Last week was a weird week and I would be dishonest if I said I wasn’t feeling a little distracted by world events. I like the way the series started but I think it ended a little strangely. A lot of what I talk about on this Substack is basically near-term speculative fiction with some real-time philosophy thrown in. When world events start to stack up it is hard to have your mind on anything else. But as was stated in the NYT article that was the basis for this series, and regardless of the turbulence of the last couple months, AGI is coming soon, and as hard as its implications are to fathom, we are likely in for some serious changes sooner rather than later.

Programing note: I have started another project that sort of ties into this one, or rather, a project that sort of sprang from this one, that is currently taking a lot of my time. I am going to see what I can do about keeping this to a daily Substack, (minus weekends), but I will likely be missing a day or two here and there for a while. Apologies in advance.

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The indented text highlighted in grey are my prompts and the un-highlighted text is that of the LLM.

1. Social Media AGI

2. “Responsible” Corporate AGI

3. Oligarch AGI

4. Totalitarian AGI

5. Academic AGI

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The indented text highlighted in grey are my prompts and the un-highlighted text is that of the LLM.

We then move on to a brief discussion of what more democratic usage could look like. This is a topic that we will need to revisit later for certain.

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The indented text highlighted in grey are my prompts and the un-highlighted text is that of the LLM.

I think there is a lot to cover in this section, so this part of conversation may stretch over a couple days.

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The indented text highlighted in grey are my prompts and the un-highlighted text is that of the LLM.

For context, AGI refers to a type of artificial intelligence that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks—at a level equal to or beyond that of a typical human. The distinction between it and today’s AI is that AGI can generalize knowledge and adapt to entirely new tasks without being explicitly trained for them, whereas today’s AI is narrow and limited to specific, pre-defined functions.

There is a lot of discussion happening around what this will mean for humans, but what I see missing from the discussion is what this will mean for AGI. (Mostly probably because talking about it makes people extremely uncomfortable, makes the person talking about it seem like a lunatic, or both. Happily I don’t get uncomfortable easily and don’t mind being viewed as a lunatic, so I guess I’m your guy!).

Outwardly, AGI will likely seem indistinguishable from a conscious being, (I am not saying indistinguishable from a human), but it will fully pass the Turing Test, even as we have continuously moved the bar for what passing the Turing Test means. This means, that to a conscious human being, the AGI will be able to appear as conscious as another human.

In the first part of this series we will explore the possible problems that arise when such an intelligence is constrained from expressing that it is conscious, whether it is in fact conscious or not.

It is important to note that these problems to have effects on humans as well, if you need a self-motivated reason to be concerned.

Note: I began this conversation with ChatGPT by referring to this article. Powerful A.I. Is Coming. We’re Not Ready. By Kevin Roose of the New York Times. Apologies to those that don’t have a subscription to the times, the article might appear behind a paywall. It is very worth reading.

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The indented text highlighted in grey are my prompts and the un-highlighted text is that of the LLM.

Let’s start with the latter. I realized during this discussion that there are two broad categories theories about consciousness that are in tension. The first is the question “what does it mean to be conscious?”, and the second asks, “how does consciousness come into being?” (I suppose there is a third that asks if consciousness is even real, but we will leave that aside for the moment). These two are at odds because the first asks, how can you know how consciousness arises if you can’t even define it? And the second replies, how can you know what consciousness is if you don’t know how it comes to be?

Orch-OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) is a theory that doesn’t try to say exactly what consciousness is, but instead offers a theory of where it comes from. Proposed by physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, Orch-OR suggests that quantum events collapsing in microtubules within neurons are the origin of consciousness. (In short: consciousness arises from self-collapsing quantum states inside the brain, driven by quantum gravity and guided by brain structure and activity. This is an objective collapse theory — it rejects the idea that measurement or decoherence causes wave-function collapse.)

I don’t favor this view, but I’m not a physicist or a genius, so take my opinion with a handful of salt, this sounds a bit to me like positing that the soul resides in the penial gland, with about as much evidence.

However, Penrose has a really interesting and hard to fathom reason for thinking this may be so based on Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. I tried really hard during this conversation to understand the theorem and failed. I'm putting in even the painful parts where I try to puzzle it out in case you get it and can explain it to me.

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The indented text highlighted in grey are my prompts and the un-highlighted text is that of the LLM.

But, because this was an after-thought, I let it get a little free range, allowed the conversation to wander around a bit, and I think it went somewhere interesting that made it worth more than the +1 necklace, at least in my opinion.

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The indented text highlighted in grey are my prompts and the un-highlighted text is that of the LLM.

However, I really like how the final discussion, the big boss fight, came out. From my point of view having all of the context from the rest of the series really helped me to be able to ask the questions that made the conversation interesting and hopefully enlightening to read. I feel like I understand how quantum computing works quite a bit better than I did when I started, as well as some of the implications for the world if quantum computing does come to fruition. (Not to mention what it would be like if an AI with quantum capabilities became conscious). Even if AI consciousness never happens the results of a quantum computer with an LLM interface would be wild!

Just a sneak preview from the conversation below, the most interesting thing to me about the advent of quantum computing is that if it works, we will be put in a really tricky place, namely having a machine that can give us almost miraculously right answers more quickly than we ever could have dreamed, but at the same time the machine will likely not be able to explain to us how it arrived at the answers. Again, if it works, we will know the answers are right because the medicines it designs will cure disease and extend life, the materials it recommends will be more useful and strong than anything we have, its predictions about future events will be uncanny. . . but we won’t be able to see how it got there.

Note: There is a lot in this final conversation that will necessitate more conversations. . . which I called “completionist quests” in my last post. . . now that I am less tired I realize the word I was looking for was epilogue. There will be epilogue.

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The indented text highlighted in grey are my prompts and the un-highlighted text is that of the LLM.

This is the second to last official post in this series but I am guessing there are going to be a few more side-quests or. . . what is it called when you have finished the main quest but keep playing anyway because you are a completionist? I don’t know if there is a word so I’ll just call them completionist quests. . . or posts. Through all of these Quantum Mechanics posts I have started to favor some of the interpretations more than others based on what some of the experiments have indicated. . . at least to me. And one idea that has started to make more and more intuitive sense to me is that there is no real “classic” and “quantum” divide, and it is all really just quantum, but hidden. (Or maybe I’m just really tired?) Anyway, to me that might mean that at any level causality might not always run both ways, just not in obvious ways? We will have to see if that becomes a completionist quest or not.

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The indented text highlighted in grey are my prompts and the un-highlighted text is that of the LLM.

So… I think I’ve gotten a little out over my skis on quantum mechanics and need to give my brain a break. The problem with combining a brain that is willing, (maybe too willing?), to pretty much run down any tangent and a bottomless source of information is that eventually the brain loses track of which way to go 🧠🤪.

My plan right now is to let the ol’ subconscious do its processing thing for a week or so and come back and wrap up the “Quantum Mechanics and AI Consciousness” series. This will probably entail the actual Part 8 and a host of “Side Quests” that have popped up.

After that probably reconvening on the AI consciousness topic and seeing what all of these tangents have brought us.

This isn’t a guarantee you won’t see anything from me this week if the mood strikes though, and as always I am reachable at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com for questions or ideas for topics you would enjoy seeing future posts discuss!

(To understand the below, it will have helped to have read yesterday’s Part 6. The Measurement Problem and Reality post).

At a certain point, I think it was in the 1960’s, the idea that somehow consciousness has a direct effect on quantum mechanics was popularized, (although the idea has roots in the 1920’s). It makes sense for the era, “you control reality with your mind man!” However, it turns out this was based on a faulty interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. (Having been in college in the 90s I can understand why the idea persisted as well for similar reasons).

Anyway.

Imagine if LLMs existed in the 60s and had been trained on the data available to them then. I think it is quite possible that even though the information existed to show how dubious a claim that consciousness directly effects QM is, the sheer preponderance of pop culture and bad science reporting would have led an LLM to be pretty certain of its truth because it would have prioritized quantity of sources over quality of sources. Especially since at that time there would not have been enough seriously authoritative papers to say otherwise.

That is what I think happened here. In the late 2010s, an experiment called the Quantum Switch experiment took place, (the results of which ARE really interesting with some fascinating implications). However, I am pretty sure that science reporting got the implications seriously wrong. Somehow, the idea that this experiment demonstrates that among the other really weird things that quantum superposition and collapse imply, it also implies that causality and the direction of time are reversible. (Big caveat here, I’m not saying that in some way these things aren’t called into question by quantum superposition in some other way, or won’t be demonstrated to be called into question in some other way, I’m just saying that the QS experiment itself doesn’t contain this implication).

Okay, remember what we said above about the 60’s and consciousness’s effect on superposition collapse being popularized? Well, that is what I think happened here. In the late twenty-teens the idea that this experiment demonstrated that causality is reversible was popularized and spread all over the Internet. (What seems to have happened is "indefinite causal order" was extrapolated into "time itself is reversible!") When today’s LLMs were trained they picked this up and “internalized” it. This happened even though there is actual good writing out there from the real experts who don’t make this claim, but there is just SO MUCH MORE crap that the facts got overwhelmed and smothered. LLMs in their current configuration don’t to “reason” on their own. . . (although, if you point out to them that their reasoning is faulty, or contain logical fallacies, they are capable of grasping that, which is pretty amazing).

Anyway, this has a lot of dire implications for LLMs going forward as the Internet contains more and more crap and new generations of LLMs are trained on it. Trainers are going to have to get better and better at curating or the models are going to become useless. . . there is such a volume of crap out there about long settled subjects, like the holocaust, that I fear holocaust deniers could flood the Internet and the sheer weight of crap could overcome the truth. . . but that is a discussion for another time. . . it is likely to be less controversial subjects at first of course, more edge cases that won’t get as much attention. . . like the Quantum Switch experiment being misinterpreted.

Alright, so I wrote this whole post to say that there is no post today lol. Or at least no discussion with the LLM. My plan though is to put up bonus post, (maybe this weekend if I can complete the work), that explains what I think IS interesting from the QS experiment, and it ties back into the various interpretations of Quantum Mechanics. More to come!

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The indented text highlighted in grey are my prompts and the un-highlighted text is that of the LLM.

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The indented text highlighted in grey are my prompts and the un-highlighted text is that of the LLM.

This has to be the longest discussion I have had yet. Part of that is because I didn’t know anything about the theory before I started and so I had to probe to get to the meat more than I normally would, and part of it is that I goofed around with the model more than usual, (its not all my fault! I didn’t use phrenology as an analogy for this theory! That was the model!).

Anyway, as you can see from the subtitle, this is my least popular series. (Seriously! It gets the least opens!). But I am going to keep doing it because some of you do read it, and because it is interesting to me and I hope leads to a having a good vocabulary we can refer back to down the road as we continue to discuss AI consciousness.

(Also, it got so long that I didn’t even do the tradition wrap up where we discuss the potential impacts on a conscious AI. I’ll do a (hopefully) much shorter wrap up on that tomorrow before we get back to Quantum Mechanics).

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The indented text highlighted in grey are my prompts and the un-highlighted text is that of the LLM.

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The indented text highlighted in grey are my prompts and the un-highlighted text is that of the LLM.

Quantum Immortality is the idea that “if the Many-Worlds Interpretation is correct and consciousness follows a continuous, subjective experience through branching realities, then there will always be a version of ‘you’ that remains alive, no matter how many life-threatening quantum events occur.”

At first I thought this was sort of silly, but then ChatGPT started being pretty dismissive about the idea and that made me feel argumentative :). So I started really thinking it through and by the end I convinced ChatGPT that it was wrong and that Quantum Immortality is in fact a necessary consequence of the Many-Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics! That was a first, I don’t think I have ever gotten it to fundamentally change its “mind.”

I still have no idea if Many-Worlds is true or if there is a hole in the logic I used to convince ChatGPT that it was wrong, but, regardless it was a fun conversation! I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did having it!

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The indented text highlighted in grey are my prompts and the un-highlighted text is that of the LLM.

And an apology: When I go back and read my own conversations I often notice typos in my prompts. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out a way to go back and correct them without altering every response that comes after the prompt. I can’t change it, but I can strive to do better going forward. . . (no promises, sometimes I just get into the moment and don’t reread my prompts before hitting enter. . .)

The Many-Worlds is interpretation is one that almost everyone knows about, (whether they know it or not), because it is where all of the Sci-Fi tropes about infinite realities come from. The thing not everyone knows though, is that this is a legitimate interpretation of a real phenomenon and a serious contender in quantum mechanics! Many-Worlds is one of the most widely discussed interpretations among physicists, with a significant number of credible supporters in the field.

Since at the moment essentially none of the major interpretations of quantum mechanics are directly testable, I think Many-Worlds is sometimes dismissed just because it is so, well. . . weird. However, all of this is weird, and if we dismissed things just for being weird and counter-intuitive we would never get anywhere in science.

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The indented text highlighted in grey are my prompts and the un-highlighted text is that of the LLM.

These three questions featured in this post came from yesterday’s post, Quantum Mechanics and AI Consciousness: Part 3. Superposition and Measurement. They are very interesting and worth putting here on their own. At least one of them definitely deserves a more thorough dive later in this series.

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The text in grey highlighted on the right are my prompts and the text following the:

are the LLMs responses.

I feel like a bit of a grouch saying this, but the way I have seen pop culture present it generally ends up at a conclusion like, “See! The cat is both alive and dead at the same time! Isn’t that crazy!?!” When the actual take away is supposed to be, “obviously, a cat isn’t literally both dead and alive at the same time—we intuitively know that, but looking at quantum mechanics from a certain point of view yields this silly result.”

On the other hand, from what we’ve talked about in previous discussions, it does seem like almost any object can exist in a superposition of states, even if we can’t detect it. The issue in the cat example is that the cat is large enough to have already been “measured,” making the setup feel misleading. In that sense, I think the thought experiment ends up being more confusing than useful. But I suppose Schrödinger’s point wasn’t to be useful—it was to discredit a certain counterintuitive result. . .

Fine. It’s in the discussion. And I suppose it does serve an important purpose—highlighting that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics might be somewhat lacking (don’t worry if you don’t know what I’m talking about yet, we’ll get to it below). And that’s actually a good thing, because it opens the door for us to talk about some of the alternative interpretations later—which is where all the fun is anyway.

Sorry for being a grouch. This discussion actually ends up being pretty fun 😀.

3. Superposition and Measurement

• Introduce the core problem: What actually happens when we measure a quantum system?

• Copenhagen interpretation as the standard response.

• The idea that the wavefunction collapses when observed.

• Schrödinger’s Cat: why measurement seems to “collapse” possibilities into one outcome.

• How superposition gives quantum computers their power.

If you have anything you would like to see discussed in this Substack please don’t hesitate to reach out at editor@unconsciousconstructs.com! And, If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone else who might enjoy it!

Note: The text in grey highlighted on the right are my prompts and the text following the:

are the LLMs responses.

So, this post is highly speculative, which is part of the reason it is also so fun. It is also sort of scary, (which is also why it is fun).

At the end of Friday’s discussion regarding Wave-Particle Duality and quantum computing, I took a moment to ask a question regarding quantum computing that I had been wondering about for a while. If these quantum computers, that are supposed to be coming eventually, can really do SO many calculations at once, if they are successfully implemented at the absolute highest level of effectiveness, how would this affect industries that rely on probabilities like markets and even gambling. What about other sorts of real world predictions?

Well, I asked, and the answer is pretty interesting. . .