Lesterpaintstheworld OP t1_jdzcbar wrote on March 28, 2023 at 8:35 AM

Reply to comment by Justdudeatplay in The subjective experience of AGIs: A thought experiment by Lesterpaintstheworld

Yes, I actually think this is a good idea.

It gets very woo-woo very fast, and the focus needs to remain solely on science / building an actual product, but when studying cognition so unconvential approaches really help. In particular, altered states of consciousness help understanding the specifics of your brain processes. From here, two mains camps: entering altered states with psychoactive substances or without.

I personally fall in camp 1: psychoactives tend to impact various parts of the brain differently, giving you a ventage point to understand the different functional components of your brain, how they interact and what purpose they serve (cf. The thousand brain theory).

I have heard that folks achieve altered state through mediating / breathing / visualiazing, but it's hard to find people that also have the technical baggage to transform the insights they get into technical elements of an Architecture for AGI. If you know people who might, I'm all ears, tell them to read this :)

Justdudeatplay t1_je3hjqw wrote on March 29, 2023 at 3:24 AM

Well I wouldn’t be one of them, but I can enter the OBE states. I’m not technically trained. It’s been happening to me all my life though. So the environment that I’m in during an OBE is convincingly real and similar to a physical one minus other dream like elements and archetypical characters. I can tell you without a doubt that the mind creates the world we are witnessing as a virtual world and holds onto that virtual environment even when inputs are gone. If an Ai is going to be like humans, then it’s has to create its own virtual environment In order for it to have internal imagery like we do. I suspect this is where we subconsciously test different actions for consequences. In my OBEs things act very much like they do here with some caveats. Then when you notice you are in a altered reality you are essentially creating feed back. An Ai is going to have 1. be constantly answering its own questions. 2. Answering those questions by seeking information 3. And answers should generate more questions. This sort of constant feed back loop, I believe is the seat of qualia.