Cody/Glen -I like this conceit of dreaming as disinhibited/discursive next-token generation.
As a sometimes *lucid* dreamer myself, I feel as if that is what is very close to what is going on for me... my best lucid dreaming is hypnapompic... happening as I awake or as I drift in and out after a good sleep (including various fever dreams such as an overheated nap on a summer afternoon). Hypnagogic also, but not so much... it seems to be a difference in tuning/calibration/angle of entry vs angle of exit?
The *lucidity* of my dreams seem to stem from some kind of split attention or an pseudo-adversarial exchange between a *conscious* and an *sub*-conscious component of "self". The mode in which I engage in my lucid dreaming experience is usually somewhat active... "guiding" the dream-wander willfully but always gently... experience tells me that deliberate lucid dreaming is a bit like catching dust-motes or herding cats... too much intention blows it up and shuts it down or ruins it qualitatively. "directed disinhibition" might be a fair description of my best method. Psychedelic (or opiod?) tripping may be similar for some, my experience with such is so acutely limited that I'm just guessing from anecdotal references.
One of my early experiences with chatGPT was to try to co-write short fiction with it, based on some simple tech or socio-political tweak. The final result was rather unsatisfying but Glen's implication that an API interface might provide more degrees of freedom than merely web-whispering at it. I hadn't thought of it before this thread came up, but the *problems* I had might have been in the category of *trying too hard*... I was probably trying to force chatGPT to be more of a writing assistant than a collaborative dreamer. Naturally I begin those story-weavings with a specific idea of what it is about and where it is going. Perhaps I can re-engage with something closer to Glen's prescription?
Jason Yunkaporta in his book Sand Talk <https://birchbarkbooks.com/products/sand-talk> invoked a (n Aboriginal) term for doing something like this intentionally with other people and calls it "Yarning".... somewhat discursive from the usual description of Aboriginal Dreaming is my own connotative understanding of it as "wandering about in the (larger) adjacent possible". Yarning seems to be a collaborative, directed version of this? The question of "what means adjacent?" is begged here methinks.
I have resisted/puzzled-over/enjoyed Glen's assertion/question about "communication is an illusion" (probably mis-stating it here?)... and wonder how that relates to this "dreaming" business? It seems that what we nominally call (or intend to be) communication is at best the weaving of yarns (and that is a good thing)?
For the musically inclined: Dream On <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89dGC8de0CA>! - Aerosmith or a Cinematic Slam version <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYXYQRU2i7c> (more to the spirit of adversarial collaboration)...
For the western take on eastern mystics among us, Alan Watts <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o>...
Discursively yours, - Steve On 9/8/23 8:03 AM, glen wrote:
One of the things we could easily try is cumulative, iterative prompting, particularly with some of the lower scoring responses. Dreams are nothing but lower scoring responses, right? While you're sleeping, your evaluation/selection mechanism is inhibited, which allows you to invest a little more in the total bullshit your own next-token generator generates. So for, say ChatGPT to dream, it simply needs instructions, including higher temperatures, to be less critical of its own responses. It would be annoying to try to do it with the web interface, but trivial to do with the API. The hidden pre-prompt could be engineered such that the n+1 prompt is a (algorithmic or random) composition of the, say, 10 responses to the nth prompt. Etc. This would be akin to dreaming, I think. At the end of however many iterations, you wake it up and write the highest scoring result down in its dream journal.Maybe I'll try that with Falcon. I can't divert my OAI budget to it. On 9/7/23 12:37, cody dooderson wrote:I asked ChatGPT if it dreamed and it said that it didn't. However, is adversarial training of neural networks much different than dreaming?A new class from MITX showed up in my email today. It is called /Minds and Machines: An introduction to philosophy of mind, exploring consciousness, reality, AI, and more. The most in-depth philosophy course available online. /https://mitxonline.mit.edu/courses/course-v1:MITxT+24.09x/ <https://mitxonline.mit.edu/courses/course-v1:MITxT+24.09x/>It may help with this question. / / _ Cody Smith _ c...@simtable.com <mailto:c...@simtable.com>On Thu, Sep 7, 2023 at 12:25 PM Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com <mailto:sasm...@swcp.com>> wrote:Great observations as usual Glen... I have lapsed into *listening* toalmost all long-form writing, whether fiction or non.... and it definitely distorts (torts?) my perception/conception of the material/subject/message. A corollary to McLuhan's Medium/Message duality?I find the "output" side to be more specific (or conscious) for methan the "input" side. Your point of cuneoformsticks/quills/pencils/keyboard/gestural-interpreters being part of our extended phenotype is very apt as is the idea that (if I understand yourintentions) it (intrinsically) effects our interoception and inter-subjective realities.I also appreciate your reflections on "mal" and "dis" which I have livedwith all of my life... "judging" or "discriminating" in ways which themselves are "adaptive" for one suite of purposes but perhaps "mal"/"dis" for another suite. Having a vector or tensor fitnessfunction with (arbitrary) signs on the elements doesn't guarantee theythemselves are "fit" for what you think they are. Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep? Do LLM's (or larger adaptive systems they are embedded in?) dream of the tensor fields they are embedded in or create or co-create with the fields of human activity/history/knowledge/experience/future/manifesting-destiny they were designed to model/emulate/expose/facilitate/co-evolve with?I dunno, but it sure is a fascinating milieu to be surfing through inthese auspicious days at the beginning (or end) of the Anthropocene. - Steve On 9/7/23 1:01 PM, glen wrote:> Both keyboards and pencils are part of our extended phenotype and play> (multiple) roles in interoception, including the induction of> inter-subjectivity. I've forgotten who it is, but there's someone on > this list who *listens* to our posts, rather than reads them. I tried> that with a blog post this morning during my mobility routine: >> https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/preferences-can-be-sick-mental-illness <https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/preferences-can-be-sick-mental-illness>> > <tangent>> Then because I had an allergic reaction to what I heard, I *read* it> later. Listening to it disgusted me. I came away thinking this > Kirkegaard dude's akin to a scientific racist ... or maybe a> eugenecist. I admit to being a fan of Thomas Szasz back in the day. (A > friend's mom actually dated him at some point ... allegedly.) But at> this point, I've been infected by the Woke Mind Virus; and it's > difficult to stomach phrases like "strict homosexuality is more> disordered than bisexuality." Reading it, however, helped me remember > that maladaption is part and parcel of adaption. Disorder is part and> parcel of order. The "mal" and "dis" prefixes are nothing but> value-laden subjectivity. The goo of reality extruded through the mold > of the author/thinker/subject. For someone like Kirkegaard to claim > they're being "objective" while using the "mal" prefix is not even> wrong. It's just bullshit. Apparently, my Woke Virus infection is > worse near my ears than near my eyes. > </tangent> >> But the point is that *which* extended trait you use (pencil, audio, > text, etc.) chooses which interoceptive cycle you engage. And when you > pretend to make such a choice on purpose, at will, any assignation of> fault would be transitive. Which wolf do you feed? > > On 9/4/23 10:29, Steve Smith wrote:>> I'm not sure my facility with the keyboard actually serves me. As >> many of you may suspect, and I suspect so myself, it allows me to be >> much less thoughtful and rigorous than I would be in handwriting or >> if I had some other throttle or impedance elements between linguistic>> centers and "paper"? >
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