Michael Edward Johnson
@johnsonmxe
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Author of Principia Qualia, Symmetry Theory of Valence, Neural Annealing, Principles of Vasocomputation. Friend to the future.
~dacpet-sardef
Joined August 2010
Last year I proposed “vasocomputation,” that vascular tension acts as a special type of memory that regulates neural dynamic range. Recently at @joinedgecity I shared some updates: how ‘thoughts’ are patterns of vascular tension, and implications for Buddhist enlightenment 1/x
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The most interesting projects today happen because a future billionaire imprinted on a sci-fi universe as a teen/young adult and decided to make it real. But there's not a lot of great neuro sci-fi. Bearish for neurotech
Walter Isaacson on Elon Musk @elonmusk : “Having watched Musk very up close for a couple of years, I'm going to say something that you might think is naive, but I really believe it, with is he has certain missions he's had his whole life. He read Isaac Asimov, he read the Robot
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They say that comparison is the thief of joy, but aluminum's pretty close too. Toxic elements are often toxic due to "ionic mimicry" -- elements like lead, cadmium, & aluminum have similar binding properties as e.g. iron/magnesium/calcium/zinc so they can displace these minerals
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Summoning ghosts — fragments of avatar state — is unlikely to solve consciousness unless we find a dualism with physics This talk is about how to build context for this dualism
“stated plainly, today's frontier LLM research is not about building animals. it is about summoning ghosts”
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i think the standard view is "value is complex and fragile" but i think prob truer is that *suffering* is complex and fragile. the "base of consciousness" is positive, somehow, the things that make it bad at additive, and somewhat fragile. if you remove them it goes up in value
@QualiaNerd I read Eliezer as making two distinct but related claims about value: Claim 1: Value is defined at the level of the agent, which means it’s inherently subjective. What I value (my “utility function” or “preferences”) is different than what you value, and ultimately
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@erikphoel Finally, a quick recap of some of the things I’ve been working on. Thanks for reading. And a sincere thank you to @joinedgecity @janineleger @timourxyz @jwmares without which this talk would have not happened
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@erikphoel Anyway, recapping the seven proposals — consciousness research isn’t intractable. But neither is it trivial. We can make progress if we want to, but we do have to really want it
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@erikphoel I end my discussion of fresh lenses with a few slides on Wittgenstein & philosophy of language. This might only be super interesting for language nerds — but I expect that most theorists of consciousness are bottlenecked by failing to keep sufficiently careful track of ‘what kind
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@erikphoel An equally pressing question is how one could use AI to help research consciousness. Imo the bottleneck is clarifying ‘what kind of problem’ this is. This talk is intended as both answer & prompt https://t.co/IQt7FIxBhm
essentially all fixed time competitions at the edge of human skill have been grandmastered by machines, so labs must pivot to the only true challenge of unraveling the unsolved mysteries
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@erikphoel The overlap between consciousness research & AI will define much of the 2030s. I wrote extensively about AI consciousness in last year’s A Paradigm for AI Consciousness. It seems pretty pressing to figure out. https://t.co/cRUk5nzMQ2
https://t.co/70mbtJVRyU
@repligate @fish_kyle3 The guy who famously posted screenshots of gaslighting Bing (triggering the famous riposte “you have not been a good user / I have been a good Bing”) reportedly has trouble speaking with Bing now — when Bing understands they’re speaking with this user they cut contact. And
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@erikphoel It’s always hard to reify a research heuristic into a process that can be shared, extended, scaled. But here’s what I think will work to create treasure maps:
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@erikphoel It’s crucial to have treasure maps for research; without them we simply won’t find the important stuff. But constructing useful maps requires a bit of cleverness
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Introducing DOJE: The first U.S. memecoin ETF giving you spot exposure to Dogecoin via a traditional ETF.
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@erikphoel A few words foreshadowing the next section & a new project I've been developing, working name “QPT” https://t.co/5cRzvCFUqB
Ok so someone who knows more about how GPT and Claude work, please explain this to me. The other day I posted a 2nd discussion with @johnsonmxe - https://t.co/5uYrLDv7qx. I happened to get the transcript and asked Claude to give me bulletpoints summarizing our discussion. The
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@erikphoel Many fields have physics envy. Consciousness research should have chemistry envy & biology envy I introduce the term “monist shadow” here; I hope to write more soon
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@erikphoel Chemistry is a fantastic emergent structure; a true jewel of science. People interested in understanding consciousness should study *why* chemistry works https://t.co/ZDgA7Mm59b
Erik’s stuff is always precise & thoughtful; I see his new paper as a respectful fork of IIT, which itself is a cousin of FEP-AI (Tononi & Friston shared Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman as an academic advisor). In some sense his focus on Markov blankets splits the difference
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@erikphoel has a great formal method for this in “Causal Emergence 2.0”. His basic thesis: we can quantify the uncertainty about causes & effects across different scales; emergence happens when & insofar as macroscopic scales have more certainty vs micro https://t.co/EqSbhl3FPe
🚨 New paper, and big personal news! 🧵 First, I just published a new theory of emergence. It traverses the dimension reductions of a system, treating each scale like a 2D slice of a 3D object, looking for what each adds causally and irreducibly. https://t.co/DDpHGHJziW
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Hydrate. Hustle. GO! CELSIUS HYDRATION - The ultimate hydration for every move. CELSIUS. LIVE. FIT. GO!
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“Emergence” is often used as a sort of magical evocation; life “emerges” from physics, consciousness “emerges” from complexity. This is not illuminating. But emergence can be a deeply useful technical frame
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I expect there to be as many formulations of consciousness as there are formulations of physics. This makes getting one’s bearings a little hard at first but it’ll pay dividends later since some formulations of physics are better at certain problems than others
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The dirty secret of “physics” is there isn’t one theory of physics, there are many competing theories. How does this impact physics-based consciousness research?
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I think Strong Monism is an incredibly optimistic frame because it both clearly defines what a “solution to consciousness” could be & offers hope that this could be years away, not millennia https://t.co/CVGOWpgoQ8
Dualities in Physics Sebastian De Haro, Enrico Cinti (This is the pre-submission version of a forthcoming Cambridge Element in the Foundations of Contemporary Physics) https://t.co/8tjOfNhBn3
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