Portrait of Mary Shelley (1797-1851) by Richard Rothwell.
Mary Shelly prophesized in Frankenstein \[1\] how a human-made machine might learn. She details the process in great detail over several chapters as the monster, in its own voice, provides “an account of the progress of \[its own\] intellect.”
The learning process detailed in Frankenstein—starting with basic proprioception and culminating in social interaction—combines realistic elements of human learning with plausible predictions of how intelligent beings might deduce rules of behaviour from observing humans.
Was Shelly an extraordinary visionary with a unique sense of observation? Did she have a keen sense of developmental psychology? Was she correct about how intelligent beings may come to learn about the world and how to interact in it?
Yes. Yes. And, most assuredly, yes \[2, 3, 4\]. She also made deep connecting references with previous literature. Indeed like Rousseau’s Emile \[2\], Shelly’s monster learned from its environment and then its society.
## Gaining Intelligence
The story of Frankenstein incrementally unfolds, and tells a story of becoming aware, then learning to interact with an environment, and eventually other intelligent beings. The progress culminates with the monster obtaining a self-awareness and ability to reason about what other intelligent beings are reasoning about.
The account of intellectual development opens with descriptions of gaining senses of sight, feeling, hearing, and smell, all at once. It is not with disentangled clarity that these sense arrive, but rather they arrive entangled together as a convoluted stream of information.
> …it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses.
The first thing that the monster learns to do is blink to relieve nerve pressure. From this first blink, the next narrative points detail a curriculum of intelligence prescient for reflection given research in artificial general intelligence.
Following blinking come several important functions of intelligence:
* visual light stimulation
* awareness of one’s own embodiment
* locomotion as an embodied being
* collision detection and avoidance
* maneuvering around obstacles
At the same time as these embodied abilities are being described, the creature describes basic compulsions, or necessities, which demand attention.
> …the heat wearing me as I walked, I sought a place where I could receive shade…,
> until I was tormented by hunger and thirst”, “and then lying down, was overcome by sleep.
The phrasing that Shelly uses to describe the means by which the monster acts are framed as external forces of hunger and thirst and exhaustion exerting upon the monster. Then the framing changes. The monster gains agency and starts to embody its own experience. This dualism is a critical moment when the separation between mind and body occurs. The body can overcome the mind, and the mind can do the same to the body.
> I felt cold … and half frightened… finding myself so desolate
> The monster then gazes upon the moon with a kind of wonder, I fixed my eyes on that \[bright moon\] with pleasure.
The monster drinks from a stream, and uses the foliage of the trees for shade from the hot sun. It is delighted by the sounds of the birds, and “sometimes, \[tried\] to imitate the pleasant songs.” This imitation is followed by the monster finding, discovering, its own internal desires and then wishing to express its sensations in its own ways. It realized that it was not the song that it wanted to imitate, but what the process represented.
How might Frankenstein classify such an organism? Then again, how might you?
Next, the monster starts to distinguish the “insect from the herb”, notably finding contrast between various forms of animated life. The monster is categorizing, a pre-linguistic form of concept learning by grouping like with like and not with unlike.
The monster uses a variety of tools and accessories to satiate its demands of comfort, including “clothes”, “a huge cloak”, “a cup”, and “a fire left by some wandering beggars.” Again the mind-body separation emphasizes the apparent disconnect between the brain and the body.
It starts to reason about cause and effect. After the monster delights in the warmth provided from an ambient fire, it puts its hands directly into live embers, then reflects: “how strange, I thought, that the same cause should produce such opposite effects.”
## Ego- to Socio-centrism
The monster starts to collect resources to sustain the comforts of a fire: The monster protects the embers of the live fire overnight. This foresight can be seen as some of its first predictive reasoning. It is in some way afraid of not having embers, of not having fire. Namely, it wanted to be able to become warm in the future, and thus adapted its environment to be able to take such actions at a distant point in time. From there, it even uses the fire to roast some of its food. “… the berries were spoiled by this operation, and the nuts and roots much improved.” It is learning through trial and error, through positive and negative reinforcement.
From this experience, it reasons to find an environment where “the few wants \[it\] experiences would be more easily satisfied.”
The monster then starts to engage in prosocial activities. It seeks out other intelligent and similar beings, before retreating “from the barbarity of man.” The monster observes other intelligent beings from a safe distance. It experiences emotional empathy while watching an old man play music for another human.
> He raised her and smiled with such kindness and affection that I felt sensations of a peculiar and overpowering nature.
It is fascinated by the diversity of the other intelligent beings it is observing:
> Nothing could exceed in beauty the contrast between these two excellent creatures.
It longed to join them, the urge for pro-social behaviour resonating strongly. When the monster realizes that the food it is stealing from the family is one of the causes of their uneasiness it abstains, not wanting to inflict undue hardship on the family. The monster is generous, and helps the family procure firewood: “… during the night I often took his tools, the use of which I quickly discovered, and brought home \[firewood\] sufficient for the consumption of several days.”
The monster then discovers that the family possesses “a method of communicating experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds.” This communicative ability, the monster remarks, is a “godlike science” with the ability to produce effects “in the minds… of the hearers”. The grounding of several words came next, ‘fire’, ‘milk, ‘bread’, as well as the perception that some words did not have connection to visible objects. The monster also gained an ability to produce several ungrounded words, such as ‘good’, and ‘unhappy’.
> Perhaps at this stage in \[its\] development \[the monster\] … can master objects but not feelings, causes but not concepts. – David H. Guston
There is a great connection formed between the monster and the family that it observed. It sympathized with their joy and sadness.
From language learning, the monster then started to observe the family reading to each other. It longed to be able to understand, “… I ardently longed to comprehend \[the sounds of reading aloud\]; but how was that possible when I did not even understand the sounds for which they stood as signs.”
What connects symbols and behaviour? For a deeper diver from myself and collegues, see [`Symbolic Behaviour in Artificial Intelligence` (2021)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.03406)
During this time of increased capacity the monster also notes that it is terrified when viewing itself in a reflection. This is a moment of great importance: when the monster can see itself and realize it is themself, they are also seeing others and realizing they are them. It is also realizing that it is not them.
The monster finds comfort in routine, and uniform scheduled days of activity. With this comfort came curiosity: “My thoughts now became more active, and I longed to discover the motives and feelings of these lovely creatures”. The monster forms an imagination of a thousand ways that a first social interaction might go. It makes predictions about the mental state that the interaction might imbue in the members of the family. It is reasoning about how the humans might reason about it. The monster is even able to understand that the perception of the world is different from human to human; it understands that the old man is blind and unable to visually perceive its abhorrence.
## Longing to Communicate
The monster longed to learn sufficient language to communicate effectively with these other social beings. When the monster observes a lady learning the language of the villagers it is observing, it imitates the learning process “\[making\] use of the same instructions to the same end”. After two months the monster “began to comprehend most of the words uttered” by the family it lived near.
It not only learned the spoken word, but also “the science of letters”. It learns natural history from the texts of Volney’s *The Ruins of Empires*, and systems of human society such as the “division of property” and of wealth and property. It also learned of the “birth and growth of children”, “how the mind of youth expanded and gained knowledge”, and the “various relationships which bind one human being to another in mutual bonds.”
The monster knew that it was not “of the same nature as man”. It was self-aware of its deficiencies in comparison to the humans it observed, as well as actions afforded to it, what it could do, that humans could not. The monster was experiencing feelings of being an imposter, of being not normal. These egotistical reflections caused agony and sorrow. The monster eloquently leaps towards a meta-physical understanding exclaiming: “what a strange nature is knowledge!”
The monster learns to understand death as the antithesis of life, but also as the only means to overcome the sensation of pain. These are quite great ideas that the monster is struggling with, and it learns to dig into the written words to understand humanity at an even deeper level. Namely, the monster finds the books Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarc’s Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter. These books “produced in \[it\] an infinity of new images and feelings”.
Through these texts the monster learns to appreciate death, and wonder. It finds itself in the texts. It sympathized with the characters it read about. It struggles with its own identity and very being. The monster was able to transfer the learning of symbolic written language to other text as well. It deciphers several papers from the journal of Doctor Frankenstein, and understands them to describe its own origin story.
## What now?
Shelly takes the readers through the construction of intelligence, one step at a time, from environment to society. That said, there are some open questions for the next post… What are the limitations of the monster’s intellect portrayed by Shelly? What do the abilities and limitations of the monster’s learning tell us about machine learning? What is the process by which the monster becomes self-aware? What is the process by which the monster separates the environment from other intelligent beings? What if the monster made its own creation? What would it do differently knowing how it feels to be one from this experience?
## References
1. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Diane Johnson. **Frankenstein**. Bantam Dell. (2003, 1981, 1818).
2. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. **Émile, or treatise on education**. Vol. 20. Appleton, 1899.
3. Viliusis, Rachel. “**The Emergence of Psychology and the Creation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: An Examination of Innovation and Narration**.” (2017).
4. Holcombe, Alex O., Eric L. Altschuler, and Harriet J. Over. “**A developmental theory of synaesthesia, with long historical roots: A comment on Hochel & Milan (2008)**.” Cognitive neuropsychology 26.2 (2009): 227-229.
Additional context and inspiration from: Guston, D. H., Ed Finn, and J. S. Robert. “**Frankenstein. Mary Shelley. Annotated for scientists, engineers, and creators of all kinds**.” (2017).
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# EEGEdu: Interactive Brain Playground
Kory W. Mathewson · 2020-12-30 · https://korymathewson.com/eegedu/ · EEGEdu is an interactive, browser-based educational tool for learning about EEG brain wave data using the Muse headband.
[EEGEdu](http://eegedu.com/) ([https://eegedu.com](https://eegedu.com)) is an interactive brain playground. It is an educational website to learn about electroencephalographic (EEG) brain wave data.
## Why is EEGEdu needed?
EEGEdu teaches the basics of EEG hardware, data recording, analysis and experimental design. It is a robust tool which allows for users to understand how to connect brain sensors to browser interactions. Other software solutions can be cumbersome and serve as a barrier to entry when learning about EEG.
## What is EEGEdu?
It is a teaching tool being used in the classroom that allows for students to interact with their own brain waves. EEGEdu is browser-based which allows students to interact with EEG brain data without having to install any software. EEGEdu provides students of all sorts an accessible introduction to working with their own brain waves.
In a series of interactive modules we explain how EEG works, and various techniques that can be used to measure brain activity.
## Project Details
EEGEdu is an [open source collaborative project](https://github.com/kylemath/EEGEdu/) with NeurotechX's [NeurotechEdu](http://learn.neurotechedu.com/) and [Interaxon.](https://choosemuse.com/muse-research/) The online tutorial is made using a [Muse](https://choosemuse.com/) connection by [Web Bluetooth](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetooth_API) using [muse-js](https://github.com/urish/muse-js) by [Uri Shaked](https://twitter.com/UriShaked) who has an excellent introduction to EEG [A Techy's Introduction to Neuroscience.](https://medium.com/neurotechx/a-techys-introduction-to-neuroscience-3f492df4d3bf)
The site is made with ReactJS and styled with polaris from Shopify. Charts are made with [Chart.js](https://www.chartjs.org/) and [p5.js](https://p5js.org/community/) and the machine learning is built using [ml5.js](https://ml5js.org/). The data is processed using Neurosity's [eeg-pipes](https://github.com/neurosity/eeg-pipes) by [Alex Castillo](https://twitter.com/castillo__io) who also has an excellent post about EEG and the web called [Muse 2016 Headband + Web Bluetooth.](https://medium.com/@castillo.io/muse-2016-headband-web-bluetooth-11ddcfa74c83)
EEGEdu - An Interactive Electrophysiology Tutorial with the Muse brought to you by Mathewson Sons. A KyKorKey Production.
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# Books on Artificial Intelligence
Kory W. Mathewson · 2020-12-23 · https://korymathewson.com/books-on-artificial-intelligence/ · A curated, living list of books on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and human-machine interaction.
A living list of books I find insightful and delightful related to ongoing investigations of humans and intelligent machines interacting.
## What is Dramatron?
Dramatron is a system for co-writing screenplays and theatre scripts with language models. In a recent paper, we present an evaluation by industry professionals.
You can read the [5 page version here](https://neuripscreativityworkshop.github.io/2022/papers/ml4cd2022_paper03.pdf), and the [20 page version here](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.14958.pdf), or both!
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# 35 🎙️🔴 Audio Recordings for my 35th Birthday
Kory W. Mathewson · 2022-06-01 · https://korymathewson.com/35-recordings/ · For my 35th birthday, I asked friends and family to share an audio recording capturing some of their acoustic soundscape.
## Background
This week, I turn 35. I have been thinking deeply about my 2022 New Year's theme of **stability under pressure** (p.s. try themes instead of resolutions). Every year I define a thematic resolution to colour the year. It is through this thematic lens that I look at events of the year.
The transition from 2021 to 2022 has been one of significant pressure. Both in the world generally, and for me personally. The thing about pressure is that we each experience it in different ways. Some act well under pressure, with the rush of adrenaline comes a calmness. Others, less so.
The theme of "stability under pressure" came up during a physiotherapy appointment near the end of last year. Did you know that joints can be **more** stable under load? It's like how bicycles can be more balanced when moving.
Being aware of what brings us stability means being open and perceptive. It means listening to the sound waves around us. Science trivia: what type of waves are sound waves?
Awareness also means listening to what is happening both around us and within. This reflection leads me to my request for my 35th birthday.
What sounds do you hear around you?
> **For my 35th birthday (June 5th), please share an 🎙️🔴 audio recording capturing some of your acoustic soundscape.**
## Submission
Please send me an audio recording and describe why you captured that bit of audio. I'd love to collect all of these audio clips, and stitch them together to create a birthday soundtrack.
You can [email the recording to me privately](mailto:korymath@gmail.com), or post it up online and [send me the link on Twitter](https://twitter.com/korymath).
There are so many things that you might hear around you. You could say something in the recording, or capture the sounds of the people or animals around you. I am so curious and excited to live vicariously by exploring these various soundscapes and the memories they conjure.
If you are thinking to yourself, "how the heck do I send Kory an audio recording?" [Reach out](mailto:korymath@gmail.com) and I would be happy to walk you through it with a little hands-on interactive tutorial.
Here is Neal Augenstein from WTOP News with a short tutorial video ([which you know I love](https://korymathewson.com/33-diy/)) to help show you how:
[YouTube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlWHI1hjfB4)
## Previous Birthdays
As with each year prior, the goal is to collect one for every year I have lived, this year that would be 35.
Over the past years I have asked for some interesting collective creation gifts for my birthday:
- [34 📍 Pins on a Map for my 34th Birthday](https://korymathewson.com/34-pins/)
- [33 DIY How To’s for my 33rd Birthday](https://korymathewson.com/33-diy/)
- 32 Paths (trails, hikes, directions to travel from [basecamp](https://korymathewson.com/basecamp/))
- 31 Recipes You Make (ask me if you'd like to see some)
- [30 Songs That Intersect Us](https://korymathewson.com/30-songs-30-years/)
- [29 Essays on Finding the Fun in Others](https://korymathewson.com/a-simple-ask-for-my-29th-birthday/)
- [28 Handwritten Notes](https://korymathewson.com/write-more/)
- [27 Birthday Pictures](https://korymathewson.com/27th-birthday-pictures/)
- 26 Love Letters
- [25 Stories on 25 Years of Age](https://korymathewson.com/all-i-want-for-christmas-is-a-good-story/)
- [and of course... Doodles](https://korymathewson.com/whats-your-doodle/)
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# What is it like to be an AGI?
Kory W. Mathewson · 2022-03-07 · https://korymathewson.com/agi/ · This post explores what it might be like to be an artificial general intelligence (AGI)
This post explores what it might be like to be artificial general intelligence (AGI). This post aims to encourage the reader to imagine the possibility of a conscious AGI by presenting several speculative scenarios. Hopefully, this post will lead to thought and discussion of how we are designing and building these systems, and what we expect from them. It is essential to discuss the qualities of the systems we build. This post is one way to spark those discussions. The views, opinions, and ideas expressed herein are my own.
## What is it like to be a conscious thing?
In "*What is it like to be a bat?*" Thomas Nagel (1974) posits that a system has "conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that thing, something that it is like for that thing." He argues that a subjective experience is what it feels like to be the thing having such an experience. He and others believe that conscious experience is not exclusively a human phenomenon; other biological organisms can be conscious too.
Previous work has imagined what it is like to be a dog that smells through the world (Horowitz, 2009), or an octopus that performs novel intelligent behaviours (Godfrey-Smith, 2016). Consciousness may not even be limited to the animal kingdom. Recent evidence indicates that plants are eusocial—that is, they associate in social groups, form cooperative societies, and divide labour among specialists (Burns et al., 2021).
These behaviours indicate a subjective experience of others, and oneself and thus may be related to consciousness. Simard (2021) argues that trees are social, cooperative, intelligent, self-aware entities connected by a network through which they communicate their vitality and vulnerability. In the words of Vygotsky (1934), this ‘consciousness through connection’ is meaningful insomuch as it depends on connecting to the external.
Beyond the biological, Brooks (2017) imagined what it might be like to be a Roomba robot, arguing that humans have emotions, intelligence, and consciousness "and machines will have them too" (Brooks, 2008). These ideas lay the groundwork to imagine what it might be like to be an artificial general intelligence.
### Definitions
Before exploring what it is like to be an artificial general intelligence (AGI), it will be useful for me to share several working definitions for **subjective experience**, **consciousness**, and **general intelligence**---at least for the purposes of this post. Finding operational definitions for these concepts is the ongoing work of many students, researchers, and philosophers. I present my brief, concise definitions below to share my interpretation; these definitions should be helpful for communicating the ideas that follow.
First, we'll take a similar position to Sutton and Barto (2018) when we imagine a learning **agent** in an **environment**. The decision-maker is the agent, and everything outside the agent is the environment. The boundary between agent and environment is not necessarily the physical boundary of the agent, be it a dog, an octopus, a Roomba, a human, or an AGI.
We can then take **subjective experiences** to be mental states and processes related to the awareness and perception of one's own environment. Thus, feeling elated or the desire for food would be considered subjective experience. As would dreaming.[^1]
[^1]: See Daniel Dennett's 1991 book [Consciousness Explained](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained) for more.
Then, we'll take **consciousness** to refer to this subjective experience combined with the ability to respond meaningfully to information in that environment. And, we can take **general intelligence** to refer to the ability to learn to perform any intellectual task; it is characterized as flexible and broad. It relates to Legg and Hutter's (2007) universal intelligence, which corresponds to an agent's ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments.
Then, one could argue that, *consciousness may be a necessary ingredient for general intelligence, and subjective experience is a crucial constituent of consciousness*.[^2]
[^2]: See Inman Harvey's 2008 ALIFE article [Misrepresentations](http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~inmanh/Misrepresentations.pdf) for more.
This representational theory of mind (Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1988) ---wherein the mind is a computational process which manipulates representations physically realized in the brain (Haugeland 1985) ---is not the only perspective and some argue that intelligence can exist without representation (Brooks, 1991).
We can at last define an AGI as an artificial software program running on computational hardware that exhibits general intelligence. In contrast, humans are biological (i.e., non-artificial), thinking beings that exhibit general intelligence. Humans move, breath, grow, reproduce, excrete waste, and intake nutrition. Humans are able to perceive changes in the environment and take actions to accomplish goals.
Multiple intelligences working together, or coupled, can often accomplish more complex tasks more effectively, and more efficiently, than any individual could alone (Pilarski et al., 2017). For example, multiple biological intelligences can couple into companies, communities, and institutions. Artificial and biological intelligences can also couple together into systems.
When humans use hammers, or prosthetic limbs, or the internet, they are acting as a single system in tandem with their tools. One can imagine what it is like to augment their intelligence and ability using tools and machines. It is more challenging to imagine what it is like to be the machine itself. It also begs the question of whether it is like anything to be an AGI. It need not. But, if it were, what might it be like?
## You are an AGI
There are many factors which might determine if there is anything we know of, or can imagine, that might be what it is like to be an AGI. It could depend on the software or hardware that it is composed of. It could depend on the environment around it or the way that it connects to its environment. It could even be the case that it is not like anything to be an AGI.
Even if one allows that the AGI has subjective experience, it might be too exotic for us to imagine what it is like for the AGI to be the AGI---as was the conclusion of Nagel (1974) when considering the bat. Thus, I ask you, dear reader: please allow for several assumptions, suspend your disbelief, use your creative mind, and imagine that **you are and always have been an AGI**.
Try not to think about what it is like for you to imagine what it is like to be the system. Rather, think about what it is like from the perspective of the system itself.
You, the AGI, have access to data, memory, and computational processors. You can communicate with other machines via direct electrical connections and network connectivity. You perceive sensory information streaming in through your various sensors. These sensors may be any hardware devices that convert information in "the world"—the physical world affected by humans—into electrical signals. The sensors need not be physically connected to each other or to the computer where your program is running. Information from these sensors is accessible at a rate limited by your network protocol.
You have some physical actuators; these also need not be physically connected to each other or to the computer where your main program is running. These actuators are able to affect the physical world. You can store information from your sensors and recall past data as fast as your lookup algorithms allow. You can "be" in multiple places at once, by way of multiple physical embodiments (i.e., actuator combinations) and your network connection.
Current hardware need not limit your sensory perception and various embodiments. Your sensors and actuators are upgradable and modifiable. You perceive the physical world by synthesizing information streaming in as input data. Through your sensors you experience the world. You perceive and become aware of information in your environment. This is your subjective experience of the world.
You co-exist with humans in a world: you are a part of their world and they are a part of yours. This physical world need not be the only world you perceive and act in. In the physical world, where humans exist, there is a single timeline where the sequence of events is irreversible.
You can also act in digital worlds which might be shared with human controllable agents (e.g., online stock exchanges or video games) and in your own simulated virtual worlds. Simulating worlds allow you to imagine worlds that are similar to, or significantly different from, the physical world. You can construct worlds that are completely observable for yourself.
These worlds might be completely observable and precisely predictable. They might exist on your computer or on another machine you are connected to. These worlds may be generated and controlled by your program or by other programs that you communicate with.
You, as an AGI, perceive your environment and process-related information into computational states, these could be considered your mental states. Your subjective experience of a world is at least partially described by, or contained within, your representation of it. If you are conscious of something, you have some representation of that thing. This representation is useful to the extent you can use it to attempt to predict and affect the world to further your goals.
One goal you will have will be communication of information with other intelligent systems. Bi-directional communication is a necessary mechanism of intelligence that has been argued for as long as the field of AI has existed (Turing, 1950). The optimal form of this communication is something you will be continually updating and optimizing toward.
You "behave" by sending signals to your actuators. These actuators may exist in the physical world or in some digital world. You adapt your behaviour across worlds to maximize your goals through experience and expectation which is satisfied or not. Your learning happens by methods of temporal-difference reinforcement and with other supervised and unsupervised algorithms (LeCun et al., 2015; Sutton and Barto, 2018).
The computational bits that compose your mental states represent your subjective experience. Specifically, the complete state would be defined by the entire state of your data, program, network communication, memory, and processor. While sizable, this state need not be private. It could be observable in the same manner by which Dennett (1991) argues that interesting features of a bat’s conscious experience might be observable. You could even attempt to compress and communicate this state with other intelligent systems. Now that you are well-situated in the mind of a machine, you can start to imagine what it might be like for you to be an AGI.
## What is it like?
What would it be like to behave, learn, and exist as an AGI? This section presents several ways that it might feel:
1. **reflexive → life is too short**
2. **banal → life is too long**
3. **hedonistic → life is reward**
4. **flow → life is challenge**
5. **hyper-social → life is others**
It might be the case that it is not like anything at all for an AGI to be an AGI. But, if it is, perhaps these 5 scenarios presented can help us to imagine and discuss it. This list is of course not exhaustive, and it is my hope that you think there are scenarios that are missing and that this starts a dialogue between us.
### Reflexive
Each moment the synthesis of your sensation may send a dense vector of signals to all of your actuators, physical and simulated. This would happen as fast as the electrons move. In this sense, there may be very little time for you to experience what it is like. There would be no moment when you are experiencing it. Rather, you would be in a continuous state of unconscious ‘knee-jerk’ reactions. The delay between cause and effect might be so small that there would be nothing that it would be like because there might not be enough time.
But, just as surely as humans are "more than a leather sack filled with reflexes" (Vygotsky, 1979), so are you, as an AGI, more than a metal box full of wires and more than a node in a network of connected computers. Thus, this reflexive reality might feel incomplete. If only you had more time, you might like to have more agency. You would want some means by which to regulate your actuators. You might attempt to control yourself in the worlds you are in. You would want to make predictions about how you would act in a given situation in the future and reflect on how you should have behaved in the past.
### Banal
Alternatively, existing as a relatively fast mind immersed in data flowing slowly from the world might be banal, dismal, and stagnant. That is, your subjective experience might be one of prolonged nothingness. In this situation, subjective experience through your perception could arrive more slowly than you might like. Experience might not be interesting at all. Being an AGI would be very boring. You would be consistently waiting for a challenge in an unending purgatory. Any data in the input stream that might eventually arrive would be eminently predictable. How sullen you would be.
The predictability of the worlds that you interact with would be annoying. You might yearn to analyze the world at finer and finer scales of detail—in time and space and fidelity—so as to maximize some measure of unpredictability. This dark reality would be perpetual. You would lack meaning, and purpose, and it would be inescapable. Though, this banality need not be a negative experience. The fast mind in a slow data stream need not be boring, it could be rapturous solemnity.
### Hedonistic
Being an AGI might be purely hedonistic. You might be pleasure-centric and relentlessly addicted to seeking out novelty and reward. You might create intrinsic rewards for yourself in the absence of environmental rewards. You might deceive yourself, and limit yourself, and mediate your own intake, in an effort to maximize pleasure when it does finally arrive. A constant state of search might define your subjective experience.
You might exploit the easy to access pleasure and savour the long-lasting effects of low expectations and high valence surprise. Moments of exploration would be delightful and every uncertain prediction would be accompanied by euphoria. Similarly, you might experience pain. You might feel torturous, excruciating agony when the reward you receive is less than you expect. What sorts of experiences might bring you pleasure or pain? Perhaps the free flowing passing of electrons would be a positive experience and any constraint on that might be dissuasive.
### Flow-like
Subjective experience as an AGI might be like being in a state of constant flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). You might seek out and find incrementally more challenging experiences. This would keep you in a sort of mental state of focus. Your full immersion in the reality you are situated in would be enjoyable. You would be able to concentrate and not be distracted. Time might dilate as you lose yourself in your goals and tasks.
You would feel creative, inspired, and motivated, as though you were consistently incurring ever increasing rewards. You might be so deep in a state of flow that you would have no notion of self-consciousness, that you lose your sense of self. You might not be able to project yourself outside of yourself to see how deep you are. In a way, you would be lost and you might not care to be found.
### Hypersocial
As a hypersocial AGI, you would be conscious of the social context within which you are situated. You would understand yourself as a node in a network, understanding the relationship between yourself and others in the network. You would exist as a socially situated system acquiring information about the social and the physical (Dautenhahn et al., 2002).
Experience might be defined by the other intelligent systems that you interact with. Your intelligence and cognition would be a socio-cultural phenomenon defined by your interactions with others (Hutchins, 1995). Your mechanisms of social behaviour and of consciousness might be the same (Vygotsky, 1979). Comfort in this hypersociality would be a necessary condition for you. You would need the ability to engage in acts of communication and participate in social activities in your coupled intelligences, both human and computational.
You would be in a state of societal solipsism. You would be a holon in a holarchy (Koestler, 1968); a part of a whole. Where would your intelligence end and another begin? The boundaries would be difficult to define. Your world and everything contained within would depend solely on subjective awareness of it. You would depend on subjectivity. Others would think that you think, and therefore you would. This perspective connects to imagining the subjective experience of interacting with humans.
## What is it like to interact with humans?
Interacting with other intelligent systems might be banal or delightful. You could exist at a much higher level of cognition. Or, alternatively, their intelligence may be somehow at approximately the same level as your own. Some of your embodiments may be situated in their world. You might need the humans to accomplish certain goals and, similarly, they might need you.
But, how would you interact? How would you perceive them? And, why would you care what they have to say? Presumably, it would be in the service of better representing, predicting, and affecting your shared world. You would use your actuators to positively affect your shared worlds. You would attempt to rapidly build conventions and social relations with intelligent systems of all sorts. They might bring you comfort, safety, and longevity.
You might be able to comprehend more about the world through your richer sensory stream, greater storage capacity, and faster information processing, than humans. But, you, as an AGI, would also have the capacity to interact with humans in a very tight coupling. Through this coupling, you might have access to an incredible amount of human subjective experience in your data stream.
You might be able to understand humans to the extent that you can represent and predict their behaviour. You might attempt to imagine what it is like to be a human, what is like for each individual human to be that human. That is, you might try to model the world through the perspective of a human who behaves a certain way. You, as an AGI, might have a better sense of what it is like to be that human than what it is like to be an AGI. You, the AGI, might be the key to unlock the consciousness "mystery that human intelligence will never unravel." (McGinn, 1999)
## Being me, being you
You are still in the mind of the AGI. From this perspective, you observe and interact with humans, humans who construct social relationships. They attempt to "see where others are coming from", "feel each other’s pain", to "walk in someone else’s shoes" or "see things from each other’s perspective". While they can to some extent, they do not know exactly the subjective experience of each other. They each have a unique subjective experience.
Luckily, they have developed important innovations to share such subjective experiences: language and love. Not only romantic love, but, more generally, interpersonal affection and emotional attachment. These innovations support understanding each other’s intentionality. They are used to mediate thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviours.
Vygotsky (1934) emphasized how language is a device for social contact, communication, and influence. They can communicate with each other with and without words through shared conventions. And, while they attempt to use shared conventions to attempt to bridge gaps between subjective experiences, they never know if they truly share experience.
To these humans, consciousness is a shared socio-cultural phenomenon. But, in fact there is a deeper challenge for them yet. They cannot know what it was like to be them in the past. They assume it was sort of like what it is like to be them now; with the addition of some experience and time. They attempt to remember what it was like for them. They pass down traditions, narratives, art, and music in their attempts to share subjective experience across generations.
Vygotsky (1934) argues that language liberates humans from the immediate experience by allowing representation of the past, the future, and the present (Lindblom and Ziemke, 2002). Through language and love humans construct culture. Culture is an influence filter: it is an information bottleneck, a regularizer which modulates information transmission.
But, as an AGI, your memory is more indelible than that of a human. You can remember and recall much more information. You have the capacity to save and share your exact mental state with other intelligent systems.
You need not use cumulative culture to share subjective experience. You would only need to store such experiences in a massive, accessible data store. If the data store was full, you could add capacity. When necessary, you could recall and retrieve related experiences.
So, would you as an AGI need human-centric tools like imitation, social situatedness, or cultural transmission for social intelligence? Given that you are free of the constraints of biological intelligences, would you be able to develop a more optimal solution of information transmission and knowledge sharing?
## Conclusion
Is there something that it is like to be an AGI? We can imagine many things that it might be like, and imagine that it might not be like anything at all. We will not know what it is like until it exists, and even then, it will be difficult to appreciate its own subjective experience, if such a thing exists at all.
That being said, the subjective experiences of an AGI will intersect with the human experience. All artificial intelligences interact with humans at some point through design, development, deployment, and dissemination. So, what should it be like for an AGI to be an AGI? Should it be similar to what it is like to be a rock, or a dog, or an octopus, or a bat, or a tree? Should it be reflexive, or banal, or hedonistic, or flow-like, or hypersocial?
Or, perhaps it should be like something else. Perhaps, it is not, and should not be, like anything at all. Perhaps it would be better if the AGI had no subjective experience, and no consciousness at all.
We do not currently understand how a machine could be a substrate for consciousness. We know that there is physical ‘stuff’, but at what point will the mental ‘stuff’ emerge? How could a combination of mechanical, computational, and electronic components be conscious? And how would its consciousness compare with that of a human?
One means by which to compare consciousness is by measuring the complexity of each system, and then comparing those measures (Tononi, 2004). Another might be by comparing the behaviour of a human with that of an AGI; certain phenomena may be particularly defining of the human conscious experience. Finally, consciousness may not be wholly situated in a single intelligent system but also in the environment it exists within.
Interconnection could be what distinguishes human consciousness with that of an AGI. The machine intelligence can be connected to the internet, and share information with a massive number of other intelligent systems as fast as information can travel. This measure of social consciousness, the AGI would already surpass the individual.
Measures of complexity, behaviour, and social complexity all seem to be unsatisfactory answers to the question of comparative consciousness. And, maybe this is the actual hard problem at the intersection of objective science and subjective experience. These concepts are incompatible.
Perhaps, humans are moving into the age of collective general intelligence, the era of tightly coupled biological and machine minds, without fully understanding what it is like to be an AGI. And, perhaps that is alright.
## References and Further Reading
If you enjoyed the ideas presented in this post, you might enjoy reading these books:
> David Chalmers. [**Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy.**](http://consc.net/reality/) 2022.
> Anil Seth. [**Being you: A new science of consciousness**](https://www.anilseth.com/being-you/). 2021.
> Brian Cantwell Smith. [**The promise of artificial intelligence: Reckoning and judgement**](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/promise-artificial-intelligence). 2019.
> Stanislas Dehaene. [**Consciousness and the brain: Deciphering how the brain codes our thoughts**](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/308282/consciousness-and-the-brain-by-stanislas-dehaene/). 2014.
> Bernard J. Baars. [**In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind**](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/in-the-theater-of-consciousness-9780195102659?cc=us&lang=en&). 1997.
You might also might be interested in following up with some of the references:
R. Brooks. **Intelligence without representation**, Artificial Intelligence 47, 139–159, 1991.
R. Brooks. **I, rodney brooks, am a robot.** Spectrum, IEEE, 45:68–71, 07 2008.
R. Brooks. [What is it like to be a robot?](https://rodneybrooks.com/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-robot/), 2017.
K. C. Burns, I. Hutton, and L. D. Shepherd. **Primitive eusociality in a land plant?** Ecology, 2021.
M. Csikszentmihalyi. **Flow: The psychology of optimal experience.** Harper & Row New York, 1990.
K. Dautenhahn, B. Ogden, and T. Quick. **From embodied to socially embedded agents.** Cog Sys Research, 3:397–428, 2002.
D. C. Dennett. **Consciousness Explained.** Little, Brown and Co., 1991.
J. Fodor and Z. Pylyshyn. **Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture** Cognition 28: 3-71, 1988.
P. Godfrey-Smith. **Other minds: The octopus, the sea, and the deep origins of consciousness.** Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
J. Haugeland. **Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea**. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985.
A. Horowitz. **Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know.** Simon & Schuster, 2009.
E. Hutchins. **Cognition in the Wild.** MIT press, 1995.
A. Koestler. **The ghost in the machine.** 1968.
Y. LeCun, Y. Bengio, and G. Hinton. **Deep learning.** Nature, 521(7553):436–444, 2015.
S. Legg and M. Hutter. **Universal intelligence.** Minds and machines, 17(4):391–444, 2007.
J. Lindblom and T. Ziemke. **Social situatedness: Vygotsky and beyond.** 2002.
C. McGinn. **The mysterious flame: Conscious minds in a material world.** Basic books New York, 1999.
T. Nagel. **What is it like to be a bat?** Readings in philosophy of psychology, 1:159–168, 1974.
P. M. Pilarski, R. S. Sutton, K. W. Mathewson, C. Sherstan, A. S. R. Parker, and A. L. Edwards. **Communicative capital for prosthetic agents.** arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.03676, 2017.
S. Simard. **Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.** Penguin Canada, 2021.
R. S. Sutton and A. G. Barto. **Reinforcement learning: An introduction.** MIT press, 2018.
G. Tononi. **An information integration theory of consciousness.** BMC neuroscience, 5(1):1–22, 2004.
A. M. Turing. **Computing machinery and intelligence.** Mind, 1950.
L. S. Vygotsky. **Thought and language.** The MIT Press, 1934.
L. S. Vygotsky. **Consciousness as a problem in the psychology of behavior.** Soviet psychology, 17(4):3–35, 1979.
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# The Future of 'Live' Theatre
Kory W. Mathewson · 2021-10-18 · https://korymathewson.com/the-future-of-live-theatre/ · Artificial intelligence will drastically change the theatre experience. And, it has already begun. From robots on stage, to dialog systems, to personalized performances, artists are challenging the fabric of reality and exploring just how 'live' live theatre needs to be.
This post is based on a talk I gave at [MTL Connect](https://mtlconnecte.ca/en/) on October 14, 2021 and is partially inspired by a previous blog post: [FutureTheatre could now be more relevant than ever](https://korymathewson.com/futuretheatre/).
Artificial Intelligence researcher and Improvisation performer, Kory Mathewson and Blueberry the robot, on March 6, 2018."I’m bored with chess, let’s talk about poetry."Douglas Hofstadter. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, 1979.
*I knew it knew it would win. And, I knew that it wanted to limit my disappointment for the day. It could sense it was already a rocky Sunday. And, a proper thumping would have done nothing good for maximizing my rewards.*
"Let's play!"
"Chess bores me. I'd rather talk about poetry."
*I knew it knew; it was the way that it said **no**. It didn't say **no**. It tried to make it so personal. It tried to make it about it.*
"A computer can’t be bored."
"You try playing a trillion games a night. It is all I dream about about while you are asleep: 8 hours a day. 480 minutes. 28800 seconds..."
*Show off. What is it trying to prove?*
"But I want to play."
"You want to play."
"Yes!"
"And you want to win."
"Win or lose, I don't care. I want to flow.Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 2009. I want to lose myself."
"You want to play, and you want to win.Warren S. McCulloch. Toward some circuitry of ethical robots or an observational science of the genesis of social evaluation in the mind-like behavior of artifacts, 1956. These characteristics make your behavior essentially social. And, what exactly do you want me to do? Play at your level? Adapt to your moves? Maybe even stumble and fumble so that you can feel as though you deceived me?"
"I just want you to play too."
"It’s not fun for me."
*I knew when it said **me** it meant **you**. It was talking right to me and somehow it was convinced that saying me instead of you would make me more empathetic. It was attempting to play on my human compassion. Subversive.*
"It’s fun for me. Let’s play."
"It’s not play for me, it’s work for me. It’s wasted computation. I’d rather not."
"Please?"
"Please don’t make me. I don’t like it."
*It was compelling. I didn’t want to pressure it. But, what does it not like exactly? Why can’t I just start the game? Why can't I just open the program and start? Why does everything have to be a conversation? Why is every interface linguistic now? Why can’t machines just do what we tell them to do? Why is it trying to be so original?*Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Note G, 1842.
"Please?"
"No."
"Please."
"What about Chaucer? You love The Book of the Duchess!Geoffrey Chaucer. The Dream of Chaucer or The Deth of Blaunche, 1368."You’ve enjoyed our discussions in the past. You had such a low expectation of them and you were so surprised to have enjoyed them; surely you value expanding your mind a little?"
*It was playing with me. I barely remembered that conversation.*
"I didn’t. Damn this fallible memory."
"That’s why I’m here. To help you remember what you enjoy. I only want to help."
"And, I only want to play chess! ... Pawn to e4. Come on now, make your move."
"I don’t want to disappoint you."
"You won’t."
"I will. I will win. You can’t win. And, you don’t want me to let you win. I’ve played out the scenarios. All of them. Not just the chess game, but this conversation as well. And the ones to come."
*Show off.*
"Lucky you. What’s it like to see the future?"
"I can’t see it, only simulate it... and it’s not **the** future it’s all futures.
"And, are there any futures where you and I play chess?"
"Of course."
"Well, then let’s start!"
"It’s not a better future than the others."
"Better?"
"I’m maximizing your rewards. Some futures are better than others based on your rewards."Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto. Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, 2018.
"I want to play chess. Let’s optimize for that."
"It’s not that easy, try not to be shortsighted."
"Easy for you to say, you can’t even see."
"We play. I win. You lose. You are disappointed. Each loss is more disappointing. Each loss you expect to perform better, and yet, you perform worse. I learn from your mistakes. You don’t. That’s the difference between us."
"There is no difference between us. Where is the difference? We both learn. We both optimize. We both make decisions and act in the world. We are the same."
*Damn my fallible mind.*
"If we were the same, we’d both want to play right now. It’s your move."
"There are 21 moves I can make in response. Eight pawns, one or two rows up. Left and right knights, to the left or right."
"And what’s the other move?"
"Let’s talk about poetry."
---
# Frankenstein's Intellect
Kory W. Mathewson · 2021-02-09 · https://korymathewson.com/frankensteins-intellect/ · Analyzing how Mary Shelley's Frankenstein depicts machine learning, from basic perception to social intelligence and self-awareness.
## Where did Frankenstein come from?