Technology, Connected - AI Girlfriends And Boyfriends

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Would you let your children have an AI boyfriend or girlfriend? We're reading Irreducible, by Federico Faggin. It's Chapter 7 and Mark and Jeremy think on paper about the hard problem of consciousness, qualia, ai awareness and the inner semantic space that creates your experience.There are 4 types of qualia: physical sensations and feelings, emotions, thoughts and spiritual feelings. From there they go back in time to Aldous Huxley and the Dharma Bums and how the modern take on consciousness isn't new. None of this is really new. Now, if AI can't feel qualia you'll end up with quasi-humanity emerging from the tech dream. But does that matter? If it looks real and feels real, it might as well be real.. But what if it slowly erodes what it means for us to be human.If you're thinking about the impact of technology on culture, you should listen to Thinking On Paper.Please enjoy the show. And share with a curious friend. Listen to chapter 1-6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2EteMXVv-8&t=357s&ab_channel=ThinkingOnPaper--Chapters(00:00) Introduction to Consciousness and AI(02:32) The Nature of Consciousness(05:12) Qualia and Human Experience(07:27) The Distinction Between Humans and Machines(09:23) The Hard Problem of Consciousness(11:27) AI, Empathy, and Human Connection(13:40) Cultural Norms and AI Integration(16:10) Interiority and Quantum Consciousness(17:54) True Intelligence vs. Machine Intelligence(19:46) Comprehension and Perception(22:20) The Future of Consciousness and AI--Join the free thinkers - www.thinkingonpaper.xyz

The Stripters and Curious Minds. Book Club is welcome to the Thinking on Paper Book Club. I mark this, Jeremy, and every week we read books that have stood the test of time. Books that will change your mind. Books that will change your consciousness this time. But what is consciousness? What is qualia? What is the hard problem of consciousness?

What is panpsychism? And the Dharma Bums are back. Yes. But first, a public service announcement from Thinking on Paper. I want AI to be conscious. AI isn't conscious, it will never will be conscious, but I want it to be conscious. Why? Because then we wouldn't have to worry. I don't mean we wouldn't have to worry about job loss, your children's future, the centralisation of data, the centralisation of power, depression, anxiety, AI girlfriends,

AI boyfriends, trillion dollar companies with 10 employees, the death of human creativity and the homogenisation of culture, because you will have to worry about that. You have to think about that. Now, no, I don't mean that. I mean I want AI to be conscious because of the long-term survival of humanity, of the species. We wouldn't have to worry about Skynet and AI blowing up the world in search of better paperclip factories, the alignment problems. Because if you combine superintelligence with consciousness, if you combine super intelligence with all our stories, all your stories, If you combine super intelligence with everything we've ever written, everything we've ever dreamed, everything we've ever said, everything we've ever lived,

then that superintelligence will come to the conclusion that humanity is fundamentally peaceful, collaborative, optimistic, hopeful, friendly, caring, loving and funny. It will be a reflection of us, the best version of us. But without consciousness, AI will just be a really smart wanker. And then all bets on. That's when shit hits the fan because it isn't conscious. We want it.

I want it to be conscious because of that. Some say I'm a dreamer. I'm not the only one. Consciousness. Chapter 7, irreducible, Jeremy. Paint us a picture. Another picture. I don't know how to follow that up.

That was amazing. That was holy. I feel very inspired, Mark. I want it to be conscious. So, like, the more I think about it, the more I read this book, the more I think on paper. the more I see people do you remember it like tune in turn off drop out

what was he's like to turn on tune in drop out there's a modern version of that but Kendrick Lamar's turn the TV off yeah but people are just turning off and yeah I want I to be conscious all right so a couple of thoughts on that Kevin Kelly believes that AI will be conscious

he talks about the thing that's going to be really interesting is when we code emotion into AI which is like no about that and how well we'll talk about the difference in why was you? Are you going to code qualia into AI? That's exactly what we're going to run down today. I've been rabbit holeing into consciousness just with irreducible,

but other other inputs, the whole, the whole thing. Man, my brain's spinning a little bit from where you head. So you want AI to be conscious. So it will manage, it will look out for humanity.

It will see the bigger picture. It will, it will see that we're all part of a bigger thing. But check it out, though. Like how many people are conscious to that level? And is consciousness, one person's consciousness and another person's consciousness, are they equal? There's some really bad dudes around that, you know, have the same, have a similar idea of consciousness that we do. But being, being kind, being empathetic, being understanding, being, seeing the earth rise.

So we talk, we're bouncing all over the place. But we were on Chris Mueller's show the other day and he brought up the idea of Earthrise, his picture taken by. this astronaut from the moon of the earth actually rising as the sun would just because of a change of perspective. But like that shift, like some people don't, I don't think consciousness, the quality of someone's consciousness is not universal, I think. No, but we're talking about super intelligence that we're not talking about the average person. We're talking about, so Dostkieski, it takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently. The idea of super intelligence is that it will be able to pattern recognition,

and connect the dots like something we can't comprehend. And if it's only access point is all the data and all the stories and all the things we've ever said and thought and dreamed, yes, they're on nefarious people, yes, there are horrible dictators, yes, there is murder and genocide. That is not the prevalent condition of the human species, far from it. And so this superintelligence, my reasoning is, like I said, I'm a dreamer, but the superintelligence will go through all of that

and it will come to this conclusion that we'll, are worth saving, that we are not disposable heroes, that we can and it will act accordingly. But because it doesn't have consciousness and as we learn about intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing and empathy comes from consciousness and all of these human facets that we need it to have to not end in a bad way. So in the language models, in the models for this, you have to sprinkle in empathy, you have to sprinkle in vulnerability, you have to code in this idea that we're a small piece of something larger.

That would be pattern recognition again, but if it doesn't have consciousness, it can't understand empathy. It can understand what empathy gives you, but it can't feel empathy because it isn't conscious, is it? Federico Fajer. So you being the dreamer.

All right. How does consciousness work, Jamie? Let's get into the book. Let's do it. I thought it was really funny. The first piece of this chapter comes from his, our host and author's recollection of his experience.

in Christianity with the Holy Communion in this idea of the examination of consciousness as a part of that process, that regimen. And as he kind of worked through where he got the first few bits of the chapter, we're like, okay, so if this idea of consciousness emanates from electrochemical signals in the brain, as this neuroscience professor told him, this neuroscience professor was on his advisory board for one of his companies. So he asked this guy about consciousness. He's like, okay, It's like electrochemical signals emanating and generating things. So he's like, okay, well, that's cool. What about computers?

Computers or electrical signals. Could computers generate or generate conscious or experience consciousness, which led him down this path of discovery that we know he figured out that computers couldn't be conscious? But that's where it starts, but qualia. Let's talk about qualia. So consciousness is the inner semantic space where the signals coming from the physical world, both inside and outside the body are processed by the brain and take the form of feelings, sensations, and meanings, i.e. qualia.

What are the four types of qualia, Mr. Fielding, according to our host and author? The four types of qualia are physical sensations and feelings, emotions, thoughts, spiritual feelings, and thoughts and spiritual feelings may or may not be quali, depending on who you ask. There you go. Yeah, so physical sensations, it's the taste of food, it's the sound of music, emotions pretty self-explanatory. The one interesting thing that I saw listed on here, the first emotion

that he listed as an example was curiosity. I'd never thought about that as an emotion before. Curiosity, friendship, compassion, joy, trust, fear, anger, sadness, pride, stubbornness, shame, envy, greed, confusion, and so on. Is curiosity an emotion? Or is it a thought?

I kind of, um, is, curiosity in emotion? That hit me. That hit me because I always think about curiosity as this vehicle. Who is it? I think the Shopify guy, the Shopify guy had this idea of the trust battery. When you're building an audience, when you're building a client base, and you've got to just keep feeding the trust battery. As long as the batteries charged, you have trust with your customers.

I think about curiosity the same way, this curiosity engine. As long as you keep it filled and activated, it's a way to seek to understand stuff. I never thought of it as an emotion before. I think it's a sensation. It's almost like a niche. You have to scratch it. And I think that it's more of a sensation than an emotion. Good call.

Good call. I like it. It lives in Qualia, though, does it not? It lives in qualia. Is Qualia the differentiator, are we saying? They like speaking about roses, don't they, in these books? And so Alders Hookley, the doors of perception. He speaks about roses.

He speaks about flowers. And so who's back? Who's back? The Dharma Bums are back. So check out our subs stack. It's not for today. But the consciousness industry, I think, is replicating what came before, but without the rebelliousness of the beatniks, without the rebelliousness of those. But I digress.

Speaking of roses, let's talk about, he had an interesting example of using how a rose is recognized by its sense to differentiate man and machine a little bit. Yeah. So let me walk you through this and let me know if I missed anything. When we recognize the smell of a rose, molecules from the rose come out and land and hit our receptors. And then what he says, a macroscopic electrical signals generated that kind of fires to our brain to say, hey, we're sensing this thing coming up. And these are inputs to our neural networks to understand the qualia that's coming in. We're making sense of all of this stuff. So we turn objective to subjective at that point.

All that stuff lands. And we go, oh, that smells like a rose. Oh, the last time I smelled a rose, it was this situation or whatever. And, you know, roses make me think about this and the memory connection and all of that stuff. Whereas machines can recognize the inputs and say, hey, that's the input. That tells me that input is tagged to a rose in my little matrix. But the machine can't remember the last time it smelled a rose. Can't do that.

I see this as an objective to subjective translation that we're able to do with. qualia that machines are not. What do you think? Yeah, I think that you summarized what he said far better than I could. The scent of a rose is not a signal. It is a quail. Something completely different from the electrical signals generated by the neural networks. It is related to them, of course, but it's not identical, nor can it be produced directly by them. I mean, yeah, we can smell a rose and we can be taken back 50 years. We can smell a rose and we can think of something else. There's this springboard of emotions and qualia that

stem from that rose. The problem is that the machine can convince you that it can smell that rose. So going back, that's the thing. This is what Aldous Hookley speaks about in the doors of perception about the, and that's the hard problem of consciousness, isn't it? That you can't.

Consciousness is the thing that we know more definitely than anything else, and yet we can't describe what it is like. So a machine could tell you it's conscious and you can't prove that it isn't, but it can convince you that it is. What almost goes back to that whole how AI and AI chatbot busted CAPTCHA. The model couldn't figure out how to actually do it, but it convinced the human to help.

To help the model do it. So yeah, very, that's the thing. It's like there's going to be a lot of pseudo-humanity kind of emerging out of this and figuring out, is that pseudo-humanity or is that real humanity? Here's a question for you. Does it matter? Does it matter if the, if you think that? this one of your AIs is conscious? I mean, do most people think is this conscious?

It doesn't really matter, does it? It's the matrix, isn't it? If it looks like a steak and it tastes like a steak, then, might as well be a steak. Yeah, I think the doesn't matter part to me is if it slowly erodes what it means for us to be human, that's the, that's the alarm button for me. You know, in our substack, this week we'd posted that, you know, people are actually using AI right now to break up where they're

boyfriends and girlfriends, which part of being a human is having the ability to figure out how to navigate difficult situations. And if we don't, if we don't navigate that, that requires empathy. If it's done the right way, it requires a little empathy. It requires kind of a, I don't know, like a softer touch a little bit than just brute force kind of thing. And if we just keep hitting these damn easy buttons, sure, yeah, we're, you know, it's going to be easy. I can just send this note over text. Well, people are texting to break up too. You know, we don't have conversations anymore. And there's the old guy in me.

This is the gray beard coming out. But I think we should still have human conversations. And, you know, that's what scares me with all of this stuff. The next generations don't. Again, the question still stands. I mean, if they're, I mean, does it, does it matter? If it's a cultural norm to, to break up by AI, to use AI to design your life, Altman was talking about these three layers of how people are using AI's.

And we fall into the oldest bracket, which was like 40 plus. 40 plus is the oldest bracket. And they, this population, use AI essentially to replace Google. And then you have the stage below that, which use AI in a more, more varied way. And then the youngest people who use it to design their lives and they use it for everything. And if it's a cultural norm to do everything like that, then who are we to say? say, you know, it's wrong, bring back the analog world. Man, I find it hard to believe that we're like, and please dump something in these comments

and convince us otherwise, but I find it hard to believe, like, that we're this same version of our parents when MTV first came out and, you know, MTV, we're staring at MTV, like, oh, that's going to melt your face and it's going to turn you into a loser and all of this. That's the one thing. Do you know how much different what we're dealing with now is from MTV. As we learned in our last book, Nexus by Noah You, Ohari, you can't compare AI to the printing press. You can't compare AI to these other technologies that have come before it because it is fundamentally very different. I still think that we're like listening to classical music and

those under 20 are listening to punk and grunge and we're just sitting in there and our rocking chair going on, it's not like it used to be. Consciousness represents the most perplexing problem for the science of mind. There is nothing that is not known more intimately than conscious experience, and yet nothing that is more difficult to explain David Chalma, the hard problem of consciousness. Well, let's talk about the idea of consciousness as an irreducible property of fundamental particles.

So I did invite, I did invite Anika Harris multiple times to the show. Hopefully she'll come hang out with the trippy kids at some point. Like her audiobook, audio documentary lights on, that's the main thesis there too, is that consciousness is fundamental. She doesn't outright prove it, right? But she's on this track to figure it out. Old as Huxley said that 60 years ago in the doors of perception.

Man, so if we could have him on the show, that would be even better. See if we can figure that out. Well, we can just bring him back as an AI embodied virtual twin. Hey, we're talking to some companies actually that are doing that very successfully. So, all right, aside from that, so consciousness, this idea of being, a piece and part of fundamental particles and not a result of particle interaction. I think that's an important thing. And that's the main difference. A lot of people have different theories about it. But I want to talk about interiority. It's a really interesting word that comes up in this chapter

quite a bit. And I want to ask you a question, Mark. If there is an influence from the outside in, from the world in, how come there isn't an influence from the inside? out. And if not, what's the point of interiority? I don't think I'm qualified to answer that. He taught, so he teased this out a little bit. I rephrased it into a question. But I think that's the idea that a lot of us are missing. We're conditioned to operate in this Newtonian world. And this, this goes back. I think there are a lot of references to Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics as we understand consciousness because we believe all of these things around us are are like you know hard and like physical where they're just things moving really really slowly to give us the impression of that

so our brain's already in this process of trying to you know we understand the world in this way because we move around in it this way but you know to understand consciousness you almost have to think quantum because a lot of the stuff is counter to what we think the world is to understand consciousness, I think you need to think more quantum and less Newtonian. The alternative is to consider that physical laws may be emergent properties of consciousness, an assumption that is hard for most scientists to accept. It would mean that the objective world derives from the subjective world, and that's asking too much. Accepting panpsychism implies that inner reality has a direct impact on outer reality. And in my notes, I've written

connect to quantum, but I don't know how. Like, when I was reading it, and I kept reading it, and my brain kept jumping like you did to this quantum idea of superposition and the collapse of the wave and how that doesn't come in reality until it is measured, observed, interacted with by something else. And I don't know how to link that thought to what he says here about emergent properties of consciousness and assumption that is hard, that physical laws may be emergent properties of consciousness.

But in the same way that the wave collapse causes whatever probability in know I'm not described this very well, but to become a reality in the same way, why can't our consciousness cause the physical realities to come into existence? There's a link there. I can't explain it very well, but that's what I was thinking somehow. I think it's really interesting, man. We're going quantum again, many worlds theory, even string theory, like all of these different worlds operating at the same relative time to us in space. You have, you know, Kerouac and Huxley in the back going, yo, guys, we are on this already. Where have you been?

I think it's really, and I can't wait to, we are going to do a Dharma Bums or Back series on all of this stuff, Mark. I think it's a great idea. There is a link to. Great, the world wasn't ready. Now the world is ready. And maybe the world is ready and also much more easily accessible via social media. Fair enough.

Fair enough. Well, let's park that one. A couple quick things that I want to run down that they're really interesting, that kind of came out more tangibly to this. this is so organizing in pattern recognition in the brain are separate from consciousness according to our host and author and I tend to believe that in consciousness being kind of a supervisor of the activities. As you're driving down the road, we did this reference before. There are mechanical things happening, but your consciousness is observing and helping you react to all of these things. So pointing back to

another old book, you know, or a bunch of books, Buckminster Fuller's idea of the phantom captain. is this idea of the captain of what's happening, you know, for you and your life and all that is a consciousness as a supervisor. I think that's a really interesting way to put it. But the idea of true intelligence, he starts talking about that coming from consciousness, true and real intelligence coming from consciousness. And it requires conscious comprehension. So what did you get from comprehension in this? I think that his example on how a machine recognizes a cup compared to how. how we recognize a cup explains it very, very well.

An example of a machine learning is when we teach a computer to recognize a cup from its visual image. To learn that task, it is necessary to have a representative sample of cup images called a training set and a program performing the simulation of a properly structured artificial neural network that automatically finds a hierarchy of common traits that are present in all the cups that are part of the training set when the program has learned the correlations existing in the many images whose name is cup, it may also recognize a cup in an image that was not part of the training set. At this point, it seems that the neural network understands what a cup is, even though the cup is only another symbol, not the conscious experience that it is for us.

This ability to generalize is good and necessary, yet the program still cannot comprehend what cup means. You know where that sent me when I read that and I kind of went back on my notes? The idea of like, okay, you train these models, here's a cup, this is a cup, all these examples of a cup, but you know, that model one. ever be able to really understand the meaning of a cup and how it interacts and all of that. It can define. It can see it, right? But I started thinking about like, why haven't we heard more about, and maybe it's out there. I just haven't heard of it. Why haven't we heard more about people

training models to screw them up? Like to all, it's almost like, stay with me here. This is going to be weird. So it's almost like it's almost like psychedelics for AI models to to purposely generate hallucinations. Are people out there like effing with models and the training data to generate hallucinations and is a hallucination incorrect or is a hallucination kind of an enlightened understanding or comprehension? That's crazy. Boom.

But that's where I... I think that there are people out there messing around with them and doing all kinds of crazy shit. So in our last show, we spoke to a very smart guy about the business. for AI and he made a lot of sense and I thought he was very good. The one point that I didn't agree with him was that, that hallucination is creativity. Let's simplify it. So objective, let's simplify it to like an objective arithmetic. So one plus one equals two. You train a model to understand that's what that is. And then all of a sudden you convince a model to say one plus one

is three. You know, is that a creative endeavor or is that just messing up something that is objective fact? Wrong is wrong. You can't be 30% wrong in something like that. It's wrong. But who says what is right and what is wrong? So creativity is breaking rules a little bit too. I'm just pushing back. I'm just pushing back. Intentionally. Intentionally breaking rule. Although a lot of creativity comes from accidents or the great advancements of the world have all come by accident. So maybe, yeah, maybe that's the AI is hallucinating to try because it knows that by hallucinating it could just serendipitously create something which might change the world. penicillin? Yeah, or beer. Who left some, who left some, you know, cereal in the corner, you know, for three months and decided to drink it? Like, what in the world? That's, anyway, I digress. Comprehension and comprehension and perception. Let's talk about that a little bit, right?

Comprehension is the process that adds new meaning to our experience and skillfully integrates it with the previous meaning. But he says requires a greater capacity for generalization than machines can handle. What do you think he meant by that? I think it goes back to what I said at the start about empathy and curiosity and the lack of qualia that the only reason that comprehension adds new meaning to our experience is because that we can connect it to all those emotions, to all those qualia that have come before and a machine, an algorithm, an AI, whatever you want to call it, can't. Yeah. So, all right. So keep banging that drum.

Keep banging that drum. No, I get it. I get it. All right. So conscious perception is, I think the way I understand it, is this. is this conversion of electrical chemical, electrical magnetic inputs into qualia, this objective into subjective. As I understand what our host and author talks about conscious perception,

but comprehension is different. Comprehension is literally what we're doing. Comprehension is thinking on paper. Comprehension is connecting the dots. It's taking something new, connecting it to something old. But don't models do that, though? Yeah, but not via quality. They do it by patterns, don't they?

So it's the same thread that keeps coming through in this. They can, they know it's a rose. They know the smell, but they don't connect it to the quality of emotion. So yes, but no. So they're pseudo humanity. Let's let's let's do it. Yeah. Studio humanity.

All right. You heard it first. I'm thinking on paper when, when AI models try to convince you that they're human, but they're actually. Okay. Nature of consciousness. I'm trying to think about, I'm going to read something here that I thought was really cool. Back to true intelligence.

So remember, true intelligence requires comprehension. Comprehension is connecting moments of qualia for humans, right? In which links memories, which links experience to new information. It's a synthesis of understanding. True intelligence is intuition, imagination, creativity, ingenuity, and inventiveness. It is foresight, vision, and wisdom. It is empathy, compassion, ethics, and love. It is the integration of the intuitive mind, the empathetic heart, and courageous action.

In other words, true intelligence. is not separable from the other properties that make us human and that require consciousness and free will. It's the ability to comprehend and make unexpected, creative and ethical decisions. Machines will never be able to do those things. Is that a definition of true intelligence or is that a definition of what it means to be human? Is that a definition of consciousness? Because true intelligence and what it means to be human are not the same thing. I think that AIs can be truly intelligent, this notion of superintelligence,

I like that. They can become that, but they can't become conscious. That's why, like, empathy and compassion and all of those things fold into the equation. Emotional intelligence is one of those, and I hate the categorization of it as a soft skill. It's like one of our most important skills in interacting as humans. So I think when I look at that, it's an encompassing of understanding information, connecting the dots, but also sprinkling in those human elements of it. So I think the true intelligence nature folds in, the emotional intelligence. intelligence side of the fence. That's how I think about it anyway.

We must be especially mindful about the dangers posed by the human abuse of computer technology, especially AI, which will bring to the four new dangers that are difficult to predict and avoid. There is no doubt that the greatest danger is represented by the desire for power, domination, possession and superiority that dulls human consciousness. So as we move into part two of this book, I'm going to leave you with a quote, as the bridge from Cicero. If you remove consciousness, everything else is nothing for man. So don't remove your consciousness, disruptors and curious minds.

Plug in your consciousness. We find ourselves once again on a Friday evening with the nature in full bloom outside and you with time on your hands. You are conscious. Go outside and wield your consciousness. Be curious. Be courageous. Be brave.

Be inquisitive. Be caring. Be loving. Be all of the things that make you different to the machines. that you are increasingly relying upon. Stay disruptive, be curious. Keep thinking on paper.