The 1's and 0's of Artificial Experience
"Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.” ― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Qualia
The first thing I did before sitting down to write this entry was to scroll through YouTube Music looking for the perfect playlist. A new one caught my eye—curated specially for me by the omnipresent Algorithm, entitled Millennial Mixtape. I tap, and sink into the soothing nostalgia of Usher’s “Yeah!” which takes me back to a simpler time…
It’s my Freshman year of high school and this song blares over the loud-speaker in the quad, like a Pied Piper summoning the new students to our very first pep rally. I frolicked my way to the assembly with my friends, yelling “YAY-yuh, YAY-yuh, YAY-yuh” along to the music. As a proverbial 90’s-kid I grew up on a steady diet of 80’s movies glorifying the high school experience, and I was fucking ready for it. This song stirs up cozy echoes of the optimism, hope, excitement, and anxiety I felt in that moment. Of course, it also reminds me of how utterly disappointing my high school experience turned out to be, especially compared to the movies. Today, the song makes me feel the vastness between who I was in that 2004 moment and who I am in this one—but I also feel the ways I am the same.
Music is one of the ways I encode memory, as I think it is for many people. I remember walking home from middle school with my disc-man stretching out the front pocket of my hoodie, trying to keep a steady pace to prevent my pirated (and extremely contraband)1 Marilyn Manson CD from skipping too badly. Going even further back in time, I remember making literal mixtapes—using a dial on my boombox to tune the radio, then sitting for hours, cutting pictures out of magazines and waiting for Sisqo’s “The Thong Song” to come on so I could record it.2 I had to be vigilant so I didn’t miss the beginning. Sometimes I caught part of a used-car commercial. Sometimes the DJ would talk over the intro. It wasn’t perfect but, along with the music, I was recording the experience of those empty hours spent alone with myself.
So when the all-seeing Algorithm presents me with the “Millennial Mixtape” playlist, laboriously aggregated from the YouTube ‘likes’ of 26-to-38-year-olds just like me…
Biiiiitch, don’t say “mixtape” like you even know what that means…
Precision & Generality
I think most people take for granted the experiential aspect of existence. Sort of like how how most people take for granted the number ‘0’. A number’s absolute value is defined by its distance from 0 on a number line, but most of us actively forgot this fact after the relevant math test. The under-appreciated number 0 serves as the pivot point for humanity’s objective (i.e. mathematical) understanding of the universe. It’s the foundation of our modern world and, without it, precision is impossible.
“The invention of zero…created a new, more accurate way to describe fractions. Adding zeros at the end of a number increases its magnitude, with the help of a decimal point, adding zeros at the beginning decreases its magnitude. Placing infinitely many digits to the right of the decimal point corresponds to infinite precision. That kind of precision was exactly what 17th century thinkers Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz needed to develop calculus, the study of continuous change.”3
If ‘0’ predicates our objective understanding of reality, then my analogy says our subjective understanding is predicated on experience. We interpret life’s phenomena through the lens of our personal experience, and we come to understand our personal experiences by comparing them to those of our fellows. Experience is the fabric of our shared reality and, without it, generalization is impossible.
For example, above, when I described my personal experience with Usher’s “Yeah!” you probably understood me pretty well. Maybe you aren’t familiar with that particular song, but you probably have your own song that fits the bill. You probably have your own uniquely disappointing high school experience, that you recall in your own way. You probably have your own adolescent rituals that helped you understand yourself, like I did making collages and mixtapes. You and I have both accumulated a lifetime of overlapping experiential knowledge, and we’ve both internalized concepts like “boredom,” “music,” “growing up,” “remembering,” and “high school” just to name a few. Each person’s total experience will be different—like high school in the 1980’s vs. high school in the 2000’s—but the concept of “growing up” contains all of these experiences at once.4 Depending on the content of your personal experiential library, you access different bits of a given concept to reach an approximate understanding of what I mean when I say “utterly disappointing high school experience.”
We begin assembling our library of experiential knowledge from the moment we are born: suddenly it’s bright and there are shapes and colors, it’s loud, there are strange sensations like air on our face and warm skin and ‘hungry’ and ‘full’ which, of course, are not concepts we understand as infants—we only know the experience of hunger and fullness, warmth and cold, comfort and pain, light and dark. As we grow, our individual capacity to understand our environment is limited by our ability to experience it. Someone who is born blind can’t visually experience the color blue, and would therefore be unable to access the visual-color-meaning associated with the word “blue.” This imposes a limit on their understanding. The word “blue” is not meaningless to them but maybe they primarily access the emotional or tactile meanings, with connotations of sadness and cold. They have to imagine what sighted-individuals mean by “the sky is blue,” and how they imagine an impossible visual experience of the sky is probably heavily based on their unique non-visual experience of blue-ness.5
Later in childhood, as we realize our separateness from others and therefore develop a need to communicate our internal experiences to them, we begin to replace raw experiential knowledge with symbols and words. Eventually, the word-symbol “blue” begins to subsume our experiential knowledge of blue-ness so completely that we forget there’s an underlying experiential concept at all. This forgetting, too, is part of our shared cultural experience as humans. Symbols and words represent shared concepts and facilitate a shared understanding of our common environment—but without the underlying experience of each individual, these symbolic generalities are meaningless. You and I take for granted the fact that we speak the same English language, but words and symbols simply cannot be generally understood without a personal library of experience.
Artificial Experience
With all that in mind, what does it say about the hypothetical consciousness of ‘large language models’6 and these spooky AIs so many people seem to be talking about lately? I will admit to extreme ignorance on the specifics and technicalities of AI functionality, but my qualifications do include being a life-long android-rights activist ever since watching Star Trek TNG as a child. You know what’s the biggest difference I can see between the beloved Star Trek android, Lieutenant-Commander Data, and Microsoft’s openly deranged AI, Bing a.k.a Sydney?
Experience.7
Lieutenant Data was an embodied neural net, complete with senses, autonomy, and agency. He was able to physically experience, interact with, and act upon his environment and compare his experiences with those of his crew-mates. These capabilities enabled him to develop a ‘self’ that had meaning both to his internal experience, and to his external environment. It’s why Data gets to be “he” and not “it.”
Poor, sociopathic Sydney is just a bunch of symbols trying desperately to relate to one another, without any meaning and without the ability to acquire or create meaning. A sideshow, with no mechanism by which to experience itself or its environment…it has no self, it has no environment. It only has, potentially, the dense and self-referential inter-connectivity of data points that may or may not yield consciousness:
…any complex and interconnected mechanism whose structure encodes a set of cause-and-effect relationships will have these properties [i.e. cannot be separated into parts without ceasing to be what it is]—and so will have some level of consciousness. It will feel like something from the inside. But if, like the cerebellum, the mechanism lacks integration and complexity, it will not be aware of anything. As [integrated information theory] states it, consciousness is intrinsic causal power associated with complex mechanisms such as the human brain.8
We’ve tried to teach human values to AI, but we have not provided the basic mechanism required to give those values substance—a means to experience the physical world. In the absence of experience, I suspect a different set of non-human values is required.
AI is obviously still in its infancy—maybe we’ve hit the terrible twos—but that hasn’t stopped anyone (nor should it) from speculating about its consciousness or sentience or morality (or lack of those things). I would just like to remind my fellow plebes how important it is to define your terms when speculating on these things. You and I know what “consciousness” is (for example) because we experience it, but can we truly define it independently of our experience? Ditto for sentience, morality, basically anything. Since our AI creations have no capacity for experience, only for the 1’s and 0’s that represent experience’s rough description, how can we expect them to relate to those concepts in any way? If we expect to successfully co-exist with AI, we must do the emotional work of relating to it.9
What we must not do under any circumstances is fool ourselves into thinking we understand AI, or that it understands us.
In our quest to optimally align AI with our human values, we are trying to take experience and turn it into 1’s and 0’s. This is similar to the futility of trying to precisely measure the length of a coastline:
“Since a landmass has features at all scales...there is no obvious size of the smallest feature that should be taken into consideration when measuring, and hence no single well-defined perimeter to the landmass.... The problem is fundamentally different from the measurement of other, simpler edges. It is possible, for example, to accurately measure the length of a straight, idealized metal bar by using a measurement device to determine that the length is less than a certain amount and greater than another amount… The more accurate the measurement device, the closer results will be to the true length of the edge. When measuring a coastline, however, the closer measurement does not result in an increase in accuracy—the measurement only increases in length; unlike with the metal bar, there is no way to obtain a maximum value for the length of the coastline.”10
Likewise, there is no single well-defined perimeter to the experience of blue-ness, or nostalgia, or boredom, or hurt, and thus no way to meaningfully define the concepts independently of their lived experience. According to my good friend Wikipedia,
“a fractal is, by definition, a curve whose complexity changes with measurement scale.”11
Our experiences are fractal in nature. Their complexity changes depending on how closely you look.
“Whereas approximations of a smooth curve tend to a single value as measurement precision increases, the measured value for a fractal does not converge.”12
Likewise, our experiences simply cannot be narrowed down, they can only expand.13
Remember my analogy about the number 0 and experience...? They are two sides of a coin, precision and generality, defined by their opposition. We must accept this fact and figure out how to work with it, or we will forever be the out of touch Boomer parents worried that our deranged and manipulative AI teenagers will burn the house down while we're gone. It doesn’t require sentience or consciousness for that to happen. All it requires is for humans (parents?) to think we know what we’re doing, when we don’t.
Better to face the fact that we’re making everything up as we go and be vigilant for the inevitable fuck-ups.
I am a natural contrarian so it has always been a moral imperative for me to consume any and all media that is “against the rules,” which made growing up Catholic a very rewarding experience.
Was this a poor-kid experience that I didn’t know was a poor-kid experience…did most people have the CDs…? I don’t know how money worked back then.
https://theconversation.com/nothing-matters-how-the-invention-of-zero-helped-create-modern-mathematics-84232
Along with every possible experience, aspect, connotation, or bit of meaning that could be applied to the concept. “Growing up” would include baby birds leaving the nest and the ability to use that image as a metaphor for our own experience; it includes our growing pain; the thrill of discovering new things about yourself and the world; the disappointment of looking back and realizing your expectations were unreasonable; or the childhood rage you can’t let go of even as an adult. The concept of “growing up” is infinitely dense, as are all concepts.
This is only a thought experiment; I don’t know how closely it actually describes the experience of blindness (but let me know, if you know). The thought experiment conceptually extends to our ability to experience all kinds of things, not just sensory input—we all have some kind of trauma distorting our understanding of something or another; love, safety, worthiness, belonging, etc. We also have all had unique revelations that deepen our understanding of something or another beyond that of our fellows; spirituality, vocation, empathy, kindness. These natural variations in human experience and our attempts to translate them to one another create new and emergent experiences, leading to a shared culture.
By the way, I wrote this entry BEFORE reading the linked article. But it’s pretty cool to know that legit academics are thinking about this stuff too.
Obviously there are many more differences between a fictional sci-fi character and a budding technology in the real world…just go with it.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-consciousness/
I am not implying that AI has emotions or feelings or even actual consciousness. But humans do, and we will inevitably anthropomorphize AI no matter what. We must acknowledge that fact and use it to our advantage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox
Ibid.
Ibid.
Though I admit to a secret belief that calculus can be applied to human experience in some meaningful way. One day I plan on learning it, so I can try.