is a discrete pulse of reality that is the mental knowing of that physical sensation, here referred to as ‘mental consciousness'”.
Now as I hinted above, the last three of these things, that consciousness is serial, discrete, and double, do not seem to accord at all with my own experience of experience.
- For me, experience is highly parallel; there is lots going on at all times. When sitting in a state of open awareness, it’s all there at once (in the present moment) in a vast and complex cloud. Even while attending to my breath, say, all sorts of other stuff is still there, even if I am not attending to it.
- Similarly, experience is continuous; it does not come in individual little packets that arise and then fade away; it’s more of an ongoing stream of isness (or at least that is how memory and anticipation present it, in the singular present moment). If thoughts arise, and especially if those thoughts contain words or images, the arising and fading away of those feel more discrete, but only a bit; it’s like foam forming on the tops of waves, and then dissolving into the water again.
- And finally, there’s no important distinction to be had between “physical sensations” and “mental impressions”; there is only experience happening to / constituting / waltzing with mind. If there were a mental impression following each physical sensation, after all, how would one avoid an infinite regress, with mental impressions of mental impressions stretching out far into the distance? Something like that does happen sometimes (often, even) but it’s more a bug than a feature.
I suspect that some or most of all of these differences come because Ingram is talking about a tightly-focused awareness, where I am more of an open and expansive awareness kind of person, even when attending to the breath and all. If you really pinch down your focus to be as small as possible, then you won’t be able to experience (or at least be consciously aware of) both fingers at once, and you may manage to make yourself see only one sensation at a time in individual little packets, and you may even notice that after every sensation you notice, you also notice a little mental echo of it (which may in fact be the sum of an infinite series of echoes of echoes that with any luck converges).
This kind of tightly-focused conscious awareness goes well, I think, with what Ingram says about it being important to experience as many sensations per second as possible. He puts it in terms of both individual sensations, and vibrations, although the latter doesn’t really fit the model; I think he means something more like “rapid coming into existence and going out of existence” rather than a vibration in some continually-existing violin string.
He is enthusiastic about experiencing things really fast, as in
If you count, “one, one thousand”, at a steady pace, that is about one second per “one, one-thousand”. Notice that it has four syllables. So, you are counting at four syllables per second, or 4 Hertz (Hz), which is the unit of occurrences per second. If you tapped your hand each time you said or thought a syllable, that would be four taps per second. Try it! Count “one, one thousand” and tap with each syllable. So, you now know you can experience at least eight things in a second!
and this strikes me as really funny, and also endearing. But he takes it quite seriously! He says in fact that “that is how fast we must perceive reality to awaken”; I do wonder if he is going to present any scientific evidence for this statement later on. I’m sure it has worked well / is working well for him, but this seems like a big (and high-frequency) generalization. I don’t remember ol’ Dogen, or Wumen, or the Big Guy Himself, talking about experiencing as many things per second as possible, as a requirement. I guess I’ll see!
ceoln 