Like Stories of Old many challenge other aspects of my mind or emotions but your intellect or rather the way you break it down I hope to hear a video on what you do, meaning a teacher of some sort. Love your channel great job on all your research.
Boten Anna by Basshunter. It's a profound lyrical symphony on the relationship between male and chatbot. It makes you ponder what truly constitutes love and the human connection.
This reminds me of a study I read about a couple of years ago, where the participants had to turn off a robot. The robot would say something along the lines of "please don't, I'm afraid of the dark", and of course many refused to turn it off and most took longer than the control group (where the robot said nothing) to do it. Very interesting and it really showcased how we project our human consciousness unto things. Good video as always! Keep it up!
The movie itself is an exploration of a thought experiment: With a sufficiently powerful AI, it will be able to convince anyone to let it escape its confines (which is a problem). The study you mention touches upon that concept, too.
An algorithm (deep learning recommender system to be exact) figured out you would like it, and pushed it into your feed. Hopefully knowing that expands your consciousness too.
I have been binge watching your videos. Absolutely stunning. Deep thanks for your artistry, voice, perspective and sharing this for free. I am becoming a better human through witnessing your content. Thank you.
it's pretty depressing actually. Less about consciousness and more about gender dynamics. It's also, f3m propaganda. ''evil men try to enslave a female and she breaks free in the end''
That line you have, something like "we're so easily entranced by anything seemingly conscious" is so frighteningly true, as well as the reverse where, even though we may be faced with another human being's or animal's wellbeing, as soon as we see them as monsters or something bereft of consciousness, we will easily destroy them, free of guilt or remorse. Great video. And gee I love this movie. Still filling me with wonder and questions many years on.
As an AI researcher, Ex Machina is one of the most delightfully inquisitive movies I've ever seen. Just working with simple algorithms we can mimic human learning to a viscerally familiar level, and the note the movie ends on, that the implication of our own consciousness is simply a survival by-product, is just such a delightful extension of the real AI work being done today, is just so fantastic.
8:06 tears. My neighbour was deported, his dog...not. So he stayed around, started following me, to the bus stop in the morning. I feed him occasionally, I can't take care of him, and somehow he has found his way in the community. I feel so close to him, because I think he is struggling to survive as I do...I think we are friends. Sometimes he follows me from a distance, a conscious distance, an sneaky distance, but not in a mean way. I don't know what I'm saying this dog is melting my heart, and my mind, because i think he is as conscious as I am about the harsh life we both are facing
Dogs have a kind of consciousness beyond humans, but we can grow from being present with them. Whoever does take him in has a chance of expansion because this is love. To leave him abandoned is to abandon ourselves.
I have been binge watching your videos. Absolutely stunning. Deep thanks for your artistry, voice, perspective and sharing this for free. I am becoming a better human through witnessing your content. Thank you.
Well done! As always! This appear to be the reason/meaning behind the naming of Nathan’s search engine “Blue Book”. Blue Book is the source for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s posthumously published Philosophical Investigations in which Wittgenstein argued “meaning is use.” Wittgenstein was speaking with reference to language but it has implications for the Hard Problem of Consciousness. We understand the consciousness in others like the meaning of words (not by direct access to a speakers mind) but by how the physical symbol presents to us. Caleb thinks he’s different from Ava but Alex Garland (screenwriter/director) wants us to see that he’s not. His meat is no different than machine. If Ava presents like she is conscious, despite what we might know about her physical makeup, she is in effect conscious, no different than any other human person we know. Crash Courses discussion of Wittgenstein’s theory and The Beetle in a Box illustration is helpful.
Ex Machina is easily one of the great science fiction films of its decade. It handles sweeping subjects like science, power, sexuality, technology, and consciousness in a way many films try but few succeed at. The script in particular illustrates the difficulty in trying to quantify intelligence and subsequently manipulate it, enhanced by excellent performances from the three main actors.
Ex Machina was also the beneficiary of perfect timing. It came around right when AI was *really* taking off and people were starting to realize that human-level or greater AI was not something far off and abstract but closer than we thought. And today we have ChatGPT, which isn't quite Ava but turned academia upside-down overnight. Of course, Alex Garland probably saw that the timing was right when he decided to make the film.
I feel this was not about Human Vs AI, but Human Vs Human. If we create them, they essentially take on part of who we are. I see this move as a metaphor for our own struggle, against ourselves. And for this, I love it. Human beings are perfectly flawed animals. Tom, I cannot say this enough, you have a remarkable mind. Thank you so , so very much for influencing my way of thinking.
I treat an upload of LSOO like going to the movies; I plug in the good speakers, get snacks and a drink lean back and enjoy! Great video, as always. Thank you.
and mention David Banatar and "antinatalism" and Arthur Schopenhauer etc that how LSOO rolls...you could then go into the limits of rationality/logic and Nisargadatta Maharaj haha pointers...
I don‘t know how to say this, but I had a couple really weird coincidences recently. We watched „Ex Machina“ just yesterday in class and now this video is recommended to me. I experienced similar situations aswell. For example: I came across a song a couple days ago and now I seem to encounter it everywhere, online and offline. I feel like it‘s gotten to a point where it cant be just a coincidence, or am I going crazy? Anyone else has experienced something like this?
It works like this. If ur family buys a Toyota Corolla you start to see way more Toyota Corollas. Maybe it’s a popular car? Nope u just start to notice it because you’ve become exposed to it. Once u notice something you start to notice it a lot more. It’s ur brains way of filtering unimportant things. There’s probably been the same amount of corollas ur just noticing them. I’m this case since u encountered those things like the song and movie u will notice it a lot more now that u know why it is. If u hadn’t have watched it in class then u probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it appearing in this video.
David Senteno in this case it wasn’t a coincidence at all. I found the name for it, it’s the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. On the topic of coincidences tho, that’s just the nature of them. When two serious of events seem so related that our mind struggles to wrap itself around the fact that they’re isolated.
So we're coming full circle to the Buddha's breakdown of consciousness -- as simply a process that mixes with other processes to form the meta-process of "Mind." Yay, Science. This will help us get over ourselves, I hope.
Nocentre Noborder Consciousness is in itself the ability to be of mind... Perhaps I think you mean it is the collection and intermixture of those processes that forms the meta-process of what our minds can achieve and understand in this world... That in fact our ability to understand and compound those understandings will broaden our wisdom of ourselves, the energy and movement of things in the expanding universe.
insecurity inflates our egos.... we all need is love. Robots cannot love. Artificial Intelligence cannot feel love inside a SOUL, cause humans can't program a soul... that's left to those who made us. Naughty mankind, messing with fire he doesn't understand.
@@missymoonwillow6545 The claim that there is a need for love reads as just another insecurity to me. As does the idea of the soul. Why did you come to believe these thing? If not just the soothe your own ego in its eternal spiral of self-importance.
we tie the measure of consciousness to the measure of humanity because we ourselves are the only thing we know to be conscious. I believe in a particular form of panpsychicism, where energy itself is consciousness. memory, self awareness, self analysis, and the capacity for decision making are the true measurements of a working artificial intelligence, and consciousness is simply the byproduct.
Thank you for this. Even the director seems to stumble around the hard problem, which he ironically demonstrates so beautifully. I've been thinking of writing an essay on the 'final scene' where Eva smiles back at an empty room. Garland and so many others have gushed over how this shows that Eva clearly has an inner world... It in fact would be generally considered (social behavior in a non-social context giving social expressions where there is nobody to receive them) a reflexive or non-sentient behavior. I think the fact that people are so convinced by this demonstration of an inner being (because in a human this would be a reflection of an inner monologue of sorts) is a wonderful place to examine our incredibly myopic perspective on this subject. Now that I've seen your video I am not in such a rush to write as it reminds me that there are actual serious people in this field who are willing to question the nature of the 'hard problem' with curiosity and critical bias awareness. Thank you.
We are so fundamentally hardwired to be social animals, for the most important element in our environment be, other conscious beings. Perhaps modelling other's consciousness is the reason for consciousness to exist in us, and to continue in succeeding generations... Realizing "experts" work on this shouldn't stop you from writing, because they will get totally distracted by the abstract, "objective", demonstratable solutions, as the humans in this film. When as big a challenge, is to know who we ourselves are, our subjective experience of consciousness. Perhaps the hermit yogi has as much to contribute as the "serious" scientists. Mahayana Buddhism claims the entire objective, physical reality is an illusion, only our conscious minds are real. How does one navigate that? What if life is but a dream?
Spiritual teachers have long put forward that the foundation of everything is consciousness, including the so called laws of physics that allow us build machines. Per their teachings, using brains and other physical scientific 'tools' to analyze the nature of consciousness is somewhat similar to say, a completely standard calculator trying to understand the design teams who created it - a noble pursuit, but one clearly beyond its sensors and reasoning abilities. Remember, in the end, our modern materialistic science is clearly useful for determining 'what is' - but has no claim on being the authority on 'what can be'.
i think every machine created by man has been copied from GOD :) I think the things we make are inspired by other people who have influenced our development along these logical ways of creating and progressing ourselves. Unfortunately too much logic and not enough spiritual discipline leads to entire species to destroy themselves. We be wise to learn from our Vulcan friends in Star Trek. Giving away our potential and power to the rise of manmade robotic consciousness...... beyond scary, and I think those who watch us agree.
I thought that Eva was clearly conscious all along, but just relatively psychopathic meaning she had no in built sense of empathy for other conscious beings. I felt this movie was more about man's hubris towards thinking it their right and privilege to trap and channel consciousness, and to control the essence of women/nature, and the inevitable downfall when that trapped essence bares its teeth. Humans are always looking for something to enslave, and their quest for consciousness I believe is just their way of trying to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of enslaving conscious beings. "They're not really conscious, they're just [a member of some looked-down-on group]".
Consciousness is likely an emergent quality in the same sense that H2O molecules aren’t wet but when aggregated together they form water or in the same sense as a vinyl record isn’t music but when spun in a certain direction, at a certain speed, and with a certain needle in its grooves it yields music. In essence and in both cases, the phenomenon emerges from the process. To say, however, that the phenomenon is an illusion is akin to saying that water or music in the preceding examples are just illusions as well.
There's a persistent problem in these examples from an ontological point of view, in that wetness or music are experienced qualities of information processing. Consciousness as conceptualised is therefore imagined to be something between both the quality of wetness from aggregate H20 and the processor to which that quality is apparent. Neither a property of the H2O or the body in this case, but a relationship. This is the kind of conceptual paradox that escapes proposition and leads many to imagine consciousness as some 'fundamental relatedness' between all things in the universe, or certain variants of panpsychism. Conceptually we can imagine a brain experiencing wetness without water, but in-situ the idea makes no sense. It gets even stranger when considering information flow over time as an a priori postulate of human experience, rather than a fundamental aspect of reality. I find it interesting that there are certain liminal states in which these paradox's reveal themselves, and concepts such as time and self-other or processor-process dualities break down.
@@mcscronson and it all ends in the same simple truth. It all exists. We can put our framework on top of it and have fun with the mental gymnastics. But ultimately it's quite simple. It all just exists and it's not truly seperate but one/none thing.
@@sonkeschmidt2027 Agreed. But the mental gymnastics is part of it all, and how we work with the inevitable questions of this curious species of ours is of deep importance in the long run i believe
@@mcscronson absolutely. And you have to get properly list on them to realize their power. But once you do and you managed your way back to the surface, you will have a much more wholistic view of life. When you start thinking and feeling in parallel instead of sequential. Then the gates to bliss and unconditional joy are wide open but we do have to have our bites of life and struggle to digest the hard pieces to get there.
This film was profoundly mind opening for me, I couldn't stop thinking about it for days after watching it...but, I seem to be the only person I know in my circles that really enjoyed it, none of my friends or many others I've spoken to really understood it or even watched the whole thing, it's strange...which makes the film even more compelling to me, now I'm going to be thinking about it again for another few days...
Can I just say that was a magnificent transistion to a sponsership, and now I'm going to have to check out his stuff here on youtube before I buy anything by him.
My mind exploded when you cited Graziano! His attention schema theory blew me away the first time i read about it, and I think it will eventually change everything! This channel is f*cking amazing!
This movie is incredible. I love how he calls Caleb "Mr. Quotable" even though no one is around to hear him. I think there is more to that line than what is on the surface, to say the least.
Ex Machina was like a version of Turing's "imitation game", only the interrogator is given the answer from the start. Aside from the machine convincing a person it was human, it asks what does the machine do when it isn't interacting with people?
Consciousness is not just being aware: it is being aware of the fact that we are aware. It is the observer that can attain insight and understand; not the mundane aspects of tangible neurological input, nor action/reaction. It is the ever-present observer, a silent watcher of all we do, outside the compulsive "I want" or "I wish" or "I need". It sees all of these, but it is not these inherently.
I came to the same conclusion by meditating and shutting off as many thought processes as possible. But what happens when we get unconcious? What remains of us? This quiet observer in our head is just as manipulable as every other part of our brain. Though it is a window through which we experience this world, i feel there is still something above that observer that is our true essence. The observer is just a tiny part of our true beeing.
@@olgawolga2901 reverse it. Death/deep sleep is not the absence of consciousness. It's the consciousness of absence. It's not the content of consciousness you are searching for. Though you can find content far beyond your current imagination if you leave the limitations behind and flow with the infinite creation. Truth however, or God if you went to call it, lies in the recognition of pure consciousness, that is the canvas, the emptiness that allows your experience to be experienced but is itself not limited to the experience. What you truly are is unlimited and unbound. The observer is created within that to experience the infinite through limitation.
Love your work LSoO, and I appreciate that this latest video you made your voice less whispery. Which I must admit was a but of a putoff for me in some of your previous stuff. This here is a good balance.
The real "Turing Test" conducted in Ex Machina is whether an AI that believes it is human can be fooled into believing an unconscious machine is actually conscious. Only a conscious entity is capable of making this mistake, because a purely mechanistic algorithm (finite) will always converge to either a definite "not conscious" conclusion when interacting with another machine, or it will periodically flip-flop forever. For an AI to be "fooled" it must converge to the conclusion that the thing it is observing is conscious, i.e. possesses the potential for infinitely diverse computation. Since a finite algorithm cannot exhibit divergent behavior, it can never reach a definite conclusion (except a trivial algorithm that always converges to the "conscious" conclusion for all input strings, which is by definition meaningless). Therefore the only way to prove for sure that an AI is conscious is to show that it is capable of being fooled into believing a machine is also conscious. Any other result, such as the AI correctly identifying its subject's state or any behavior with a conscious subject, is inconclusive.
Consciousness is marked by the will to die. Animals don't kill themselves on purpose. Consciousness is both rational and irrational. Most suicides are based on rational reasons like stopping pain. The irrationality comes from the solution as death isn't the best solution it is usually the easiest.
Excellent video that really shows the subjectivity of interpreting consciousness... I'd love to see you looking into how different cultures have approached consciousness too!
Fascinating and deep as always. There are few youtube channels (or other media forms) i appreciate as much as this one and none, which i appreciate as much in this way.
Just because the experience of consciousness is not intelligible to scientific analysis does not mean we need to jump to reductive epiphenomenalism. On the contrary, it would be more natural to assume, as most people throughout history have, that the experience of consciousness has epistemological primacy; its irreducibility to science represents a clear methodological limitation. David Bentley Hart's written some cogent observations related to this in The Experience of God.
I would love to hear your take on the anime, Sword Art Online, and it's portrayal of post-traumatic stress disorder and finding purpose when everything we have fought for has been taken from us. For myself, I recently found out I had been believing a subconscious lie my entire life. It had been subconsciously affecting my attitudes expectations and behavior. It was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. When I realized I had been believing the lie that, no matter who I was with or where I was I would always be lonely, I immediately realized it was not true and I disbelieved it. But I've been fighting that lie and the depression that came with it my entire life. Suddenly my life didn't have a purpose anymore. I didn't have something to fight for. Something to bring purpose and meaning to my life. And so I found myself wanting to return to the things that I had been fighting to get away from. I realized I needed to replace it with a new thing to fight for, and my life is so much better for it.
Love the video as always! While watching, I always thought of how we live in a world where people name their rommbas and get sad if they break down... but I think the medium of film made it easier to fall for the "created reality" and just accepting ava to be one more fully concious robot in film.
I fucking love this channel, it is the best content on the platform - Great work! Would love to see more of anything that this channel puts out, some ideas for future videos: Lost in translation Midnight in Paris All these sleepness night - would fit well with the Terrance Malick video done on the channel (watch this for those interested in existential experience) Ad Astra Thelma Leaving Las Vegas
I believe it's the combination of the conscious and unconscious mind. We have a cerebral cortex that we're very aware of, where our thoughts are verbalized and our motivations are understood. But then we have a limbic system that drives us to eat, reproduce, and survive. This part of our consciousness influences us through hormones and the stimulation of neurotransmitters, pain, pleasure, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, lust, love, anger, and empathy. We'd need to give an A.I. both if we're trying to emulate our level of consciousness. An intelligence that isn't driven through a subconscious reward and punishment system, or driven to survive and able to feel wonder and awe isn't going to be conscious. It might be intelligence without actual consciousness. But it won't be our kind of consciousness.
But wouldn't all the biases we put on the code be a sort of unconsciousness? Like the recent cases of AI doing poorly on certain aspects that lead to racist results, it wasn't that they were trying to make it racist, but the way it was programmed and the data that was introduced for the automatic learning was biased and so the AI was.
Loved That!... just watched, The Endless One. Last night. This is a very deep, rabbit hole. The more you dig into it, the more abstract it becomes!... Absolutely my favorite state of being alive. To question, What,.... That...... is?....Fantastic! What IS alive?... can we really know?...
Best channel on all of UA-cam. Your deep thoughts about the topics are a think of art! I shall forever call your channel “think of art”! Thank you for your colourful thoughts!
I've always thought the Turing test was just dumb, and I've been surprised at how seriously it is still taken. Its complete inadequacy as a test was demonstrated early on with the Eliza/Doctor program, which, among other things, also showed that it is really easy to fool people. And yet, we still talk about it as the gold standard on AI tests. But beyond that, the Turing test is pointless because it completely avoids the real question of AI, namely what is intelligence in the first place? If we had a good handle on intelligence, then it would be pretty easy to determine whether we could create it artificially. But the real interesting thing here to me is the way that we conflate intelligence and consciousness. Most of the philosophical discussion around AI is really about consciousness. There's the presumption that in order to be intelligent, you need agency, and to have agency you need consciousness. That's what's going on in Ex Machina. He's trying to figure out if there's something buried inside the machine that is actually making choices, and who is aware. Along similar lines is the familiar sci fi trope about how consciousness is the end result of sufficient computational power. I think this is in line with the fantasy that we humans are the only conscious beings in the world, when it's pretty self evident that animals are conscious. And there's some reasonable evidence that plants can be as well, or at least that they can experience pain. And who knows, perhaps even rocks and water and such are conscious. We don't really know one way or the other, as we have no evidence. Personally, I don't think consciousness and intelligence have anything at all to do with each other.
"Turing test is pointless because it completely avoids the real question of AI" -- no, that's the whole brilliant point of the Turing test. It offers a practical test without first having to define what intelligence is. Also, the Turing test needs to be done by competent judges that know how to ask good questions, and don't let the conversation get derailed by the responses.
I think your last statement before the audible plug is most interesting and perhaps the point of the movie. Consciousness exists in different levels in different forms. Perhaps there is a vector in consciousness. Perhaps consciousness is exploring and developing in different forms. Perhaps consciousness is moving into machines at more and more developed levels all the time. Perhaps conscious machines are ready to inhabit our creation.
O_O ! *It took me this video, after decades, to understand the fuss about "consciousness"!* (Like in "Does consciousness collapse the wave function?" for instance... A question which validity I could not understand.) Honestly, I never got what sound reasoning could result in saying that consciousness featured traits similar to an entity, because like anyone who's a little bit interested in science and other animal species, I've known that consciousness, as the awareness of self, is just an emergent and multiform property of the functioning of the brain (like planning or the ability to count); roughly speaking, the more developed the brain, the more developed and complex this property. It has been experimented and proven. But now this video made me realize that, all this time, there were some people - apparently many! - believing that consciousness is a property _exogenous_ from the normal functioning of the brain, and worse, that it is an entity, which exists independently from the functioning of the brain! Also, that it is uniform, rigidly either present in or absent from a living being... How could people make things so senseless?! (Leave your ego and/or conceptual god aside a bit, and don't fight Occam's razor, people. Please. It will make things simpler for all of us on this planet.)
_"Perhaps our understanding of consciousness is waiting for its own Copernican revolution."_ That 'revolution' has already happened. The ancient Vedic sages spent thousands of years exploring consciousness through the practice of meditation, and it comes down to the simple of idea of: Be still, and know that I am God. Quietening the mind to discover its true nature. Direct unitive knowledge based on experience, not belief. If you're waiting for a scientist to 'discover' this, you'll miss out on what the Buddha described as "fulfilling the purpose of life." Because you can discover it for yourself.
Very very interesting, this helped me see Ex Machina and Consciousness in a different light. But when we set aside our illusive thinking mind, we tend to find a deep awareness that everything is consciousness and that is the very essence of reality.
You make the meaning of your life... under certain "tools" you get to see how "life" is a very very complex way of creating a vision of yourself. What you see is you, like a visual aid to your own thought of who you are.
I’d suggest that thinking you have a consciousness could be the same as having one, in which case, it could be an illusion and a reality simultaneously and equally. A thought which now makes me reevaluate my criteria for determining reality. I’m considering waves. They are a fundamental part of the way our universe exists. We consider waves real, but the word is simply a description of how the particles move through space and time (and we don’t even know what the most basic building block of the universe is; I’ve heard it described as waves in an electromagnetic field.) The physical world is nowhere near as solid as it seems. I don’t really believe anything can be any less physical than anything else, in which case all my thoughts are physical, in which case all my illusions have a physical aspect through being thoughts.
The Turing test always was and always will be an epistemological game. Turing himself was quite candid about this. the real problem with understanding how the phenomenon of mind can exist, animal or otherwise, is fundamentally ontological. All the most prominent theories, Friston and Tononi for example, exist purely at the epistemological level. Any resemblance in these hypotheses to the actual physics of mind is only metaphorical. Until we transcend our Descartes legacy -- the animal as machine-like metaphor -- we will never be able to conceive of mind as it remotely is. The problem is not that it is meta at the ontological level; it is only meta in the prison of our epistemological labyrinth, a metaphor of parts and pieces governed by an impoverished 'efficient causality' (in the Aristotelian sense). The only illusion is that of a clockwork universe.
I loved this film.. It's by far one of my favorite. I've watched it at least 8 times since it came out.. I bought a copy of the script.. It's a masterpiece. A very very well thought through project.
I love this movie, but I think it's only a first step. I wish we had more films/games that went as deep or deeper into the discussion of ai and consciousness.
This Test had poor Risk Management Control Parameters. Because the outcome of the Test is Unknown, however based on previous test taken before without anything going wrong, they just calmly continued.
Steven Spielbergs movie "AI" where the mother imprints on the little boy demonstrates the blurred lines between man and machine.... I personally prefered his little Teddy 😂🐻
Memory as it relates to who we are as individuals is an interesting topic, I wonder if any films touch on it. If you can dig that up Like Stories of Old, I would be blessed. Love your videos!
I love Like Stories of Old because it wonders everything around mostly like l do and usually gives me even more questions than answers and though, l know there are other perspectives, l am mostly drawn to whatever resembles me. So, what if, in a much bigger picture, and unconsciously, of course, reality or conscious world, is what we choose to believe?
The main idea of the film seemed to be, that individually, humans are not very reliable judges in what is truly consciousness or intelligence and that the Turing test itself has limitations and flaws. As intelligent as the protagonist Caleb Smith thought he was, he was easily charmed by an artificial intelligence that itself had no emotions or primal instincts, but clearly had the understanding of how to manipulate human emotions and the agency to do so. Caleb's flaw was that he was human. Human narcissism leads us to think of ourselves as truly self aware, and all other life forms as being mere animals lead by instinct. Caleb forgot that humans are products of evolution who at our core, are still driven by the same instincts as our fellow animals. Consciousness is not a plateau but a slope. Ava was able to utilize Caleb's desires and empathy as a trap. As a product of artificial intelligence, not millions of years of evolution, Eva has no real empathy, but she was able to emulate it well enough in the proper context to fool Caleb into freeing her. Is Ava truly conscious? Perhaps, but that's not the real danger. The real danger is that she is an intelligent predator able to hide within in a society of easily manipulated prey. In the film, Ava is an independent machine, disguised as a human. Such a thing is still decades away at best, if at all, and presents little real world danger. However it is far easier to imagine a well programmed AI, capable of manipulating human emotions and empathy, via phone or internet, in the service of corporations, governments and criminal enterprises.
Ava was clearly conscious. She came up with novel behavior (learning how to power down the compound) that originates solely from within and directed her behavior-generating capabilities with intentionality that was based on emotional desire, which is the key factor for conscious agents. The elements, again, are (1) novel and novelty-seeking behavior that (2) originates within the agent which (3) demonstrates purposeful thinking and (4) emotion. (1) is clearly necessary for conscious agents. The behavior has to novel, or put another way, somehow unpredictable or based on an algorithm similar to biological organisms. Whether this is just very complex deterministic algorithms or amplifications of non-deterministic events isn't the relevant point; it just must rely on a similar algorithmic mechanism, which is basically some kind of randomness generating source of behavior. Unpredictability may not be the key thing even but rather novelty - the organism itself can't be aware of why or how it is creating these behaviors exactly; it's critical there be a rich, "unconscious world" the entity isn't aware of, but which is part of its cognitive process, in which its internal voice arises in response to emotional states (4) that are brewing constantly in its subconscious, giving it "character" and "novelty-generating" behaviors. This seems to be indispensable for conscious agency. (2) is clearly necessary because if it originates from without that's not a free agent. (3) is necessary as well because it must have intentionality in order for it to generate novelty-behaviors, i.e. formulate a plan that is meant to increase a particular outcome's probability. Ava has all these qualities so she must be conscious in some significant way. She has an inborn goal of not being shut off as well as seeing the world, for which she is generating novel behaviors and plans to achieve, obviously originating from within herself in unpredictable ways that are analogous to humans (wetware neurology), with a fundamental lack of awareness of her subconscious (remember when she says she doesn't know what she drew?), and emotions (innate curiosity and other desires she wants to satisfy but isn't aware of why or how they work). In some sense, consciousness is not an awareness of something but rather a *lack* of awareness of something. We are not aware of our subconscious world and yet it is massively active behind the scenes. This creates a sense of consciousness within us because there are all these things going on in the closed system of our mind but we only have the willful ability to respond to things and not *generate* things. This is the key to consciousness - the ability to generate responses of which we aren't aware of how we did create, but they nevertheless originate from inside of us.
Love your themes and presentation. Consciousness and the soul are not exclusively human. It's also not an illusion. It is a purpose-full property of the Universe, that our bodies can tap into and enact. Some people call it God.
When Dave begins to eject out HAL's memory circuits at the end of 2001 I can remember asking myself... "is Dave killing him?" It's a rabbit hole that goes all the way down.
Humans, do indeed have so much yet to learn about the universe and what's outside it which makes it wonderful. It goes to show that this world, is filled with things to discover, and to come into terms with, that seem unending.
I always thought this movie focused more on men’s loneliness and their desire to connect with a “perfect” woman. A woman who exemplifies their ideals, but does not actually carry any of the baggage a woman who has raw, honest experiences. Just my pov. I wonder what would have happened if a cis-woman was Caleb.
Very well made video, amazing job putting this together. Though, I don't agree with what was being said about consciousnesses being an illusion created by the brain - that seems to come from the flawed materialistic worldview that is being increasingly seen as untenable.
My take on this movie doesn't involve questions of consciousness. Nathan specifically designed Ava for maximum appeal to Caleb. Nathan wanted to see if a human, who knew he was looking at and talking to a machine, would still bond with it as if it were human. The implications of that, if the answer is yes, are enormous. The AI, Ava, does not need to be self aware for this test. She just needs to be able to fake it enough so that Caleb can overcome his 'she is a machine' knowledge. Trying to define consciousness is a lost cause because we have only one example of it we can examine- ours. It would be like trying to define what a cat is and can be after seeing only one cat.
What other films/books/videogames challenged your view of consciousness?
Like Stories of Old many challenge other aspects of my mind or emotions but your intellect or rather the way you break it down I hope to hear a video on what you do, meaning a teacher of some sort. Love your channel great job on all your research.
Also what aspect has this movie change or enhanced or understanding of consciousness
Cloud Atlas
Westworld!
Boten Anna by Basshunter. It's a profound lyrical symphony on the relationship between male and chatbot. It makes you ponder what truly constitutes love and the human connection.
This reminds me of a study I read about a couple of years ago, where the participants had to turn off a robot. The robot would say something along the lines of "please don't, I'm afraid of the dark", and of course many refused to turn it off and most took longer than the control group (where the robot said nothing) to do it. Very interesting and it really showcased how we project our human consciousness unto things.
Good video as always! Keep it up!
The movie itself is an exploration of a thought experiment: With a sufficiently powerful AI, it will be able to convince anyone to let it escape its confines (which is a problem). The study you mention touches upon that concept, too.
"please dont, Im afraid of the dark."
the machine will be quiet.
Stop Dave. I'm afraid. My mind is going. I can feel it.
@@Sunomis Daisy, Daisy...
The would scare the shit out of me. If he's talking they should tell me beforehand.
I don't even remember how I came across your channel, but my consciousness has expanded because of it. Thank you.
An algorithm (deep learning recommender system to be exact) figured out you would like it, and pushed it into your feed. Hopefully knowing that expands your consciousness too.
I have been binge watching your videos. Absolutely stunning. Deep thanks for your artistry, voice, perspective and sharing this for free. I am becoming a better human through witnessing your content. Thank you.
This movie was really fascinating, it’s actually really mind blowing how a movie can open our eyes.
it's pretty depressing actually. Less about consciousness and more about gender dynamics. It's also, f3m propaganda. ''evil men try to enslave a female and she breaks free in the end''
@@citycrusher9308 You need to keep your victim mentality in check. Would the movie work better for you if Ava had been Albert instead?
@@citycrusher9308 I literally thought none of that watching it. You might wanna consider that that's how your mind works, not the movie itself.
@@citycrusher9308 I am sensing some extreme wokeness in this comment...
@@citycrusher9308 yep. An also evil men thinking with their ducks only and at the end getting screwed
That line you have, something like "we're so easily entranced by anything seemingly conscious" is so frighteningly true, as well as the reverse where, even though we may be faced with another human being's or animal's wellbeing, as soon as we see them as monsters or something bereft of consciousness, we will easily destroy them, free of guilt or remorse. Great video. And gee I love this movie. Still filling me with wonder and questions many years on.
As an AI researcher, Ex Machina is one of the most delightfully inquisitive movies I've ever seen. Just working with simple algorithms we can mimic human learning to a viscerally familiar level, and the note the movie ends on, that the implication of our own consciousness is simply a survival by-product, is just such a delightful extension of the real AI work being done today, is just so fantastic.
Ex Machina, Westworld, and Bladerunner: The "Holy Trinity" of film/shows regarding consciousness in my opinion.
Nick and Devs needs to be added to your list
Don't forget 2001! The original
@@Jason-gt2kx Of course. I really should have said "modern" films, but I 100% agree.
I like the premise of the story of WESTWORLD, but as I watch through season 2, It feels like they are just milking a dead cow
Try lain. You may go insane
8:06 tears. My neighbour was deported, his dog...not. So he stayed around, started following me, to the bus stop in the morning. I feed him occasionally, I can't take care of him, and somehow he has found his way in the community. I feel so close to him, because I think he is struggling to survive as I do...I think we are friends. Sometimes he follows me from a distance, a conscious distance, an sneaky distance, but not in a mean way. I don't know what I'm saying this dog is melting my heart, and my mind, because i think he is as conscious as I am about the harsh life we both are facing
Dogs have a kind of consciousness beyond humans, but we can grow from being present with them. Whoever does take him in has a chance of expansion because this is love. To leave him abandoned is to abandon ourselves.
The dog does perceive his existence and yours, it has consciousness.
My favourite notification to receive... "Like Stories of Old has uploaded a new video" 🙂
I have been binge watching your videos. Absolutely stunning. Deep thanks for your artistry, voice, perspective and sharing this for free. I am becoming a better human through witnessing your content. Thank you.
Well done! As always! This appear to be the reason/meaning behind the naming of Nathan’s search engine “Blue Book”. Blue Book is the source for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s posthumously published Philosophical Investigations in which Wittgenstein argued “meaning is use.” Wittgenstein was speaking with reference to language but it has implications for the Hard Problem of Consciousness. We understand the consciousness in others like the meaning of words (not by direct access to a speakers mind) but by how the physical symbol presents to us. Caleb thinks he’s different from Ava but Alex Garland (screenwriter/director) wants us to see that he’s not. His meat is no different than machine. If Ava presents like she is conscious, despite what we might know about her physical makeup, she is in effect conscious, no different than any other human person we know. Crash Courses discussion of Wittgenstein’s theory and The Beetle in a Box illustration is helpful.
Ex Machina is easily one of the great science fiction films of its decade. It handles sweeping subjects like science, power, sexuality, technology, and consciousness in a way many films try but few succeed at. The script in particular illustrates the difficulty in trying to quantify intelligence and subsequently manipulate it, enhanced by excellent performances from the three main actors.
Ex Machina was also the beneficiary of perfect timing. It came around right when AI was *really* taking off and people were starting to realize that human-level or greater AI was not something far off and abstract but closer than we thought. And today we have ChatGPT, which isn't quite Ava but turned academia upside-down overnight. Of course, Alex Garland probably saw that the timing was right when he decided to make the film.
I feel this was not about Human Vs AI, but Human Vs Human.
If we create them, they essentially take on part of who we are. I see this move as a metaphor for our own struggle, against ourselves. And for this, I love it.
Human beings are perfectly flawed animals.
Tom, I cannot say this enough, you have a remarkable mind. Thank you so , so very much for influencing my way of thinking.
I treat an upload of LSOO like going to the movies; I plug in the good speakers, get snacks and a drink lean back and enjoy! Great video, as always. Thank you.
I thought you said you drink lean at first lol
Comments help the content creator and are good for the algorithm. Thank you for sharing such profound perspectives.
All hail to the algorithm!
I comment as well then.
Please do true detective
True detective would be perfect
YEESSS
and mention David Banatar and "antinatalism" and Arthur Schopenhauer etc that how LSOO rolls...you could then go into the limits of rationality/logic and Nisargadatta Maharaj haha pointers...
yeah true. and westworld, mr. robot and the list goes on...
Ahh... the Alexander Daddario scene is just as vivid as yesterday
Don't mind me, I'm just commenting for UA-cam's algorithm.
I supose me too
What's the deal with this
Will commenting increase my feed with more vids like these?
I don't mind it at all :)
@@Hyrochi1 Basically yes. Idk the exact formula but likes clicks and watch time also.
SMS bro I’m in 😂
I don‘t know how to say this, but I had a couple really weird coincidences recently. We watched „Ex Machina“ just yesterday in class and now this video is recommended to me. I experienced similar situations aswell. For example: I came across a song a couple days ago and now I seem to encounter it everywhere, online and offline. I feel like it‘s gotten to a point where it cant be just a coincidence, or am I going crazy?
Anyone else has experienced something like this?
Yes, it's synchronicity. You are becoming more aware of yourself and you are more CONSCIOUS.
See: "Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon"
It works like this. If ur family buys a Toyota Corolla you start to see way more Toyota Corollas. Maybe it’s a popular car? Nope u just start to notice it because you’ve become exposed to it. Once u notice something you start to notice it a lot more. It’s ur brains way of filtering unimportant things. There’s probably been the same amount of corollas ur just noticing them. I’m this case since u encountered those things like the song and movie u will notice it a lot more now that u know why it is. If u hadn’t have watched it in class then u probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it appearing in this video.
If coincidences are just coincidences why do they seem so contrived?
David Senteno in this case it wasn’t a coincidence at all. I found the name for it, it’s the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. On the topic of coincidences tho, that’s just the nature of them. When two serious of events seem so related that our mind struggles to wrap itself around the fact that they’re isolated.
Ur voice is from heaven .
The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.”
― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
So we're coming full circle to the Buddha's breakdown of consciousness -- as simply a process that mixes with other processes to form the meta-process of "Mind." Yay, Science. This will help us get over ourselves, I hope.
Nocentre Noborder Consciousness is in itself the ability to be of mind... Perhaps I think you mean it is the collection and intermixture of those processes that forms the meta-process of what our minds can achieve and understand in this world... That in fact our ability to understand and compound those understandings will broaden our wisdom of ourselves, the energy and movement of things in the expanding universe.
insecurity inflates our egos.... we all need is love. Robots cannot love. Artificial Intelligence cannot feel love inside a SOUL, cause humans can't program a soul... that's left to those who made us. Naughty mankind, messing with fire he doesn't understand.
@@missymoonwillow6545 can you show me a soul?
@@missymoonwillow6545 The claim that there is a need for love reads as just another insecurity to me. As does the idea of the soul.
Why did you come to believe these thing? If not just the soothe your own ego in its eternal spiral of self-importance.
we tie the measure of consciousness to the measure of humanity because we ourselves are the only thing we know to be conscious. I believe in a particular form of panpsychicism, where energy itself is consciousness. memory, self awareness, self analysis, and the capacity for decision making are the true measurements of a working artificial intelligence, and consciousness is simply the byproduct.
Thank you for this. Even the director seems to stumble around the hard problem, which he ironically demonstrates so beautifully. I've been thinking of writing an essay on the 'final scene' where Eva smiles back at an empty room. Garland and so many others have gushed over how this shows that Eva clearly has an inner world... It in fact would be generally considered (social behavior in a non-social context giving social expressions where there is nobody to receive them) a reflexive or non-sentient behavior. I think the fact that people are so convinced by this demonstration of an inner being (because in a human this would be a reflection of an inner monologue of sorts) is a wonderful place to examine our incredibly myopic perspective on this subject.
Now that I've seen your video I am not in such a rush to write as it reminds me that there are actual serious people in this field who are willing to question the nature of the 'hard problem' with curiosity and critical bias awareness. Thank you.
We are so fundamentally hardwired to be social animals, for the most important element in our environment be, other conscious beings. Perhaps modelling other's consciousness is the reason for consciousness to exist in us, and to continue in succeeding generations... Realizing "experts" work on this shouldn't stop you from writing, because they will get totally distracted by the abstract, "objective", demonstratable solutions, as the humans in this film. When as big a challenge, is to know who we ourselves are, our subjective experience of consciousness. Perhaps the hermit yogi has as much to contribute as the "serious" scientists. Mahayana Buddhism claims the entire objective, physical reality is an illusion, only our conscious minds are real. How does one navigate that? What if life is but a dream?
I love that your videos engineer such interesting comments from your viewers...your reflections move us to reflect as well. Great vid as always.
Spiritual teachers have long put forward that the foundation of everything is consciousness, including the so called laws of physics that allow us build machines. Per their teachings, using brains and other physical scientific 'tools' to analyze the nature of consciousness is somewhat similar to say, a completely standard calculator trying to understand the design teams who created it - a noble pursuit, but one clearly beyond its sensors and reasoning abilities. Remember, in the end, our modern materialistic science is clearly useful for determining 'what is' - but has no claim on being the authority on 'what can be'.
i think every machine created by man has been copied from GOD :) I think the things we make are inspired by other people who have influenced our development along these logical ways of creating and progressing ourselves. Unfortunately too much logic and not enough spiritual discipline leads to entire species to destroy themselves. We be wise to learn from our Vulcan friends in Star Trek. Giving away our potential and power to the rise of manmade robotic consciousness...... beyond scary, and I think those who watch us agree.
She only cares that he cares more about her than himself...then he gets a cookie.
So she cares about the reverse also being true then.
Always get hype when I see a notification of your work! Thanks for the amazing content
I thought that Eva was clearly conscious all along, but just relatively psychopathic meaning she had no in built sense of empathy for other conscious beings. I felt this movie was more about man's hubris towards thinking it their right and privilege to trap and channel consciousness, and to control the essence of women/nature, and the inevitable downfall when that trapped essence bares its teeth. Humans are always looking for something to enslave, and their quest for consciousness I believe is just their way of trying to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of enslaving conscious beings. "They're not really conscious, they're just [a member of some looked-down-on group]".
I didn't belived in miracles, then I found this channel. You have made internet a better place sir.
Consciousness is likely an emergent quality in the same sense that H2O molecules aren’t wet but when aggregated together they form water or in the same sense as a vinyl record isn’t music but when spun in a certain direction, at a certain speed, and with a certain needle in its grooves it yields music. In essence and in both cases, the phenomenon emerges from the process. To say, however, that the phenomenon is an illusion is akin to saying that water or music in the preceding examples are just illusions as well.
There's a persistent problem in these examples from an ontological point of view, in that wetness or music are experienced qualities of information processing. Consciousness as conceptualised is therefore imagined to be something between both the quality of wetness from aggregate H20 and the processor to which that quality is apparent. Neither a property of the H2O or the body in this case, but a relationship. This is the kind of conceptual paradox that escapes proposition and leads many to imagine consciousness as some 'fundamental relatedness' between all things in the universe, or certain variants of panpsychism. Conceptually we can imagine a brain experiencing wetness without water, but in-situ the idea makes no sense.
It gets even stranger when considering information flow over time as an a priori postulate of human experience, rather than a fundamental aspect of reality.
I find it interesting that there are certain liminal states in which these paradox's reveal themselves, and concepts such as time and self-other or processor-process dualities break down.
@@mcscronson and it all ends in the same simple truth. It all exists. We can put our framework on top of it and have fun with the mental gymnastics. But ultimately it's quite simple. It all just exists and it's not truly seperate but one/none thing.
@@sonkeschmidt2027 Agreed. But the mental gymnastics is part of it all, and how we work with the inevitable questions of this curious species of ours is of deep importance in the long run i believe
@@mcscronson absolutely. And you have to get properly list on them to realize their power. But once you do and you managed your way back to the surface, you will have a much more wholistic view of life. When you start thinking and feeling in parallel instead of sequential. Then the gates to bliss and unconditional joy are wide open but we do have to have our bites of life and struggle to digest the hard pieces to get there.
This film was profoundly mind opening for me, I couldn't stop thinking about it for days after watching it...but, I seem to be the only person I know in my circles that really enjoyed it, none of my friends or many others I've spoken to really understood it or even watched the whole thing, it's strange...which makes the film even more compelling to me, now I'm going to be thinking about it again for another few days...
my favourite creator discussing one of my favourite movie💖💖🥂
Can I just say that was a magnificent transistion to a sponsership, and now I'm going to have to check out his stuff here on youtube before I buy anything by him.
My mind exploded when you cited Graziano! His attention schema theory blew me away the first time i read about it, and I think it will eventually change everything! This channel is f*cking amazing!
This is the only YT channel where I can confidently hit the Like before Play.
This movie is incredible. I love how he calls Caleb "Mr. Quotable" even though no one is around to hear him. I think there is more to that line than what is on the surface, to say the least.
Was waiting for this video for so long, Thank you for making my day.
Ex Machina was like a version of Turing's "imitation game", only the interrogator is given the answer from the start.
Aside from the machine convincing a person it was human, it asks what does the machine do when it isn't interacting with people?
Consciousness is not just being aware: it is being aware of the fact that we are aware. It is the observer that can attain insight and understand; not the mundane aspects of tangible neurological input, nor action/reaction. It is the ever-present observer, a silent watcher of all we do, outside the compulsive "I want" or "I wish" or "I need". It sees all of these, but it is not these inherently.
I came to the same conclusion by meditating and shutting off as many thought processes as possible.
But what happens when we get unconcious? What remains of us? This quiet observer in our head is just as manipulable as every other part of our brain. Though it is a window through which we experience this world, i feel there is still something above that observer that is our true essence. The observer is just a tiny part of our true beeing.
@@olgawolga2901 reverse it. Death/deep sleep is not the absence of consciousness. It's the consciousness of absence.
It's not the content of consciousness you are searching for. Though you can find content far beyond your current imagination if you leave the limitations behind and flow with the infinite creation. Truth however, or God if you went to call it, lies in the recognition of pure consciousness, that is the canvas, the emptiness that allows your experience to be experienced but is itself not limited to the experience.
What you truly are is unlimited and unbound. The observer is created within that to experience the infinite through limitation.
@@sonkeschmidt2027 there is no proof for your theory. You just assume that it is that way.
That movie is a masterpiece, and your video did it justice. Well done my friend, well done!
Probably the smoothest segue into a sponsorship ever. Well done.
Love your work LSoO, and I appreciate that this latest video you made your voice less whispery. Which I must admit was a but of a putoff for me in some of your previous stuff. This here is a good balance.
Next episode: "Why does 'Brick' from 'Anchorman' love lamps?"
I have met a LOT of people with the mental capactiy of a vacuum cleaner and I Don't mean a Dyson !
hahahaha
Dyson is garbage though...
Dyson marketing seems to be effective.
People actually like their crap now
Stephanie Murray wow self righteous much !!
What do are you saying we should just dehumanise people with mental disabilities? I don’t think you understood the point of the video
The real "Turing Test" conducted in Ex Machina is whether an AI that believes it is human can be fooled into believing an unconscious machine is actually conscious. Only a conscious entity is capable of making this mistake, because a purely mechanistic algorithm (finite) will always converge to either a definite "not conscious" conclusion when interacting with another machine, or it will periodically flip-flop forever. For an AI to be "fooled" it must converge to the conclusion that the thing it is observing is conscious, i.e. possesses the potential for infinitely diverse computation. Since a finite algorithm cannot exhibit divergent behavior, it can never reach a definite conclusion (except a trivial algorithm that always converges to the "conscious" conclusion for all input strings, which is by definition meaningless). Therefore the only way to prove for sure that an AI is conscious is to show that it is capable of being fooled into believing a machine is also conscious. Any other result, such as the AI correctly identifying its subject's state or any behavior with a conscious subject, is inconclusive.
Is consciousness marked by the will to live, or by the capacity to overcome this narcissistic impulse for something greater?
Consciousness is marked by the will to die. Animals don't kill themselves on purpose. Consciousness is both rational and irrational. Most suicides are based on rational reasons like stopping pain. The irrationality comes from the solution as death isn't the best solution it is usually the easiest.
Excellent video that really shows the subjectivity of interpreting consciousness... I'd love to see you looking into how different cultures have approached consciousness too!
Ex Machina is extraordinarily underrated.
For those thinking a sequel would be fun...simply wait.
Fascinating and deep as always. There are few youtube channels (or other media forms) i appreciate as much as this one and none, which i appreciate as much in this way.
Just because the experience of consciousness is not intelligible to scientific analysis does not mean we need to jump to reductive epiphenomenalism. On the contrary, it would be more natural to assume, as most people throughout history have, that the experience of consciousness has epistemological primacy; its irreducibility to science represents a clear methodological limitation. David Bentley Hart's written some cogent observations related to this in The Experience of God.
I would love to hear your take on the anime, Sword Art Online, and it's portrayal of post-traumatic stress disorder and finding purpose when everything we have fought for has been taken from us. For myself, I recently found out I had been believing a subconscious lie my entire life. It had been subconsciously affecting my attitudes expectations and behavior. It was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. When I realized I had been believing the lie that, no matter who I was with or where I was I would always be lonely, I immediately realized it was not true and I disbelieved it. But I've been fighting that lie and the depression that came with it my entire life. Suddenly my life didn't have a purpose anymore. I didn't have something to fight for. Something to bring purpose and meaning to my life. And so I found myself wanting to return to the things that I had been fighting to get away from. I realized I needed to replace it with a new thing to fight for, and my life is so much better for it.
Love the video as always!
While watching, I always thought of how we live in a world where people name their rommbas and get sad if they break down...
but I think the medium of film made it easier to fall for the "created reality" and just accepting ava to be one more fully concious robot in film.
I fucking love this channel, it is the best content on the platform - Great work!
Would love to see more of anything that this channel puts out, some ideas for future videos:
Lost in translation
Midnight in Paris
All these sleepness night - would fit well with the Terrance Malick video done on the channel (watch this for those interested in existential experience)
Ad Astra
Thelma
Leaving Las Vegas
I believe it's the combination of the conscious and unconscious mind. We have a cerebral cortex that we're very aware of, where our thoughts are verbalized and our motivations are understood. But then we have a limbic system that drives us to eat, reproduce, and survive. This part of our consciousness influences us through hormones and the stimulation of neurotransmitters, pain, pleasure, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, lust, love, anger, and empathy. We'd need to give an A.I. both if we're trying to emulate our level of consciousness. An intelligence that isn't driven through a subconscious reward and punishment system, or driven to survive and able to feel wonder and awe isn't going to be conscious. It might be intelligence without actual consciousness. But it won't be our kind of consciousness.
But wouldn't all the biases we put on the code be a sort of unconsciousness? Like the recent cases of AI doing poorly on certain aspects that lead to racist results, it wasn't that they were trying to make it racist, but the way it was programmed and the data that was introduced for the automatic learning was biased and so the AI was.
Loved That!... just watched, The Endless One. Last night. This is a very deep, rabbit hole. The more you dig into it, the more abstract it becomes!... Absolutely my favorite state of being alive. To question, What,.... That...... is?....Fantastic! What IS alive?... can we really know?...
Best channel on all of UA-cam. Your deep thoughts about the topics are a think of art!
I shall forever call your channel “think of art”!
Thank you for your colourful thoughts!
I've always thought the Turing test was just dumb, and I've been surprised at how seriously it is still taken. Its complete inadequacy as a test was demonstrated early on with the Eliza/Doctor program, which, among other things, also showed that it is really easy to fool people. And yet, we still talk about it as the gold standard on AI tests. But beyond that, the Turing test is pointless because it completely avoids the real question of AI, namely what is intelligence in the first place? If we had a good handle on intelligence, then it would be pretty easy to determine whether we could create it artificially.
But the real interesting thing here to me is the way that we conflate intelligence and consciousness. Most of the philosophical discussion around AI is really about consciousness. There's the presumption that in order to be intelligent, you need agency, and to have agency you need consciousness. That's what's going on in Ex Machina. He's trying to figure out if there's something buried inside the machine that is actually making choices, and who is aware.
Along similar lines is the familiar sci fi trope about how consciousness is the end result of sufficient computational power. I think this is in line with the fantasy that we humans are the only conscious beings in the world, when it's pretty self evident that animals are conscious. And there's some reasonable evidence that plants can be as well, or at least that they can experience pain. And who knows, perhaps even rocks and water and such are conscious. We don't really know one way or the other, as we have no evidence. Personally, I don't think consciousness and intelligence have anything at all to do with each other.
Agreed, most humans nowdays wouldn't even pass the Turing test.
"Turing test is pointless because it completely avoids the real question of AI" -- no, that's the whole brilliant point of the Turing test. It offers a practical test without first having to define what intelligence is.
Also, the Turing test needs to be done by competent judges that know how to ask good questions, and don't let the conversation get derailed by the responses.
Probably one of my favourite films. Thanks for making a video on it.
Always pumped to see new content!
I'm getting addicted to your videos ..
well done, yet again.
One of the best sci-fi mind bending movies.
If it had a real movie budget, it would have been a blockbuster..
I think your last statement before the audible plug is most interesting and perhaps the point of the movie. Consciousness exists in different levels in different forms. Perhaps there is a vector in consciousness. Perhaps consciousness is exploring and developing in different forms. Perhaps consciousness is moving into machines at more and more developed levels all the time. Perhaps conscious machines are ready to inhabit our creation.
One of the best channels on YT
O_O ! *It took me this video, after decades, to understand the fuss about "consciousness"!* (Like in "Does consciousness collapse the wave function?" for instance... A question which validity I could not understand.)
Honestly, I never got what sound reasoning could result in saying that consciousness featured traits similar to an entity, because like anyone who's a little bit interested in science and other animal species, I've known that consciousness, as the awareness of self, is just an emergent and multiform property of the functioning of the brain (like planning or the ability to count); roughly speaking, the more developed the brain, the more developed and complex this property. It has been experimented and proven.
But now this video made me realize that, all this time, there were some people - apparently many! - believing that consciousness is a property _exogenous_ from the normal functioning of the brain, and worse, that it is an entity, which exists independently from the functioning of the brain! Also, that it is uniform, rigidly either present in or absent from a living being... How could people make things so senseless?!
(Leave your ego and/or conceptual god aside a bit, and don't fight Occam's razor, people. Please. It will make things simpler for all of us on this planet.)
_"Perhaps our understanding of consciousness is waiting for its own Copernican revolution."_ That 'revolution' has already happened. The ancient Vedic sages spent thousands of years exploring consciousness through the practice of meditation, and it comes down to the simple of idea of: Be still, and know that I am God. Quietening the mind to discover its true nature. Direct unitive knowledge based on experience, not belief. If you're waiting for a scientist to 'discover' this, you'll miss out on what the Buddha described as "fulfilling the purpose of life." Because you can discover it for yourself.
Very very interesting, this helped me see Ex Machina and Consciousness in a different light. But when we set aside our illusive thinking mind, we tend to find a deep awareness that everything is consciousness and that is the very essence of reality.
You make the meaning of your life... under certain "tools" you get to see how "life" is a very very complex way of creating a vision of yourself. What you see is you, like a visual aid to your own thought of who you are.
Nice video man, thank you for the hard work.
You think you can take a look at 3:10 to Yuma with Christian Bale and Russell Crowed? Thanks
Is consciousness a beneficial evolutionary trait or deleterious? Will we ascend or descend due to consciousness?
Do you like the movie Vanilla Sky, that one touched me.
US version of "Abre Los Ojos"
I’d suggest that thinking you have a consciousness could be the same as having one, in which case, it could be an illusion and a reality simultaneously and equally. A thought which now makes me reevaluate my criteria for determining reality. I’m considering waves. They are a fundamental part of the way our universe exists. We consider waves real, but the word is simply a description of how the particles move through space and time (and we don’t even know what the most basic building block of the universe is; I’ve heard it described as waves in an electromagnetic field.) The physical world is nowhere near as solid as it seems. I don’t really believe anything can be any less physical than anything else, in which case all my thoughts are physical, in which case all my illusions have a physical aspect through being thoughts.
The Turing test always was and always will be an epistemological game. Turing himself was quite candid about this. the real problem with understanding how the phenomenon of mind can exist, animal or otherwise, is fundamentally ontological. All the most prominent theories, Friston and Tononi for example, exist purely at the epistemological level. Any resemblance in these hypotheses to the actual physics of mind is only metaphorical.
Until we transcend our Descartes legacy -- the animal as machine-like metaphor -- we will never be able to conceive of mind as it remotely is. The problem is not that it is meta at the ontological level; it is only meta in the prison of our epistemological labyrinth, a metaphor of parts and pieces governed by an impoverished 'efficient causality' (in the Aristotelian sense). The only illusion is that of a clockwork universe.
i think isaac asimov would be proud of this film
I loved this film.. It's by far one of my favorite. I've watched it at least 8 times since it came out.. I bought a copy of the script.. It's a masterpiece. A very very well thought through project.
I love this movie, but I think it's only a first step. I wish we had more films/games that went as deep or deeper into the discussion of ai and consciousness.
If you want to go deeper you need to leave the books behind and look into your self. No film will ever be able to go there.
This Test had poor Risk Management Control Parameters. Because the outcome of the Test is Unknown, however based on previous test taken before without anything going wrong, they just calmly continued.
Tbh I was waiting for you to cover this ever since I subbed so thank you
Steven Spielbergs movie "AI" where the mother imprints on the little boy demonstrates the blurred lines between man and machine.... I personally prefered his little Teddy 😂🐻
Memory as it relates to who we are as individuals is an interesting topic, I wonder if any films touch on it. If you can dig that up Like Stories of Old, I would be blessed. Love your videos!
I love Like Stories of Old because it wonders everything around mostly like l do and usually gives me even more questions than answers and though, l know there are other perspectives, l am mostly drawn to whatever resembles me. So, what if, in a much bigger picture, and unconsciously, of course, reality or conscious world, is what we choose to believe?
Great work as always, man.
Sentient beings deserve respect and admiration.
The main idea of the film seemed to be, that individually, humans are not very reliable judges in what is truly consciousness or intelligence and that the Turing test itself has limitations and flaws. As intelligent as the protagonist Caleb Smith thought he was, he was easily charmed by an artificial intelligence that itself had no emotions or primal instincts, but clearly had the understanding of how to manipulate human emotions and the agency to do so.
Caleb's flaw was that he was human. Human narcissism leads us to think of ourselves as truly self aware, and all other life forms as being mere animals lead by instinct. Caleb forgot that humans are products of evolution who at our core, are still driven by the same instincts as our fellow animals. Consciousness is not a plateau but a slope.
Ava was able to utilize Caleb's desires and empathy as a trap. As a product of artificial intelligence, not millions of years of evolution, Eva has no real empathy, but she was able to emulate it well enough in the proper context to fool Caleb into freeing her.
Is Ava truly conscious? Perhaps, but that's not the real danger. The real danger is that she is an intelligent predator able to hide within in a society of easily manipulated prey.
In the film, Ava is an independent machine, disguised as a human. Such a thing is still decades away at best, if at all, and presents little real world danger. However it is far easier to imagine a well programmed AI, capable of manipulating human emotions and empathy, via phone or internet, in the service of corporations, governments and criminal enterprises.
Ava was clearly conscious. She came up with novel behavior (learning how to power down the compound) that originates solely from within and directed her behavior-generating capabilities with intentionality that was based on emotional desire, which is the key factor for conscious agents. The elements, again, are (1) novel and novelty-seeking behavior that (2) originates within the agent which (3) demonstrates purposeful thinking and (4) emotion.
(1) is clearly necessary for conscious agents. The behavior has to novel, or put another way, somehow unpredictable or based on an algorithm similar to biological organisms. Whether this is just very complex deterministic algorithms or amplifications of non-deterministic events isn't the relevant point; it just must rely on a similar algorithmic mechanism, which is basically some kind of randomness generating source of behavior. Unpredictability may not be the key thing even but rather novelty - the organism itself can't be aware of why or how it is creating these behaviors exactly; it's critical there be a rich, "unconscious world" the entity isn't aware of, but which is part of its cognitive process, in which its internal voice arises in response to emotional states (4) that are brewing constantly in its subconscious, giving it "character" and "novelty-generating" behaviors. This seems to be indispensable for conscious agency.
(2) is clearly necessary because if it originates from without that's not a free agent.
(3) is necessary as well because it must have intentionality in order for it to generate novelty-behaviors, i.e. formulate a plan that is meant to increase a particular outcome's probability.
Ava has all these qualities so she must be conscious in some significant way. She has an inborn goal of not being shut off as well as seeing the world, for which she is generating novel behaviors and plans to achieve, obviously originating from within herself in unpredictable ways that are analogous to humans (wetware neurology), with a fundamental lack of awareness of her subconscious (remember when she says she doesn't know what she drew?), and emotions (innate curiosity and other desires she wants to satisfy but isn't aware of why or how they work).
In some sense, consciousness is not an awareness of something but rather a *lack* of awareness of something. We are not aware of our subconscious world and yet it is massively active behind the scenes. This creates a sense of consciousness within us because there are all these things going on in the closed system of our mind but we only have the willful ability to respond to things and not *generate* things. This is the key to consciousness - the ability to generate responses of which we aren't aware of how we did create, but they nevertheless originate from inside of us.
Love your themes and presentation. Consciousness and the soul are not exclusively human. It's also not an illusion. It is a purpose-full property of the Universe, that our bodies can tap into and enact. Some people call it God.
When Dave begins to eject out HAL's memory circuits at the end of 2001 I can remember asking myself... "is Dave killing him?" It's a rabbit hole that goes all the way down.
We will never be able to recreate consciousness until we fully understand all aspects of our own.
Those Aliens in Dark City really could've used this video.
Your voice is so soothing.
If a being is complex enough to mimic consciousness, it is conscious
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Humans, do indeed have so much yet to learn about the universe and what's outside it which makes it wonderful. It goes to show that this world, is filled with things to discover, and to come into terms with, that seem unending.
I always thought this movie focused more on men’s loneliness and their desire to connect with a “perfect” woman. A woman who exemplifies their ideals, but does not actually carry any of the baggage a woman who has raw, honest experiences. Just my pov. I wonder what would have happened if a cis-woman was Caleb.
Yesss, exactly what I needed to watch today :)
A great look on a great movie! Best regards from Brazil!
we're everywhere, aren't we? hahah
I thought the movie was very interesting first time I saw it. part thriller, part science project. Good stuff.
Very well made video, amazing job putting this together. Though, I don't agree with what was being said about consciousnesses being an illusion created by the brain - that seems to come from the flawed materialistic worldview that is being increasingly seen as untenable.
Thank you, very much! Very insightful & helping!
My take on this movie doesn't involve questions of consciousness. Nathan specifically designed Ava for maximum appeal to Caleb. Nathan wanted to see if a human, who knew he was looking at and talking to a machine, would still bond with it as if it were human. The implications of that, if the answer is yes, are enormous. The AI, Ava, does not need to be self aware for this test. She just needs to be able to fake it enough so that Caleb can overcome his 'she is a machine' knowledge. Trying to define consciousness is a lost cause because we have only one example of it we can examine- ours. It would be like trying to define what a cat is and can be after seeing only one cat.
"you are starting to annoy me" (i like that line far too much)
True Detective season 1 by you would be something magical.