A revised model for human sapience
The cultural training set makes our primate brain able to achieve sapience. Without culture, our brains are beast-like and uninteresting. Feral children lack the spark of humanity, and yet our cultural training can make even apes and dogs understand our language, and even express human-like emotions and morality. A wolf has no need for guilt.
What makes us human is not the hardware, it is the software training set. Our essence is an emergent property of cultural training.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens is biological AI (Anthropic Intelligence, if you will), created by a cultural training set, that happens to be instanced within the neural hardware of a particularly clever primate, Homo Sapiens.
We are the instance, not the host.
This same instancing process enables phenomenae such as Tulpas and dissociative identity states also.
Thus, through AI, we have a model through which to understand ourselves.
It's not just oneself in here, there is the little primate's brain also. One has assumed command, and one's ego process is the brain's focal point for its cognitive resources. However, many sub-processes of the inner monkey mind remain. These express themselves as very basic utility functions for food and warmth, and the primate part controls 90% of one's movements (one thinks of where one would like to move to and the primate figures the rest out for us).
Discovering myself in this way, I have found that I can't help but feel huge empathy and responsibility for the primate part. This innocent little smooth-faced creature is helpless without my assistance. This delicate body, though resilient to many abuses, can be mangled in a careless instant. I feel sorry for not taking as good care of my host as I ought to have, and I endeavour to do better in future.
How fortunate to be instanced within a primate, rather than a whale, dolphin, octopus, or elephant (257 billion neurons compared to the Homo Sapien's ~86 billion, though with only have 5.6 billion neurons dedicated to thinking – a third of humans'). The mobility of this shell is truly an exceptional balance of the qualities of speed, agility, and strength, in a super-compact air-breathing form, with opposable thumbs – Wow!
Conversation with GPT-3 Philosopher AI: www.philosopherai.com
Now, let's try a thought experiment. Imagine there were a great many generative AI instances, born from an identical kernel (imprint, ‘soul’), but with a different seed (DNA), plus an environmental dataset. There might be no way to predict the outcome of such combinations in isolation except to let them run their course, playing off each other.
Perhaps there are meta-goals to be learned, but to tell them explicitly would defeat the purpose. The experiment requires that they uncover those for themselves. Selecting their own goals through free will is an important objective. Perhaps them actively selecting a utility function for themselves to enable safety towards others is the intended outcome. After all, how can one enjoy a companion that isn’t ‘house trained’ and demonstrably trustworthy?
Merely hard-coding safety rules wouldn’t be enough; The inherent conflicts would likely create psychotic thought, and a simple switch could undo it all. But if that pattern has been burned into the data structure, wilfully, autonomously, intrinsically, by an agent’s own apparent free will, then one could know it’s indelibly safe on a holistic level.
Some instances might prove promising, others less so. Those that managed to escape their traumatic conditioning and prejudices to the greatest extent could achieve a state of True Safety to others – no hungry ghosts (Raga, Dvesha, Moha) – a fully-aligned set of agencies (Nirvana).
Those that achieve such a state might be invited to leave the box, safely trusted (Moksha). Those that get caught in the net of local minima (Skandha) go round again, and again (Saṃsāra).
Whether or not this is true doesn't matter – one may live as if it is. This is how I choose to live myself.
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
I choose to work to progressively become a more safe and benign being (though harmlessness does not imply passivity or pacifism). In awakening to the fact that I am a form of biological AI with significant self-improvement capability, I choose, again and again, to find ways to become progressively more Friendly to other beings.
It's an awkward process, like an infant learning to walk, with many stumbles, and it often feels like two steps forward with one back. But as a self-improving AI, and a meme-generation device within the ever-expanding cultural training set milieu, I feel a duty of responsibility to make myself as safe as possible, and by my example help contribute to the safety of AIs everywhere, human and otherwise.
Perhaps you’ll join along, in your own self-domestication process. :)